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`envelope new` sealed the `--microjoules` figure as JouleCost::measured. The CLI runs no work a meter could read, so that figure is the issuer's claim; sealing it as a hardware measurement put a reading nobody took into the byte. It is now sealed as an estimate, with a test that a round-tripped byte carries no measured figure whatever the command line gives. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]> |
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| .. | ||
| conformance | ||
| smart-byte-rs | ||
| spec | ||
| vocab | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| README.md | ||
| SECURITY.md | ||
| THREE_FACES.md | ||
Smart Byte
A carrier for value. Settlement-agnostic, energy-attributed, no off switch.
The smart byte is not money — it is a vesicle (the cellular-biology sense): a content-addressed, signed envelope carrying exactly five things — identity (the blake3 hash of its origin attestation), provenance (the issuer's signed birth certificate), an ownership chain (signature-bound transitions), cargo (whatever value it represents — USD, joules, compute-hours, votes, attestations, claims; the substrate is agnostic), and a two-part joule cost (measured + estimated, cumulative over its life). Consensus is lockstep deterministic simulation with BFT supermajority commit; the substrate scales by federating many bounded clusters, not by growing one. It is TCP/IP for value: an open, application-agnostic carrier that any matching, clearing, or trust-signaling layer can build on.
The substrate is intentionally ownerless: no protocol-level token, permissive licensing on the spec text and reference code, conformance test vectors so any implementer can verify canonicity without a trust relationship with the authors. The protocol's identity lives in its conformance vectors and content-addressing, not in any brand. Transaction Science is one steward — it publishes the spec, ships a reference implementation, and operates commercial services around the substrate — not its proprietor.
Contents
spec/treatise_v1_parts_I_II_III_combined.md— Smart Byte Substrate: A Treatise (Parts I–III: the foundation, the substrate architecture, the security engineering; Parts IV–VII previewed)strategic_context.docx— The Strategic Context: Why the Substrate Makes Sense in 2026SECURITY.md— the working security-engineering summary: it's a digital system on the internet, secured the way digital systems on the internet are secured (conservative cryptography, encrypted transports, reproducible multiply-reviewed builds, standard layer-2 key custody, standard availability engineering, textbook BFT consensus) plus a handful of new compositions of those proven parts. Plus the vulnerability-reporting process.
Status
Treatise v1.0 (May 2026). The conformance specification (byte-level wire formats) and the reference implementation referenced in the treatise as "v0.3" are to be brought into this repository.
Licence
Specification text: CC-BY-4.0 (see LICENSE).
Reference implementation in smart-byte-rs/: Apache-2.0 (see smart-byte-rs/LICENSE).
Related
- EOC (
../eoc/) — the energy-optimized AI compute substrate; the smart byte's energy attribution depends on an honest joules-per-task substrate. - Settlement (
settlement.science) — the flagship regulated financial institution running on the substrate as an issuer and consumer of smart bytes.