stake, Priced Strangers

Syntax

stake = "stake" number "on" fact "toward" party ;

Example, from spec §4.9:

stake 5 on offer(design-review) toward maya

Semantics

In Osmol, flow requires a gap: no construct may create pressure toward a twin that has not declared a matching seek. That is error[O-003], no gap, no gradient. stake is the sole exception. It is the only construct that may originate pressure toward a twin holding no matching gap, and it does so by putting the initiator's reputation on the table.

The mechanics, per spec §4.9: the stake is forfeited if the receiver marks the flow unwanted, and returned with standing if the receiver adopts the gap. The spec's summary line is the whole design in one sentence:

Spam is thus not filtered by Osmol; it is priced by its grammar.

The economics

The stake mechanism is the language-level face of the Osmosis protocol's anti-spam economics (protocol spec, §8). Under that regime, bulk unsolicited contact carries linear cost and superlinear reputational risk: every stranger you press on costs a stake, and every "unwanted" verdict compounds against your standing. The spam strategy is not filtered but priced out of rationality. This inverts, at the protocol layer rather than the client layer, the economics email fixed in 1971, where sending is free and the receiver pays with attention.

The Fifty-Year Letter states both halves of the argument. The disease (its Chapter 2): an inbox is the only to-do list in your life that any stranger on Earth may write on, without permission, at no cost. Spam is a rational response to a broken price signal, not an abuse of it. And the sober rebuttal to the arms-race objection (its Chapter 7): sender agents will always be optimized against receiver agents, and the arms race already exists, but the attacker currently fights for free. You cannot stop adversaries; you can stop subsidizing them.

The formal version of this claim is Theorem 5 (Spam irrationality): under any strategy, the expected return of unsolicited pressure without adopted gaps is negative. It is game-theoretic, needs a different toolbox than the convergence proof, and is open; see The Open Theorems.

Honesty: v0.1 does not implement stake

The reference interpreter has no stake support at all. There is no rule for it in osmol.py's pattern table, so a stake line fails parsing as an unrecognized declaration: it neither prices nor flows. In v0.1, the only anti-spam machinery actually running is:

  1. O-000, the tombstone verbs cannot be written, and
  2. no-gap-no-flow, the engine only ever evaluates pressure against declared gaps, so a gap-less twin simply attracts nothing.

An implementer targeting v0.1 conformance should treat stake as reserved grammar with specified semantics awaiting a runtime: parse it if you wish to be forward-compatible, but do not invent flow behavior for it. The economics live in the wire protocol's future, not in today's interpreter.