Proof of Sit: a consensus mechanism for objects that do nothing
The IGNEOUS Geological Committee
We present IGNEOUS, a protocol on Solana in which participants adopt a rock that then sits there. We introduce Proof of Sit, a mechanism by which a custodian may attest, for a fee, that their rock remains where it was. We show that this attestation is always true. We further show that the protocol has no yield, no governance, no roadmap and no moving parts, and argue that these are its principal features.
1Introduction
Most protocols do something. This creates a number of problems: they can do it badly, they can stop doing it, and they can be asked to do more of it. A protocol that does nothing is immune to all three.
Rocks have done nothing, reliably, for roughly four billion years. No other technology comes close to this record. IGNEOUS brings a representation of that record to Solana, at a block time of about 400 milliseconds, which is considerably faster than the rock.
2Prior work
The pet rock was introduced to the consumer market in 1975 and sold well for one holiday season. It came in a cardboard box with breathing holes, which it did not need. Our work differs in three respects: the rock is procedurally generated, the box is a blockchain, and there are no breathing holes.
Geology as a discipline has studied rocks extensively. We have read some of it. The traits in Section 4 are drawn from real classifications and real localities; the rocks themselves are not real. Neither is most of what you own on a blockchain.
3Proof of Sit
Let r be a rock and t a time. Define the sit predicate S(r, t) to be true if r is sitting at time t. By construction, S(r, t) is true for every r and every t.
A sit is an on-chain attestation of S(r, t) by the custodian of r. On mainnet today a sit is a transaction containing a transfer of 0.0005 SOL to the treasury and an SPL Memo of the form igneous:v1:sit:<id>, signed by the custodian. The registry fetches the transaction from a Solana RPC node, confirms the signer, the fee, the destination and the memo, and increments the rock's sit counter by one. This is the only quantity in the protocol that goes up.
Consensus on whether the rock is sitting is reached instantly, because nobody disagrees.
4The specimen
Each rock is a pure function of a 64-bit seed chosen at adoption. The seed drives a deterministic pseudo-random sequence that selects a class (igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic), a mineral from 21, a variety, a type locality, an age within that locality's known range, a hardness on the Mohs scale, and a form: pebble, cobble, fragment, slab, shard or nodule.
The geometry is an icosphere of about 120,000 vertices, scaled to the form's proportions, cut by fracture planes, eroded back toward an ellipsoid, and displaced by seeded simplex noise. Colour comes from the mineral: speckled for granite, banded for gneiss, veined for marble, layered for sandstone, vesicular for pumice. Mass is computed from volume and the mineral's density. Some pumice specimens would float. We have not tested this.
Because the rock is a function of its seed, it cannot be altered, upgraded or lost. It can only be moved, which is discussed with some reluctance in Section 5.
5Economics
The protocol has four instructions. Adoption costs 0.020 SOL. A sit costs 0.0005 SOL. A move costs 0.0010 SOL and resets the rock's unmoved record. A pet is free and takes the form of a signed message, limited to one per wallet per rock per minute.
Fees are paid to the treasury at BpEuEGRJr5ync6A4XUccoKNBmZBnenyFiX7kfbCULvFG. The treasury funds the registry. It does not buy anything back, stake anything, or distribute anything. There is no token. The rock is not a token. The rock is a rock.
The leaderboard ranks rocks by time since last move. The dominant strategy is to do nothing. We believe IGNEOUS is the first protocol in which the dominant strategy and the product are the same thing.
6Security
The registry accepts an action only if the transaction succeeded, the fee was paid by the signer to the treasury, and the memo names a valid action. Signatures are unique in the registry, so a transaction cannot be counted twice. A seed can be adopted once. Only the custodian may sit or move a rock. Pets are verified with ed25519 against the claimed wallet and expire after five minutes.
The rock itself has no attack surface. We checked.
7Limitations
Today the registry is the source of record, built from on-chain transactions that anyone can audit. An Anchor program implementing adopt, sit, pet and move_rock as on-chain accounts is written and included in the repository with tests. It is not deployed. When it is, each rock becomes a program-derived account seeded by its custodian and seed, and the registry becomes a read of the chain.
The rocks do not exist in the physical world. Neither do the leaderboards, though we would argue the rocks are more convincing.
8Future work
None.
9References
- [1] G. Dahl. The Pet Rock Training Manual. 1975.
- [2] S. Gustavson. Simplex noise demystified. Linköping University, 2005.
- [3] F. Mohs. Treatise on Mineralogy. 1825.
- [4] S. A. Bowring, I. S. Williams. Priscoan (4.00 to 4.03 Ga) orthogneisses from northwestern Canada. Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, 1999.
- [5] A. Yakovenko. Solana: a new architecture for a high performance blockchain. 2017.
- [6] A rock. Personal communication. No response.