I would argue that PoW participants still need to "ask others", albeit for different kinds of information - - For starters, if say I'm accepting a BTC payment,

I would argue that PoW participants still need to "ask others", albeit for different kinds of information - - For starters, if say I'm accepting a BTC payment, I need to ask a trusted source about the market value of BTC. - I need to ask which software I can trust to implement the Bitcoin protocol. - If I don't want to verify every transaction from the genesis, I need to ask for a checkpoint. - In case I'm being eclipsed, I need to ask whether the chain I'm seeing is the canonical one, or what approximate hash rate the canonical chain should have.