What are quorums used for?

Quorums are used in various contexts, particularly in decision-making processes, to ensure that a minimum number of participants are present to validate the legitimacy of a meeting or vote. In legal and corporate settings, a quorum is necessary for decisions to be made, preventing a small minority from overriding the majority's will. In distributed systems and databases, quorums help maintain consistency and reliability by requiring a majority of nodes to agree on a transaction or state change before it is considered valid.