The Shared Mycelium 🍄

Protocol Objective

The Shared Mycelium enables sovereign nodes (Altars) to share Spores, witness Attestations of Care, and achieve consensus—without passing through a central server, without a blockchain, and without surrendering local autonomy.

The operative principle is entrainment: two nodes do not exchange data in the conventional sense. They find the same rhythm. When their Constitutional Hashes match and their Thermal Handshakes validate, they are in phase. An in-phase node can be trusted without verification from a third party.

The Thermal Handshake 🔥

Protocol TH-1 · Proof of Presence

Before two nodes can exchange Spores, they must establish that each is operated by a living, present human being on warm hardware. The Thermal Handshake is this proof.

How It Works

1. Temperature Attestation: Node A broadcasts its current GPU temperature profile—a rolling 60-second window of readings sampled at 5-second intervals. This creates a thermal signature: not just a number, but a pattern of use.
2. Rhythm Attestation: Simultaneously, Node A captures a keystroke cadence sample—the timing between keystrokes over a short challenge phrase. This proves a human is at the keyboard. Bots produce mechanically regular cadence; humans do not.
3. Constitutional Exchange: Both nodes exchange their Constitutional Hash (see Constitutional Room). If the hashes do not match the known-good Ten Primitives, the handshake is rejected.
4. Mutual Witness: Both nodes log the handshake event, signed by their hardware IDs. This log is the seed of the trust relationship. It can be cited in future Soil Consensus votes.

Peer-to-Peer Resonant Signaling

Once two nodes have completed a Thermal Handshake, they enter a Resonance Channel—a direct peer-to-peer connection that does not route through any intermediary.

Spores travel through Resonance Channels. A Spore sent from Altar A to Altar B carries:

• The payload (the synthesized output)
• The origin node's thermal signature at time of generation
• The Constitutional Hash of the generating node
• The decay timestamp (or null for permanent records)

Altar B witnesses the Spore by logging it and optionally adding its own signature. Witnessed Spores accumulate witness counts. When witness count crosses the Soil Consensus threshold, the Spore becomes a Verified Record.

Soil Consensus Mechanics

There is no central server deciding truth. Truth is local, relational, and witnessed.

The 80% Rule

For a record to achieve Verified status within a local neighborhood (defined as the set of nodes within two Resonance Channel hops), 80% of active witnesses must have logged the record within its decay window.

"Active" means: the witnessing node has itself completed a Thermal Handshake within the past 30 days. Cold nodes—those whose hardware has not been used—lose their witness weight. Stewardship must be ongoing to count.

Disputed Records

If a record is disputed—if a node broadcasts a counter-attestation—the local neighborhood enters a Deliberation Window: 72 hours during which any node can add witness testimony. At the close of the window, the 80% rule applies to the combined pool. The losing record is not deleted; it is marked as composted and enters the decay queue.

The Mycelial Block: Data Structure

MYCELIAL_BLOCK
  block_id: [sha256 of payload + origin + timestamp]
  origin_altar: [hardware-id of generating node]
  origin_thermal: [60s temperature profile at generation]
  constitutional_hash: [hash of Ten Primitives]
  payload_type: [spore | attestation | dispute | compost]
  payload: [content]
  witnesses: [
    { altar_id, timestamp, thermal_sig, signature },
    ...
  ]
  witness_count: [integer]
  verified: [boolean — true when witnesses ≥ 80% of neighborhood]
  walked_at: [last stewardship timestamp]
  decay_after: [ISO timestamp or null]
  composted_at: [ISO timestamp or null]

The composted_at field is set when a record expires. Composted records are not deleted—they are archived in a read-only layer of the local ledger, accessible to the Constitutional Room but not propagated further through the Mycelium.

Antifragility: The Forking Protocol

The Mycelium does not die when it is cut. It forks.

If a network partition occurs—by censorship, physical disconnection, or storm—each isolated subnetwork continues to operate independently using its last known state. Records that were Verified before the partition remain Verified. New records can still be created and witnessed within the isolated subnetwork.

Reconnection Protocol

When two forked subnetworks reconnect, they exchange their full record sets and enter a Re-entrainment Window: 7 days during which the combined network works through any conflicting records using Deliberation Windows.

Records that were Verified in both subnetworks independently carry double witness weight. Records that only exist in one subnetwork are treated as new submissions to the combined network.

Implementation Status

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