"If it’s not Paxos, it’s probably wrong."
Is Bitcoin Paxos?
Is Bitcoin Paxos?
Consider the simplest case: 1/2 of bitcoin users/miners are temporarily split off from the other half, for say a week (all atlantic/pacific fibers are broken at once, all satellites fall out of the sky, other huge catastrophes occur all simultaneously). Each half would append their own blocks to the blockchain happily, and depending on the chain lengths added, once the partition went away there would be no good way to reconcile. Thus: not consistent in the face of partitions.
Why do you say that? The chain with the greatest total difficulty wins.