Adversarial Model

Assumed Adversaries

NIL-0's current draft considers three adversary classes: (1) a Settlement Domain that over-reports available liquidity to attract routing, (2) a Human Settlement Cell that accepts assignments it does not intend to fulfill, and (3) a domain that persistently avoids rebalancing its residual exposure.

Current Mitigations

Over-reporting liquidity is mitigated by re-validating capacity at assignment time rather than trusting advertised figures (05). Unreliable HSCs are mitigated through witness score degradation, which reduces future assignment priority (06, 15). Persistent rebalancing avoidance is mitigated by the throttling circuit breaker described in 14.

Open Questions

None of these mitigations currently impose an upfront cost on the adversarial party — they are reputational and throttling mechanisms, not collateral-backed. Whether a collateral or bonding mechanism is warranted for higher-notional HSCs is an open question tracked alongside NIP-0007.