consensus-mechanism

Definition

How groups of entitities come to decisions. In general to learn about consensus mechanisms read any textbook on decision making, automated reasoning, multi-objective decision making, operations research etc.

Overall reliability

A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires coordinating processes to reach consensus, or agree on some data value that is needed during computation.

More information

More on wikipedia or in this 2018 report from the cryptocurrency field.