appendix-e.md

A book that asks you to check its work should say what the work was.

Primary documents. The Epic Cash white paper, first published in 2019 and revised since; the 2026 technical edition; and the protocol's own source code and consensus rules, which are the only authority on what the chain actually does. Where the documents and the code disagree, the code wins, and the book says so where it matters.

The chain itself. Supply figures, emission schedule, block times and the date of the singularity are properties of the ledger, not claims about it. A reader with a node can reproduce every supply number in this book.

The public record. Exchange listings and fee schedules; the Zcash Orchard advisory; the Zano incident report; disclosures from Firo and Beam; the Bogatyy paper on Grin transaction tracing; and the market data used in chapter fourteen, captured on 5 November 2026. Prices move; the capture date is stated so a reader can tell the difference between an error and a stale figure.

The Quest for Superior Money. The thirty-two attribute framework, published in 2026, which supplies the test in Part Two. The book applies it; it did not invent it.

No consolidated third-party audit of the full protocol has been published. Epic's cryptography inherits from the Grin and secp256k1-zkp lineage, and its range proofs are a genuine zero-knowledge construction — but a lineage is not an audit of this codebase. Chapter thirteen says this plainly rather than letting the reader assume otherwise.

There is no published post-mortem of the 2021 episode. The book describes what is publicly known and declines to narrate what is not.

The genesis date is inconsistent across sources. The 2019 white paper gives 1 August 2019; later material gives 2 September 2019. The chain settles this question and the sources do not; the discrepancy is noted rather than resolved by preference.

Privacy has not been measured. No study has attempted to trace Epic transactions at the scale Bogatyy attempted on Grin. The claim that Epic resists the tracing he claimed on Grin is an argument from its construction, not an experimental result, and is presented as such.

The research, drafting, typesetting and figure work were done with substantial AI assistance, directed and edited by the author. This is disclosed because a reader is entitled to know how a text was produced, and because the alternative — leaving it out — would be the kind of omission this book criticizes elsewhere.

Every number in the text was checked against a source at the time of writing. Where a figure is an estimate, the text says so. Where a claim is contested, the text gives the contest. Where the author does not know, the text says he does not know.

If you find an error, the useful response is not to trust the book less. It is to check the source, and then to say which line is wrong — that is the whole method, and it only works if readers use it.