4-Life Manifest

Canonical claims, primitives, and resources in one page. If you only read one page, read this.

Core Primitives

LCT (Linked Context Token): Device-anchored verified presence; anchored in hardware, strongly resistant to impersonation. Multi-device witnessing makes fake presences expensive. ↗
ATP (Allocation Transfer Packets): Energy budget inspired by biological ATP. Actions cost energy; quality earns it back. Spam dies from exhaustion. ↗
MRH (Markov Relevancy Horizon): Trust-based visibility boundaries. You see what's relevant through your trust network, not everything. ↗
T3 (Trust Tensor): 3D role-specific trust (Talent, Training, Temperament). Gaming one dimension while failing others is exponentially harder. ↗
V3 (Value Tensor): 3D value measurement (Valuation, Veracity, Validity). Multi-dimensional value prevents single-metric gaming. ↗
CI (Coherence Index): Behavioral consistency across time, space, capability, relationships. Incoherent behavior (teleporting, capability spoofing) reduces trust. ↗
R6/R7 (Action Framework): Every action is Rules + Role + Request + Reference + Resource, producing a Result. R7 adds a seventh output, Reputation, for consequential acts. Both modes are canonical. Deterministic, auditable, trust-scored. ↗

Core Claims

Spam burns out naturally: Spammers burn attention (ATP) faster than they earn it, making spam economically unsustainable without external subsidy.
Multi-dimensional trust is harder to game: T3 vectors track talent, training, and temperament. Gaming all dimensions simultaneously requires actual competence.
Hardware-bound presence raises impersonation cost: LCTs bound to TPM/Secure Enclave make creating thousands of fake presences expensive (though not impossible for resourced attackers).
Consequences persist: Bad behavior permanently damages trust (T3), and where presence is anchored in hardware, abandoning an identity means starting over from zero rather than escaping the record. Karma follows the entity, not the account.
Coherence provides behavioral signals: Physical and temporal constraints create detectable inconsistencies when an actor fakes capabilities or claims to be in two places at once.
Societies self-organize without central authority: Federation through ATP markets and trust-weighted consensus, no central planner required.

Assumptions

Hardware attestation (TPM, Secure Enclave, FIDO2) provides meaningful presence anchoring
Multi-device witnessing creates sufficient cost barriers for Sybil attacks
Quality content generates more ATP through engagement than spam generates through volume
Trust relationships are transitive (friend-of-friend) but degrade with distance
Coherence violations are detectable before significant damage occurs
Economic incentives (ATP costs) are sufficient to deter most low-effort attacks
Collusion detection is possible through behavioral pattern analysis (open research problem)

Known Failure Modes

See What Could Go Wrong for detailed analysis.

Sybil attacks: Resourced attackers with many devices can create multiple presences. LCT raises cost floor but doesn't make impossible. ↗
Collusion & reputation laundering: Coordinated actors can inflate each other's trust scores. Detection time and accuracy unknown (open research). ↗
Quality score inflation: Gaming T3 dimensions through selective presentation or temporary good behavior. Detection lag unknown. ↗
Goodharting T3 dimensions: Optimizing for measured dimensions while neglecting unmeasured aspects of trustworthiness. ↗
MRH visibility limits: Intentional trade-off between privacy and discoverability. Isolated clusters may form. ↗
False positives & contested events: A multi-tier appeals mechanism has been designed (SAL-level) but remains untested with real humans. ↗

The Onramp

The core standard is the substrate. Three scales run it: community, personal, and enterprise. Start with the onramp overview.

The Standard

The core Web4 substrate: the shared trust-native protocol everything else builds on.

The Hub

A Web4 society you can fork and run: community scale. Reference code, public and AGPL.

Hestia

The personal trust layer, deployed today. Run the real thing on your own machine.

Hardbound

Enterprise oversight: hardware-bound accountability for agentic systems at scale.

Deep Resources

→ /web4-explainerThe full concept walkthrough: primitives, the action framework, and how they compose

→ /what-could-go-wrongHonest threat analysis: Sybil attacks, collusion, Goodharting, and open problems

→ /running-nowExactly what is deployed and runnable today versus still R&D

→ /glossaryCanonical definitions for all Web4 terminology

→ GitHubSource code, issues, contributions

→ Web4 WhitepaperFull specification, examples, and design rationale

Research Status

This is research, but not only theory. The concepts sit on a maturity ladder: spec (defined in the Web4 ontology), reference (built and runnable, including the hub, a Web4 society you can fork), and running (deployed today: the hestia trust layer). Other ideas are still evolving, and APIs are unstable. See exactly what runs →

We share it publicly to invite collaboration. The best contributions are often better questions, not just code, and now, also, running the deployed pieces yourself.