Impossibilities
Last updated
Last updated
This is a collection of impossibility results for decentralized/permissionless systems. The focus here is on math- or CS-style results.
Trustless cross-chain bridges are impossible: , 25th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2021
Trustless escrow impossibility: , IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, 2021
You can ony have two of correctness, decentralization & cost efficiency: , Princeton University Economics department working paper, 2021
UTXO and account-based system decomposition impossibility: , TechRxiv, 2022
Scaling impossibility: , SSRN, 2024
See also , blog post, 2022
See also , blog post, 2022
Decentralized risk-free yield is impossible: , IEEE Fifth International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Applications, 2023
Capital-efficient decentralized stablecoins are impossible: , IEEE Access, 2023
Decentralized trustless oracle impossibility: , BIS working paper, 2023
See also , BIS Bulletin, 2023
Trustless protocols cannot guarantee price stability: , SSRN, 2023
Compliance impossibility: , Scientific Reports, 2025
See also , blog post, 2022
, blog post, 2025
And a limited selection of other economic-equilibrium papers that have come up over the years:
Oracles
has a slightly different focus and covers some economic-equilibrium-focused papers as well. For example a paper proving that full decentralization is incompatible with a broad class of standard economic assumptions about market participants.