This is a list of papers that I think take the reader through the literature that results in globally available distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus Systems, this is a work in progress. Please suggest additions and removals.

Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults (1980)

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/reaching.pdf

The Byzantine Generals Problem (1982)

http://www.utdallas.edu/~praba/agree-lamp.pdf

Asynchronous Consensus and Broadcast Protocols (1985)

http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs426/2013/bib/bracha85asynchronous.pdf

Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process (1985)

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf

Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony (1988)

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm88.pdf

Timestamps in Message-Passing Systems That Preserve the Partial Ordering (1988)

http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs426/2012/lab/bib/fidge88timestamps.pdf

Implementing fault-tolerant services using the state machine approach: A tutorial (1990)

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.895/fall02/papers/Schneider/p299-schneider.pdf

The Part-Time Parliament (1998)

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf

Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (2001)

http://lambda.csail.mit.edu/~chet/papers/others/l/liskov/castro-thesis.pdf

The Sybil Attack (2002)

http://research-srv.microsoft.com/pubs/74220/IPTPS2002.pdf

Separating Agreement from Execution for Byzantine Fault Tolerant Services (2003)

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lorenzo/papers/sosp03.pdf

Beyond One-third Faulty Replicas in Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems (2007)

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~jinyuan/bft2f.pdf

In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version) (2014)

https://www.ongardie.net/var/blurbs/pubs/raft-tr14.pdf

The Stellar Consensus Protocol: A Federated Model for Internet-level Consensus (2015)

https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf