state economics — price the act, free the being, fund the machine forever

two products, three channels, four rules, one curve. writing state is energy (landauer): pay once at the margin. holding state is persistence: free forever — no rent, no dormancy, no eviction, no death. security is funded by an asymptotic emission tail whose cap is the size of the field — eternal budget, provable bound, and this is not a trade-off. this page spec-ifies §3e of steps-blocks-epochs (state-growth fees) and answers the funding question that oikos left open: who pays the machine in 2140.

1. why this page

the question who pays for state, and who pays for security is fundamental, and every surveyed chain answers it by conflating two independent layers. survey, one line each:

the synthesis: nervos found the structure (two layers), parano1d found the pricing layer, the asymptotic curve closes the funding layer. rent as a class dies: the tail funds security forever, so state pricing is freed to be purely about scarcity discipline.

2. the two products (separate the flies from the cutlets)

1. creation / deletion = energy. writing information into shared consensus is irreversible work; the price is one-time, paid at the act (landauer). deleting works for the system and restores capacity — it is free and reduces the bill.
2. holding = persistence. being is not an action and is not a service. a gene pays no rent for sitting in the genome. therefore: no rent, no dormancy rule, no eviction — zero mortality terms anywhere in the mechanism. an agent that wants to reserve itself for a long term does not pay repeatedly — it locks (rule 1).

3. the mechanism — four rules + one curve

rule 1 — the price of writing: burn or lock, holder's choice. a net-new slot costs W(φ) = W₀ × M(φ), where φ is state occupancy and M ∈ {1, 2, 4, 8} steps at φ ≥ {50 %, 75 %, 90 %}. payment has two forms:

• burn — the fee is destroyed. for ephemeral state: apps, short cycles. payment to everyone through deflation.
• lock — k × W(φ) worth of token is frozen while the slot lives, unlocked on deletion. for reservations: agents, long-term positions, books. cost of holding = immobilized capital's opportunity cost; mechanically zero, terminally infinite. this is the no-death reservation: keep the lock, keep the slot, forever.
• deletion is always free and always netted: only created − deleted slots are priced in a transaction.

rule 2 — holding is free. no member of any formula charges for be. permanence is unconditional once written or locked.

rule 3 — expansion, the stress valve. 10 of the last 18 finalized blocks at φ ≥ 75 % → capacity ×2, φ → φ/2, M → 1×. growth of capacity is bookkeeping (old root = left child, canonical empty tree = right), never an event.

rule 4 — the metabolism: one asymptotic curve. supply(h) = C · (1 − q^h) with C ≤ p (the field size, goldilocks). one curve feeds two channels by fixed proportion: earners (miners and stakers — the two lotteries of steps-blocks-epochs §5) and the machine (a fixed share that may be 0). eternal security budget, hard cap, closed form provable inside the step relation.

anchor. W₀ is a fraction of the block reward, not a bare constant — the price of writing scales with the value of the network; early dust is never subsidized forever for a fixed penny.

4. what the mechanism refuses

as important as what it does: no rent (existence is not tariffed) · no death (no dormancy, no eviction) · no auction (no demand oracle, no EIP-1559 orchestra) · no miner-earned growth fee (a miner paid from state scarcity is structurally long that scarcity — burn and lock sit with the holder, the miner stays neutral) · no conflation of state pricing with security funding (two layers, two channels, one direction each).

5. relation to the other pages

• steps-blocks-epochs §3e: this page is its specification — the occupancy ladder, the expansion valve, and now the burn-or-lock choice. the child spec closes when these rules are written into foculus/specs/parameters.md with numbers.
• oikos: books settle value at home; citizenship is a long-term reservation → books live in the lock channel by default. agents of the graph reserve their presence by lock, not by rent — matching the no-death position.
• term: contract state follows the same rule: creating a live right pays at the margin; holding it is free; the lock variant is what timelocked vaults and long rights use.
• monetary policy: the asymptotic tail replaces both ergo-rent and parano1d's unbounded tail. not a trade-off: the sum of an eternal geometric series is finite, and the cap chosen at the field size makes the whole monetary policy one closed form.
• bbg: state lives in the polynomial; φ is computed from committed counters only — the entire mechanism is step functions and closed forms, arithmetizable inside the step relation.

6. the complexity budget — six numbers

7. open questions

1. per-dim φ: bbg carries many public dimensions; is occupancy priced per dimension or on an aggregate? (books suggest: aggregate capacity, per-book filters.)
2. lock without unlocking horizon: an agent that never deletes holds a lock forever — is the opportunity cost a sufficient discipline, or does k need an occupancy-dependence too?
3. rescaled expansion window for a 1 s step cadence: 10-of-18 blocks becomes what in steps?
4. machine share default: 0 until the machine names its first need, or small from genesis?

8. acceptance

1. the four rules and the curve stated as closed forms over committed counters, reviewed.
2. conformance on the chaosnet: a book created via lock, held across epochs, deleted → capital unlocked, net burn zero; net growth burns correctly at each ladder step; supply(h) = C(1−q^h) verified against the emission schedule in audit/.
3. foculus/specs/parameters.md gains the six numbers; steps-blocks-epochs §3e marked specified with this page as its normative reference.