But it wouldn&#x27;t, because the surrounding infrastructure would be guaranteeing that. My point is that distributed systems engineers are assuming too few things about the hardware and OS. A much wider space of distributed algorithms become useful if you have full control over your stack.<p>Do you think NASA quibbles about how to make a perfect consensus bit-coding algorithm between the fault-tolerant processors of a mars probe? No; they just use hardware+firmware that provides a hard real-time platform, allowing the algorithm itself to be simple.