---
id: "papers-distributed-consensus-diffuse-trust"
type: "talk"
type_label: "Talks and presentations"
title: "Distributed Consensus and Diffuse Trust Systems"
maintainer: "Samuel M. Smith"
authors:
  - "Samuel M. Smith"
date: null
year: null
reading_level: "practitioner"
reading_level_label: "Practitioner"
reading_level_meaning: "architects, product people and adopters who know identity systems"
evidence: "informative"
evidence_meaning: "an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite"
status: "quiet"
status_meaning: "no change in six to eighteen months; still correct"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "history"
  - "theory"
roles:
  - "security-architect"
  - "communications"
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/presentations/DistributedConsensus.web.pdf"
source_license: null
source_license_note: null
found_on: "smith-papers"
kerisse_credit: false
abstract_license: "CC BY 4.0"
abstract_license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
abstract_attribution: "KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/)"
last_checked: "2026-10-15"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/papers-distributed-consensus-diffuse-trust/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/papers-distributed-consensus-diffuse-trust"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/papers-distributed-consensus-diffuse-trust"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/papers-distributed-consensus-diffuse-trust.md"
---

# Distributed Consensus and Diffuse Trust Systems

A 39-slide deck by Samuel M. Smith on distributed consensus as the basis of diffuse trust systems. It explains Byzantine agreement and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) in detail, with quorum sizing, view changes and implementations, and backup slides on blockchains, elliptic curve cryptography, identity and key management. It is not about KERI.

Labels: reading level Practitioner; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://github.com/SmithSamuelM/Papers/blob/master/presentations/DistributedConsensus.web.pdf (license not recorded).
The abstract is KSKB's own text under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/; credit KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/).