3 · A Verifiable Substrate

🚧 Draft (core-idea sketch). Part A · Core Ideas.

The problem. To sell computation you must trust the result. To share code and data across a decentralized system you need it portable, deduplicated, and addressable by what it is rather than where it lives. General-purpose code doesn't give you any of this for free.

The core idea. disp: programs are content-addressed trees, computation is deterministic reduction (tree calculus), and types are predicates the result must satisfy. Because reduction is deterministic and confluent, two honest executors of the same program agree bit-for-bit — so a buyer can verify a result by re-execution, by sampling k independent executors, or (when the result-predicate is cheap) by just checking the predicate. Reduction-step counts give a machine-independent "gas" unit for metering work. Moving a tree preserves its hash, so storage and routing of code/data become the same operation.

Leans on: nothing — it's foundational tech. Enables: the resource market (5) — verifiable compute, the value algebra, and metering all come from here; and machine-resolvable questions for the truth machine (7).

⚠️ Where it's thin. disp is a working prototype, but effects, erasure, the optimizer, and a self-hosted parser are pending — and crucially there is no networking/serialization story yet. "Nothing connects disp to the network today beyond intent" is the single largest gap between layers. Part B.