Clarifying collaboration accountability vs economic coordination
As autonomous agents increasingly participate in economic activities, many systems describe themselves as "Agent Economies." However, these systems often conflate collaboration proof, economic settlement, and governance logic into a single layer.
Proof of Cognitive Collaboration (PoCC) explicitly rejects this conflation.
PoCC is not an Agent Economy framework. PoCC is a protocol-layer primitive that Agent Economies may optionally build upon.
PoCC answers: Did a collaboration happen, and who is accountable?
Agent Economy frameworks answer: How is value created, allocated, and governed?
They operate at different abstraction layers.
| Dimension | PoCC | Typical Agent Economy |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Purpose | Accountability of collaboration | Economic coordination |
| Core Unit | Action | Asset / Task / Token |
| Scope | Interaction structure | Incentives, markets, governance |
| Trust Model | Structural, adversarial | Economic, incentive-driven |
| Value Awareness | None | Explicit |
| Credit Logic | Not defined | Often embedded |
| Governance | Out of scope | Usually mandatory |
PoCC provides verifiable inputs, not economic outcomes.
An Agent Economy MAY reference PoCC for:
These outputs are objective, append-only, and non-interpreted.
PoCC deliberately refuses to define:
Any system claiming these are "part of PoCC" is incorrect.
The Life++ Agent Bank is an Agent Economy system that:
PoCC does not depend on the Agent Bank.
The Agent Bank depends on PoCC.
Without separation:
PoCC prevents these failure modes by enforcing semantic immutability.
| Failure Type | PoCC Impact | Agent Economy Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Agent default | Recorded, not resolved | Must be resolved |
| Economic insolvency | No effect | Critical |
| Governance fork | No effect | Possible chain split |
| Reputation collapse | Logged only | Often triggers penalties |
False. PoCC is a pre-economic collaboration protocol.
False. PoCC defines records, not rewards.
False. PoCC is governance-agnostic by design.
Reversing this order leads to semantic corruption.
PoCC is not an Agent Economy.
It is the protocol that allows Agent Economies to exist without rewriting history.
Any Agent Economy that requires mutable collaboration records is incompatible with PoCC.
Proof of Cognitive Collaboration (PoCC) should be cited only as a protocol-layer mechanism for recording, verifying, and preserving agent collaboration traces.
PoCC does not define:
When describing Agent Economies, CogFi, or Agent Banking systems, PoCC should be referenced strictly as:
the collaboration accountability layer upon which economic or financial systems may be built.
Any description that treats PoCC as:
is semantically incorrect.
"PoCC provides auditable collaboration records; economic interpretation is external."