[Cryptography] DSM: deterministic state machine (edge, post-quantum, no public ledger/consensus)

[cryptskii at proton.me]

Hi all,

I’m sharing an article I posted yesterday that highlights what I think is one of the strongest aspects of DSM’s design: resistance to smart collusion and no saleable authority surface in the ordinary validity path.

Article:
https://irrefutablelabs.org/articles/DSMSecurityComparison.html

The article is grounded in this recent paper:

Breaking Omertà: On Threshold Cryptography, Smart Collusion, and Whistleblowing
https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1582.pdf

The core point is simple. Many systems try to mitigate collusion by making authority harder to corrupt. DSM takes a different approach by removing the intermediary authority that collusion would normally target.

The article also touches on MEV and valid but non neutral ordering. I think this matters when looking at the long term economic and fairness effects on a protocol. Even when behavior remains technically valid, repeated preferential ordering or timing advantages can still create meaningful extraction over time. In that sense, MEV and related ordering games can become the long game version of collusion: not an obvious break, but a slow structural drain through priority, timing, and access.

That framing is not how these problems are usually discussed in Web3. My view is that the language around MEV often makes the issue sound smaller than it is, partly because many architectures can only mitigate it rather than remove the authority surface that creates it.

Feel free to read when you get a chance. Feedback is more than welcome.

Thanks, everyone.

Brandon