Intercloud: Eventual Consistency for Decentralised Economies via Chilling-Effect Consensus

Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [Submitted on 21 Apr 2026] Intercloud: Eventual Consistency for Decentralised Economies via Chilling-Effect Consensus Gregory Magarshak We present Intercloud, a decentralised economic network in which streams of private data are secured by Watcher swarms that observe only cryptographic hashes, never plaintext. Intercloud requires no global consensus beyond a single shared random seed per epoch. Two mechanisms provide security: (i) ripple deduplication via epoch-stamped identifiers, preventing any ripple from propagating through the same node twice per epoch, guaranteeing termination without global coordination; and (ii) chilling-effect consensus, in which a swarm reaches finality by attesting to the absence of conflicting evidence rather than voting between alternatives. Any conflicting attestation automatically yields a self-certifying Proof of Corruption. We prove four main results. First, execution ripples terminate in bounded time via the ripple-ID mechanism. Second, a swarm of about 35 Watchers -- assigned by a verifiable random function, independent of total network size -- suffices for double-spending prevention, matching Hoepman's lower bound. Third, two correct clients can hold conflicting finality attestations only if the adversary compromises a supermajority of the assigned swarm or eclipses both clients from all honest nodes; we prove necessity and sufficiency. Fourth, Buridan's Principle does not apply: the consensus question is absence of evidence, not a binary choice on a continuous input. We also develop a complete economic model. Local coins are issued and retired by currency streams; security weight tracks value automatically as Intercoin weight adjusts at each epoch shuffle. Junior nodes detect corruption and earn lottery rewards for propagating Proofs of Corruption; vesting makes corruption economically irrational. The coin and content layers are strictly separated: regulators observe weight flows without learning amounts, coin types, identities, or rules. Comments: 11 pages, 1 table, IEEE conference format. Companion paper to "The Magarshak Machine" (Magarshak, 2026) Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) MSC classes: 68M14, 91B26, 94A60, 68M12 ACM classes: C.2.4; H.3.4; K.6.5 Cite as: arXiv:2605.22830 [cs.DC]   (or arXiv:2605.22830v1 [cs.DC] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.22830 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Gregory Magarshak [view email] [v1] Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:33:45 UTC (26 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.DC < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR cs.GT References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)