[synthesis]

This reminds me of a paper on Byzantine quorum systems "Asymmetric Distributed Trust" from 2020 by Christian Cachin and Björn Tackmann https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2019.7. After reading said paper, I was contemplating the benefits of an assymetric quorum system for (non-byzantine) consensus. I concluded that I couldn't find any benefits in doing so. If I remember correctly, say that one quorum consists of 3 out of 7 nodes, then you no longer tolerate 3 failures for a 7 node cluster (something you would tolerate with the common majority-quorum approach). So there is no benefit with this. In terms of performance, the leader will synchronize with 6 other nodes. In a majority-quorum system that can tolerate two fails, a leader will synchronize with 4 other nodes. So there is also a performance drawback. That being said, there may be performance benefits that can be gained by weighting nodes differently and asymmetrically.