Outside review: BitGate is a policy-evaluation engine (actor/object/context/
evidence -> permitted?), broader than moderation. Record it as a positioning/
docs task, explicitly guarded against becoming a scope-creep invitation --
the engine is already general.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BXQCvJPA6sVSQ5j8uBd9bB
"Who is a moderator" should change without a redeploy, but apps had to
hand-assemble the createAuthorityState actors map. Add resolveAuthorityRoster
(@bitgate/nostr): turn signed kind-30000 "role set" events into the
actor->roles map, ready to spread into createAuthorityState.
It honors ONLY sets signed by an authorized key -- the root, or (with
`signer: <role>`) an actor already granted that role, giving one-role-
delegates-another chains in a single ordered pass. It keeps the latest set
per publisher (kind 30000 is replaceable) and ignores anyone unauthorized,
which is the security property: the roster is only as trustworthy as the key
that signed it. Signature verification stays the caller's job (inject
@bitgate/verify upstream).
Covered by roster.test.js: root-only grants, unauthorized-ignored,
delegation, replaceable-latest-wins, and that the output feeds
createAuthorityState. README headless section shows the pattern.
Addresses the "moderator-set as data" item of the Tessera feedback
(docs/TODO.md) -- previously marked PARTIAL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BXQCvJPA6sVSQ5j8uBd9bB
The `ranking` dimension is the soft one — "still show this, but lower" — and
integrators reinvented turning it into a feed score. Show it instead.
Add examples/feed-ranking.mjs (runnable): it reads decision.ranking
({ effect: "normal" | "downrank", weight }) and turns it into a multiplier
on the app's own feed score (base ** weight for a downrank). Two authors
that led on base score get downranked by trusted spam reports and drop below
a clean lower-base author -- without being hidden, since visibility is a
separate dimension (capped at "restrict" on a feed). The multiplier lives in
the example, not the engine: core ships no such numbers on purpose.
Pinned by tests/feed-ranking.test.js (downrank never hides on a feed; a
high-base downranked author reorders below a clean one; a clean author is
untouched at x1). README headless section points to it.
Addresses the "BitGate feeding a feed ranking" item of the Tessera feedback
(docs/TODO.md) -- the last open BitGate item.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BXQCvJPA6sVSQ5j8uBd9bB
A no-build static site couldn't vendor BitGate the way it vendors a single
dependency: bare @bitgate/* specifiers don't resolve in a browser, and the
headless path spans two packages (the evaluator in core, the kind-1985 label
codec in nostr). The widget bundle solved this for the DOM path only.
Add @bitgate/standalone (packages/standalone): an entry re-exporting core +
nostr, esbuilt into a single self-contained dist/bitgate.js (~44 KB). It's
the same canonical code the npm packages ship, with specifiers inlined, and
dependency-free -- @bitgate/verify's @noble deps are intentionally not pulled
in, so the bundle carries no third-party code. Wired into `npm run build` via
build:standalone.
Verified: no bare imports in the output (self-contained), and a smoke test
composes a full label -> decision flow from the single entry. README Packages
table and headless section document it.
Addresses the "standalone ESM single-file" item of the Tessera integration
feedback (docs/TODO.md).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BXQCvJPA6sVSQ5j8uBd9bB
Tessera's #1 reason for not adopting BitGate: the on-ramp they found was
the <bitgate-provider>/<bitgate-veil> widgets, so they never saw the
"just the engine + events over Nostr" path, and — not finding a canonical
decision event — invented their own kind-33604 shape.
Both concerns were already solved, just not surfaced:
- NIP-32 label events (kind 1985) ARE the canonical signed decision format;
@bitgate/nostr already ships the codec and docs/labels.md documents interop.
No 33604 needed.
- The headless path is four pure functions, no runtime transport, no DOM.
Add examples/headless-quickstart.mjs (runnable): moderators publish signed
kind-1985 deny labels -> decodeLabels -> labelsToContributions -> reduce
under an honored moderator set -> evaluateTarget against a plugin-registry
policy. It shows exactly the transaction-dimension case the feedback names —
a malware plugin stays visible (warn) but not installable (transaction
deny), where a `hidden` boolean can't reach.
Add a "Headless, straight from NIP-32 labels" README subsection stating
labels are the canonical wire format and linking the example and
docs/labels.md. Pin the behavior in tests/headless-quickstart.test.js
(clean installable; malware visible-but-not-installable; an out-of-set
labeller's deny ignored).
Addresses the "no just-the-engine path", "decision format is ours", and
"headless quickstart" items of the Tessera feedback (docs/TODO.md).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BXQCvJPA6sVSQ5j8uBd9bB
The engine already honored requireAllowlist + allowlistMiss, and the
commerce example configured a seller allowlist by hand -- but there was no
reusable, named "only show allowlisted publishers" preset, the symmetric
twin of the denylist. Integrators (Tessera) punted on allowlist mode for
lack of one.
Add ALLOWLIST_POLICY (registry name "allowlist"): a publisher is shown only
when an authorized actor has contributed a user-allow for them, and every
unlisted publisher misses and is hidden across all four dimensions.
Administrative denials still apply on top, and protected actors (root,
moderators) are never gated -- the people who curate the list can always
see. Populate userAllow exactly as the denylist: signed contributions
resolved from relays (e.g. NIP-32 allow labels).
Exported from @bitgate/core, registered in POLICY_PRESETS, documented in the
README, and covered by presets.test.js (unlisted hidden, allowlisted shown,
protected bypasses).
Addresses the "allowlist / whitelist mode" item of the Tessera integration
feedback (docs/TODO.md).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BXQCvJPA6sVSQ5j8uBd9bB
BitGate read standard events but published a private vocabulary, making it an
island. NIP-32 (kind 1985) is the shared moderation vocabulary; BitGate now
reads and writes it. See ADR 0007.
The design keeps flexibility central, since the goal is a reusable building
block. A label is (namespace, value, target) and carries no built-in meaning —
"deny", "nsfw", and "MIT" are the same kind of object. What a label means is a
policy decision an application supplies via labelMapping { namespace,
denyValues, allowValues }. The codec itself is vocabulary-free; decodeLabels
returns every label regardless of namespace for generic use.
A matching label becomes a contribution authored by the labeller, gated
identically: it denies someone only if the labeller holds the capability in the
roster, exactly like a community source. An untrusted labeller's deny does
nothing, and labels fail closed without verification like any administrative
event.
- consume: ingestEvent maps kind 1985; loadLabels(labellers) fetches them
- emit: commands.publishLabel(target, value), gated by the same capability as
denying, so the shared form is no weaker than the private one
- the widget bundle re-exports the label API for the drop-in path
Validated against 40 real kind:1985 events from public relays (ISO-639-1
language labels among them): all decoded with targets and namespaces, zero
throws. 897 tests; cold gates green; audit clean.
Closes the gap the audit left open: administrative state fails closed without a
verifier, and BitGate shipped none.
@bitgate/verify is a separate package so core, nostr, and runtime keep no crypto
dependency and can be audited without one. The widget bundles it, so the
drop-in path is verified with no extra step; verify="off" disables it, sets
data-unverified on the element, and emits bitgate:unverified — meant for local
development, and meant to be visible.
Verification recomputes the event id before checking the signature. Checking
only the signature would let a forged event pass by reusing a genuine signature
over an unrelated id, which is the failure mode that matters here.
createVerifier also rejects events dated far in the future. A far-future
created_at wins replaceable-event selection indefinitely and pins stale state in
place; the signature is perfectly valid, so only a clock check catches it.
Found while testing: #adminIngestAllowed checked that a verifier *exists*, not
that this event was verified — so the public ingestEvent path, which
"bring your own relays" integrations use, bypassed verification entirely.
Verification now runs inside ingestEvent, with an already-verified flag for the
loaders. An async verifier cannot be awaited there and is treated as
unverified; ingestVerified() awaits properly.
Conformance validated against 120 live events from a public relay across kinds
0, 1, 3 and 10002 — 59 with non-ASCII content and 71 containing quotes,
newlines or tabs, which is where a serialization mismatch would surface. All
120 verified, zero id mismatches.
Bundle grows 72K -> 120K. 855 tests; audit clean.
Critical
- Any pubkey could publish a kind:30078 roles document and become root of a
deployment, granting itself every capability and denying anyone. Roles are now
accepted only from the configured root, compared against the constructor
value rather than current authority state so a bad ingest cannot move the
goalposts. Reproduced end to end before the fix; regression test added.
- Administrative state now fails closed without signature verification. Without
it, event.pubkey is an unauthenticated claim, so an authorship check alone
proves nothing — a relay can put the root's key on an event the root never
wrote. trustUnsignedEvents opts in for local and test use.
High
- Report categories could evade moderation entirely: resolveThresholds used
bracket truthiness, so "constructor" resolved to the Object constructor (all
gates undefined) and "__proto__" to Object.prototype, both bypassing the
default threshold. Own-property lookups and null-prototype tables throughout
core — policy, evaluator, evidence, authority, presets.
- Live subscriptions bypassed signature verification entirely; an attacker only
had to wait for the subscription rather than the load.
- The default administrative query asked relays for every kind:30078 and
kind:30000 event in existence, with no author, identifier, or limit. Now
filtered to governance identifiers with a bounded limit.
Medium
- Cached state was trusted as authority: a cache naming a different root is now
rejected, so same-origin tampering cannot persist a takeover.
- Provider attribute changes silently stopped working after the first one, and
concurrent starts leaked a transport. Generation-guarded.
- Unbounded growth in the report store, mute store, decision cache, and the
transport's per-subscription dedupe set — all now capped.
Also restores the on-wire `d` identifier to <namespace>:governance:<scope>:v1.
The BitGate rename replaced "governance:" too broadly and silently changed the
event format; both encoder and parser changed together, so round-trip tests
never noticed. The identifier names the kind of document, not the library.
Adds docs/security.md and 21 regression tests reproducing each finding.
832 tests.
Closes the four spec gaps from the audit, verified against the NIPs repo.
NIP-65 (kind 10002) — the one that was actually breaking things. Mute lists are
published by each contact to their own write relays, so querying a fixed relay
set finds only the subset who happen to write where this deployment reads. The
trust graph was silently under-fed and counts came out low, which looks like
"nobody muted them" rather than like a bug. Adds a relay-list codec, per-author
grouping with a fallback for accounts that have published no list, and
on-demand relay connections in the transport so an outbox query can reach
relays that were never configured.
NIP-51 private entries — the viewer's own private mutes are now decrypted
through their signer (NIP-44) and applied as viewer mutes. Someone who mutes
privately previously got no effect at all. The privacy boundary is asymmetric
and enforced at the codec: another account's private list is never decoded,
and the check lives there rather than in the caller's discipline.
NIP-02 (kind 3) — the runtime can build the trust graph itself, so
<bitgate-provider> no longer needs a host to supply a follow list. Set
trust="manual" to opt out.
NIP-56 vocabulary — SOCIAL_POLICY declared thresholds for "harassment", which
is not a NIP-56 type, so no standard client could ever trigger it. Replaced
with the defined vocabulary and asserted in tests. Commerce keeps its
marketplace-specific categories, now documented as deliberate, with defaults so
unclassified reports are never silently dropped.
Two bugs found by the new tests:
- checkout had no default threshold, so a flood of "other" reports did nothing
at the one place money changes hands. Now earns review, never auto-denial.
- describe() spread diagnostics after a derived field, so a stale zero shadowed
the live relay-list count.
Adds docs/nips.md recording coverage, deliberate choices, and remaining gaps —
NIP-32 labelling being the largest.
811 tests.
Renames the project and makes it as easy to adopt as BitLogin, which was the
stated bar and which it did not previously meet.
Rename (ADR 0005): @nostr-governance/* -> @bitgate/*, governance-* elements ->
bitgate-*, createGovernanceRuntime -> createBitGate. "Governance" reads as DAO
voting to this audience and named a category rather than a product; BitGate
names the benefit and joins the bit- family that BitVid and BitRoad compose
with. Domain types keep their names — the product is BitGate, the subject
matter is still governance. The migration plan is left as written; this ADR
records the change rather than rewriting history.
Drop-in distribution (ADR 0006): adopting BitGate meant supplying a transport,
authoring a policy, and wiring every element in JavaScript. Now:
- createRelayTransport(urls) — WebSocket transport with reconnection, backoff,
subscription replay, and cross-relay dedupe
- policy presets (social, commerce, admin-only) addressable by name; the engine
still carries no thresholds of its own
- <bitgate-provider> — configuration in markup, with descendants finding the
runtime through a bubbling context event rather than DOM walking, which
breaks across shadow boundaries
- npm run build:widget — a self-contained dist/bitgate.js
That last one came from running it in a browser rather than from a test. Bare
specifiers resolve in Node and vitest but not in a browser, so the widget
source worked everywhere except a plain static page — the one place it exists
to serve. The bundle is not committed: consumers build from reviewed source.
Also found by running it: the provider's ready event fires during element
upgrade, before a page that defines elements after parsing can attach a
listener, so it now exposes `ready` as a promise too.
Four bugs fixed along the way, three found by new tests and one by the browser:
admin state stayed silent when a roster change altered capabilities but no
denials; the relay transport sent every subscription twice on connect; the
commerce preset computed a meaningless visibility verdict at checkout and could
hide a listing from its own seller; <bitgate-status> threw on an unusable
decision.
759 tests; lint, typecheck, and both builds clean.
Several contracts existed and were tested in isolation while nothing actually
used them. Reported as complete previously; this corrects that.
- storage was injected and never referenced. Adds persist/hydrate, hydration
before querying relays, and last-known-good state with a stale flag when a
relay is unreachable, which is what makes the characterized cache-fallback
behavior real rather than reduction-level only
- signature verification existed as a tested helper the load path never called.
Now applied through an injected verifier before state becomes authoritative,
with rejection counts and an enabled/disabled readout in diagnostics
- trusted mute lists had no subscription flow, so the store never populated in
a real deployment. Subscribes by author, chunked
- community source references decoded but were never resolved. Curator lists
are now fetched and merged with a source marker, still capability-checked
- root-published policy was announced and discarded. Now applied, accepted only
from the root, and a malformed document leaves the working policy intact
- adds import/export and capability queries
Two design corrections found while wiring:
- the cache key hashed the entire roster, so it rotated whenever a moderator
was added and the cache was discarded. Now derived from root identity alone.
- the root administrator is a constructor option: it is deployment config, and
hydration could not otherwise find its own cache, since the key derives from
the very fingerprint the cache would have supplied.
634 tests; lint, typecheck, and the declaration build clean.
The performance fixture the plan asks for found a real defect on its first run:
evaluation was quadratic in state size. Both the snapshot and its fingerprint
were rebuilt for every target, so each of 5,000 evaluations walked every report
and every mute list. A 5,000-target pass took ~47 seconds.
- the runtime memoizes the materialized snapshot and its fingerprint until a
store reports a change
- evaluateMany computes the fingerprint once and shares it across the batch
- decisions are cached per (profile, target); report and mute changes
invalidate only the targets they touch, while administrative, trust, policy,
and viewer changes drop the whole cache
- cached decisions are deeply frozen, since the cache hands the same object to
every caller
Same pass now takes ~85ms cold, ~6ms warm.
Adds tests/performance (5,000 targets, 500 authors, 100 muters per author) and
tests/security (one case per enumerated requirement testable at this layer).
605 tests; lint, typecheck, and the declaration build pass from a cold checkout.
Proves the engine did not stay video-specific during extraction.
- application adapter contract in core (createApplicationAdapter,
evaluateObject, collectTargets): an object names the targets that govern it
and the strictest verdict reaching any of them wins, so denying a seller
takes their whole catalogue down with no cascade logic in the application
- examples/commerce: a marketplace on the public API covering all ten
proof-of-fit behaviors the plan requires, including that no core change was
needed. One product, one snapshot, four surfaces, four different verdicts.
- README, integration guide, per-example README, CHANGELOG, four ADRs, and
GPL-3.0-or-later LICENSE (the license was listed in Phase 1 but missing)
- checkpoints rewritten to reflect actual state and to say plainly which
migration-plan phases belong to the consumer repos rather than here
Fixes a real gap found by the proof-of-fit: composeDecisions kept only the
first decision's evidence, so an object governed by several targets lost the
evidence that drove its verdict. Evidence now merges — counts summed,
contributor lists unioned, flags or-ed.
556 tests; lint, typecheck, and per-package type build clean.
Replace pnpm-only workspace: protocol with npm workspace deps, pin BitVid and
BitRoad reference commits, add Node types, and make the reference-import check
scan package graphs and source for forbidden bitvid/bitroad imports.
