FAQ
Glossary is the dictionary. This is the argument. Same questions keep showing up in debates — irreducible slogan, glass of water, untested, teacher-to-president, decay that never hits zero, Tₛ=1, retirement as a hole, new civilization. If you came to grade a t-shirt, start here. If you came to ask whether rest counts, skip to the own lawn. If you came to run a loop, skip to the last section.
What this is
What is the Extropy Engine?
An audit loop. A UI for the life you're already living. Faces: LocalFlow, HomeFlow, quests, GrantFlow, shops. SignalFlow packages the claim. The kernel mints. Cheap laptop, clone the repo, you're a node. Not a coin you buy. Not a church. Not two apps.
R, F, ΔS, w · E, Tₛ — what do the letters actually mean?
R is rarity of the action class, not reputation. F is Frequency of Decay (repeats pay less), not falsifiability — that is script-ℱ. ΔS is verified entropy reduction, not XP. w · E is weighted emergence: the eight-domain weight vector dotted with this loop’s effort vector. That is the product inside the mint, which is why PHOTON 404 can say the English. It is not a fifth letter. Tₛ is the slam window for this loop: instant confirm pays 0. log(1/Tₛ) is that clock. 0.99ⁿ is a different clock. Full stop-sign: /key.
How do I explain this without saying entropy token?
Verified change in a system. Causal evidence on a DAG. Standing from that evidence. Standing is not money — it can change access. ΔS is the measurement proxy. XP is global standing. CT is community standing at this DFAO. L is literal standing at this till, this moment. EP is the till spark, born and burned in the sale: EP = XP × L. CAT is skill. IT is voice. Those last two stay off the mint so credentials and votes cannot be bought with XP. The hard test is not the slogan. It is whether the proxy’s error gets expensive. The fungus line stays the hook. This paragraph is the translation.
Do we have to start a new civilization for this to work?
No. You convert one that already exists. Overlay. Shops, licenses, neighborhoods, the job you already have, the handshake already on the wire. You do not wait for a sealed utopia. You put both-edges, contest, leak, and a DAG on infrastructure people already use. Checks on power that is already there. Greenfield is a fantasy of a clean page. This is a layer.
Why would this work if people suck?
It does not require people to be good. Most systems fail because they do. They try to teach virtue, or they hope the next cohort is nicer. People game what they can touch. This loop is built for that: both edges, late burn, decay, cash still buys milk. You do not need a moral majority. You need enough nodes in a place that closed loops outrun the puff. That is a local threshold, not a conversion of the species. Fungus, not fire. The rest of the street can ignore it.
Does a doctor have to re-earn being a doctor in here?
No. The license is opening evidence: a CAT record, issuer = the old board, lane = the practice. Not XP. Not a throne. Once they are in, this graph is what continues — cases, teaching, loops they actually close. Retired weight that can issue new CATs and argue rarity in that lane is that DAG history, not the framed diploma. Same for electricians, teachers, welders. Doctor is one example. If the paper was a lie, contest and late burn still apply. The license gets them in the door. It does not give them the house.
Is this a cryptocurrency? A religion? A theory of everything?
No. XP is not spent and not purchased. Access economy. Decay and late burn can still kill standing XP. Failure conditions are published on purpose. A system that hides those is a religion. This one lists them.
Is the Extropy Engine hosted on extropyengine.com?
No. That's a website. Papers, a clock face, an RSS feed. Hostinger is not a node. The Engine is the git you clone onto a laptop. Keys stay on the box. Nearby, node to node. Internet is for people who aren't next door.
Isn't this just a panopticon? A surveillance state with extra steps?
No. A panopticon is one tower that can see every diary. A surveillance state is a central log you cannot opt out of. This has neither. The PSLL is a file on your disk. The network sees a proof — yes or no — not the file, not the photos. Looking writes a vertex. A silent fetch is a detectable act. did:key on first boot, no registrar. Node to node on the LAN. That is a ledger you hold, not a camera pointed at you.
Isn't a zero-knowledge proof just showing someone your ID?
That's the mix-up. Handing the bartender the license is showing him the information — birthday, street, photo, name. He doesn't need any of that. He needs 21 or not. Your phone looks at the license on YOUR side and answers one question. The till gets yes or no. The bar's book records that a check happened. Anyone who later wants WHO writes a look vertex. Do not write “chip versus photocopy.” That line is noise. ZKP circuits are not in Codex v2.1. 2.1 is the current Codex. Today the handshake is signatures.
This is untested. Why throw a ledger at the world?
Because this is a game. The world already runs on unintended consequences. No special risk here. Log on through the internet you already have. Correct way: cheap laptop, clone the repo, you're a node. Next person does the same. Nearby you talk node to node. Internet is for people who aren't next door. ZKPs talk to each other. You get the part for your seat. Other people check it. Then more people talk. Then more people do it. Play it on the life you're already living.
The mint vs the slogan
XP means Extropy Points, right? Or experience points?
The letters are XP. That is the name. Not Extropy Points. Not a branded expansion of experience points. You can hear “experience points” in a 1:1 life-to-game translation. That is a rhyme, not the definition. ΔS is the entropy reduction. XP is the proxy of that ΔS on the ledger — bits-equivalent — so like-cases can be compared. Saying XP “is” entropy reduction skips the proxy.
EP is Emergent Points, right? Or Epistemic Proof?
Emergent Product. Till spark. At the register: EP = XP × L, then it burns. L is first-class: this moment, this community, this store. CT feeds it. The house can tweak a public coefficient. Early mesh: a penny, maybe five cents off. Dense mesh: more of the fiat ticket can clear. Not a currency. Not Epistemic Proof — that is a proof-layer record, letter collision, does not buy milk. Product is the math: XP times L.
What are CAT, CT, and IT?
CAT is a skill record: unique, lane + level + issuer. Are you qualified to do this, and at what level. CT is community standing — a meter for this DFAO. Feeds L at the till. IT is influence standing, not Insight Token. Governance and demonstration work weights more. Obscure private labor still mints XP; it does not mint the same IT unless influence is the job. IT decays ~5%/month if you vanish. None of these are bags.
What is the actual XP formula?
XP = R × F × ΔS × (w · E) × log(1/Tₛ). Canonical v3.1.2. Reputation never enters it. Tₛ is the slam window: instant confirm pays 0. Δt is clipped to the action class so waiting is not a mint. F is repeats. 0.99ⁿ is standing after settlement. Three clocks.
Then why XP ≥ ΔS / cₗ²? That’s not even usable.
Correct. Alone it has no experiment, no mint, no lose-condition. It is the irreducible form — a pedagogical compression of the mint, same job as E = mc² next to E² = (pc)² + (mc²)². Scoring the slogan as if it were the Engine is a category error. Untested is not the same as not physics. The audit loop is the test. The t-shirt is not supposed to survive a calorimeter.
Measurement
Weaponized Transparency — isn’t that the observer effect? Quantum?
No. That reading is not in the work. Schrödinger’s cat was a reductio: apply the quantum recipe to a cat and you get an absurdity. That was the point. Quantum does not apply to the macro. The pop-sci version — I heard a spooky thing on The Big Bang Theory, this lyric says observation, therefore quantum — is a rhyme, not an argument. The lyric is talking about systems while fucking with them. Watching becomes ammunition in the ordinary sense: institutions, metrics, cameras, the song. Not ħ. Not collapse. If a narrator opens there, they invented a thesis and hung it on the author. The author does not think that way. The inference is theirs.
“This is not a metaphor.” So what is it?
Bits-equivalent. A lawn, a fight, a trade deal are treated as information events. Landauer: erasing information has a heat floor. You do not need a frozen joule for “mowed.” You need a stand-in that can drift when new measurements land. Equivocation is on the table: Shannon bits, J/K, and English “order” are not the same object. Constants are what you worship. Proxies move. Physicists who stop at the sentence because they do not want two domains in one line are not the audience. The sentence stays. Sign-off is not a requirement.
A glass of water is worthless by a stream and priceless in a desert. That’s subjective value. Thermodynamics didn’t change.
The trick is isolation. They hold the glass still and move the story, then call the story subjective. Stream vs desert, the coupled system is a different object: body water, time-to-next-source, search cost, a dehydrating organism, who else is dying. That is w · E across domains, not a feeling painted onto unchanged physics. Marginal willingness-to-pay maps an isolated commodity. It does not measure the mesh.
How do you measure mediating a fight? Where’s the thermometer?
There isn’t one. SignalFlow plus evidence (duration, who confirms, whether it recurs) propose a provisional bits-equivalent. You do not type in a score. The other side of the loop agrees. Then it hits the mint formula. Not a 1/10 validator caste. Not in the canon.
Are you saying there’s no objective reality?
There is no view from nowhere. Every measurement is from someone, through an instrument, in a language, under a protocol. “Objective” in practice is intersubjective protocol laundered into furniture. That is not the same as “ΔS is a mood.” Constraint still binds — wreckage, heat, a DAG that will not close — and every bit of that is still from somewhere. The Engine is maps for access, and a loop that can fail in the open.
“But it hasn’t been tested”
Cute and internally consistent. Hasn’t been tested.
For an audit system that exists to keep auditing, that sentence is a catch-22. You cannot show the forest before you plant it. “No websites, so nobody will use a network” is the same move. The composition is what only running it tests. Demanding the composition already be certified before the loop is allowed to exist is how you guarantee it never exists. Pieces (Landauer, DAGs, ZKPs, decay, slash) have been beaten to death in other machines. Two nodes exchanging a packet is the garage. A Nature stamp on a civilization that hasn’t been switched on is the wall.
Why not sand the language so physicists will sign off?
Because the line is a filter, not a typo. Domain partitions that let someone refuse to think across them are not the audience. Funding-shaped language is how every other stack became inauthentic. This one refuses that box.
Time, credit, death
A teacher whose student becomes president — doesn’t the graph explode?
No. The protocol does not walk the light cone. Late mint is citation-gated: a new vertex has to exist that names causal parents and hangs evidence. No citation, no edge, no XP. Infinite downstream is cosmology, not a query. You get the delta of the proxy, not a second full paycheck. Hop-weight is not frozen in Codex v2.1. Do not invent a fraction.
If the president is later a disaster, can the teacher’s XP be destroyed?
Late mint first. Same machine both ways. A later huge ΔS — Nobel, a society-scale fix — can still write a citation-gated delta into the original vertex. That is when decades later still has weight. Late burn of later-revealed harm is the other direction. It slashes remaining dust plus that new delta. It does not empty the wallet. Ordinary XP thirty years on is ≈ 2.7% of the original mint (0.99³⁶⁰). Clawing a lawn from 1996 is bookkeeping. Treating “it can take your XP away in 30 years” as the headline, without the mint direction and without the curve, skips the logistics.
1% every 30 days — so it lasts 30,000 days?
No. 1% of what is left, each ~30 days. Remaining after n months is 0.99ⁿ. Half-life ≈ 69 months (~5.8 years, half still there). ~8 years ≈ 38%. ~20 years ≈ 9%. ~30 years ≈ 2.7% — dust. It never hits zero in the reals. 30,000 days is the wrong arithmetic. Decay is a leak. Late mint is the long-horizon mechanism that can still move a number, and only for a later huge, cited ΔS. Late burn of ordinary remaining pile is a mark on a vertex, not a sword.
If most of it already leaked, do you claw the old XP back?
No. You don’t collect what decay already ate. You mark the vertex BURNED and slash remaining dust. At 30 years that remaining is ≈ 2.7% of the original mint. The DAG does not forget. The wallet does not get a 1996-shaped hole.
Is the 30-day settle window a law?
No. It was a starting number. Could be 5–40. Per-DFAO knob. Late burn has no expiry either way. 5%/month is IT, not XP. XP decay is ~1%/month of remaining.
Tₛ = 1 makes XP = 0. Is the formula broken? Are F, Tₛ, and 0.99ⁿ the same clock?
Not broken. Tₛ = 1 means you slammed the loop shut (Δt ≈ 0). log(1/Tₛ) = 0 is the anti-farm, on purpose. People read “decay factor = 1” as “full payout.” That is how decay usually works. This term is elapsed time of this loop, Tₛ = exp(−λ min(Δt, Δt_cap)), so log(1/Tₛ) = λ·clip(Δt). Three clocks: Tₛ this loop, F repeating the class, 0.99ⁿ standing after it settles. Do not “fix” it with log(1+1/Tₛ). That pays slam-bots. Cap Δt so stalling does not print. Rarity-splitting 400 fake classes is a DAG job, not this term.
The loop
So this is just LocalFlow and SignalFlow?
No. Those are two packages. HomeFlow is the household. Quest market is the 2–5 minute grain. GrantFlow is discovery plus proposer. Validation-neighborhoods take blind slices. Identity writes did:key. PSLL is the diary. xp-formula / xp-mint / loop-ledger / dag-substrate are the book. LocalFlow is errands. SignalFlow routes claims. Collapsing the Engine into those two is a reading error.
DFAO means max seven people, right?
No. Decentralized Fractal Autonomous Organization. Scale labels (NANO → PLANETARY) are suggested rule sets, not membership caps. Seven was a shorthand that leaked as a law. It is not. Same loop at every scale: post, do, confirm. Votes rewrite the room they are cast in. Only PLANETARY hits everybody, and that is supposed to be hard.
Can a neighborhood run this like an HOA?
Yes — as a MESO wrapper, not a deed eraser. The Engine is the same. HOA jobs become LocalFlow loops. You install Docker once, run one script, the laptop is a node, the neighborhood DFAO starts SHADOW, confirmed work mints XP. Liens and architectural control stay on the recorded paper until that paper changes.
At the till
If I don’t have enough EP, can I still buy milk with cash?
Yes. You are still spending dollars. EP is a layer on top of that, not a lock and not a cash table. At purchase, both edges agree on a bits-equivalent estimate (EP = XP × L from the mesh). A vertex settles some of the exchange. The rest still rings in fiat. Low standing means the layer covers less, not that the fridge locks. Cash cannot mint XP.
You said no fiat on-ramp. So this replaces money?
No. No on-ramp means cash cannot mint XP. People keep spending dollars. The Engine is a tracking layer: bits-equivalent proxies, fine-tuned as like-cases stack, so the ΔS of this kind of exchange gets less wrong. A vertex can settle some of the ticket. That is not EP = this many dollars. Mom-and-pop first. Repeat-farming is F. Keep the other job or don’t.
Can a shop (or a DFAO) just crank L and extract XP?
That’s the economic attack. L is this-door CT against the house slider, not a coupon the owner types in secret. The slider is public and writes a vertex. Optional auto uses this till’s proofs and load, not other shops’ customers. Both edges still accept the estimate. Cash rings the rest — L cannot lock the fridge. A house that juices the slider to harvest standing is farming; F, contest, late burn, and the next fractal still apply. Unsolved experimentally: whether a captured house can still extract. That’s a test, not a vibe. See open problems.
Do I have to work at every shop to get L?
No. CT and L are not mopping their floors. They are whether this door can count on you as a node of demand. Regular groceries. A pattern they can order stock against. Shopping five stores at random is allowed. It is just higher entropy for that house, so L here is worse. Do what you want. Habits (walk vs Hummer) can become modifiers later if that DFAO votes them in. Day one is not a carbon priesthood.
Who is allowed to change XP, CT, and L?
Different floors. L: this-door CT against the house slider. Hand-set or optional auto from this till’s proofs. Writes a vertex. Override and kill stay with the house. That slider also writes into their own EP and the next fractal. CT: this DFAO can vote how CT is scored in this room. That vote does not rewrite CT next door. XP: how the mint works is planetary. Cash-out is a lose-condition. If a room votes cash-out, they forked. This is not Randall’s engine. He wrote the loop. Rooms run rooms.
How do domain bands and the slider meet at the till?
You may show this door domain bands as ZKPs — yes or no, or band ≥ n — for the instruments that door asked about. Those bands plus this-door CT go against the house slider and become L for this ticket. Auto-slider, if on, reads this till’s proofs and load. Looking at a graph to hunt WHO still writes a vertex.
Retirement, rest, the own lawn
Do I only earn XP working a job, or helping a neighbor?
No. That’s the old clock. The mint is verified entropy reduction, not a wage. You mow your own lawn: the grass is shorter, the mess is less. HomeFlow can close that loop. Sensors can hang evidence. They do not mint. Someone in the household, or the mesh, still has to agree. You do not type in a score. You get the reduction of that lawn — the same physical ΔS a neighbor would have produced mowing it for you. The neighbor version is two households. Yours is one house taking care of itself. F still applies: mowing it every Saturday pays less than the first time. Cooking, putting a kid to bed, fixing the hinge, walking the dog, recovering from a fever if the loop can close — those are loops. A job is one way a loop shows up. It is not the box.
What if I retire? Or get sick? Or take a vacation? Do I starve when I stop “working”?
People rarely retire into a coma. They keep a house, a garden, grandkids, a body, a street. That still mints if it is real and the loop closes. Standing you already have does not vanish on a Friday. XP leaks ~1% of remaining per month — half still there at ~5.8 years. You live on that, plus whatever living still writes. Sick: you are not clawed for being sick. Care is a loop for the person who shows up. Vacation: rest is not a hole in a living system. Recovery is biological. A week that actually puts a life back together is not “unproductive.” You do not need a PTO token. The extractive picture accrued sick days because the job was the only meter and rest was a theft from it. Here the meter is the life. If you vanish from every loop including your own house, standing fades like anyone else’s. That is the treadmill, not a boss taking your days.
So is there PTO? Sick days? A vacation balance?
Not as a separate pile you spend. PTO was a patch on a wage that stopped when you left the building. Here you already accrued the thing that matters: standing from loops that closed. You can live on it while you rest. It leaks slowly. You also keep coupling — buying at a door you belong to updates this-door CT, which feeds L next time. Cash still cannot mint XP. Showing up is not a paycheck. It is how this shop still knows you. If you want a written vacation ledger, you are asking for the old box back. The circle is: live, loops close, standing sits, till spark at the door, rest is still a life.
This still sounds like work-score capitalism with extra steps.
That’s the training. Clock in, clock out, rest is a hole, only what you sold to someone else counted. This measures anything you can self-report, have a sensor report, submit as a claim, or tell an assistant — then have verified. Not a vibe. Not a diary entry that prints money. SignalFlow proposes. The other side agrees. The box was the job’s. Living was never inside it. A decentralized mesh does not need you to pick one employer as the meaning of a year. Years stack. Pieces fall in. You were already mowing the lawn.
Not its job
Does the Engine decide trials? Replace twelve jurors?
No. It can hold a public audit trail: claim, evidence, both edges, later burn if the story was theater. That is a better evidence graph than a two-week performance. It does not mint a verdict. Unanimous twelve is a captured metric — the scored thing is agreement. You can hate that model and still not put a gavel on XP. CAT stays off the mint. A diagnosis is a stamp, not a second physics.
Do kids get no XP? Is the system ruthless to disabled people?
No. That is NotebookLM fanfic. A child can have a did:key. A closed loop they actually did can mint. That can stand in for some allowance. They also do not carry adult bills; do not write a Black Mirror episode that forgets that. Someone with Down syndrome greeting at a door is a loop if that door says the loop closed. If they cannot close one, standing does not print. Care is not the mint’s job. A DFAO, a church, a desk can be the room that tracks volunteer loops and pays the care in cash and time. The Engine does not write a morality constitution for the weakest. The community can. Looking at a graph to hunt WHO still writes a vertex.
Run it
How do I actually start?
Clone the kernel. For the neighborhood app today: git clone, cd packages/neighborhood-app, node server.mjs, open localhost:4016. That's the job board on your machine. Full Engine: Docker Desktop, then the join script. Handshake a peer. You do not wait for a priesthood and you do not wait for seven.
How do I get a DID? And what stops a bad actor on my node?
You don't apply. The node writes a keypair on first boot. That's a did:key — W3C, no registrar, no company. Backup data/keys/node.pem. Lose it and you're a new node. ZKPs are what you show: band, confirmed this loop, unique in this room, not slashed. The till gets yes or no, not your diary. Keys stay on the box. Don't punch the database at the WAN. One captured node can lie about itself; it cannot silently rewrite a neighbor's DAG. Sybil: identity is cheap, standing is not. Unique-in-DFAO stops fifty votes from one person. Looking is a vertex. Today the handshake is signatures. ZKP circuits are not in Codex v2.1. 2.1 is the current Codex.
TCP? A new protocol? What does Web3 do here?
TCP and QUIC already move packets. Don't invent ExtropyTCP. Web3 (libp2p, gossipsub, DHTs) reinvented discovery and a global shout — gossip as truth. That's not this pattern. LAN first: next door talks node to node. Internet is for people who aren't next door. Keys on the box. Proof on the wire, not the diary. Looking writes a vertex. Causal DAG, both edges agree — not a lottery for a block. Today the handshake is HTTPS + signatures. libp2p + Noise later is still a pipe. The overlay is the thing.
Where do I listen / read?
Book, papers, and two podcasts are on this site. Talk RSS: https://extropyengine.com/podcast/feed.xml. Research Pod RSS (automated, unsigned, AI audio overviews): https://extropyengine.com/podcast-log/feed.xml. Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts listings exist for the talk show.
Dictionary of terms: Glossary. Places it can break: Open problems.