MIZAN · the papers

One research programme, in parts.

Each paper carries one enforceable claim — something a reader can check, not a position they must accept. Each has its priority timestamped to Bitcoin before release, so the sequence itself is verifiable. The capstone comes last, after every part has been public, attacked, and survived.

We announce a paper when it is timestamped and publish it when it is ready, in that order, always. Nothing on this page is a promise about future work; the drafts already exist and their existence is anchored.

§ 01The series
Published
Paper I
SSRN · July 2026
Priority anchored
The manager's discretion, removed. N becomes the leaf count of a committed Merkle tree, the winner is forced in-circuit to be the maximum of the committed set, and the deflation recomputes inside the proof. Every anti-overfitting statistic in finance divides by a number the person being judged types in; this paper is the mechanism that ends that. It is the paper behind everything else here.
Published
The survey
SSRN · August 2026
11 pages
The whole forty-six-year literature assembled and argued in one place — Grossman–Stiglitz through the modern overfitting programme — with an order-of-magnitude cost estimate, a taxonomy separating what the field cannot fix from what it has simply failed to, and the structural reason each of the five prior remedies failed. It ends on the finding we would least like to be true: disclosure-based verification adversely selects against genuine skill.
Published
The standard
SSRN · 2026
22 pages · CC BY 4.0
Not a paper arguing a position: a specification anyone may implement without asking us, including a competitor. Forty-one numbered normative requirements, three conformance levels, nine public conformance vectors, and — stated normatively — the boundaries it refuses to certify. Frozen: corrections are published as errata rather than edited into the document.
In preparation
Paper II
Draft timestamped
Who Sees the Strategy? The Sealed Model
Proving a hidden model's track record without revealing a single parameter: committed position streams, forward-only tracks, fail-closed semantics. The disclosure question, closed — the half of the problem that makes the other half worth solving, because a proof nobody will submit to is not a proof of anything.
In draft
Paper III
Priority timestamped
July 2026
Who Judges the Judge? Era Law: Verifier Governance for Credentials That Outlive Their Issuer
The issuer's discretion, removed. Eras named by their hash; superseded, never revoked; one changed byte is a new judge by definition; weakness disclosed rather than rewritten. Written with the production scars documented rather than tidied away — including the incidents where the machinery inconvenienced its own operator.
Ahead
Paper IV
then the capstone
The refusal study — and the consolidated reference implementation
One pre-registered configuration against thirty-four US stocks and against its own maker, reported as data: the refusals as findings rather than as marketing. Then the capstone — the consolidated reference-implementation paper — last, after every part above has been public, attacked, and survived.
§ 02How to read this programme

Announced when timestamped. Published when ready.

In that order, always — because a research roadmap that can be quietly reordered afterwards is a marketing document. Each draft's existence is anchored before it is described here, so the sequence is checkable rather than asserted. If a paper listed above never appears, that absence is itself on the record.

What we would rather have than agreement. Every paper here makes claims a competent reader can attack, and the reference implementation is public so the attack can be concrete rather than rhetorical. A finding against the specification or against our own engine is published on the errata register whether or not it flatters us. If you find something wrong, we would rather publish your catch with your name on it than defend the sentence.

ENGINE v11 · 3ac3b10b… ● LIVE REGISTRY 77 CREDENTIALS · APPEND-ONLY VERIFY ~81 MS · OFFLINE · TRUSTING NO ONE ANCHOR BITCOIN #962,013 SPEC VTR-1 · FROZEN · CC BY ROOT 88298a2e…c6825a · MERKLE-COMMITTED