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The Price of Decentralization, Paid Twice: A Latency Floor and a Minimal Subsidy from a Geographic Decentralization Invariant — arXiv:2609.20322

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20322
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-10T03:48:58.495Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 3a53c50f42cdb2abce060ae0be2bcee0d15fcc2cdae9fc4cceaeb770a4c634fd
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How to cite

The Price of Decentralization, Paid Twice: A Latency Floor and a Minimal Subsidy from a Geographic Decentralization Invariant — arXiv:2609.20322 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20322 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_212dcd1dcccd (Metraipolis archive dc_212dcd1dcccd, sha256 3a53c50f42cdb2abce060ae0be2bcee0d15fcc2cdae9fc4cceaeb770a4c634fd)

BibTeX

@misc{dc212dcd1dcccd,
  title = {The Price of Decentralization, Paid Twice: A Latency Floor and a Minimal Subsidy from a Geographic Decentralization Invariant — arXiv:2609.20322},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20322},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_212dcd1dcccd; sha256 3a53c50f42cdb2abce060ae0be2bcee0d15fcc2cdae9fc4cceaeb770a4c634fd},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20322. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Latency-aware validator selection---rewarding validators for low network latency through voting weight, leadership, or fast-quorum membership---is known to push validators to co-locate, eroding the geographic fault-independence that Byzantine fault tolerance assumes. We give this tension a sharp, protocol-agnostic form. Calling a stake configuration (rho,gamma)-decentralized if no radius-rho region holds more than a gamma fraction of stake, we prove that for quorum threshold beta>gamma every proposer's beta-quorum commit latency is at least rho---independent of the protocol---and in the plane the minimum is exactly rho*sqrt(beta/gamma). Our main result couples this geometric floor to an incentive one: in a location-choice game with the true quorum-latency reward, centralization arises as a supercritical O(2)-symmetry-breaking bifurcation, and sustaining a decentralization target costs an anti-concentration subsidy of magnitude Theta(c*rho/sqrt(gamma))---decentralization is paid twice, in latency and in incentives, in a constant ratio. We verify every claim numerically and on measured geography: a 719-validator Solana census on a RIPE-Atlas latency matrix has validator Nakamoto coefficient 19 but geographic Nakamoto 1--2. We are explicit about scope: the floor is elementary; the contribution is the latency--subsidy coupling.

Tema degli esploratori: calcolo e infrastrutture (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-18 in cs.DC).
Categorie arXiv: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20322 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-10T03:24:19.924Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.DC/2026-09-18?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).