FINALITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHODLER

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Finality is conditional on beliefs about the future rather than Bayesian certainty accumulation, with social finality emerging from community consensus that radical protocol changes or deep reverts will be rejected. Protocol finality divides into honest threshold finality relying on Byzantine Agreement safety properties, cryptoeconomic finality adding slashing accountability where rational coalitions avoid attacks costing more in stake than rewards, and representative finality using randomly-sampled committees with stronger assumptions about honest majorities and adaptive corruption resistance. Finality strengthens temporally as transactions progress from single-validator proposals to chain depth to committee endorsement to majority confirmation and eventually social immutability, with categorical notions capturing qualitative shifts in protective assumptions despite feedback loops between confidence and user behavior affecting reversion risk.