{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/threshold-logical-clocks-for-asynchronous","title":"Threshold Logical Clocks for Asynchronous Distributed Coordination and Consensus","arxiv_id":"1907.07010","date":"2019-07-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Bryan Ford"],"abstract":"Consensus protocols for asynchronous networks are usually complex and inefficient, leading practical systems to rely on synchronous protocols. This paper attempts to simplify asynchronous consensus by building atop a novel threshold logical clock abstraction, which enables upper layers to operate as if on a synchronous network. This approach yields an asynchronous consensus protocol for fail-stop nodes that may be simpler and more robust than Paxos and its leader-based variants, requiring no common coins and achieving consensus in a constant expected number of rounds. The same approach can be strengthened against Byzantine failures by building on well-established techniques such as tamper-evident logging and gossip, accountable state machines, threshold signatures and witness cosigning, and verifiable secret sharing. This combination of existing abstractions and threshold logical clocks yields a modular, cleanly-layered approach to building practical and efficient Byzantine consensus, distributed key generation, time, timestamping, and randomness beacons, and other critical services.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.07010v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.07010v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"threshold-logical-clocks-for-asynchronous","repo_url":"https://github.com/dedis/tlc","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}