signal
information transmitted from a sender to a receiver that changes the receiver's state or behavior. a signal carries meaning only if it costs something to produce — otherwise it is noise. this is the core insight of signaling theory
in biology, costly signals (peacock tails, gazelle stotting) are reliable because faking them is expensive. in economics, spending money signals preference. in cyber, every cyber/signal consumes focus and stake — making each cyberlink a costly signal by construction
a transaction (tx) is a signal in the formal sense: an atomic state change that a sender commits resources to produce. blockchains generalize transactions beyond payments to arbitrary state transitions. cyber generalizes further — the cyber/signal is simultaneously a knowledge assertion, an economic commitment, and a proven computation