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Then you are introducing trust assumptions and new attack vectors. There are no universally trusted parties to provide checkpoints.
Yes, I'm introducing trust of large scale society itself, but not a particular institution. We already trust society implicitly with basically everything we do.
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And if somebody has hacked Facebook or Twitter? Or put pressure on them from some USG agency? Or has compromised your access to them? Or maybe you just don't trust them because they routinely censor data and besides treat their users as data crops?
Exactly. It's not just facebook and twitter. It's them, and hacker news, and slashdot, and the various subreddits, and this forum, and wikipedia, and the google homepage, and the local grocery store's bulletin board, and the lcd display above the central square, and everyone who cares to participate's website or other medium. You'd have to break all of them - reduce the world to the Truman Show. Good luck!
Granted, it may increase the potential for consensus failure, if the USG posts a different hash than Russia, or w/e. But at least it will be much clearer which agencies are vying for which consensus outcomes.
The idea has obviously not been fully fleshed out. But I think these kinds of things are worth thinking about to the extent that internet based consensus systems can be reflected off the real world. There's more to this than simply accelerating the heat death of the universe
