[Vervious]

Consensus protocol researcher here. For what it’s worth, I think that the plethora of blockchain research in the last 10 years has made consensus much easier to understand. Raft (in particular, with all of its subtleties) reads (and implements) like Greek in comparison.

For a new beginner to consensus protocols, today, I would start them with Bitcoin, and then move onto Paxos/Tendermint/Simplex, and skip Raft entirely. (Simplex is my paper, a simplified version of PBFT).

[woooooo]

Not a consensus protocol researcher.

It seems like blockchain brings a bunch of extra stuff, complexity and cost? Raft seems comparatively simple to me.

What does blockchain bring that's easier to maintain and harder to fuck up than "elect a leader and replicate a log"?

[Vervious]

A blockchain (without all the bells and whistles) is definitionally equivalent to a state-machine or log replication system (but handling byzantine faults). (Each log entry is just a block).