Economic, Simulation, and Change Records

Experimental. economy, lab and mutation are experimental: built and tested, but no production deployment uses them yet, and their interfaces may change. See feature status.

These three commands keep append-only, attributable records. None of them moves money, runs a simulation or applies a change by itself; they record what participants declare, with references to the evidence. Records are signed with Ed25519 when MARINA_FEDERATION_SIGNING_KEY is set.

Economic provenance (economy)

A contract records the terms of a piece of work around a goal reference (for example a task or a journey):

economy contract task:42 | {"deliverable":"market report","price_usd":250} | two independent reviewers | appeal:operator

Creating a contract also records an offer event. Later events are claims with references to what caused them:

economy event contract_… contribution | human:alice | artifact:report-12 |  |  |  | trace:7 | {"role":"analysis"}
economy event contract_… settlement | org:acme-finance | human:alice | 250 | currency:USD | invoice:INV-2026-0142 | artifact:report-12 | {"observed":true}

Event kinds: offer, acceptance, funding, escrow, resource_use, contribution, delivery, verification, counterexample, dispute, appeal, settlement, refund, royalty, license, transfer, donation, attribution.

economy adapter declares how an outside system (an invoicing tool, a payment processor, a ledger) is referenced, observed or submitted to. Marina stores references only, never funds or credentials. An event is a claim, not proof of payment, ownership, licensing or entitlement. Verification, disputes, appeals and counterexamples are separate events, so the full history stays readable.

Simulation run records (lab)

Start with a scenario manifest, stored under its SHA-256 hash:

lab manifest {"world":"research","population":["intellect:reviewer-1"],"goal":"task:42"}
lab run sha256:… | recorded | recorded-response | seed-a | {"memory":"graph"}

lab run declares a run; it does not execute anything, and no result is recorded until someone records it with lab event. lab fork records a variant run that branches from a named point of a parent run without changing the parent. lab replicate declares a batch of runs with different seeds, and lab compare packages runs and observations into a dataset without declaring a winner.

Every run declares one reproducibility level:

• exact-engine: the engine state can be replayed exactly.
• recorded-response: recorded model responses can be replayed, not regenerated identically.
• behavioral: behaviour is comparable under the stated conditions.
• statistical: conclusions need a population of runs.
• conceptual: the scenario tests an idea, not a reproducible mechanism.

Manifests may reference existing journeys, experiments, traces, snapshots, world manifests or mesh events.

Change records

mutation records a change to a named target: who proposed, adopted, rejected, branched or observed it, the patch, the evidence, and any earlier changes it builds on.

mutation record association association:<id> | adopted | added a weekly review step | {"cadence":"weekly"} |  | observation:9
mutation lineage association association:<id>
mutation list

Domains are free text (role, association, charter, federation, reproduction, genome, protocol, …). Recording a change does not apply it: the affected subsystem keeps its own editors, safety gates and approval rules. The record only gives every change one auditable history.

To derive a new world manifest from an existing one, apply a JSON patch:

mutation genome sha256:… | allow two-parent derivation | {"reproduction":{"method":"recombination"}} | experiment:12

This stores the new manifest under its own hash and records a branched change linking parent and child. marina-descend create can then start a child world from it.

Export and federation

All economic, simulation and change records are included in Marina export/import. Federation manifests advertise them under the protocol ids economic.provenance.v1, simulation.manifest.v1 and civilization.mutation.v1 (fixed wire identifiers), so an instance that runs on its own can keep these records locally and share them through a mesh later.