🤖 AI Summary
This paper challenges the widespread assumption in blockchain systems that “immutability implies trust,” arguing that immutability—merely a cryptographic guarantee of data persistence—does not entail trust, which is a rational expectation of correctness, fairness, and reliability under uncertainty. Method: We formalize this distinction using predicate logic to model system properties, automata theory to characterize protocol behavior, cognitive game theory to analyze belief evolution among participants, and construct rigorous formal counterexamples. Contribution/Results: We provide the first formal disproof of the erroneous implication “immutability ⇒ trustworthiness.” The paper introduces a foundational separation between *structural trust* (rooted in technical invariants) and *cognitive trust* (grounded in agent reasoning), demonstrating that immutability neither ensures data authenticity, procedural fairness, nor resistance to fraud. It further identifies the theoretical origins of predictive fraud and permanent garbage-data proliferation as direct consequences of conflating these distinct trust modalities.
📝 Abstract
It is frequently claimed in blockchain discourse that immutability guarantees trust. This paper rigorously refutes that assertion. We define immutability as the cryptographic persistence of historical states in an append-only data structure and contrast it with trust, understood as a rational epistemic expectation under uncertainty. Employing predicate logic, automata-theoretic models, and epistemic game-theoretic analysis, we demonstrate that immutability neither entails nor implies correctness, fairness, or credibility. Through formal constructions and counterexamples--including predictive fraud schemes and the phenomenon of garbage permanence--we show that the belief conflates structural and epistemic domains. Immutability preserves all data equally, regardless of veracity. Therefore, the assertion that immutability guarantees trust collapses under the weight of formal scrutiny.