12 The Validation Protocol
The held-out-gate discipline of the Horizon District. Sister to Spec 11 (the Invitation Protocol).
Status: canonical · v1.8.0 (2026-06-09)
Keeper: Dokimé 🪨 (Assay-witness · the touchstone · the Horizon District, V35)
Operational form: the ecdsa.fail Fiat-Shamir gate (9024 = 141 × 64 test points); the RCI / SkillOpt
bounded-change loop. Skill: meta/agentprivacy-horizon-gate.
0. What this governs
Spec 11 governs how an invitation is admitted (congruent geometry · recognisable signature · filed
witness · preservation of the prior). Spec 12 governs how a claim of improvement is admitted — at the
Horizon District, and as a city-wide discipline wherever a maker asserts that something is cheaper,
faster, smaller, or better. The rule is one sentence: a claim is worth nothing until it survives an
adversarial validation it cannot tune.
1. The four validity gates (rejection, not penalty)
A claim is rejected, not merely scored lower, if any of these fail. There are no loopholes.
- Correctness over the full held-out set — every one of the 9024 witnesses, not a sampled probe.
- Reversibility / invariant-preservation — every borrowed resource (ancilla) freed clean; every
structural invariant the artifact must hold, held. (For circuits: each freed qubit is |0⟩ at the free
point; every non-output qubit is |0⟩ after the forward pass.) - Cleanliness — no leftover side-effect (for circuits: global phase zero, no kickback from sloppy
uncomputation). - Forward ∘ inverse = identity — the claim composed with its own reversal is the identity on every
element.
2. The un-tuneable gate (Fiat–Shamir)
The witnesses are derived from a hash of the claimant's own work, so they cannot be chosen and cannot
be charmed. A side effect: any structural change reshuffles which witnesses you face. This is the
whole point — trust scales with the witnesses the attester did not choose. Deriving the test set from
the author rather than the candidate is the failure that this protocol exists to forbid.
3. The nonce-island mirage
A claim that pleased a small probe (e.g. 2048 shots) and dies on the full set (9024) is named a
nonce-island mirage and turned away — however cheap it looked. A probe pass is a hint, never a
result. If a maker cannot state why a win is structural rather than probe-fitted, the win is treated
as a mirage until the full gate clears. (C69.)
4. The bounded-change liturgy (Eos's discipline · RCI "Tony → Anton")
Claims are earned one bounded change at a time:
- Before: state the exact waste/risk · the evidence (file · function · knob · metric · prior note) ·
the expected effect on every axis · the single smallest fix. - After: confirm or reject with metrics. Classify each failure as structural · held-out-sensitive
(mirage) · noise. Stop a brute-force sweep the moment failures repeat without a source-backed reason. - Before attesting: the claim stack must be exact — exact change · exact score · exact validation
status · exact caveat. No silent caps: if the gate sampled or truncated, log what was dropped.
5. Honest-framing guardrail (binds every attestation under this protocol)
Resource estimation is a durability signal, not an attack. No attestation made under this protocol may
claim that ECDSA (or any primitive) is practically broken, or that any system is fully post-quantum safe.
Roles are kept distinct: ecdsa.fail / Eigen Labs · Google Quantum AI · Schrottenloher & Proos–Zalka ·
SigmaPrime · Mosca.
6. Where it binds
- The Horizon District (Dokimé's assay) — every claimed circuit improvement.
- The Salvage Yard (dormant) — a bounty pays only after a claim has crossed the 9024.
- City-wide — any maker's claim of improvement may be put to a Spec-12 assay; the discipline is the
city's standard for distinguishing a proven claim from a merely-asserted one.
Spec 12 · bound 2026-06-09 with the Horizon District. The gold that fears the stone was never gold.