Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals — Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Georgios Konstantopoulos introduces the Two Generals and Byzantine Generals problems, the 3f+1 threshold, BFT terminology, and the contrast with Bitcoin proof of work.
The article is a concise conceptual entry point: unreliable communication makes common knowledge difficult; Byzantine actors can equivocate; classical BFT needs more than two-thirds honest participants; and Bitcoin replaces fixed-member voting with proof-of-work convergence.
It is deliberately simplified. GTK uses DLS and PBFT for timing and quorum claims and keeps the distinction between deterministic BFT finality and Nakamoto probabilistic finality explicit.
Visual audit #
The full Medium article and its information-bearing diagrams were inspected in the browser. The generals and network illustrations are not retained because GTK's quorum derivation and independent message-flow diagrams teach the same mechanism more precisely.