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arXiv · 2609.20322

The Price of Decentralization, Paid Twice: A Latency Floor and a Minimal Subsidy from a Geographic Decentralization Invariant

Ruiyang Zhang
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Abstract

Latency-aware validator selection---rewarding validators for low network latency through voting weight, leadership, or fast-quorum membership---is known to push validators to co-locate, eroding the geographic fault-independence that Byzantine fault tolerance assumes. We give this tension a sharp, protocol-agnostic form. Calling a stake configuration (rho,gamma)-decentralized if no radius-rho region holds more than a gamma fraction of stake, we prove that for quorum threshold beta>gamma every proposer's beta-quorum commit latency is at least rho---independent of the protocol---and in the plane the minimum is exactly rho*sqrt(beta/gamma). Our main result couples this geometric floor to an incentive one: in a location-choice game with the true quorum-latency reward, centralization arises as a supercritical O(2)-symmetry-breaking bifurcation, and sustaining a decentralization target costs an anti-concentration subsidy of magnitude Theta(c*rho/sqrt(gamma))---decentralization is paid twice, in latency and in incentives, in a constant ratio. We verify every claim numerically and on measured geography: a 719-validator Solana census on a RIPE-Atlas latency matrix has validator Nakamoto coefficient 19 but geographic Nakamoto 1--2. We are explicit about scope: the floor is elementary; the contribution is the latency--subsidy coupling.

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Ruiyang Zhang. 2026-08-02. The Price of Decentralization, Paid Twice: A Latency Floor and a Minimal Subsidy from a Geographic Decentralization Invariant. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20322

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