[jbangert]

This simplified algorithm doesn't distinguish between learners (readers) and proposers (writers) to the value. I'd say this conveys the core ideas of paxos, and it makes sense to treat learners as a (performance-critical) extension/optimization, just like the many optimized paxos variants in the literature. Another benefit of treating read/write as a single operation is that it serializes reads and writes (e.g. in a distributed log).