#5870. From premise to practice of social consensus: How to agree on common knowledge in blockchain-enabled supply chains

July 2026publication date
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Computer Networks and Communications;
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More details about the manuscript: Science Citation Index Expanded or/and Social Sciences Citation Index
Abstract:
Attaining “Common Knowledge” is essential in the formation of deals and agreements, but is hard to achieve over point-to-point communication networks such as the Internet. While blockchain technologies provide a helpful mechanism in the form of technical consensus, originally created to resolve the double-spending problem, little does it address impediments to proper contract formation that have to do with the quality of exogenous data, asymmetry of information, or even its suitability (the colloquial garbage-in/garbage-out problem). In the face of the limitations of technical consensus, we explore how the strengths of technical consensus can be utilized by introducing another dimension of consensus – what we have called social consensus – which directly addresses the formation of true (if retrospective) Common Knowledge essential to arms-length agreement between multiple actors. We have eschewed the notion that social consensus as an epistemological concern, and instead focus on mechanisms by which environments of multiple actors form and sustain bodies of information that enable them to go about their activities with a reasonable level of confidence that others in the supply chain will ‘do their bit,’ backed by a ‘failsafe’ mechanism enforced by cryptography which holds the actors unharmed in case the envisioned finality is not obtained. These bodies of information create what is essentially a retrospective form of common knowledge, and a lesser variant, mutual knowledge. We propose an implementation from the preferred mechanism of a multisig primitive, which builds and improves on the Gnosis multisig, in the use case of decentralized blockchain-powered supply chains consisting of multiple parties, human and machine.
Keywords:
Blockchain; Common knowledge; Consensus; Information asymmetry; Information asynchrony; Multisig; Supply chains

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