Diecast / Notes

Picture a shopkeeper who prints her prices on paper and pins them to the wall. Trade is good, so one evening she takes the paper down and prints higher numbers. Nothing about the shop changed — only the sign did. Now picture a second shopkeeper who has her prices cut into the stone of the building the day it opens. She cannot raise them either. Both shops sell the same bread. Only one of them has sold you something besides bread: the certainty that the sign is still up tomorrow.

Almost every argument about a token's launch parameters — the fee, the supply, the rules of the pool — reduces to those two words: editable rules. A rule that can be edited is a rule you are renting. Its value is the landlord's patience, and patience is not auditable.

Now look at where a token's rules can live. They can live in a post, which costs nothing to change and is worth about that. They can live behind an admin key, which is a promise wearing a keyhole. Or they can live the way Diecast's do: written into the contract at construction, with no setter, no second strike and no restrike authority. At construction the deployer makes the Face Choice — one face from a fixed set of five — and that face decides how every trade's 2% divides between retiring supply and deepening the Pool, for the life of the token. The fee, the split rule and the supply are fixed in the same stroke. After construction, the deployer can neither shift a balance, halt trading, nor reissue a single retired unit.

The struck face is a public reading from block one. You do not have to trust this paragraph; you can read the face yourself, and the documentation shows you how. That is what a rule looks like when it stops being a sign on a nail.

Every token makes its last editable decision eventually. Diecast simply makes it first — the first decision was the last editable one.