Now, it's true that the lucky monopolist who ended up as the Bill Gates of data feeds probably doesn't have an incentive to screw it up on purpose, and it probably won't be too bad in practice. Often the winners of natural monopolies are pretty good at their jobs - Windows isn't all that bad... But I doubt this is what the designers intend. You have a lot of cost and complexity with all the voting stuff to make the decisions about outcomes decentralized, but then you end up with a de-facto centralized structure anyway, and worse a centralized structure that's hard to fix if it goes bad. If you knew you were going to end up with authorities anyhow I think there would be simpler, more robust ways to do settlement. (For example, skip the voting and let people specify a list of settlement authorities in the contract and a protocol to choose between them if they diverge. That puts your settlement authorities in self-correcting free-market competition as you describe for contracts, rather than lumbering you with the one who won the battle to be the de-facto go-to guy.)