Clockless Consensus - Truth-Selection via an Unknown-Future Schelling Point

Many of the questions that matter are empirical yet unanchored: there is a fact of the
matter, but no oracle will rule on it and no one can name the day the evidence lands —
where a disease outbreak began, what a dietary pattern does over decades. Prediction
markets cannot reach them, because they need a settlement event to import. What remains
measures what a crowd believes now, and nothing in it pulls that belief toward evidence.
Nor does adding a stake supply the pull: where belief is traded with no resolution to
anchor payoff, momentum dominates and the profitable move is to front-run the crowd
rather than to be right.

We introduce clockless consensus, which supplies the missing pull without importing an
anchor. A participant stakes real value on a True/False position; the position locks
and settles neither on a date the holder picks nor at an oracle's ruling, but at a moment
set by the activity of the question itself — more contested questions settle later,
and no one can time their own settlement. Each position is thus its own synthetic
resolution event, never a shared date. Reward rises with how lopsided the crowd was
against a position at entry, and with whether the crowd has come around by the time it is
measured: bold at entry, correct at settlement.

The conceptual core is an unknown-future Schelling point: a Keynesian beauty contest
converges only because every player is scored at one shared instant, and removing that
instant leaves nothing to coordinate on except an answer that does not move — for an
evidence-bearing question, the truth. We propose no theory of truth and do not claim that
perfect epistemic consensus is attainable; this is an incentive mechanism meant to improve
the long-run aggregation of dispersed evidence under uncertainty. We give the design
rationale, a game-resistance analysis, and — centrally — a precise account of why
simulation can validate the mechanism's engineering properties but not its epistemic
claim.