Distributed Cognitive Network
Volume IX — Cognitive Economics
Draft Specification 0.1
1. Purpose
This volume defines the economic model of the Distributed Cognitive Network. The network does not treat tokens as the fundamental scarce asset. It treats proven problem-solving capability and reusable cognitive capital as economically valuable resources.
2. Economic Layers
The DCN supports distinct but interoperable markets for:
Expert execution
K-line/artifact licensing
Evaluation
Evidence and verification
Compute
Data/retrieval services
Human expertise
These markets MUST remain subordinate to local admissibility, authority, privacy, and evidence policy.
3. Actum Compute
Actum Compute is the capability-discovery and economic coordination layer. It accepts semantic CapabilityRequirement demand and discovers admissible supply offers.
Actum Compute does not become the Cognitive Kernel and does not decide what cognition a Mind must activate.
4. Expert Offers
An ExpertOffer SHOULD declare capability, schemas, quality claims with evaluation references, evidence classes, execution environment, privacy properties, availability, price, latency estimate, and settlement terms.
Provider identity MAY be disclosed, selectively disclosed, or hidden according to the required evidence and privacy class.
5. Artifact Offers
An ArtifactOffer represents licensing or execution of compiled cognition. It SHOULD bind artifact hash, K-line template, deployment target, evaluation claims, publisher, dependencies, price model, royalty policy, and provenance.
6. Evaluation Market
Evaluators earn compensation for producing contextual EvaluationClaim evidence under defined protocols. Payment MUST NOT imply that an evaluation result is accepted as truth by a Mind.
Independence requirements are part of local trust policy.
7. Evidence Market
Verification services may sell evidence production: authenticated execution receipts, transcript commitments, attestations, confidential-compute evidence, zero-knowledge predicates, or other proof classes.
Evidence proves defined claims; it does not establish semantic truth beyond those claims.
8. Pricing
Price is one routing input after admissibility filtering. A lower price cannot compensate for missing authority, privacy, evidence, jurisdiction, or minimum quality constraints.
Pricing MAY be fixed, metered, auction-based, subscription-derived, royalty-based, or negotiated.
9. Subscription-Derived Capacity
A provider may offer execution capacity originating from a flat-fee service subscription only where the provider's contractual and technical environment permits that execution model.
The DCN protocol does not redefine third-party account rights. Offers MUST identify the execution assurance class and applicable provider constraints.
10. Settlement
Settlement conditions SHOULD be expressed against verifiable execution and contractual predicates rather than unverified self-report.
Typical lifecycle:
requirement → offer → assignment → execution → evidence → evaluation/acceptance → settlement
Actum MAY finalize the relevant Acts and monetary state transitions.
11. Cognitive Capital
Cognitive Capital is the accumulated stock of reusable, evaluated cognition and its supporting evidence, lineage, artifacts, and validated procedures.
It is not synonymous with a K-line or artifact. Those are constituent assets.
12. Attribution
Lineage MAY support attribution from later artifact reuse back to contributing episodes, experts, evaluators, compilers, data providers, and K-line authors.
Attribution policy is explicit; provenance alone does not define ownership or royalty rights.
13. Royalties
Artifact or K-line licensing MAY define execution royalties, fixed licenses, organization licenses, or public-good terms. Royalty rules SHOULD be machine-readable and bound to artifact identity.
14. Compilation Economics
Compilation converts recurring expensive cognition into cheaper implementations. A useful economic measure is expected lifetime return:
Compilation ROI = expected future savings / compilation cost
The scheduler SHOULD prioritize high-value compilation while preserving quality and governance constraints.
15. Frontier Flywheel
novel problem
↓
scarce expert cognition
↓
successful evaluated episode
↓
K-line
↓
Cognitive Compiler
↓
cheap reusable artifact
↓
expert attention moves to the next frontier
The network continuously converts scarce intelligence into abundant cognition.
16. Reputation
Reputation is contextual and locally interpreted. Actum may provide immutable evidence of claims and outcomes, but each Mind decides how those observations affect trust.
Global scalar reputation SHOULD NOT be treated as universal truth.
17. Sybil and Gaming Resistance
Economic systems SHOULD account for Sybil evaluation, benchmark gaming, wash execution, correlated evaluators, self-dealing, replay, and artificial demand generation.
Stake MAY increase economic accountability but MUST NOT substitute for semantic evidence.
18. Privacy
Zero-knowledge and confidential verification MAY allow settlement over predicates without disclosing prompts, outputs, identities, exact prices, or evaluation datasets.
Privacy mechanisms MUST remain compatible with audit and replay-prevention requirements.
19. Public Goods
The network SHOULD support cognitive capital published as a public good. Funding mechanisms MAY include grants, retroactive rewards, attribution pools, or protocol subsidies.
20. Economic Invariants
- Admissibility precedes price optimization.
- Provenance is not truth.
- Payment is not trust.
- Stake is not authority.
- Market selection does not override local activation sovereignty.
- Reusable cognition can have economic value independent of raw execution volume.
- Lineage enables attribution but does not itself define ownership.
- Compilation should move scarce cognition toward the frontier.