Imagine a crypto-currency-based market for mechanically verifiable proofs of theorems and for programs with proofs that they meet their specifications. Simply described, people can attach bounties to mathematical conjectures and other people can try to come up with a proof. If they manage to do so, they submit a formalized version that will be checked automatically and they will receive the reward.

In this market where trust is based on automatic proof checkers, we can imagine how disruptive a proof of False may be: someone who is able to make the checker believe that they can prove False can actually prove any theorem and therefore is able to claim payment for any awaiting conjecture. They can also produce programs that do not really meet the specifications they claim to meet.

Until we can have absolute certainty that a proof checker, such as the kernel of a proof assistant, does not make it possible to prove False,1 we need to leave room for this possibility and take measures so that it does not break havoc.2

To prevent a large disruptive effect, we need to have counter-measures for when a proof of False is found, and as soon as we acknowledge this, it becomes clear that we need to incentivize people to prove False and to share their proofs, by paying them for such a proof3 (in order to trigger said counter-measures).

What would counter-measures be like?

The basic idea is rather simple: as soon as a proof of False has been found, freeze the entire market for the time it takes for the developers of the proof checker to release a new version where the bug has been fixed. Once such a version is released, check all existing proofs and put transactions that are linked to a proof that does not check anymore on hold. If a proof was relying on a lemma that has been invalidated, the proof (and the associated transaction) can still be saved by finding an alternative proof to the lemma. Alternatively, if a transaction is associated to a theorem whose negation happens to be provable, or if no valid proof can be found for a reasonable delay, revert the transaction.

This looks like transaction history rewriting, like the hard fork of Ethereum blockchain after the DAO event, but this is different because here the reverting of such transactions is part of the predefined crypto-currency protocol so there is no debating to do on the legitimacy of such an action.

How to make sure that people share their proof of False rather than using them to steal other people’s money?

All proofs are public and people may look at them carefully to see whether they look suspicious or not. If a proof looks suspicious, then the person who finds the proof suspicious can try to derive a proof of False from it, either by proving that the theorem that is proved is actually wrong, or by extracting the fallacious argument (hack exploiting a critical bug) from the proof and using it to prove False directly. Then the person gets the reward and the original author of the suspicious proof loses their own rewards. Given that this is bound to happen, the self-interest of the original author pushes them to share their proof of False directly.

Where does the money for paying proofs of False come from?

The first solution that comes to the mind is to create these rewards out of fin air. Unfortunately, sudden creation of money decreases the value of the currency for everyone, and thus each proof of False has a negative impact on the whole market. This impact is unpredictable.

Another solution is inspired by CDS (credit default swaps): people can bet that no proof of False will be found by buying these bonds. The bonds have a predictable growth rate. Whenever a proof of False is found, the bonds serve to pay the reward and thus some people lose money but the actual market is unaffected (the money to pay the CDS rent is created4 in a fully predictable way).

This form of self-insurance would moreover be a strong driver to get a more and more resilient proof checker.

We could discuss how these bonds would work in more details, although this is not the subject of this post. Bonds could be created at regular intervals and so the longer since the last proof of False, the bigger the reward is (and the less interesting not sharing a proof of False becomes). The rent for these bonds could slowly decrease over time to compensate for the creation of new bonds (but sufficiently slowly so that people are well compensated for their initial investment). At bond creation, there could be an auction to choose who gets to buy it first and at what price.

Note that this might not be completely sufficient to avoid a sudden bad impact of a proof of False on the market, because if people start to believe that there is no proof of False left to be found, then they can start to think that the (large) reward for such a proof is never going to be claimed, and thus that this represents an amount of money that is actually out of the currency system. If such a belief is then contradicted, this would still create a shock.

Limitations

A first, important, limitation is the strong link required between the proof market and the crypto-currency itself. This is not without reason though, as smart contracts (which are basically programs) based upon invalidated proofs that they meet certain specifications would need to be invalidated as well.

A second limitation is the uncertainty that this places upon any transaction in the system. If some transactions happen to be reverted, then the wallet that was used to send you money may not have had enough money to actually do so. Then you will lose whatever exceeding amount you have received from this wallet. If this means that you, in turn, would not have been able to realize some transactions you previously conducted, the recipient may lose part of their money as well…

This inherent risk to any transaction may be evaluated and taken into account. With a public transaction record, it is easy to compute a risk factor depending on the amount available in the payer’s wallet, the part of this money that comes directly from rewards in the proof market and how long the associated proofs have been there, and recursively the risk associated to each of the transactions the rest of the money comes from. If this risk is too high, it might be a reason to refuse a transaction. Otherwise, the associated risk might just be taken into account as a supplementary fee.

An alternative solution to both of these limitations is to make the proof market use its own reward tokens that can be converted into real digital coins only after some time has elapsed. Then only the internal transactions in the proof market can be reverted and there is no risk associated to transactions that take place outside of it. This supposes to define what delay would be sufficient to guarantee with near certainty that the proofs that were submitted are not suspicious.

Conclusion

We may legitimately ask whether this whole protocol is necessary. At the moment, proof checkers are not critical enough applications to be fully trustworthy in an adversarial context. They are very helpful to verify critical applications, but in this case the proof author is not trying to fool the checker, and the risk of accidentally exploiting a bug is much lower. We could wait until a proof checker is, itself, formally verified (a huge task but still bound to happen in the future). However, we would still be trusting a conjecture: that the underlying logic is consistent.5 That in itself may not be viewed as such a big problem, given that the whole field of cryptography, and therefore crypto-currencies as well, already depend on a conjecture.

  1. Actually we won’t ever reach this level of certainty: even if we could guarantee that there are no implementation bugs left, there could still be inconsistencies in the mathematical theory that is used itself. We can never be fully sure such inconsistency is not present because of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem. 

  2. This echoes Vladimir Voevodsky proposal of getting ready to work on mathematical proofs in inconsistent settings. 

  3. The idea of paying for a formal proof of a theorem and in particular for a proof of False is not novel, cf. this comment on /r/Bitcoin in early 2014. 

  4. Or, if you want to avoid money creation, the rent of these bonds can be paid by an insurance fee on all transactions in the proof market. 

  5. A conjecture that itself can never be completely solved, because of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem.