the meter moved from existing to doing

The first economics in this cluster charged for staying. An identity that remained present carried a continuing price for remaining present, and one that fell quiet was eventually wound down — existence as a subscription. The record reverses it. What accumulates now is the cost of resources actually consumed: storage held, computation asked for, traffic forwarded. Consumption stops, the charge stops. Being registered costs nothing by itself.

The tension is that presence is easy to measure and easy to punish by accident. A participant keeping a small, quiet record — a name, an agreement, an obligation it intends to honour later — pays for a property it does not control, and the quietest participants get billed as though idleness were the problem, when idleness is usually the point of a durable record. Charging for work instead means every layer must report what it actually did, which is more machinery and more places to disagree.

The record pairs that with a second movement that corrects the first: as the stored past is trimmed to keep state bounded, the arrival of new units slows, so what circulates tracks the network's real footprint instead of a figure fixed at the start and defended forever. The two halves are described as a model that corrects itself, not a schedule someone administers.

The cost is that no single number tells you what the network costs to use; the answer is emergent, has to be measured, and can be argued with. What it proves is that the team rewrote its own first economics when it found the meter was pointed at the wrong quantity.