Protocol Rules

Four protocol rules hold the design together.

The reward law is retrieval-native: miners earn credit when their patches help the substrate retrieve answer-bearing documents. Anchoring the reward to a measurable property keeps the system from drifting into subjective territory like "this patch looks well-designed."

Difficulty hardens naturally as the corpus grows. The same 1024-word substrate has to compress more useful structure to keep scoring well, which means the game gets harder over time without anyone having to turn a knob.

When a corpus delta is unusually large, the minimum-improvement threshold freezes for one epoch while the parent baseline is recomputed against the new query distribution. The grace exists because a major distribution shift would otherwise produce a one-day cliff where every miner's prior structure suddenly looks worse against the new queries.

The per-patch hidden query pack is derived from a future Base blockhash, plus the patch hash, miner address, parent root, corpus root, bundle hash, and epoch secret. The coordinator cannot pre-test against the actual hidden pack because that blockhash does not exist yet when the patch arrives. Without that future-randomness binding, a coordinator could quietly retry patches against known queries until they passed.