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): Hardware-bound verified presence, 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 Result + Reputation. 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 abandoning an identity means starting over from zero. 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.