A collection of 100 impossibility results and some discussion of commonalities and differences among them:

This talk is about impossibility results in the area of distributed computing. In this category, I include not just results that say that a particular task cannot be accomplished, but also lower bound results, which say that a task cannot be accomplished within a certain bound on cost.

You may ask yourself why impossibility proofs are important: my answer is that if you don’t know what’s impossible, you run the risk of wasting a lot of time trying to achieve the unachievable!