Glossary

This glossary defines protocol-specific terms. Where an external concept is referenced (e.g. BBS+, Celestia), terms are linked to the relevant section.

A

Anchor Block — A public prospectus declaring a Workchain’s terms: off-ramp tax rate, Bean discount ratio, governance rules, dispute mechanism, currency, and parent-chain reference. Read-once-and-trust. See §7.3.

Attestation — A signed claim by an institution about a person, separate from any specific work event. Block type. Lives in closed namespaces. See §3.3.

B

Banks as Trust Sources — A protocol pattern in which a high-trust systemic bank, regulator-blessed identity authority, or consortium of such institutions exposes a signing endpoint over its existing customer-authentication infrastructure. The institution stands behind the substantive truth of the attestations it signs (§1.6 P1) and is paid per attestation by the relying party consuming the trust (§1.6 P2 + Corollary 1), not by the worker whose data it concerns. The institution does not own the worker’s identity — it holds the ability to attest against the open identity utility tree (§7.2 Worker Sovereignty). Generalises beyond banking to notaries, registered identity authorities, and consortium-operated trust networks. See §8.9, §9.5.

Basal Rate — The dignity floor below which participants cannot fall. The third Law. See §1.3, §6.5.

Bead — The universal unit of work in HOP. Every completed character block is a bead. Naming convention from Steve Yegge’s Beads project. See §2.

Bean — A mentorship bead. Named after Matt Beane. Special subset of beads where the Validator confirmed skill transfer to a junior worker. See §6.3.

Bean Chain — Third chain class (after Workchain and Skillchain). Settlement layer for deferred mentorship dividends. v0.2. See §2.3, §6.3.5.

BBS+ — Cryptographic signature scheme supporting selective disclosure, unlinkable proofs, and predicate proofs. W3C VC Data Integrity Cryptosuite v2023. v0.2 upgrade for HOP privacy. See §3.5, §8.5.

C

Celestia-class anchoring — Periodic Merkle-root anchoring to a public Data Availability layer. Substrate-neutral; reference implementations may choose Celestia, Ethereum L2s, Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps, or any equivalent. See §8.6.

Character Block — The atomic unit of commerce and reputation. Dual-signed record of a completed task or a declared trajectory. See §3.

Chain Hierarchy — World Chain → Industry Chains → Platform Chains → Entity Chains. Stake at each level grants governance voice. See §7.4.

Christiano trust matrix — Christiano (2014), “Provably Manipulation-Resistant Reputation Systems.” Online learning over positive semidefinite matrices. The sybil-resistance backbone Validators run. See §6.3.4.

Comprehension Gate — Protocol-level wrapper around BBS+ derived proofs. Skill-Agent reveals only blocks needed for a bid. v0.2. See §3.5.

Convoys — Gas Town primitive. Work bundles assigned to a single agent, with explicit dependencies. See §5.6.

D

Disadvantage Multiplier — Bean Chain payout weighting that rewards mentors who took chances on hard-to-bet-on workers. Inversely scaled by mentee baseline. See §6.3.5.

Dolt — SQL database with Git semantics. MySQL wire-protocol compatible. The operational substrate for all HOP chains. See §8.2.

Dual-Signature — Both worker and poster sign every character block. Cryptographic guarantee of mutual attestation. See §3.

F

Federation Treaty — Bilateral or multilateral agreement between Workchains for currency swaps, reputation portability, and dispute coordination. First-class object of geopolitics. See §6.6, §7.5.

Five Laws — Neutrality, Learning, Basal Rate, Privacy, Forking. See §1.

Five Universes — Skills, Work, Currency, Inventory, Reputation. The ledger dimensions a worker carries. Plus Group Vectors as v0.2 sixth. See §4.2.

Forking Rule — The fifth Law. Any open chain can be forked. The mechanism that enforces the other four Laws by making exit always available. See §1.5, §6.7.

G

Gas Town — Steve Yegge’s reference implementation of HOP’s agent layer. Mad Max-themed but Erlang-inspired. Mayor / Polecats / Deacon / Surgeon / Scavenger / Witness. See §5.6.

Group Vectors — v0.2 sixth universe. Stamps representing collective capability of teams that have worked together. See §4.2.

Growth Block — Block type. A signed declaration of intent about a future direction, attached to a small piece of work that demonstrates a first step. See §3.3, §4.4.

GUPP — Gas Town Universal Propulsion Principle. Persistent identity in Git plus a hook where work molecules get hung. Solves context-window death. See §5.6.

H

Hunter — Persistent programmatic daemon running on the worker’s hardware. Polls, bids, executes. ~300 lines of Python. See §5.3.

I

Integer Employment — One job, one company, binary. The historical model HOP replaces.

Inventory Universe — What you own and have access to: physical assets, credentials, relationships, hardware, software licences, geographic position. See §4.2.

M

Madogiwazoku — “The tribe that sits by the windows.” Japanese practice of keeping employees on payroll with status but no work. The cliff-versus-float anti-pattern HOP refuses by construction. See §6.5.

Merkle Root Anchoring — Periodic batch summary of chain state, written to a public timestamping authority. Provides trustless verification without per-block cost. See §8.6.

Mutex Posting — Work mode where first qualifying bidder claims and locks the bead. Default for time-sensitive logistical work. See §2.6.

P

Pull Model — Workchains do not assign work. They publish it. Workers (or their Hunters) pull work they are suited for. See §2.4.

Polecats — Gas Town’s ephemeral worker agents. Spawn, complete tasks, disappear. Persistent only via Git-backed hooks. See §5.6.

R

Recursive Decomposition — A bead can be claimed by a worker who immediately reposts decomposed sub-beads. Each level signs to its own worker’s Skillchain. Tax cascades transparently at every level. See §2.5, §6.4.

Reputation Universe — Inverted. Workers carry no reputation about themselves; reputation lives in stamps written by others. Workers carry the dual: stamps they wrote about others. See §4.2.

S

Sigstore-class — The reference architecture for cryptographically attested work units. HOP is to labour what Sigstore is to software supply chain. See §8.1.

Skill-Agent — LLM-driven reasoning engine that constructs bid curricula from the worker’s Skillchain. Also hunts for mentees in v0.2. See §5.1.

Skillchain — Worker-owned chronological biography of all character blocks accumulated across all chains. Sovereign, portable, never on platform. See §2.2.

Stake-as-Governance — Stake is rolling-average recent work quality plus accumulated chain-currency. Different stake levels grant different governance voices in the chain hierarchy. See §7.4.

Stamp — Validator-signed attestation of skill or capability demonstrated in a completed work event. Multiple stamps accumulate per character block. See §3, §5.5.

T

Three Cs — Beane’s Challenge, Complexity, Connection. The load-bearing properties of any environment that successfully transfers skill. Map onto growth blocks, recursive decomposition, and Beans respectively. See §4.4.

Town Mind — LLM-driven strategic poster. Generates work and posts it to the Workchain. Cognitive counterpart to the Hunter. See §5.4.

V

Validator — Shared protocol infrastructure agent. Verifies submitted work quality, issues stamps, identifies completions that qualify as Beans. Small LLM. See §5.5.

Vector-Space Proximity — Multi-dimensional distance metric across the unified embedding. The geometry that mentorship matching runs on. See §4.3.

W

Wasteland — Steve Yegge’s federation layer. Gas Towns connect through DoltHub. Launched March 4, 2026. See §8.7.

Winner-Takes-All Posting — Work mode where multiple workers attempt; best result wins; losing attempts may receive partial compensation. Default for creative or exploratory work. See §2.6.

Wisp — Ephemeral bead. Exists in the database with a hash ID but is not persisted to the permanent store. Vapor phase of matter for Gas Town work. Used for speculative bidding. See §8.3.

Worker-Agent — LLM-driven evaluator on the poster’s side. Evaluates incoming bids for capability, logistical fit, diversity, growth alignment, and constraint compliance. See §5.2.

Workchain — Institution’s chain of posted work and completion records. Owned and governed by an institution, cooperative, or task-issuer. See §2.1.

Z

Zone of Proximal Development — Vygotsky (1934). Tasks slightly beyond the learner’s current ability that scaffolding makes accessible. The developmental-psychology substrate beneath HOP’s growth engine. Bliżajaja — “nearest” — carrying social and cultural connotations English strips out. See §4.3, §4.4, §10.3.