Immutability Does Not Guarantee Trust: A Formal and Logical Refutation

TL;DR

This paper rigorously challenges the common claim in blockchain discourse that immutability guarantees trust, showing through formal analysis that immutability alone does not ensure correctness, fairness, or credibility.

Contribution

It provides a formal and logical refutation of the claim that immutability guarantees trust in blockchain systems, highlighting the distinction between structural data persistence and epistemic trust.

Findings

Immutability does not imply correctness or fairness.

Structural data persistence does not equate to trustworthiness.

Counterexamples demonstrate the limits of immutability in ensuring trust.

Abstract

It is frequently claimed in blockchain discourse that immutability guarantees trust. This paper rigorously refutes that assertion. We define immutability as the cryptographic persistence of historical states in an append-only data structure and contrast it with trust, understood as a rational epistemic expectation under uncertainty. Employing predicate logic, automata-theoretic models, and epistemic game-theoretic analysis, we demonstrate that immutability neither entails nor implies correctness, fairness, or credibility. Through formal constructions and counterexamples--including predictive fraud schemes and the phenomenon of garbage permanence--we show that the belief conflates structural and epistemic domains. Immutability preserves all data equally, regardless of veracity. Therefore, the assertion that immutability guarantees trust collapses under the weight of formal scrutiny.