The 0SCALE

Impactinomics is the economics of Impactivism — how impact is measured, scored, and minted. At its centre is the 0SCALE (the 0IMPACT-SCALE): a seven-point scale for judging the quality of an impact, anchored at zero and symmetric around it.

The seven points

The scale is a "0BOOL" — a boolean stretched into a spectrum. It starts at the neutral centre and runs symmetrically in both directions:

0BOOL	Quant	State	Feeling
0FALSE	−3	DOOM	worst
FALSE	−2	GLOOM	bad
-0	−1	0INDIFFERENT	meh
00	0	HARMONY	neutral
0+	+1	FLOW	good
TRUE	+2	JOY	fulfilled
0TRUE	+3	BLISS	best

The important properties:

• It begins at 0. 00 (HARMONY) is the neutral origin, not one extreme end. Impact can be negative (0BURN, −1 to −3) or positive (0BOON, +1 to +3), measured against harmony rather than against zero-as-nothing.
• It is symmetric. Harm and good are scored on the same ruler, mirror-imaged. The system takes negative impact as seriously as positive.
• The goal is net-positive, not perfection. What matters is that the balance of what you create sits above harmony — the target minimum is a small but real positive net, not a flawless record.

0REALTALK — why the terms matter as much as the numbers

The table above is not only a scoring rubric. It is vocabulary — and the vocabulary has a name. 0REALTALK is the whole set of terms this system thinks in: 0BOOL and 0TRUE, DOOM and BLISS, 0BURN and 0BOON, HARMONY, 0BONUS, 0TRUECOST, A:A. It is not jargon laid over the model. It is the model, stated in words.

What makes it a contextual language is that each term carries its own frame. −3 is a number and means nothing on its own — it needs a scale, a direction, an origin, and a claim about what that origin represents. DOOM carries all of it. Use the word anywhere in the network — in a capsule, a lookup, a governance proposal, an agent's reasoning — and the symmetry, the zero-anchor and the judgement against harmony travel with it. The context never has to be re-established, because it was never detached from the term.

That is what makes 0REALTALK the bridge between impactinomics and the hive mind. Impactinomics is the economics: measuring, scoring, minting. The Hive-Knowledge Graph is what the network knows. Those are two different layers, and bare numbers do not survive the trip between them — a −3 sitting in a ledger is not knowledge, it is a cell. A DOOM is a fact that any member, and any agent, can read without first being handed the manual.

So the chain is built to shuttle contextual knowledge, not merely values. Every event it emits is stated in these terms, which is why one member's experience becomes something the whole hive can use rather than something only its author can interpret. A shared vocabulary is what turns many separate ledgers into a single body of knowledge — and it is why these terms are defined this carefully before anything is measured with them.

A:A — the alignment of intention to outcome

Behind the seven points is A:A — Alignment itself, whose perfect form is 0PERFECT-ALIGNMENT. A:A measures how well the intention of an impact matches its outcome: the alignment of what an impact was claimed to be with what it turns out to be worth. Crucially, that worth is judged by whoever is looking — so A:A is perspectival: the value of an impact according to the one looking, re-derived at each read and maturing as the real outcome comes in. In shorthand, A:A = {my estimate} : {your estimate}.

What is built today. The perspectival re-derivation described above is design, not current behaviour. Karma's valuation carries an alignment_input_millis field that is None at every call site, so a lookup returns a value with no alignment contribution rather than one re-derived for the looker. The Impact-Stamp itself is produced per lookup; what is missing is the alignment input feeding it, and a surface that renders it.

For now it is recorded as a signed gap on the seven-point 0BOOL band — under-delivering on intention scores negative, meeting it sits at harmony, over-delivering is positive — and may later open up to finer ratios. The exact model is deliberately provisional: getting alignment right is the network's largest area of ongoing balance work, refined and matured on the sim-nets rather than fixed up front.

This page carries the canonical definition of A:A; every other page defers to it. Three points, because each has been contradicted elsewhere in this corpus:

• A:A expands to Alignment (0LITERAL 0PERFECT-ALIGNMENT) — not "Agenda-to-Agenda". Entity-to-entity agenda proximity is the superseded framing; alignment is intention-to-outcome (decisions §30).
• It is SIGNED and symmetric with the band — never 0.0–1.0. An unsigned score cannot express misalignment as a sign, and the whole gate is stated as neutral-or-positive; an unsigned form would need a threshold that exists nowhere and that two implementers would invent differently. Karma's alignment_input_millis is correspondingly a signed integer.
• Continuous and discrete are not in conflict — they are the same quantity at two resolutions. The underlying value is fine-grained (Karma stores it in millis, thousandths); what a record reports is that value projected onto the seven-point band. The scale bounds of the underlying value are genuinely undecided — the field is None at every call site, so nothing has fixed them yet, and this page will not invent them.

A:A gates residual, and only residual. For impact to push upstream, the binding between the Chain of Accountability and the Chain of Impact must be neutral-or-positive — aligned. Aligned impact pushes; neutral impact is held; misaligned impact pushes nothing. It does not gate minting: a claim assessed as harmful still mints a Capsule, carrying negative impact (decisions §40), because the network records all impact rather than only the flattering half. What alignment decides is whether value flows onward, not whether harm is written down.

From score to minted impact

A single impact event brings together three things:

• QUANT — the raw magnitude or work-units of the action. This is the governed base value the network sets per type of action (see Governance — the ActionCatalog). It answers "how big was this, in principle?"
• The 0BOOL quality — where this specific event lands on the scale, from the attester's judgment. It answers "how good, actually?"
• The bonus (0BONUS) — which has two components, and they behave differently:
  • Upstream COI — drawn from positive alignments already earned along the Chain of Impact. This one is perspectival: it is relative to the alignment of whoever is looking, so the same record can carry a different upstream bonus for different viewers.
  • Openness — the fraction of gatable evidence the owner chose to make public to everyone. This one is absolute: identical for every viewer, a property of the record rather than of the reader. Openness that counted a viewer's own private grants was deliberately rejected — it would reward a minter more the more insiders privately viewed them.

Together these produce the impact minted into a Capsule. The magnitude is governed and consistent; the quality is judged per event; the bonus rewards building on aligned work and publishing your evidence.

One timing note that matters: the bonus is computed when the record is looked up, not folded in at mint time. That is what makes value re-derivable — see Minting and Residual for how a claim becomes a capsule.

Why measure this carefully

Because if impact is going to be the unit of value, it cannot be a vibe. The 0SCALE gives Impactivism a shared, symmetric, zero-anchored ruler — one that scores harm and good on the same terms, that gates reward on genuine alignment, and that separates the governed magnitude of an act from the judged quality of a specific instance of it. Getting this measurement right is the single largest area of ongoing balance work in the network.