Requests for comment · discussion, not standard
Where reality pokes back
A contract standard earns trust by being honest about its hard edges. Every prior standard for structured commerce modelled the binary layer - an invoice's fields, a payment's amount - and left the soft layer to prose and lawyers: force majeure, a government ban, a court order, a secrecy duty, calling the whole thing off. These documents work through that soft layer in the open.
They are not part of the specification. The syntax is a strawman, used to force a shape into view; where it reads as pseudo-code, that is deliberate. An RFC is a basis for conversation - a worked example of how a hard situation could be transcribed, offered so it can be argued with, not adopted by default.
- 0001 Overrides: how reality pokes a running contract Open for comment Force majeure, waiver, break-glass, court orders, government intervention
- 0002 Lifecycle transitions and entrenchment Open for comment Assignment, replacement and novation, termination, rescission, anti-rug-pull protection, hardship
- 0003 Secrecy (sekretess) as a pillar Open for comment Confidentiality, selective disclosure, field-level sealing, receipted reads, escalation privacy, OSL
- 0004 State reads: what does a register read mean? Open for comment Condition precedent, status cells, register reads, declared transitions, retention of title, revocable permission, escalation levels
- 0005 Time: the operator set, and the calendar it resolves against Open for comment Deadlines, notice periods, working and banking days, late-payment interest, day-count conventions, timezone rules under replay
- 0006 Binding effect: how a mechanical contract acquires legal force Open for comment Enforceability, expert determination, evidence, the referee's own accountability, consumer floors, jurisdictional ceilings
- 0007 The verb set and its register Open for comment Naming, one word one meaning, legal register, emit vs notify, staged pool movements, undeclared builtins, guard polarity
- 0008 Conservation: the fourth law Open for comment Double-entry, boundary accounts, splits and rounding, encumbrance as a balance sheet, what an auditor can read
- 0009 What the linter can actually promise Open for comment Decidability, the bounded fragment, cost of pool safety, input caps, a signed proof manifest
- 0010 Receipts: coded reasons, term ids, and what a receipt may quote Open for comment Rejection codes, captions, what a receipt may reveal, sealed versus opaque, cross-contract statistics, language neutrality
- 0011 Freezing the grammar: this is not YAML Open for comment Surface syntax, why it only looks like YAML, one spelling per construct, a layered freeze, canonical signing form
The discipline is the same one the specification runs on: the machine never judges the storm, the coup, or the emergency - it judges the signed paperwork about it, and the unjudgeable predicate stays prose. What an RFC explores is where the procedure around that predicate can be transcribed, and where it honestly cannot. Creaks are recorded, not papered over.