Just the first 2 chapters (~30p) + the Conclusion (~10p) contain a lot of useful food for thought.
I would be concerned as an examiner if this came across my desk, more so if I read the colophon where the author comments that they intended to write their own typesetting system, before reading Knuth and wisely concluding that they were unlikely to do anything better than TeX. Top tier yak shaving there.
Per-lecture reading lists are on the course page [1]. He also points at Elaine Shi's Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains [2] and Andrew Lewis-Pye's Consensus in 50 pages [2] as background, though these are more textbooks, not papers.
Remarkably, the first 7 lectures deal with permissioned systems, recapitulating the classic results of consensus in distributed systems (Dolev Strong, FLP impossibility, CAP) - no blockchain in sight. This takes us to the state of the art at the end of the 1990's (with algorithms that can achieve consensus in the presence of byzantine failures, namely Byzantine Paxos and PBFT, though he discusses a modern variant, permissioned Tendermint from 2014).
Lecture 8 stays permissioned and proves consistency and chain quality for the longest-chain rule. Only at Lecture 9, with proof of work, does anything specifically blockchain appear; then L10 block rewards and selfish mining, L11 transaction fee mechanism design; L12 proof-of-stake sybil resistance with the whole litany of attacks possible there.
Very good series in my view, and shows how little technical merit this whole blockchain circus has - nearly all the great properties people tout (reliability, consistency, audibility, availability) can be achieved with good old permissioned tech more efficiently, with pretty instant and deterministic finality.
Anyway, I found the series worth watching for the classical consensus material alone.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEGCF-WLh2RLOHv_xUGLq...
[1] https://timroughgarden.github.io/fob21/
Erlang is simply the right language to build a chat server with, and it doesn't make sense to rewrite it in another language, even though Facebook did that with the server for Messenger. :P
Certainly parts of the WhatsApp stack have changed considerably. No more FreeBSD / no more only a handful of OS processes per node, much less Mnesia (not sure if there's any Mnesia left... I don't get that level of information). I've seen signs that they may have returned to large nodes, so they might be back to millions of connections per node, but that was very much not the case when I left; connection counts had dropped on our FreeBSD nodes because we were doing a lot more on the chat channel and then again because the Facebook nodes we migrated to were so much smaller than our FreeBSD nodes.