  Byzantine agreement, arguably the most fundamental problem in distributed
computing, operates among n processes, out of which t < n can exhibit arbitrary
failures. The problem states that all correct (non-faulty) processes must
eventually decide (termination) the same value (agreement) from a set of
admissible values defined by the proposals of the processes (validity).
Depending on the exact version of the validity property, Byzantine agreement
comes in different forms, from Byzantine broadcast to strong and weak
consensus, to modern variants of the problem introduced in today's blockchain
systems. Regardless of the specific flavor of the agreement problem, its
communication cost is a fundamental metric whose improvement has been the focus
of decades of research. The Dolev-Reischuk bound, one of the most celebrated
results in distributed computing, proved 40 years ago that, at least for
Byzantine broadcast, no deterministic solution can do better than Omega(t^2)
exchanged messages in the worst case. Since then, it remained unknown whether
the quadratic lower bound extends to seemingly weaker variants of Byzantine
agreement. This paper answers the question in the affirmative, closing this
long-standing open problem. Namely, we prove that any non-trivial agreement
problem requires Omega(t^2) messages to be exchanged in the worst case. To
prove the general lower bound, we determine the weakest Byzantine agreement
problem and show, via a novel indistinguishability argument, that it incurs
Omega(t^2) exchanged messages.
