{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0148","slug":"flp","title":"Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process","authors":"Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch and Michael S. Paterson","year":1985,"date_label":"1985","publisher":"Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch and Michael S. Paterson","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Consensus","topics":["Consensus"],"source_url":"https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf","source_label":"Journal of the ACM","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 1985 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"No deterministic protocol does all three. Any protocol that is always safe has an execution that never decides.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/flp","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/flp","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/flp","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"FLP study","href":"/whitepaper/flp"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Paxos","href":"/whitepaper/paxos"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Partial Synchrony","href":"/whitepaper/partial-synchrony"}]}