Too Long; Didn't Read
If you don’t work in computers, you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how data gets stored on computers or in the cloud. I’m not talking about the physical ways that hard disks or memory chips work, but about something that’s both a lot more complex and a lot more understandable than you might think: if you have a piece of data that many people want to read and edit at once, like a shared text file, a bank’s records, or the world in a multiplayer game, how does everyone agree on what’s <em>in</em> the document, and make sure that nobody overwrites someone else’s work? This is the problem of “distributed consensus,” and in order to discuss it, we’ll have to discuss bad burritos, sheep-tyrants, and the imaginary islands of ancient Greece.