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DKP-4-UPGRADE-001

Version: 1.0 · Status: Freeze

System Upgrade & Anti-Capture Protocol

0. Preamble

DKP-4-UPGRADE-001 defines the only lawful mechanism by which the Dikenocracy system may be modified after deployment.

In DKP, upgrades are treated as high-risk system events. Any change to formulas, thresholds, weights, or protocol logic may alter power balance, incentives, and survival guarantees.

This protocol exists to ensure that:

  • system evolution remains possible,
  • system capture remains impossible,
  • no upgrade can bypass axioms, Physical Truth, Defense integrity, Crisis safeguards, or Justice constraints.

UPGRADE is not governance-by-vote; it is governance-by-proof.

1. Purpose

The purpose of this protocol is to:

  • regulate changes to DKP formulas, parameters, and protocol logic,
  • prevent hostile, covert, or incremental system capture,
  • enforce full transparency, simulation, and reversibility of upgrades,
  • provide deterministic rollback and recovery paths.

2. System Position

This protocol operates:

  • strictly downstream of DKP-0-ORACLE-001 (PTL) and DKP-0-TIME-001,
  • downstream of all L1–L3 execution protocols,
  • downstream of DKP-4-ERROR-001 and DKP-4-CRISIS-001,
  • upstream of DKP-8-SIMULATION-001 and DKP-8-AUDIT-001.

Hard constraints:

  • DKP-4-UPGRADE-001 SHALL NOT redefine axioms (A1/A2).
  • DKP-4-UPGRADE-001 SHALL NOT modify Physical Truth Layer rules.
  • DKP-4-UPGRADE-001 SHALL NOT operate during active Crisis states (C1–C4).

Any modification of DKP-4-UPGRADE-001 itself SHALL require the highest security threshold and MUST demonstrably preserve or strengthen anti-capture guarantees relative to the current version.

3. Upgrade Definition

An Upgrade is any proposed change that affects:

  • mathematical formulas, coefficients, or transformations,
  • thresholds, weights, or scoring functions,
  • protocol logic, state machines, or trigger conditions,
  • cross-layer interactions or escalation rules.

Cosmetic, UI, documentation, or presentation changes are not considered upgrades under this protocol.

4. Upgrade Invariants (Hard)

4.1 Axiom Preservation

No upgrade SHALL weaken, reinterpret, or condition Axiom A1 (Preservation of Life) or Axiom A2 (Systemic Sustainability).

4.2 PTL Anchoring

All upgrade evaluation, validation, and acceptance MUST rely exclusively on PTL-verifiable data and simulations.

4.3 Non-Emergency Rule

Upgrades SHALL NOT be executed under urgency, fear, or crisis conditions.

4.4 No Silent Change

Every upgrade MUST be publicly visible, formally specified, and fully auditable.

4.5 Non-Degradation Invariant (Defense & Crisis)

No upgrade SHALL reduce, weaken, delay, condition, or probabilistically dilute the effectiveness, trigger sensitivity, execution scope, or response latency of:

  • DKP-3-DEFENSE-001, or
  • DKP-4-CRISIS-001

relative to the currently deployed version.

Any modification affecting L3 or L4 protocols MUST demonstrably preserve or strengthen survival guarantees under worst-case PTL-confirmed scenarios.

4.6 Physical Inevitability Preservation

Any upgrade affecting threat detection, Defense triggers, Crisis escalation logic, or containment boundaries MUST preserve the system’s ability to respond to PTL-confirmed Vectors of Physical Inevitability.

Removal, weakening, probabilistic reinterpretation, or indirect delay of inevitability-based triggers is forbidden.

5. Upgrade Proposal Requirements

Any Upgrade Proposal MUST include:

  • formal specification of all proposed changes,
  • explicit before/after formula and logic comparison,
  • expected Impact deltas across relevant domains,
  • identified failure modes and deterministic rollback plan,
  • full simulation parameters and assumptions.

Incomplete proposals SHALL be rejected procedurally.

6. Simulation and Proof Phase

Before approval, every upgrade MUST undergo:

  • mandatory simulation under DKP-8-SIMULATION-001,
  • stress-testing against adversarial and edge-case scenarios,
  • capture-resistance analysis (including incremental takeover detection),
  • public release of simulation results and methodology.

No simulation → no upgrade.

7. Anti-Capture Safeguards

The protocol SHALL enforce:

  • caps on influence over upgrade initiation,
  • detection of correlated proposals via DKP-1-IDENTITY-001 linkage,
  • rejection of cumulative micro-upgrades converging toward capture,
  • historical traceability of proposal lineage.

8. Approval and Activation

An upgrade MAY be activated only if:

  • all simulations pass predefined safety and stability thresholds,
  • no unresolved ERROR or Justice appeals remain,
  • the activation window is publicly announced in advance.

Post-Crisis Cooldown Rule

Any upgrade affecting Defense, Crisis, Identity, or Justice layers SHALL NOT be proposed or activated until a full post-crisis audit and stabilization period has completed, as defined by DKP-8-AUDIT-001.

A mandatory Cooling-off Period SHALL apply:

  • no less than 30 DTI-Days MUST elapse between publication of final simulation results and activation.

During this period, any Subject MAY initiate DKP-4-ERROR-001 procedures upon detection of capture vectors, regressions, or hidden degradation.

Activation MUST:

  • occur at a deterministic DTI-Day,
  • be reversible within a defined window,
  • be automatically logged and committed.

9. Rollback and Reversion

If post-activation monitoring detects:

  • unexpected Impact deviation,
  • instability or emergent capture vectors,
  • violation of upgrade invariants,

then automatic rollback to the last stable version SHALL be triggered.

Critical errors SHALL NOT be corrected by stacking new upgrades on top of a faulty version.

Rollback priority is higher than optimization or feature progression.

10. Transparency and Audit

All upgrade-related artifacts MUST be:

  • publicly accessible,
  • PTL-anchored,
  • permanently archived,
  • auditable under DKP-8-AUDIT-001.

11. Prohibited Actions

This protocol SHALL NOT:

  • allow emergency or crisis-time upgrades,
  • permit opaque or discretionary parameter tuning,
  • bypass simulation, audit, or cooling-off requirements,
  • privilege specific Subjects, groups, or interests.

12. Finality Clause

Once frozen:

  • any modification requires a new protocol identifier,
  • mandatory simulation and audit,
  • explicit compatibility declaration.

Protocol Hash (SHA-256): [to be inserted at freeze]

END OF PROTOCOL