The Steward's book
The rule
The Network Steward is a rule, not a party. Five percent of every fee comes here, and it leaves only one way: as prepaid offers to buy bandwidth on links the network wants, paid out against settled receipts and refunded on shortfall. Nobody holds it, nobody votes on it, and no payer can get back more of it than it paid in.
Balances
Amounts in cents. The pilot settles in dollars by monthly invoice; the Steward's escrow is a line on that invoice, not money in an account.
Open offers
An offer pays whoever carries the route, against receipts, at the premium above the relay's posted price. Each card says who can collect it, and whether anyone on the lab can.
Payouts
Each row is one settled window that an offer applied to. The premium is paid in proportion to delivery over the minimum; the rest of that window's premium goes back to the poster.
Where the income came from
The map
The map
The feed carries no map until the Steward runs. The lab's map, from the plan: domain earth, unit USD, Mint bw-mint; places house (the bench's wire and the house's Wi-Fi), next-door (the neighbor's 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi), and one mapped place with no link yet, so that the first-link program has something to want. A link inside one place, like the bench wire, has no second bridge to post for.
The three programs
Matching. When a bonded, aged payer posts an offer, the Steward adds up to m of its escrow. The second bridge. For every link that carried fees and has no second path through a different mapped place, an offer for one, sized at f of the fees the link carried. The first link. Every mapped place with no settled receipt gets a standing offer, topped up from income until a receipt settles across a link to it.
What the operator sees
On bw-mint, after each hour's commitment:
The record a payer signs to post an offer (bwkit purchase post), from the plan:
{"kind": "purchase", "proto": 1,
"id": "pur-7f3a", "program": "payer",
"poster": "ed25519:…eY42wSx0",
"route": {"from": "ed25519:…eY42wSx0",
"to": "ed25519:…Z-tE7IoY", "not_via": []},
"min_bytes": 50000000, "premium_per_gb": 0.02,
"windows": 168, "deadline": 1792900800,
"proving": null, "escrow": 1.00, "unit": "USD",
"posted_at": 1792296000, "sig": "…"}
At a street's scale the same page reads differently: a hundred homes buying a gigabyte a day at ten cents pay $10 a day for carriage, the Steward's share is fifty cents a day, and a sole bridge carrying it all would see a $3.50 bounty for its competitor posted every week.
The rule is Sections 3.3, 5.1 and 7 of the paper; the cap and the three programs are one file of pure functions that the simulator and the Mint both run. Check a proof verifies the commitments the fees come from.