Tendermint — Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the Age of Blockchains
Ethan Buchman's thesis connects replicated state machines, partial synchrony, BFT consensus, gossip, application separation, validator governance, light proofs, and early Tendermint evaluation.
The thesis's strongest durable explanation is architectural: consensus orders a transaction log; deterministic applications execute it; gossip distributes proposals, votes, blocks, and transactions; validator-set and accountability mechanisms sit around the agreement engine. It also describes Tendermint's proposal, prevote, precommit, lock, and commit rules and evaluates an early Go implementation under crash, delay, and Byzantine scenarios.
The software architecture, protocol details, ecosystem names, operational claims, and benchmarks are a 2016 snapshot. Current behavior is checked against CometBFT specifications; the thesis remains useful for mechanism, rationale, and historical evaluation.
Visual audit #
All 109 physical pages were rendered and inspected. Load-bearing visuals include the replicated-state-machine architecture, Byzantine equivocation example, consensus state machine, gossip topology, application boundary, and evaluation plots. GTK redraws only the general RSM and round mechanisms; historical screenshots and benchmark plots are not retained.