0TRUECOST

0TRUECOST is the measure of negative impact carried inside an Impactium record — the true accumulated cost of taking something from idea to reality and delivering it into another's hands.

It is a part of an Impactium record, not a second unit running beside it. A record carries the measure of the impact known when it was minted; 0TRUECOST is the negative half of that measure — what the thing cost the world. Value and cost live in one record, on one ledger, with opposite signs.

The cost side of the ledger

Impactium deliberately separates two things ordinary money blends:

	The impact side	The 0TRUECOST side
What it is	The measure of the verified good created	The measure of what creating and delivering it cost
Sign	Positive impact	Negative impact — the environmental and social harm behind it
Moves?	Never — there is no operation anywhere in the system to transfer impact	In part — cost follows the thing traded (see below)
Divisible?	Recorded, not exchanged	Splittable among the parties responsible

The principle in one line: we do not trade the good you do; we account for the cost of what is delivered — and we make that cost follow the delivery.

What "true cost" captures

Traditional economics externalizes cost — pollution, resource depletion, exploitation, social harm are pushed off the books and onto someone else. 0TRUECOST is the discipline of putting them back on the books. It is:

• Accumulated — the total cost built up across everything required to bring something into existence and place it in another's hands, along the full chain of delivery.
• Correlated to negative impact — it captures the externalities Impactivism makes visible instead of hiding.
• Splittable — a delivery's cost can be divided among the parties responsible for it.

Two components, two different rules

0TRUECOST is not one undifferentiated figure. It has two components, and they behave differently when the thing they belong to is traded:

Component	What it is	On trade
0TRUECOST[PRODUCTION]	Every cost of taking a product or service from idea to reality — planning, prototyping, production	Always transfers — it is inseparable from the thing itself
0TRUECOST[LOGISTICS]	The tangible cost of transporting, moving, or otherwise providing the product or service to another entity across the supply chain	Optional — it may be passed on, or kept

What is built today. The split above is design, not current behaviour. On chain a TrueCostRecord carries a single flat amount and a single traded flag, so the two components — and the different transfer rules that are the whole point of separating them — cannot yet be expressed. A record today says how much and whether it moved, not which part moved and why. Splitting the figure is what makes the transfer rules enforceable rather than descriptive.

What something cost to exist travels with it always: whoever holds the thing holds that history, and no trade launders it away. What it cost to hand over is a decision the provider makes.

Passing logistics on costs you 0BONUS

Choosing to pass 0TRUECOST[LOGISTICS] downstream diminishes 0BONUS — the bonus that lifts what a record is worth.

That rule is the whole thesis of true cost, enforced mechanically rather than asked for politely. Ordinary accounting rewards externalizing delivery burden: push freight, packaging, handling and haulage onto the buyer, the carrier, or the commons, and the numbers improve. Impactium inverts the incentive. Absorb the cost of getting something to someone and you keep your bonus; push it downstream and the network reads your record as worth less. Internalizing delivery cost is the rewarded choice — that is what putting true cost on the books means when it is a rule rather than a request.

How much bonus a pass-through costs is deliberately open. No rate appears here because none has been decided. What is designed is the mechanism and the governance hook that tunes it; the number itself is exactly the kind of parameter Impactium matures by simulating it before setting it.

What the chain does today

The two-component model is the design, not shipped chain behavior. x/truecost currently records one accumulated true-cost figure per delivery, links it to the impact record that delivery carried, attaches the resources exchanged, and lets that single figure be split among parties in basis points — the record is marked traded once any share is assigned away from the source.

That shape cannot express production and logistics separately, so it cannot yet apply their different transfer rules, and there is no path from a logistics pass-through into 0BONUS. Separating the components changes committed state layout, and the intent is to do it before the pre-genesis network goes live — after that the chain is never reset, and a layout change costs a governed migration.

The bridge to today's economy

0TRUECOST is also how Impactium adopts transitionally, without demanding a hard cut-over. A transaction on Impactium can involve any resource — fiat, crypto, goods, services, barter — and Impactium itself is never one of them. Those exchanges are recorded as resource legs ({resource_type, amount, denomination}), and the legs accrue into the true-cost record: what a delivery truly cost includes what was exchanged to make it happen, not only its externalities.

This makes 0TRUECOST the bridge ledger between existing commerce and impact accounting. A business does not have to abandon money to start participating; it keeps trading as it does today, and Impactium overlays the impact-and-true-cost accounting on top.

An honest note on maturity

The shape of 0TRUECOST is settled: the negative-impact measure inside an Impactium record, accumulated along the chain of delivery, splittable among the responsible parties, and made of a production component that always transfers and a logistics component that may be passed on at the cost of bonus. What is not settled is the calculation standard — exactly how heterogeneous costs and resource legs are quantified and normalized into a single true-cost figure — nor how steeply passing logistics on should reduce 0BONUS. Both are active work, shaped by the network's governance and matured by simulation before anything is fixed. Impactium is explicit that this is a frontier rather than pretending it is finished.