title: Why is Paxos leader election not done using Paxos?
body: <p>The questions below are intended to be serious rather than frivolous. I lack  experience in distributed systems, but I do understand how Basic Paxos works and why leader selection is useful. Unfortunately, my understanding is not deep enough to fathom the questions below.</p>
  
  <p>In the paper <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/64636/tr-2003-96.pdf" rel="noreferrer">Consensus on Transaction Commit</a>, page 8 (page 11 of the linked PDF), we have the following statement.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Selecting a unique leader is equivalent to solving the consensus
    problem.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>If this statement is true, and the very purpose of Paxos to achieve consensus, <strong>why is Paxos itself not generally used for leader election?</strong> </p>
  
  <p>Moreover, the same paper endorses the leader election algorithm described the <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/aguilera/papers/stableleader-disc2001.pdf" rel="noreferrer">Stable Leader Election</a> paper. </p>
  
  <p>If the two problems are equivalent, and the same paper endorses a different leader election algorithm, <strong>why isn't the other algorithm used for solving the general consensus problem instead of Paxos</strong>?</p>