Protocol Genesis
1. ABSTRACT
Establishes the founding premise of NIL: that payment instructions and capital movement can be represented as separate protocol concerns, and defines the minimal vocabulary used by all subsequent proposals.
2. MOTIVATION
Existing payment infrastructure treats capital movement as the mechanism of settlement itself. This conflation makes it structurally impossible to separate what is owed from how it is ultimately paid. NIP-0000 exists to name that separation before any protocol mechanics are specified.
3. TERMINOLOGY
Intent, Obligation, Execution, Capital movement, Finality — defined here as independent protocol concerns for use by all subsequent proposals.
4. SPECIFICATION
NIL defines five distinct concerns that MUST be represented independently at the protocol level:
- Intent — a desired economic outcome.
- Obligation — a tracked, transferable representation of that outcome.
- Execution — the local act of satisfying an obligation.
- Capital movement — the physical displacement of liquidity between domains, if required.
- Finality — the state in which an obligation ceases to exist as an unresolved commitment.
No subsequent proposal MAY define a mechanism that requires two of these concerns to occur atomically unless explicitly justified.
5. INVARIANTS
No two of the five concerns MAY be required to occur atomically without explicit justification in the proposal that does so.
6. FAILURE CONDITIONS
Not applicable — Genesis defines no executable mechanism and has no runtime failure modes of its own.
7. SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS
Genesis defines no executable mechanism and introduces no attack surface on its own. It constrains the design space of all following proposals.
8. REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION
The reference implementation is the NIL-0 simulation network. No production implementation of this proposal exists; behavior described here is normative for the simulation only.