Assess students' ability to evaluate and compare design trade-offs, performance characteristics, and failure modes of Byzantine-fault-tolerant protocols (e.g., PBFT, HotStuff) versus crash-fault-tolerant protocols (e.g., Paxos, Raft) in permissioned blockchain and geo-replicated database settings. Scope includes safety and liveness under partial synchrony, message and cryptographic overhead, latency and throughput scaling, leader election/view-change, recovery and reconfiguration, impact of network partitions and malicious actors, and practical deployment considerations; questions should require comparative analysis, scenario-based protocol selection, and justification of mitigations for observed failure modes.