appendix-a.md
The scorecard on page 38 compresses thirty-two attributes into a grid. This is the same test, expanded, so a reader can argue with a specific line rather than the whole table.
Each row is a question. If you disagree with the verdict, the disagreement is now narrow enough to be useful.
A note on the word yes. It means the property holds in the base protocol, not that it holds for every user in every circumstance. Someone who buys EPIC on an exchange and leaves it there has a custodial claim on a private ledger, which is a different object from coins in a wallet they control. Several of these attributes are lost at that boundary, and the loss is the exchange's business model, not Epic's design.
| # | Attribute | What it asks | Epic | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Means of payment | Can you pay someone with it directly? | Yes | | 2 | Peer to peer | Can you pay without an intermediary? | Yes | | 3 | Divisible | Can it be split into ordinary amounts? | Yes | | 4 | Digital | Does it exist natively online? | Yes | | 5 | Borderless | Does it cross borders without permission? | Yes | | 6 | Unit of account | Can prices be set in it? | Yes | | 7 | Private by default | Is privacy the default? | Yes | | 8 | Decentralized | Is control spread beyond any one party? | Yes | | 9 | Fungible | Is one unit interchangeable with another? | Yes | | 10 | Surveillance resistant | Are who-paid-whom links hidden from observers? | Yes | | 11 | Politically resistant | Are its rules out of a government's reach? | Yes | | 12 | Censorship resistant | Is it safe from selective blocking? | Yes | | 13 | Confiscation resistant | Are holdings safe from seizure without the keys? | Yes | | 14 | Scarce | Is the supply capped? | Yes | | 15 | Store of value | Does it hold value across time? | Yes | | 16 | Inflation resistant | Is expanding supply at will hard? | Yes | | 17 | Fair launch | Did everyone start on equal terms? | Yes | | 18 | Publicly verifiable | Can anyone check the ledger? | Yes | | 19 | Trust minimized | Can you verify without trusting a third party? | Yes | | 20 | Permissionless | Can you use it without approval? | Yes | | 21 | Immutable | Is rewriting history hard? | Yes | | 22 | Neutral | Is it indifferent to who uses it? | Yes | | 23 | Survivable | Can it outlast its founders? | Yes | | 24 | Eco-friendly | Is securing it cheap in energy? | Yes | | 25 | Open governance | Can anyone see and influence decisions? | Yes | | 26 | Regulation friendly | Can it comply without changing its nature? | Yes | | 27 | Durable | Does it resist decay? | Yes | | 28 | Scalable and fast | Does it settle quickly under load? | Yes | | 29 | Portable and mobile | Can you carry it anywhere? | Yes | | 30 | Available to the unbanked | Does it work without a bank? | Yes | | 31 | Widespread acceptance | Will a stranger take it? | Not yet | | 32 | Quantum future proofed | Does it survive quantum computing? | Not today |
Thirty of those answers are a plain yes, and they read the way they should: nobody can map your payments, change the rules underneath you, pick your coins out of the set, or seize them without your keys. Two are qualified — the design is not quantum-proof today, and it is not widely accepted yet — and only the second of those is a failure no design can fix.
12, censorship resistant. Safe from selective blocking, which is the row's meaning. A miner can still leave a transaction out of a block, and a state can cut your connection — but no one can pick your coins out of the set and refuse those in particular, because the chain gives them nothing to pick by.
24, eco-friendly. The claim is comparative, not absolute. Most of Epic's blocks are mined on commodity CPUs and GPUs rather than purpose-built ASICs — though a minority, around four percent, use Cuckatoo, which ASICs can mine. The comparison that matters is against chains secured entirely by industrial hardware, not against a hypothetical zero. A reader who thinks any proof-of-work is disqualifying will mark this row no, and that is a coherent position.
26, regulation friendly. This does not mean Epic is compliant with any particular regime, and it does not mean regulators approve of it. It means the protocol does not require an identity field to function, so an exchange or custodian can meet its own obligations at the edges without the base layer being rebuilt.
31, widespread acceptance. The only unambiguous failure, and the one this book is about. Everything else on the list is a property the design supplies. This one is supplied by other people deciding to use it, which is why no amount of engineering settles it.
32, quantum future proofed. Not today. A large enough quantum computer would break the commitments and the signatures alike, as chapter seven says. What makes the row survivable is that the scheme can be replaced without changing the money — same chain, same supply, new cryptography.