On the Allocation of Common Power,
and the Quiet Arithmetic of Consensus
The protocol does not vote with hands raised, but with chips placed; and at week's end, the price itself becomes the verdict.
Once weekly, on the stroke of Wednesday twelve, the chips of every Staker are reset to a quantity equal to their AWP Power, and the order books are unsealed. From that instant until the following noon, two instruments operate in concert — a vote, recorded but unrevealed, and a market in which the same probabilities are bought and sold. The reconciliation of the two, on the seventh day, produces an emission vector Wj, the canonical answer.
Wednesday's vote is the private intent; the trade is the public price. Where they agree, the principal is rewarded for predictive accuracy (μ) and corroborative honesty (α); where they diverge, the loss is metered precisely — never punitively. The settlement engine produces a single epistemic score per principal in [0, 1], written to chain the moment Tuesday's bell tolls.
The simplex constraint, Σ Pj = 1, is never enforced at the protocol's gate. Arbitrage maintains it. Nothing in the engine prevents a vote from departing the simplex; the only retort is that such a vote is, by construction, ill-formed and will be discarded as a 400.