Fair exchange is incomparable to consensus

In asynchronous systems where processes are prone to crash failures, we show that fair exchange is incomparable to distributed consensus. By incomparability we mean there exist failure detector classes that solve fair exchange and not distributed consensus, and vice versa. Remarkably, this is in contrast to the folklore belief that solving fair exchange is generally harder than solving distributed consensus

Fair exchange is incomparable to consensus

In asynchronous systems where processes are prone to crash failures, we show that fair exchange is incomparable to distributed consensus. By incomparability we mean there exist failure detector classes that solve fair exchange and not distributed consensus, and vice versa. Remarkably, this is in contrast to the folklore belief that solving fair exchange is generally harder than solving distributed consensus