Protocol Economics
The previous page showed how replication keeps your data alive across the network. But every copy takes real resources: disk space, electricity, bandwidth. If nobody pays, the copies disappear. On a centralized platform, the company pays, and the company decides when to stop paying. Avatarnet has no company. So who pays?
The answer is you, and every other participant, through a system of progressive contributions that funds the entire network, including the dead.
Your Place on the Network
When you join Avatarnet, you create two things: an Avatar (your identity) and a Network Estate (your place on the network). The Avatar is the cryptographic keypair that proves who you are. The Network Estate is everything you build through hosting: your level, your boost badges, your guaranteed backup slots. Both start empty and both start temporary.
Your avatar begins as a temporary identity with a .temp.avtr domain and a 90-day countdown. During those 90 days, you must obtain three verifications from trusted members of the network, real people who have been hosting for at least nine months. If you succeed, your avatar becomes permanent, your domain drops the .temp prefix, and your Network Estate begins accruing level progress. If you fail, your avatar and all its copies are deleted.
This is the entry gate. It prevents attackers from flooding the network with fake accounts, because each fake account needs three real people to vouch for it, and those real people had to host for nine months to earn verifier status. The cost of faking that is enormous.
Once permanent, your Network Estate enters the level system. Avatarnet defines seven levels, L1 through L7, each requiring progressively more time on the network. The pattern is simple: every level requires 3^n months of uptime. Levels belong to the estate, not the avatar, because they represent hosting labor, not identity.
The number of copies your estate can maintain across the network equals 3^n, the same number as the months required. An L3 estate that has been on the network for 27 months can have up to 27 copies of its data spread across independent machines. An L5 estate after 20 years can have 243.
L6 and L7 extend beyond a human lifetime. These are ancestor tiers, reachable only when descendants continue hosting the Network Estate on behalf of a deceased family member. The system is designed to carry estates across generations.
How You Earn Storage
Every avatar on the network earns 3 megabytes of storage per day, regardless of level. This is not a suggestion or a target. It is a right that must be exercised within three days or it expires permanently.
To exercise the daily unlock, you accept the increased storage and immediately provide proportional hosting for other people's data in return. The network assigns you data to host, verifies you are actually hosting it, and only then does your storage grow.
At 3 MB per day, the math is predictable:
There is no way to accumulate years of unused storage and dump it on the network all at once. Uncommitted storage expires in three days. Every megabyte of your bucket was already paid for through proportional hosting at the time it was earned.
Progressive Contribution
Not every participant contributes equally. Higher-level estates contribute proportionally more storage to the network, following a formula called L+2. The "+2" means your estate's contribution ratio is always two steps above its level number.
At L1, your contribution exactly covers your own backups. At L2 and above, you produce surplus, extra capacity that the network uses to host people who are not contributing: visitors who only browse, people who cannot afford to host, and the dead.
This is the progressive taxation that Backupism described. The more backups you want, the more you contribute, and the surplus from that contribution funds everyone else. Individual greed for safety creates collective abundance.
Network Health
The network tracks its own health as a single percentage: how much surplus capacity remains after covering all guaranteed commitments. When health is high, every avatar has room to grow. When health drops, the network tightens.
The health system operates on two layers: status zones that tell you what is happening, and circuit breakers that tell you what the system does about it.
Status Zones
Your dashboard shows network health as a single filling bar with a percentage and zone label. The zones tell you how the network is doing at a glance.
Health drifts gradually as users join, leave, or stop contributing. It does not jump from Excellent to Failing overnight. The diagram below shows what happens as health drops from full capacity to zero.
Circuit Breakers
The three double lines in the diagram are circuit breakers, automatic safety mechanisms that fire at specific thresholds. They work like circuit breakers in your house: when the load is too high, the breaker trips to prevent damage.
At 50% health, the first breaker trips. All temporary avatars, those still in their 90-day probation, are deleted. They have not earned permanence, and removing them frees the most capacity with the least harm.
At 33%, the second breaker removes surplus copies above each user's guaranteed floor. If you have 27 copies and your guaranteed floor is 5, the extra 22 are removed. Your data is still safe with 5 independent copies, but the network is conserving resources.
At 0%, the third breaker freezes the network. No new uploads, no new storage commitments. But the guaranteed copies are never deleted. The system preserves what it promised and waits for capacity to return.
Zero percent health is an economic alarm, not a data destruction event. Your active copies scale proportionally with health: at 80%, the network maintains 80% of your non-guaranteed copies. At 0%, only the eternal floor remains. An L5 user with a full boost badge still has 21 copies safely distributed across the network. Those copies are untouchable.
Recovery
Circuit breakers do not deactivate the instant health improves. Each breaker requires sustained health above its threshold before it switches off, preventing the network from flickering between states during unstable recovery.
As health climbs back, the network restores copies in priority order. Eternal floor copies are already preserved, so restoration begins with base guaranteed copies, then stress-earned copies, then normal replication. Users with higher boost badges get their copies back first, which is why responding to stress calls matters even for users whose eternal floor is already maxed out. The badge determines your place in the recovery queue.
Stress Calls
When health drops below 80%, the network issues a stress call, a broadcast asking participants to contribute more storage in exchange for a permanent reward.
The reward is a boost badge: a multiplier recorded on your Network Estate that never expires and never decreases. It increases the minimum number of copies the network guarantees for your estate, even during the worst crises.
The twist is that the reward is inverted. Responding early, when health is still near 80%, earns the highest badge value. Waiting until health drops to 40% earns much less. This prevents rational actors from holding out for maximum crisis before helping. First responders get the best deal, and the network gets help when it needs it most.
Accepting a stress call is not instant. You must host continuously for 90 days (the same three-month pattern that appears everywhere in the protocol) before the badge locks permanently. Miss a day and it subtracts a day from your progress. The network ensures you actually delivered the hosting you promised before it rewards you.
The badge has two effects. First, it increases your estate's guaranteed copy floor up to three times the base (so an L5 estate with a full boost has 21 untouchable copies instead of 7). Second, the full badge value, which has no cap, determines your estate's priority in the recovery queue when the network restores copies after a crisis. An estate with a higher badge gets its copies back first.
The base guarantee is L+2: the estate's level number plus two. The maximum floor is three times that base. An L3 estate starts with 5 guaranteed copies. If the owner responds to enough stress calls and vests successfully, the estate's floor rises to 15 copies that the network will preserve even at 0% health. Beyond that cap, additional badges still increase recovery priority.
The economics engine keeps the network running. But it raises a deeper question: what happens when the person behind the estate is gone? Digital Permanence answers that, covering what happens when you stop hosting, when you die, and why the system gets cheaper with every generation.