Emerging global synchrony

Another approach is to build a mechanism requiring for reaching synchronous behaviour without explicitly building it in from the beginning.

Emerging blockchain technologies seem to fall into this category of systems. In the blockchain-everything space, synchrony is being called 'a global consensus', which, in this document are used as equivalent. (Admittedly, the relation between synchrony and consensus is a simplification for the purposes of the current brainstorming document -- needs to be further researched.) Maybe partially due to popularity of the blockchain technologies, synchronization is being studied under the name of distributed consensus algorithms-- both studying the emergence of coordinated behaviour in distributed systems.

Bitcon is interesting because it achieves consensus not only via technical means, but also with the help of built-in economic mechanism. An example of Bitcoin reveals five constituencies involved in reaching consensus (see talk by Andreas Antonopoulos):

  1. Software developers (process consensus - new updates, changing rules, etc.) = creators of the system;
  2. Miners (runtime consensus - voting with hashing power based on economic incentives) = middlemen - trust providers;
  3. Exchanges = middlemen - liquidity ;
  4. Wallets = marked participants;
  5. Merchants = market participants;

Note the contrast between five constituencies and the prevailing understanding that the consensus is created only by miners. There could be different weights of importance of different constituencies in the underlying consensus algorithm of a distributed system. Actually, a system with built-in synchrony can be said to have 100% weight on the first constituency...