  We present Cobalt, a novel atomic broadcast algorithm that works in networks
with non-uniform trust and no global agreement on participants, and is
probabilistically guaranteed to make forward progress even in the presence of
maximal faults and arbitrary asynchrony. The exact properties that Cobalt
satisfies makes it particularly applicable to designing an efficient
decentralized "voting network" that allows a public, open-entry group of nodes
to agree on changes to some shared set of rules in a fair and consistent manner
while tolerating some trusted nodes and arbitrarily many untrusted nodes
behaving maliciously. We also define a new set of properties which must be
satisfied by any safe decentralized governance algorithm, and all of which
Cobalt satisfies.
