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.
A sibling of the BitLogin design system rather than a twin: the same
ink/paper/brass foundation and serif display, with verdigris — the patina brass
takes as it ages — where BitLogin uses its violet seal.
- index: the signature visual is the product's whole argument, one listing
reaching four surfaces and getting four different verdicts
- docs: five-step integration, elements table, presets, common mistakes
- demo: the real engine running in the browser against an in-memory transport,
so nothing is fetched or published. Add reports, restrict the seller, switch
moderator identities, and watch every surface re-decide.
The widget bundle now re-exports the runtime and core entry points, because a
static page has no package manager — anything it might need has to be reachable
from the one file it loads.
Also fixes the site build reusing a stale widget bundle. It only rebuilt when
the file was missing, which is precisely how a broken demo ships: the page
loads, the module resolves, and an export added since the last build is
silently absent. Caught by running it.
vercel.json mirrors BitLogin's security headers, with connect-src widened to
wss: for relay traffic.
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.
npm audit reported 5 vulnerabilities (1 critical, 2 high, 2 moderate), all
transitive through [email protected]: vite -> esbuild, and postcss -> nanoid. They
were dev-only and never shipped — packages publish src and dist alone — but
they were also free to fix.
vitest 3 runs the existing suite unchanged: 687 tests pass, and npm audit now
reports zero vulnerabilities.
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.
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.
The evaluator was a skeleton with invented thresholds (5/3/10/5) and two
unimplemented branches. Rebuild it against the migration plan's spec and the
behavior characterized from the pinned reference commit.
Core:
- four independent decision dimensions (ranking, visibility, interaction,
transaction) with severity ladders and max-merge composition
- stable reason identifiers replacing free-text strings
- structured evidence, redacted unless a profile opts in
- administrative-state reduction with capability filtering at merge time, so
revoking a role drops that actor's entries immediately
- protected actors stripped from every denial set
- snapshot fingerprints for cache invalidation
- generic policy engine: applications supply profiles and category thresholds;
the core carries none of its own
Characterization:
- 34 generated fixtures covering every behavior the plan's Phase 0 requires
- conformance suite that actually evaluates them, replacing a placeholder that
asserted a list's length
- reference thresholds (3/3/20/5, 60-day mute window) live in bitvid-compat as
an application profile, not as engine defaults
Fixes found while building:
- reduceAdminState accepted malformed target identifiers, because getTargetKey
formats anything it is given
- community-user-deny fired for any contributor rather than only for
community-curated sources
273 tests pass; typecheck and the reference-import guard are 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.
thePR0M3TH3AN