v2.5 — The Prose Pass
v2.5 is a prose pass. An audit against the thesis’s own best writing (Part I) found the gold-standard voice allocated almost entirely to the demolitions — fee incidence, the fork attack, the closed-stack comparison — while the constructive chapters (Work Credits, the design space, the evaluation framework) and the instrumentation core (telemetry, red lines 1–8) were left as bullet lists and spec boxes. The capability was present throughout; the document’s spec-first architecture kept burying it.
What changed
The red lines get their paragraphs. Red Lines 1–8, previously bare definitionboxes with one-line shrugs, now carry the dramatization Red Lines 9–15 already had: the touchstone for RL1, refund safety as a verdict for RL2, monoculture as a single point of political failure for RL3, telemetry capture as rigging the scoreboard for RL4, the guards-in-scrip condition promoted to trip wire for RL5, the paper-gold precedent for RL6, the shrinking anonymity set for RL7, and precedent-not-heist for RL8.
The conclusion is re-ordered and its overclaim fixed. “Proofs will anchor truth” — a formulation the objections chapter explicitly disavows (“proofs do not create truth; they bound disputes”) — becomes “Proofs will bound what can be faked.” The seven-instrument incantation at the chapter’s peak is replaced with three human sentences each instrument makes measurable. And “Two Loops, Not One” now precedes “Equip, Don’t Manage,” so the thesis ends on the owner/tenant question rather than a dashboard epigraph.
The reference applications become narratives. The four Create/Compute/Prove/Settle/Verify recitations now open with a scene — a newsroom and a fabricated clip, a treasurer under capital controls — before the flow.
Analogies deployed throughout, all historically on-thesis. The touchstone (verification asymmetry), Lloyd’s Register and the assay punch (lot sampling), water pressure and the trunk main (DVC and min-cut), paper gold (wrapper dominance), the fire extinguisher versus the contract for its delivery (convenience yield), SushiSwap’s vampire attack (the fork’s moat), a thousand cars with one GPS (policy concentration), guards paid in fresh scrip (issuance-funded security), and the toll versus the detour (the capturable wedge).
Structural repairs. The Part III closing refrain, printed twice within fifty lines, is deduplicated and the summary given its own close. The 230-word Mechanical Pressure Ratio bullet is broken into prose. The “Cross-reference:” ledger-opener in fee routing is replaced. The hedging loop — value-capture conditions restated four times, “typed service claims” recited — is compressed to statement-once-plus-pointer.
No mathematical content, definition, threshold, or cross-reference was altered. Every red line reads on the same quantities. The page count moves 394 → 404.
The canonical edition is /pdf/next-gen-sov-v2.5.pdf; the author-maintained brief is /pdf/afterfiat-brief-v2.5.pdf.