[barnacs]

I think it all comes down to relativity and the speed of light.

There is no single, universal, true ordered state (ledger/db). Participants need a conflict resolution mechanism to figure out whose truth is correct. One must rely on a localized consinstent state of some authority (leader/consensus).

[api]

The fact that every human society ends up with some kind of centralized oligarchy is probably also due to this effect. Something has to resolve disputes about the state of the system.

A solution that somehow goes around these limitations could have implications beyond computing. It could enable “headless” large scale cooperation. This would be a fundamental innovation in the evolution of intelligence generally.

Proof of work is the only one we have that kind of works and it’s massively expensive. You could argue that it’s just a way to make economically irrational or short sighted collusion prohibitively expensive rather than a true solution and might only work in a domain like a currency where there is a direct mapping to cost.

[barnacs]

Proof of work essentially allows for a periodic leader election, where the leader has sufficient time to propagate its state update along with a verifiable proof of authority in a permissionless decentralized system.

Decentralized cooperation in society likely wouldn't be permissionless, in most cases you would probably want to assign some voting power per human/citizen/share certificate/whatever. I'm also not sure if decentralized, verifiable randomness is easier to achieve outside of computer networks (for example, source some verifiable randomness from the universe based on a pre-defined algorithm).