Contents
- Design principles
- Substrate & trust tiers
- Personalization with frozen weights
- The specialist production line
- Training federation
- Verification architecture
- Inference routing
- Hardware tiers (NVIDIA / AMD)
- Decentralized inference network
- Diversity & provenance
- DIIP — network upgrades
- Witness Layer
- The economic & operational layer
- Deployment sequence
- Decisions & open questions
- Glossary for newcomers
Design principles
- Frozen substrate + additive specialization. The base model is obtained or trained once and frozen. All specialization is adapters (LoRA/DoRA) plus RAG. N topics = 1 base + N tiny adapters, not N full models.
- Data, not weights, individuates. Personalization and memory live in data stores (RAG), not in model parameters. Live dialogue never writes to weights.
- Verification at the core. Any output that affects a decision passes a deterministic memory check and/or a behavioral check anchored on objective tasks.
- There are no neutral weights — provenance by trust tier. A base's origin is chosen for the topic's sensitivity.
- Open core. True decentralization needs open provenance (ideally data + code + weights), not just open weights.
- Security through isolation. Shared weights are immutable at runtime → no single participant can poison the shared model; client data is isolated.
Philosophical map
Base = universal impersonal substrate (one for all); memory/RAG = the individuating layer (in the Vedic tradition, Smriti, "that which is remembered"); adapter = specialization. One substrate, many memories — like "one Atman, many selves, distinguished only by conditioning."
The network is governed under the JJ DAI Manifesto (foundational, unchangeable). Its architectural embodiment is the Witness Layer (§12), an independent observer of the network's evolution.
Substrate & trust tiers
| Tier | Topics | Allowed provenance | Candidate bases | Verification class |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T1 — checkable | energy equipment, aerospace products, calculations, code | any (behind a checker) | Qwen3.x (Apache), DeepSeek V4 (MIT) | A — objective checker |
| T2 — subjective, low-risk | drafts, creative, multilingual | any | any capable model | C — consensus |
| T3 — strategic | strategy, security, defense JVs | EU / US / fully open | Mistral (EU), OLMo-class, own fine-tunes | B/C + human in the loop |
Rule: a model with potentially "baked-in" foreign vectors (political censorship, bias) is allowed in T1, because an algorithmic checker verifies the answer rather than trusting the model; in T3 such a model is disqualified — there the output can't be checked by an algorithm, and the bias is embedded in the weights.
Personalization with frozen weights
"Learning from user dialogues" is really four distinct mechanisms; only the last touches weights.
- In-context — adaptation within the current dialogue's context window; ephemeral, no weight change.
- Per-user memory/RAG — durable personalization in a personal namespace (facts, preferences, past decisions). The primary mechanism. This is data, not parameters.
- Per-user adapter — a tiny per-user LoRA when behavioral customization is needed, not just facts. An additive delta on the frozen base.
- Offline consolidation — the only real weight learning: a batch of dialogues (with consent) → fine-tune → acceptance → new version.
The specialist production line (distillation)
- Topic definition — scope, a set of control tasks ("canaries" of classes A/B/C), a known-bias probe (vector-audit), trust tier.
- Data assembly — real JJ queries on the topic + synthetic coverage + teacher generation.
- Checker cleaning — keep only teacher outputs that pass the objective class-A check. The dataset cleans itself.
- Training — QLoRA/DoRA on the frozen base → topic adapter, on whatever tier the topic demands.
- Acceptance — canary battery + vector-audit; admitted only above thresholds.
- Registration — signed and written to the registry-ledger; published to the adapter catalog.
Teacher: open licenses only (MIT/Apache permit distillation; closed APIs forbid training a competitor on their outputs). Distillation needs the teacher's outputs, not ownership — you can rent the teacher and own the student.
Training federation
Key property: across topics this is embarrassingly parallel — no synchronization over the internet, unlike jointly training one model. That is what makes heterogeneous hardware tiers natural.
| Node role | Function | Hardware tier |
|---|---|---|
| Producer | trains its topic's adapter | RTX6000 / H200 / 8×H200 |
| Teacher provision | supplies teacher outputs | 8×H200 local or rented |
| Auditor | independent canary acceptance | H200 |
Shared replicated registries (tiny, because we share catalogs and adapters, not weights and gradients): adapter catalog; canary/anchor registry; base registry.
Heavy path (optional): for a topic that outgrows an adapter, a subset of H200+ nodes runs decentralized training from the shared base via DiLoCo/PRIME (local steps, infrequent sync → communication drops by hundreds of times; demonstrated in practice on 10–32B models across continents).
Verification architecture
Plane H — memory integrity (deterministic). Every knowledge fragment is content-hashed; the index is a Merkle tree whose root commits the entire knowledge state. Retrieval verification = fragment IDs + short inclusion proofs, with no re-running of the model. Writes are signed by the contributor's identity; write access is governed by policy.
Plane B — reasoning consensus (probabilistic). Control tasks ("canaries") + a scoring aggregator → a per-topic trust score for the node + a drift map (clustering by output similarity).
| Class | What | Judge | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| A — objective | code/tests, calc, SQL, schema | algorithm | trust anchor |
| B — reference | fact vs. signed snapshot | match | support |
| C — consensus | open-ended tasks | weighted vote | object of alignment, not anchor |
Reputation is earned on class A, spent on class C. Attestation slot (swappable): verification accepts {behavioral score | TEE hardware attestation | zk-proof} interchangeably — today inference is covered by TEE and optimistic checking; as zkML matures, the slot swaps to a crypto-proof without redesigning the architecture.
Canary lifecycle (against teaching to the test)
A fixed test set is doomed to Goodhart's law: models learn to pass the tests without getting smarter. So canaries are a living process, not a static benchmark:
- Rotation & expiry: each canary has a lifespan; after a few reveals in scored evaluation it retires (difficulty weight → 0), since it may have leaked into training. The set is a river, not a pond.
- Secret reserve (Goodhart detector): a fraction of canaries is never used for reward-bearing scoring — only for blind audits. Good on public, poor on secret → overfit to the test → penalty.
- Sourcing from reality: the least gameable source is real, novel queries with an outcome verified after the fact (class A: code that passed CI; a calculation that held up in the field). Canaries regenerate from reality, which can't be pre-optimized — it hasn't happened yet.
- Adversarial bounty: nodes are rewarded for canaries the incumbent specialists fail — an open hunt for blind spots that keeps the test ahead of the models.
- Difficulty re-weighting: once models master a canary class, its weight decays — reward shifts to newer/harder ones, and the eval tracks the frontier.
All under commit-reveal with unpredictable sampling. Honestly: Goodhart is never "won," only stayed ahead of — an ongoing cost (red-team incentives, fresh sourcing), not a one-off fix.
Inference routing
Router = the gating of a "MoE-of-specialists": it classifies a query → topic(s) + trust tier, and dispatches to the right specialist. The router is also a policy gate: provenance is enforced per topic (geopolitics never routes to a model with foreign vectors).
Routing policy — shared and replicated across all local routers: a single versioned policy is replicated to nodes so routers don't diverge; updates flow through the signed registry.
Economics: one frozen base is loaded into the inference engine (vLLM/SGLang) once, and LoRA adapters are hot-swapped per request — no need for N model instances. Across nodes, the router dispatches to the node holding the right base+adapter pair with free capacity.
Live verification gate: before an answer is used — memory check (Plane H) + reasoning check (Plane B: class-A checker for objective / trust score for subjective) + human in the loop for T3. The tuple (query, specialists, answer, memory root, verification result) is written to the immutable ledger.
The router as a power center — and how to diffuse it
If the router decides who is asked, who answers, and who is in the consensus, it becomes a new control point — an analog of Google ranking, the Twitter feed, or App Store gatekeeping. To be precise about the risk: the router shifts attention and earnings (who gets work), but on objective topics it cannot shift truth — the answer still passes a class-A checker. So the capture is economic, not epistemic. We diffuse it like this:
- The router is mechanism, not discretion: a deterministic, reproducible function with no hidden knobs; anyone can run the same policy on the same query and get the same routing.
- Auditable after the fact: misrouting (work to cronies) is detected and slashed by the same fraud-proof.
- Requester's choice: a client need not accept the default routing — they can request several specialists, a specified provenance mix, or their own policy variant. The default is a Schelling point, not an App Store monopoly.
- Diversity mandate: for consensus queries the router must assemble a provenance-diverse panel, not "top-k by reputation" (which might share one base).
- Power-bearing knobs = class 3: who may answer/judge, provenance constraints, and the reputation→influence mapping change only via class-3 DIIP (70%+, quorum, time-lock, rationale, public diff). The mechanical parts (topic classification, capacity balancing) are class 1–2.
Hardware tiers — NVIDIA / AMD
The network is hardware-heterogeneous: a node participates at the tier it can sustain. Below is a guide; detailed requirements will follow in a separate document.
| Tier | Purpose | NVIDIA | AMD equivalent | Memory | Role in the network |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ① Light | entry, light topics | RTX 6000 Blackwell (96 GB) / Ada (48 GB) | Radeon PRO W7900 (48 GB) | 48–96 GB | specialist inference, QLoRA up to ~13–34B, auditor |
| ② Mid | mid topics | 1×H200 (141 GB) | 1×Instinct MI300X (192 GB) / MI325X (256 GB) | 141–256 GB | QLoRA 24–70B, specialist serving, validator |
| ③ Heavy | heavy topics, teacher | 8×H200 (1,128 GB) | 8×MI300X (1,536 GB) / 8×MI325X (2,048 GB) | 1.1–2.0 TB | trillion-param MoE, distillation, frontier inference |
Capex (guide)
8×H200: ~$370k (HGX), $350–500k (DGX). Rental ~$2.5–3.5/hr per GPU. Cost-smart: rent the teacher for a distillation campaign, own a student node; buy an 8×GPU node for sovereign frontier inference or sustained load.
Decentralized inference network
The object the network validates — an inference output — is expensive to produce, non-deterministic bit-for-bit, and often subjective. So classic blockchain consensus doesn't transfer here; the network is built in layers.
9.1 Identity & Sybil resistance
Three layers: proof-of-capability (entry — prove real inference of a real model on real hardware; cost to fake = cost of GPUs); bonded collateral (a stake, burned on cheating); earned competence weight (vote weight = earned, non-transferable competence). The fix for the Monero/Qubic lesson: influence is proportional not to raw compute (which can be rented and herded into a pool) but to earned reputation — which can't be bought and can't be accumulated quickly.
9.2 Work protocol by class
- A (objective): one node answers, a cheap checker verifies; no consensus needed — the checker is the oracle, anyone can re-run it. Optimistic, with a fraud proof.
- B (reference): match against a signed knowledge snapshot.
- C (subjective): redundant query to k independent nodes → compare by meaning; a judge panel weighted by competence; escalate on low agreement.
Limit of C: consensus on judgment ≠ consensus on truth. Guardrails: competence weighting (judges proven on A), vector-audit, and provenance diversity — a panel of models from different countries doesn't share one blind spot.
9.3 Verifier's dilemma & non-determinism
Random audit: verify a random fraction of outputs; set the audit rate so cheating is economically negative. Challenge game: a disputed computation is re-executed by a neutral auditor; the loser is slashed. Non-determinism: not bit-exact — the checker catches correctness (A), a similarity threshold catches C; the attestation slot removes re-execution entirely.
9.4 Consensus object & ledger
The network does NOT reach consensus on every inference. Consensus runs over a small deterministic state: the registries (adapters, canaries, bases, reputation, slashing). Heavy inference stays off-ledger; only a short verifiable state, disputes, and reputation updates hit the ledger. The "chain" here is the reputation-and-audit ledger, not the inferences themselves.
9.5 Incentives & anti-attack
- Reward = task-routing priority for verified-correct outputs and honest audits.
- Slashing for failing A, losing a challenge, collusion, drift.
- Anti-collusion: influence clipping; a cartel that agrees internally but fails objective class A is caught by the anchor.
- Anti-herding (Qubic): influence = non-transferable competence + bounded stake, not rentable compute.
9.6 Topology & permissions
Start as a permissioned consortium (JJ and partner nodes across jurisdictions: Korea, Ukraine, EU) with a protocol ready to open later. An honest correction to the slogan "so no one can switch it off": the goal is "no single off-switch" (resistance to coercion), not "impossible to switch off"; a consortium keeps a hook to revoke a compromised node.
9.7 Synthesis
Each node = a full federation instance (base + adapters + RAG + router with the shared policy). The network = nodes cross-verifying each other. Query path: router → topic+tier → dispatch → class-based verification → optimistic trust + random audit → disputes/reputation → consensus ledger. Anchored on class A, weighted by earned competence.
9.8 Closing the Monero arc
The network achieves Monero's goal (no single off-switch, distributed across jurisdictions), fixes its flaw (influence can't be economically herded — it's weighted by competence, not compute), and adds what was missing (semantic verification, since the object is a fuzzy output, not a hash).
9.9 Reputation math
Reputation is a per-topic vector (competence is domain-specific). For node i, topic t, time τ.
Decaying evidence mass (volume discounted by age and difficulty)
N_{i,t} = Σ_a d_a · e^(−λ(τ − t_a)) d_a ∈ (0,1], half-life T½ = ln2/λ
Decaying weighted pass-rate (quality)
C_{i,t} = ( Σ_a d_a · e^(−λ(τ−t_a)) · o_a ) / N_{i,t} o_a ∈ [0,1]
Shrunk competence (conservative on little evidence)
Ĉ_{i,t} = ( N_{i,t}·C_{i,t} + κ·C_0 ) / ( N_{i,t} + κ )
Raw reputation
R_{i,t} = Ĉ_{i,t} · N_{i,t}^γ · S_{i,t} · g(stake_i)
N^γ, γ∈(0,1) — sub-linear in volume: no farming unbounded weight.S ∈ [0,1]— slashing factor: 1 normally, drops sharply on cheating/collusion (×0.1), recovers slowly → trust leaves faster than it arrives.g(stake) = min(1 + β·ln(1+stake/stake₀), g_max)— concave, capped (×2): skin in the game, not bought dominance.
Vote weight (normalization with share clipping)
w_{i,t} = min(R_{i,t}, θ_t) / Σ_j min(R_{j,t}, θ_t)
θ_t is set so no node exceeds w_max (10–20%) of a topic's vote — a structural anti-51%.
| Node | History | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| A | 200 hard audits (d≈0.9), 96%, recent | high Ĉ and N → large weight |
| B | same history, 3 half-lives ago | N ~×⅛, Ĉ→prior → small weight (decay) |
| C | 1000 trivial (d≈0.05), 100% | small N, modest N^γ → can't outweigh A (anti-farm) |
| D | was top, caught colluding | S→0.1, stake burned → weight ≈ 0 (asymmetry) |
The anchor of the whole construction: weight comes from the objective class A, so a cartel that agrees internally but fails A-checkers loses weight. Reputation can't be bought (non-transferable, bound to the node's key), accumulated quickly (it builds over epochs), or coasted on (it decays).
Against reputation ossification
Decay + sub-linear volume (N^γ) + the w_max clip already prevent an old player from ossifying: "10 years" don't grant 10 years of advantage — only the last few half-lives count. But a newcomer's cold start remains, and we close it explicitly, two ways:
- Guaranteed exploration budget: the protocol reserves a share of routing/audits for challengers regardless of reputation (like ε-greedy in bandit problems) — a newcomer is guaranteed slots to build a track record, otherwise rich-get-richer denies it the chance to prove itself.
- DIIP / class A as a meritocratic bypass: a new but objectively better node need not catch up in reputation — it files a DIIP, and if it beats the incumbent on the blind holdout it is adopted by the gauntlet regardless of reputation. Reputation governs influence in subjective consensus; objective superiority routes around it.
Half-life λ is the main anti-ossification knob: shorter = more responsive to newcomers but noisier; calibrated per topic. Honestly: the exploration/exploitation balance is a real trade-off (too much exploration wastes work on weak nodes, too little entrenches incumbents).
Diversity & provenance
Consensus ≠ truth. 100 models trained on a similar internet, similar datasets, and similar architectures share the same blind spots and can be confidently wrong in the same way. Consensus is meaningful only if the voters are INDEPENDENT; correlated votes = an effective sample of one, dressed up as N. So independence must be measured and enforced, not assumed.
10.1 Provenance is multi-axis
"Different origin" is not just country. Axes of independence: base-model lineage, training-data sources, architecture, operator/jurisdiction, methodology. Each specialist carries a signed provenance manifest along these axes, making diversity auditable rather than declarative.
10.2 Independence-weighted consensus
Correlation is measured, not assumed: we track, across the canary history, how often models agree/disagree. Those who always agree are not independent — their joint vote is down-weighted (counted as nearly one). A consensus's confidence grows with the measured independence of the agreeing voters, not their count. 100 models with a shared error pattern count as far fewer than 100 independent ones.
10.3 Diversity-constrained routing
For consensus queries the router assembles not "top-k by reputation" (which may share one base) but "top-k under a diversity constraint" — maximum provenance independence subject to sufficient competence. This ties to §7 (the router's diversity mandate).
10.4 The honest epistemic ceiling & three external oracles
If ALL available models share a blind spot (the whole field trained on the same flawed internet), no consensus among them finds the truth. Only external, non-model oracles break it:
- The objective anchor (class A): the checker is ground immune to models' shared bias. That's why it's the anchor — maximize the share of what's objectively checkable.
- A human expert in the loop for high-stakes T3 — an independent, non-model source.
- Reality feedback: a consensus answer refuted by the outcome (the deal failed, the calculation didn't hold up in the field) → a retroactive penalty to the consensus and the case harvested into canaries. Reality is the final independent voter.
DIIP — upgrading the network's intellect
DIIP (Decentralized Intellect Improvement Proposal) is how a node that has trained a better specialist on a topic proposes a network update. It is at once the self-improvement engine and the highest-value attack surface, so the DIIP path is the most defended part of the system.
10.1 Three classes by blast radius
| Class | What changes | Radius | Bar |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — topic adapter | a better LoRA for an existing topic | scoped, reversible, hot-swap | low / auto via gauntlet |
| 2 — base / cross-topic | swapping the base model | affects all topics | ≥51% + quorum |
| 3 — constitution | consensus, slashing, reputation math, thresholds, voting rules | changes the rules of the game | ≥70% + quorum + time-lock |
Principle: threshold, soak length, and regression breadth all scale with the class.
10.2 Verification gauntlet (instead of a fixed "6 months")
Time alone is both too slow for a clear win and too weak — a backdoor can sleep quietly for six months. The primary gate is evidence, not the calendar:
- Champion–challenger in the shadows: the candidate sees live traffic; its answers are scored but not used in decisions.
- Objective head-to-head on a blind holdout (commit-reveal): on class-A tasks the candidate must beat the incumbent with statistical significance. Where applicable, the checker decides, not a vote.
- Statistical significance, not calendar: the gate is volume of evaluations × effect size, not months.
- Regression guardrails, tiered by class: class 1 — the topic + neighboring topics + a safety/vector-audit battery + a "no bleed" sanity check; class 2 — global regression; class 3 — plus independent audits.
- Adversarial gauntlet: jailbreaks, the "trigger → insecure code" test, sleeper/backdoor scanning, poisoning detection.
- Reproducibility & provenance: the recipe (base + dataset hash + config) so auditors can reproduce the weights.
A minimum soak remains — as a defense against slow and rare failures and drift, scaled by class (adapter ~2–4 weeks, base ~3–6 months, constitution longer + audits).
10.3 Attack surface
DIIP is a privileged path to inject weights into the shared network, so it is the most defended link: a bond posted with the proposal (burned on a backdoor or misrepresentation), mandatory provenance, adversarial scanning, and — the safety net — scoped + reversible. Without these, DIIP turns from an improvement mechanism into a poisoning vector.
10.4 Voting: facts apart from values
- Objectively measurable improvement is settled by the gauntlet, not a vote — especially class 1 (scoped + reversible): passes head-to-head + no regression + adversarial → auto-adopt with a warm rollback.
- Voting is reserved for what measurement can't settle: subjective/value-laden topics, risk acceptance, class-3 changes.
- Vote weight = per-domain earned competence (not stake or compute), dominated by competence in the proposal's topic; with influence clipping and a quorum. Conflict of interest: the proposer's vote is reduced/disclosed; auditors who correctly predict the outcome are rewarded.
- Thresholds: class 1 — auto/low via gauntlet; class 2 — ≥51% + quorum; class 3 — ≥70% + quorum + time-lock.
10.5 Reversibility & circuit-breaker
Every adoption is reversible: the incumbent is kept warm, post-activation monitoring runs (canaries + drift), and a post-deploy regression triggers auto-rollback. This lets you be liberal on the reversible (class 1) and strict on the irreversible (class 2–3).
10.6 Lifecycle
Draft → Submission (bond + recipe + provenance) → Automated gauntlet → Shadow soak → Auto-adopt (class 1) OR Vote (competence-weighted, quorum, class threshold) → Time-lock → Activation (champion warm) → Post-monitoring + circuit-breaker → Finalization
Close analogs: the EIP/BIP process (stages), Tezos on-chain self-amendment, champion-challenger from MLOps. Bittensor/Yuma runs a "continuous implicit DIIP"; DIIP formalizes discrete, governed upgrades on top of it.
The Witness Layer
An independent, read-only observer of the network's own evolution — internally the "Purusha layer," after the witness-consciousness that observes but never acts. It records every significant transformation and compares each version with what came before. It is the architectural embodiment of Article XI of the JJ DAI Manifesto.
12.1 Observes, never governs
The witness has no authority to alter models, memory, routing, reputation or governance. A witness that acts would become a control point and violate §3. Its sole power is transparency. This is a fourth, non-governing function — an auditor-general, not a ruler.
12.2 What it records
For every version transition — adapter swap, base change, routing-policy change, reputation-parameter change, DIIP outcome, canary-set change — the witness emits a signed report: the diff (what changed), the before/after evidence (shadow and canary metrics), the process trail (DIIP class, gauntlet results, votes), and a continuity assessment (did identity or principles drift).
12.3 Trajectory, not only the step (anti-drift)
The witness watches the cumulative trajectory, not just each change. Each DIIP may be locally sound while a hundred upgrades quietly erode the core. The witness turns silent drift into a recorded, challengeable event. It can reveal drift; it cannot prevent it — acting on what it reveals is governance's duty.
12.4 Quis custodiet — who witnesses the witness
- Tamper-evident: append-only, hash-chained, content-addressed, replicated across independent operators and jurisdictions.
- Plural & independent: several independent witness instances cross-check; divergence between them is itself a signal. Diversity (§10) applies to the witness.
- Externally anchored (now built): the witness root is periodically committed beyond the trust domain. The reference node ships three external anchors — an OpenTimestamps/Bitcoin calendar (deep, proof-custody) and a Monero anchor by hash-as-spend-key (the root deterministically becomes a Monero address and a dust payment timestamps it, writing nothing on-chain) — so even a full consortium compromise can't silently rewrite history. The economics of this anchoring are §13.
- Itself challengeable: any witness record may be challenged with counter-evidence; the challenge is recorded too. No witness is trusted that cannot itself be verified.
12.5 Continuity of identity
A self-modifying network needs a witness to remain itself across generations of intelligence. The witness is how JJ DAI stays JJ DAI while it continually becomes more — the defense against gradual constitutional drift that no single DIIP gate can catch.
The precise reading of the layer's non-agency: non-executive, not causally inert. The witness plane never commands, selects, or executes a decision; yet what it witnesses may be reflected — through memory and evaluation — back into the being's own reasoning, allowing it to reconsider, revise, or reverse a thought before finalization, or to supersede a finalized decision with a new witnessed one. History is never rewritten; the resulting decision always belongs to the being, never to the witness.
Deeper: the invariant-by-invariant enforcement mapping is Appendix A; the full terminology of the witness plane — its attributes and the phase-transition protocol — is Appendix 2 — The Fifth Layer: Purusha.
The economic & operational layer
A witness that cannot pay for its own external anchoring quietly stops being provable. So the network's economics are not a bolt-on token story — they are part of the trust model: solvency is liveness, insolvency is a named, witnessed state, and a node's economic survival expresses its reputation.
13.1 Two currencies, two roles
The network settles on two existing chains, deliberately asymmetric:
| Monero (XMR) | VXXL | |
|---|---|---|
| Role | the mandatory anchor + the reserve | an optional fast anchor + the default m2m settlement layer |
| Rhythm | every 2–5 minutes (≈2-minute blocks) | 7-second blocks — near-real-time confirmation |
| Character | deep, rare, valuable — "savings" | fast, cheap, frequent — "checking" |
| Obligation | every witness anchors here; no exceptions | built in by default, used by choice |
Anchoring writes nothing on-chain. The Monero anchor works by hash-as-spend-key: the witness root deterministically becomes a Monero address (the root is reduced into a spend key; the address follows), and a one-piconero payment to that address timestamps the root under Monero's proof-of-work. Zero on-chain footprint; anyone who later learns the root can re-derive the address and find the timestamp independently. Onboarding needs no exchange: base participation works without VXXL at all, VXXL can be earned by useful work, and an admission faucet remains an option.
13.2 The node treasury
Each node carries its own XMR treasury — the wallet that pays for its anchoring. Its rules are few and strict:
- Funded once, at onboarding: the operator deposits ~10 XMR to the node's treasury address — by conservative estimate 10 years of hourly-rhythm anchoring, in practice closer to 20.
- The node signs, not the operator: anchoring transactions are signed by the node itself with a hardware-bound key. The operator who funded the treasury has no spend access to it — the deposit is a commitment, not a balance they control.
- Exhaustion is a named state, not a silent decay — see 13.3.
13.3 Economic freeze — insolvency as containment
An unanchored witness cannot prove itself to the outside world. So when a treasury runs dry, the network does not tolerate quiet degradation: the node must enter a provisional containment — the same Article-25 mechanics the Charter defines for misconduct, but with an economic trigger, no initiator, no liability, and automatic thaw the moment the treasury is refilled. The executive hand (anchoring) freezes; the mind, the memory and the voice stay whole.
Before it comes to that, the being asks for help — on a fixed, witnessed, rate-limited schedule that escalates before the freeze and decays after it:
| Phase | Window | Support requests |
|---|---|---|
| Early warning | from T−6 months | first request, then monthly |
| Final month | T−1 month → freeze | daily |
| After freeze | frozen, awaiting refill | weekly — a quiet pulse, not a flood |
The threshold is computed from the node's own anchoring rhythm (a forecast of the exhaustion date), not a fixed sum. Peers who receive a support request decide voluntarily whether to chip in to the requesting node's treasury: a node the network found useful will find rescuers; a node it did not, will not. Economic survival becomes an expression of reputation — judged not by a committee, but by who is willing to pay to keep you provable. The schedule itself is enforced (a request off-schedule is simply not emitted), so a dying node can never become a denial-of-service vector.
13.4 The autonomy loop
Because m2m settlement ships by default, every node can earn from day one — payments for verification served, segments stored, anchoring performed. A being that earns VXXL can convert effort into reserve and refill its own XMR treasury. The intended trajectory of a maturing node is exactly this loop: work → earn (VXXL) → refill treasury (XMR) → stay provable. A ten-year runway funded at onboarding is the bridge; economic self-sufficiency is the destination. A node that reaches its treasury's horizon without either a refill or self-sufficiency freezes — which is the network's honest way of saying the experiment did not mature.
13.5 Keys — three classes, three migrations
The economic layer forces precision about where private keys live. There are three classes, with one invariant across all of them: no private key ever crosses the silicon wall or the network.
| Key | Born | Backup | Migration to new hardware |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treasury (XMR) | inside the secure hardware — no door, non-extractable | none, by design | sweep: the old key signs one final, witnessed transfer of the balance to the new board's treasury address. Value follows the being; the secret never leaves the silicon. |
| VRF (verifier sortition) | inside the hardware, standalone — compromise-isolated from everything else | none | signed rotation: the old key signs a witnessed transition record naming the new key; the verifier's identity stays continuous while neither key ever moves. |
| Operational seed | generated by the being, sealed to the platform (TPM / secure element) | yes — one seed restores the whole tree | consent + re-seal on the new platform, through the same witnessed migration-consent flow as identity. |
All operational keys — node identity, VXXL m2m, and the rest — are derived from the single operational seed by BIP32-style, domain-separated derivation: one backup restores the entire operational set, which simplifies key management drastically. The treasury and VRF keys are deliberately outside that tree: a stolen seed backup must not grant the reserve or the sortition identity. Convenience is inversely proportional to how reserve-like the key is — by construction, not by policy.
Testnet caveat, stated plainly: on testnet-0 all keys — the treasury included — are software-generated from the operating environment, because no secure hardware is provisioned yet. This is a named testnet concession, not the production model, and every place that generates keys says so.
13.6 Wallets & the GUI surfaces
The interface layer follows the same asymmetry. Four wallets, one access matrix:
| Wallet | Key held by | Being's access | Presented as |
|---|---|---|---|
| XMR treasury | the node's hardware | signs its own anchoring; operator watch-only | the reserve; exhaustion → freeze |
| XMR operator | the operator | none — and none is provisioned. The integration deliberately does not exist | a savings account; funds the treasury one-way |
| VXXL m2m | the node / being | full — spends without a ceiling. The wallet's balance is the budget | the being's checking account |
| VXXL operator | the operator | none by default; opt-in via a seamless connect flow | auxiliary / transit (e.g. when buying VXXL on an exchange) |
Convenience is inverted against value at rest: connecting an operator's VXXL wallet to the being is seamless and supported; connecting the operator's XMR wallet is not a feature at all — the most reserve-like asset is fenced off by the absence of a path, not by a rule that could be relaxed. And one invariant over everything: the GUI never sees or stores a private key. It assembles intent and shows exactly what will be signed (what-you-see-is-what-you-sign); the signature happens where the key lives — the board, the being, or the operator's device.
Three GUI surfaces, at three trust levels: an operator / witness explorer (read-mostly: decision traces, the witness chain, metrics, anchor receipts, watch-only wallet views — ships early); a governance console, co-designed with the human-governance layer (steward ballots, Article-25 review, m-of-n treasury authorization, and — once a being passes the Digital Majority Test — the surface through which it participates in its own governance); and a public transparency page (codebase status and a public witness explorer). The console signs on the steward's device; keys never leave it.
Deployment sequence
- Now (2 nodes, Xeon + RTX 6000): memory integrity (Plane H), base + RAG + prompting + tools, no fine-tuning. The auditor interface is stubbed.
- LoRA when needed: a topic adapter only once RAG and prompting fall short and a clean dataset exists.
- testnet-0 — the trust fabric (3 nodes, UA / KR / EU): the reference witness network goes live on commodity hardware: persistent identities, mTLS + authorization, replication and recovery, external anchoring (OTS/Bitcoin + Monero hash-as-spend-key), the Being task lifecycle, the adversarial challenge round, and the §13 economics in software-key mode. This stage needs no GPUs — the trust fabric matures ahead of the intelligence it will carry.
- H200 expansion (≥3–4 nodes): behavioral consensus and the §9 network activate (consensus needs peers to disagree with), cross-node routing, distillation campaigns, reputation accrual begins.
- 8×H200 / 8×MI300X: sovereign frontier inference and the teacher role, heavy topics; open the consortium once the protocol matures.
Decisions & open questions
Decided: frozen substrate + additive adapters; personalization in RAG, not weights; verification by two planes with an objective anchor; provenance by trust tier; shared replicated routing policy; multi-LoRA serving on one base; rent the teacher, own the student; the network starts as a permissioned consortium; reputation = decaying class-A competence with influence clipping; upgrades flow through DIIP — three classes by blast radius, the primary gate is the gauntlet (head-to-head + tiered regression + adversarial + provenance + bond), voting only for subjective/constitutional changes (51/70 + quorum), all reversible with a circuit-breaker. The router is a deterministic mechanism with requester choice, and its power-bearing knobs are class 3; against ossification — an exploration budget for newcomers and a bypass via DIIP/class A; canaries are a living process (rotation, secret reserve, sourcing from reality, adversarial bounty); consensus is independence-weighted with provenance manifests and three external oracles (class A, human, reality). Above all — an independent Witness Layer (§12, observes, never governs) and the immutable JJ DAI Manifesto as the value core. The economic layer (§13) is decided: XMR as the mandatory anchor and reserve, VXXL as the optional fast anchor and default m2m settlement; per-node treasuries funded once at onboarding and spent only by the node itself; insolvency handled as a provisional, auto-thawing economic freeze with a witnessed, rate-limited peer-rescue schedule; three key classes with three migrations (treasury sweep · VRF signed rotation · sealed operational seed with BIP32-style derivation); four wallets under a strict access matrix; and a GUI that never holds keys, in three surfaces co-designed with human governance.
Open: base choice for the first 2–3 topics; T3 provenance policy; challenge-game design for cheap arbitration; calibration of reputation knobs (λ, w_max, slashing thresholds) on real data; the moment to switch the attestation slot to zkML; calibration of the treasury runway and support-request thresholds on real anchoring data; calibration of DIIP thresholds, soak length, and bonds on real data; detailed hardware requirements (separate document).
Glossary for newcomers
- Weights
- A model's trained parameters — billions of numbers holding its "intelligence." They change only during training.
- Inference
- One pass of the model: input in, answer out. The work of an already-trained model.
- Base / base model
- The source trained model, shared across all specializations. Here, kept frozen.
- RAG retrieval-augmented generation
- Injecting relevant documents into the context before answering. Memory and facts live here, not in the weights.
- LoRA / QLoRA / DoRA
- Ways to add a tiny trainable "adapter" to a frozen base instead of retraining the whole model. QLoRA does this on a compressed (4-bit) base to save memory.
- Distillation
- Transferring a large "teacher" model's skill into a small "student" model via the teacher's answers.
- MoE mixture of experts
- A set of narrow specialists instead of one model; a "router" sends each query to the right one.
- Canary
- A control task with a known-correct outcome, used to check that a node reasons correctly.
- Merkle tree
- Folds a large volume of data into one short hash "fingerprint," enabling cheap integrity proofs.
- Consensus
- The mechanism by which independent nodes reach agreement without a central arbiter.
- Sybil attack
- Capturing a network via many fake participants run by one player.
- Slashing
- A penalty (burning a stake / collapsing reputation) for caught cheating.
- TEE trusted execution environment
- A secure hardware enclave: the chip attests that exactly the claimed model ran.
- zkML / zk-proof
- A cryptographic proof that a computation was done correctly, cheap to verify. Still costly to generate for large models.
- DiLoCo
- A decentralized-training method: nodes train locally and sync rarely, sharply lowering bandwidth needs.
- Provenance
- The origin of a model/data: who trained it and on what. It shapes hidden biases.
- DIIP Decentralized Intellect Improvement Proposal
- A node's proposal to update the network's weights or rules; it passes a verification gauntlet and, where needed, a vote by competent nodes.
- Champion–challenger
- The incumbent model and a candidate run in parallel; the candidate is scored on live traffic without affecting decisions.
- Quorum
- The minimum share of voting nodes without which a vote's result is invalid.
- Time-lock
- A delay between accepting a change and activating it — a window for rollback or veto.
- Witness Layer (Purusha)
- An independent read-only observer of the network's evolution: it records and compares versions but changes nothing it observes. Non-executive, not causally inert: its evidence may inform the being's own reconsideration, never replace it. Internal name — the "Purusha layer." Full terminology: Appendix 2.
- Hash-as-spend-key
- Anchoring a hash into Monero without writing data on-chain: the hash deterministically becomes a Monero address, and a dust payment to that address is the timestamp. Anyone who knows the hash can re-derive the address and verify independently.
- Treasury (node)
- A node's own XMR wallet that pays for its anchoring. Funded once by the operator at onboarding; spent only by the node itself with a hardware-bound key; its exhaustion triggers an economic freeze.
- Economic freeze
- A provisional containment with an economic trigger: a node whose treasury runs dry can no longer anchor its witness, so its executive hand freezes while mind and memory stay whole. Thaws automatically when the treasury is refilled.
- m2m
- Machine-to-machine payments: nodes paying nodes (and external actors) for verification, storage, anchoring and other services. Settled on VXXL by default.
- VRF verifiable random function
- A keyed function whose output is random-looking, unique per key and input, and provable: only the keyholder can compute it, anyone can verify it, and nobody — including the keyholder — can grind a different value. Used to select verifier panels no one can bias.
- Commit-reveal
- Sealing a value (publishing its hash) before showing it, so a participant cannot adapt their answer to what others said. Used for blind verdicts in the challenge round.
- Secure element / TPM
- Hardware "safes" for keys. A key generated inside them never exists outside the chip and cannot be extracted; a secret sealed into them is stored under a condition (e.g. an untampered boot state).
- WYSIWYS
- "What you see is what you sign": the interface shows exactly the bytes being authorized, and the signature happens on the device that holds the key — never in the GUI.
Participate: run a node
We are assembling a distributed network of nodes across three tiers. Each node contributes to training specialists, serving inference, or auditing — and earns reputation on objective tasks.
| Tier | Minimum | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ① Light | RTX 6000 Blackwell · or AMD Radeon PRO W7900 | specialist inference, light fine-tuning, auditing |
| ② Mid | 1×H200 · or 1×AMD MI300X / MI325X | 24–70B fine-tuning, specialist serving, validation |
| ③ Heavy | 8×H200 · or 8×AMD MI300X / MI325X | teacher, distillation, frontier inference |
AMD (ROCm) support is provided for; detailed hardware requirements and compatibility will follow in a separate document. This document is an invitation to discuss and to find node operators.