The Fischer--Lynch--Paterson (FLP) impossibility result is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental negative results in distributed computing: no deterministic protocol can guarantee consensus in an asynchronous system with even one faulty process. For forty years, the field has treated this as an immovable constraint, designing around it with randomized protocols, failure detectors, and weakened consistency models. This essay argues that FLP is not a law of physics but a theorem about a particular system model -- and that Open Atomic Ethernet (OAE) circumvents it by rejecting the asynchronous model at its foundation. We introduce the term bisynchronous to describe OAE's key property: bounded-time bilateral resolution in which both parties reach common knowledge of outcome at every round boundary -- a strictly stronger guarantee than synchrony alone. By constructing a bisynchronous, swap-based protocol at Layer 2, OAE sidesteps the load-bearing assumptions of FLP's asynchronous model, achieving deterministic atomic coordination without violating any impossibility result.

翻译：Fischer–Lynch–Paterson (FLP) 不可能性结果被广泛认为是分布式计算领域最根本的否定性结论之一：在异步系统中，即使只有一个故障进程，任何确定性协议也无法保证达成共识。四十年来，该领域一直将此视为不可逾越的约束，通过随机化协议、故障检测器和弱一致性模型等方法进行规避。本文认为，FLP并非物理定律，而是关于特定系统模型的定理——而开放原子以太网 (OAE) 通过从根本上否定异步模型规避了该结论。我们引入“双同步”这一术语来描述 OAE 的关键特性：在每一轮边界处，双方都能就结果达成共同认知的有界时间双边决议——这是比单纯同步性更强的保证。通过在第二层构建基于交换的双同步协议，OAE 绕过了 FLP 异步模型的核心假设，在不违反任何不可能性结果的前提下实现了确定性的原子协调。