Research corpus ConsensusBLC-STUDY-0143

The Part-Time Parliament

A value is chosen only when a majority has accepted it in some ballot, and every higher ballot must honour a value that majority might already have chosen.

Official external source only
Design paper
Official source

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Record

Authors: Leslie Lamport
Date: 1998
Publisher: Leslie Lamport
Version: Source cited by the 1998 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.
Document ID: BLC-STUDY-0143
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

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.

Direct answer

A value is chosen only when a majority has accepted it in some ballot, and every higher ballot must honour a value that majority might already have chosen.

Where to read

Official source — Lamport
Blockchain Lab study, the canonical readingOriginal commentary. Not a transcription of the paper.

Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.

Full text

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.

What changed

A reading of the public document. Not a copy of it, and not a claim about a later network that reused the name.

Relationships

Canonical readingPaxos study
Related paperTendermint
Related paperHotStuff

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Lamport, L. (1998). The Part-Time Parliament. Leslie Lamport. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf

BibTeX

@techreport{paxos1998,
  title = {The Part-Time Parliament},
  author = {Leslie Lamport},
  year = {1998},
  institution = {Leslie Lamport},
  url = {https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/paxos}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - The Part-Time Parliament
AU  - Leslie Lamport
PY  - 1998
PB  - Leslie Lamport
UR  - https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-STUDY-0143",
    "title": "The Part-Time Parliament",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Leslie Lamport"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          1998
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Leslie Lamport",
    "URL": "https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

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Rights record

Source status: Official source
Use status: Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.
Rights: Official external source only
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections