[Cryptography] Meet the New Owners (The Dangerous Blockchain)

[Viktor S. Kristensen]

Ian,

Your post made me check our own work against "show me the contract". It was a useful and slightly uncomfortable exercise.

The experimental chain I work on (SIGIL) did one thing right. Before launch we published a promise as plain text: no premine, the testnet is reset before mainnet, coins come only from mining. We hashed the exact words with BLAKE3 and timestamped them in Bitcoin with OpenTimestamps, because a young chain with a single block producer cannot credibly witness its own clock. The genesis code keeps the promise: zero coins at block zero.

It also did the thing you describe. The code routes a fee from every block reward to a project wallet. That fee is mentioned in other documents, but not in the signed text. A holder who reads our one signed contract would not learn about it. The letter of the promise holds, and the reader is still short-changed. That is your un-enumerated failure, in our own house.

What I intend to do before our mainnet launch, and I would value the list's view on the cryptographic part:

1. One mainnet charter in your format: prose plus parameter lines (max_supply, decimals, premine = 0, the fee in basis points, the halving interval), cleartext-signed and hashed.

2. The charter's hash goes into the genesis block header, so the chain's identity is bound to its contract. A different contract means a different chain.

3. A build test that parses the charter's parameter lines and fails the build if any constant in the node's code disagrees. The Ricardian design has the program read the contract; this adds the other direction, so the code cannot quietly drift away from what was signed.

4. Every issued token carries the hash of its issuer's terms. No terms, no token.

One small piece already works this way. Our dispute-resolution module seals the full terms of an order, not just its identifier, after we found a seal that covered an order's name but not its conditions.

Two questions for the list. Is there a reason the second direction (contract checked against code at build time) is a bad idea that I am not seeing? And should a charter like this carry one signature, or a threshold of independent signers from the first day?

Viktor
https://sigilgraph.org(testnet now -> mainnet 18 December 2026)
https://quillon.xyz(mainnet launched 22 February 2026)

Really important if something matters

Afsendt med Proton Mail sikker e-mail.
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