For about fifteen years, nearly every decentralized consensus protocol—whether PoW, PoS, or DAG variants—has implicitly relied on the same core assumption:
That achieving consensus requires all nodes to share a single, global, ordered history of blocks.
This linear history makes verification simple, but it also introduces structural constraints: global synchronization, replay overhead, finality coupling, and increasing centralization pressure as the network grows.
At some point I started asking a very simple but uncomfortable question:
Is this assumption a mathematical necessity… or just an engineering tradition?
Does decentralized consensus really need a chain?
✦ A hypothetical alternative
Suppose we abandon the requirement for shared historical ordering, and instead allow:
- Each proposal (block/message) to exist independently
- No parent references, no global ordering
- Nodes propagate proposals according to local trust
- Consensus emerges from network topology, not chain structure
If this were possible, we would need to ask:
- Would such a system still converge?
- Could finality be emergent rather than sequential?
- Would full nodes still need to store history at all?
- Would high-latency environments (e.g. interplanetary networks) remain viable?
- If consensus weight derives from behavior rather than capital, would we see less centralization?
✦ A working hypothesis: the L.O.P. Principles
To explore this direction, I defined a minimal set of constraints for a purely local trust model, called the L.O.P. Principles (Locally / Observed / Principles):
1. Trust is strictly local and must never be globally shared
2. Trust must be derived only from directly observed behavior
3. Trust rules must be defined according to the network’s purpose
These rules look trivial at first—but their consequences are not.
They prohibit global trust synchronization
They eliminate the idea of a “single reputation state”
And they force every node to determine trust boundaries independently
In such a world, consensus is no longer a product of shared history.
It becomes a property of network topology + local trust + emergent convergence.
✦ Unresolved questions (and why I am posting here)
To be absolutely clear: I do not yet know whether this direction is viable.
I would specifically love to hear criticism, references, or proof-based counterarguments to questions like:
- Has this direction been explored—and disproven—before?
- Is there a theoretical impossibility result that makes “historyless consensus” unattainable?
- Could local trust models lead to permanent partitioning?
- Can topology collapse be formalized as finality?
- Are there applicable results from CRDTs, epidemic consensus, or multi-agent systems?
- Does this violate any classical impossibility results (FLP, CAP, etc)?
- Is there any known way to prove (or disprove) convergence in such a model?
I am explicitly hoping someone will tell me why this cannot work, if that is indeed the case.
✦ What this is not
- Not a token launch
- Not fundraising
- Not a product
- Not a whitepaper announcement
- Not an “X is better than blockchain” argument
Right now this is simply a conceptual question, one that I think deserves public scrutiny:
If a chain is not strictly necessary, then perhaps we have not yet explored the full space of consensus designs.
✦ Repository (empty for now, for future work)
I have created an empty GitHub repository only as a placeholder for future drafts, experiments, or specifications:
There is currently no documentation, no code, and no implementation.
If anyone finds this direction interesting, feel free to Watch the repository, but please don’t expect anything yet.
✦ Open-ended closing questions
If consensus can emerge without shared history:
- Do we need to redefine what “consensus” means?
- Is blockchain just one special case of a larger design space?
- Could Web3 eventually shift from ordered history → stable trust states?
If the answer is “yes”, then perhaps we haven’t reached the boundary of decentralized consensus at all.