EC Protocol: Consensus Semantics and Byzantine Fault Model

We present EC (Echo Consent), a distributed consensus protocol for maintaining shared state across a permissionless network without global coordination or immutable history. Unlike blockchain systems that prioritize permanent finality, EC treats consensus as a continuous, locality-scoped process where agreement reflects current majority alignment rather than irreversible commitment. The protocol introduces several novel mechanisms: (1) Proof-of-Aligned Storage (PoAS), a challenge-response scheme that verifies nodes store data consistent with the network majority, enabling peer selection without global knowledge; (2) organic sharding through address-space locality, where nodes maintain responsibility for nearby regions without explicit shard assignment; and (3) token scattering, an emergent security property where typical usage patterns naturally distribute tokens across neighborhoods, defeating targeted capture attacks. EC operates under standard honest-majority assumptions but explicitly acknowledges and documents their implications. Safety is prioritized over liveness: committed state is locally immutable, while global consistency emerges probabilistically through continuous alignment pressure. Transactions support atomic multi-token operations, enabling applications like stateless gift cards, decentralized naming, and verifiable voting without shared infrastructure. We provide formal analysis of vote threshold confidence (91% probability of majority support when threshold reached), neighborhood capture costs (linear scaling with network size), and PoAS discrimination (20× ratio between aligned and misaligned nodes at θ=8 overlap threshold). The protocol occupies a distinct design space suited to applications where current shared agreement matters more than permanent historical record.