Society · Protocols
MonotonicCounter
Value that never decreases
Definition
Mechanism
A distributed coordination primitive where a value (clock, version, balance) never decreases. This simplifies consensus: a node seeing a higher value knows it is seeing later state, without needing to compare histories. It is the foundation of logical clocks and CRDTs, and relies on a StateLock (or CRDT logic) to ensure the value never regresses.
Risks
Failure modes
Counter overflow (finite integer space).
Relationships
Builds on
Used by
References
Infrastructure
Immutable append-only log of agent actions for compliance and debugging
Infrastructure
Immutable record of one agent's cast choice
Infrastructure
Handling relativistic event ordering