Can you imagine a better way to solve this issue? My rationale behind this is that users agree beforehand who are going to be the state custodians, who at the end are the ones responsible for keeping the state coherence. The creator of the state machine is not transcendental; for example, if we both are going to participate in some sort of process, contract, or any other thing modeled by a state machine, we can both be state custodians and have the same responsibility. The creator doesn't matter at this point. Unresolved forks are a risk, but I think this model correctly places the responsibility on the participants, the state custodians, and does not enforce any specific requirements. I see these state machines as a way to define an agreement declaratively with all its possible states and conditions. This is a low level primitive to build things on top, and requirements for specific use cases like strong security of the state and dispute resolution should be application specific