Just a heads up, but that's not really that similar.
The needs for consensus with byzantine fault tolerance for crypto systems and the needs of consensus for distributed systems via paxosy or rafty algorithms are miles apart. The fundamental mathy research is related but the communities and the algorithms for each are quite different.
If you "discover" something so simple, don't see people using it already, and don't see most(!) people getting totally excited after learning to know about it, then you know it's some kind of scam. It's not clear who is scammed and how. Maybe the guy is scamming himself into believing he has a meaningful job. Who knows. But you can now consciously decide if you want to participate in any role (scammer, victim, police) of that game or simply move on with your life.
It'd almost certainly seem interesting to see whether one might manage to crosspollinate the above paper with this 'recent' generalization result from parameterized computational social choice theory:
Aziz, Haris; Lee, Barton E. – Sub-committee Approval Voting and Generalised Justified Representation Axioms (2017/2018)
Abstract:
"Social choice is replete with various settings including single-winner voting, multi-winner voting, probabilistic voting, multiple referenda, and public decision making. We study a general model of social choice called sub-committee voting (SCV) that simultaneously generalizes these settings. We then focus on sub-committee voting with approvals and propose extensions of the justified representation axioms that have been considered for proportional representation in approval-based committee voting. We study the properties and relations of these axioms. For each of the axioms, we analyze whether a representative committee exists and also examine the complexity of computing and verifying such a committee."
I feel like a jerk reiterating this point from a cousin post but just a heads up, but that's not really what this post is about. Maybe I'm being too literal and I'm missing the connection you're drawing.
Consensus in voting systems is concerned with selecting either a single winner or a ranked order from a set of candidates given the diverse preferences from a pool of voters. It concerns the protocol by which they communicate their preferences (vote favorite, pairwise, ranked preferences, etc.) and the protocol by which they're combined to pick a winner (consensus) from the population. The focus is on minimizing how objectionable the winning candidate is over all voters.
Distributed consensus is more concerned with agreement of a proposition between set of identical nodes (i.e. no preferences) that communicate by sending messages over an asynchronous, lossy, reorderable, channels. The focus here is about mitigating weakness of the communications channels and provide stronger guarantees beyond that.
> The focus is on minimizing how objectionable the winning candidate is over all voters.
This is precisly the problem with electronic voting. It is not about creating a process that is mathematically sound — it is about creating a process the average voting helper can transparently follow, verify and trust in. Every electronic system, no matter how transparent is always a black box to everbody who didn’t either design it, or has both the skill and time to take it apart.
A mathematically sound result that average people can doubt, because it is a blackbox to them, is useless for any meaningful vote.
I really like how understandable it is.