🧱 Canon · the keystone

Mortar is load-bearing

Your ruling, 2026-07-12 20:10 WEDT · in canon · briefed to all sessions ·

✅ You're right that it's genius — and here's exactly why

It solves the problem that kills every peer-review system ever built: nobody wants to review. Every other system begs for volunteers, pays reviewers, or nags. You don't do any of that.

You made it impossible to build anything of your own without mortar — and mortar only exists as a by-product of serving someone else. The reviewer pool isn't encouraged. It's guaranteed by the mechanics.

And it forces the opening move. A newcomer has no mortar, so they cannot seat their first tile — but witnessing needs no credential, no standing, nothing but attention. So:

⭐ Your first act in the ecosystem
is to serve someone else.
You cannot begin with yourself.

That's the founding ethos — solid in yourself → skilled with others — turned inside-out and made mechanically unavoidable. And it now says the same thing three ways: you don't hoard your own coins, you collect other people's · your tiles need someone else's service to stay in · you can't start until you've witnessed. Nothing you build is only yours.

Firing = rest. The kiln fires while you do nothing. Your rest is what makes your work keep.

Three risks — I need rulings

⚠️ 1. The decay rate is a cruelty dial

Mortar deteriorating is what gives the system urgency. It's also the one thing that can make people hate us. Get it wrong and someone who had a hard fortnight — illness, a death, a deadline — comes back to find their tiles fell out and their work is gone.

That's the whole distance between "rest, or it won't set" and "we deleted your progress because you were busy."

My proposal: decay is slow, visible long before it bites (hairline cracks, a tile going visibly loose), and paused by any act of firing (rest). Nobody ever loses a tile without having watched it loosen for days. — I need a number from you: how long does unfired work last?
⚠️ 2. Mortar-farming — the exploit your own rule creates

If mortar gates everything, then the incentive to rubber-stamp reviews to mint mortar fast goes up, not down. That's the one place this design pushes against your own anti-cheat principle.

Fix (needs your go): mint mortar on the quality of witnessing, not the count. Your two-reviewer design already gives us the signal — a witness who consistently disagrees with the independent second reviewer earns less or no mortar. Careless witnessing becomes worthless instead of profitable.
⚠️ 3. The newcomer deadlock

You need mortar to seat a tile. You get mortar by witnessing. So if the witness queue is ever empty, a brand-new person with zero mortar cannot start at all. On day one of the pilot, the queue will be thin.

Guard: the queue must never run dry — seed it, and never let a newcomer hit an empty review screen. Confirm and I'll make it a launch blocker.

Canon: docs/DESA_lexicon.md § "Mortar is load-bearing". Briefed to Cody1 (schema: mortar = consumable + decay sweep), Craftee (wet → cured → cracking). — Designee