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.
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.
Follows bitlogin's layering: the engine stays headless and the widget is a
consumer of the published API, never a dependency of it. Building it was also a
test of that API — an element needing something unexposed would have been a
finding, the way the commerce example was.
Viewer elements: governance-veil (blur on restrict, disclosure on hide, warning
on warn), governance-report, governance-status. Moderator elements:
governance-capabilities, governance-action, governance-admin-panel.
Deliberate behaviors:
- hidden content leaves the accessibility tree rather than being visually
covered, so a screen reader does not read out what the viewer must not see
- a hidden decision renders a disclosure, not nothing: content that silently
vanishes is indistinguishable from a bug and leaves no route to appeal
- refused moderator actions stay visible and name the missing capability. A
hidden button teaches nothing about the authority model, and the command
layer enforces the same check independently — the UI is an explanation,
never the gate
- no element computes policy; wording maps from stable reason identifiers and
is overridable per application
Found while building it: GovernanceAdminStore emitted only when reduced denial
state changed, so revoking a role that denied nobody announced nothing, leaving
capability-gated UI and the decision cache stale.
The root tsconfig deliberately omits the DOM lib — that absence is what keeps
core, nostr, and runtime from reaching for browser globals — so the widget
carries its own DOM-aware config rather than relaxing the guarantee globally.
687 tests; lint, typecheck, and the declaration build pass from a cold checkout.
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