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Leslie Lamport definitely doesn’t share your opinion. A known fact about the Paxos paper is that there are no dumbed down summaries worth reading because the proper thing is so approachable. Not sure if you only have to sound smart if you’ve got nothing to say but certainly feels like it could be the case.

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Paxos is so mistifyingly hard that Raft was invented as part of a project to understand Paxos (and the advisor and proponent of the project was John Ousterhout, who's pretty badass). There are also I believe a few papers trying to trying to explain Paxos more clearly

Just as a quick source to my claims:

1. The raft paper is titled "In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm"

2. The abstract of this tutorial on Understanding Paxos https://www.ux.uis.no/~meling/papers/2013-paxostutorial-opod...

3. Lamport's own "Paxos made simple" https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf

> A known fact about the Paxos paper is that there are no dumbed down summaries worth reading because the proper thing is so approachable.

A known fact is that it's impossible to actually implement it correctly, and the "approachable" paper seems to be a significant factor in this.

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