Research & Ideasquirq

What is quirq

The definition: potential quirqs budgeted by a human owner, minted by verification against captured state.

A quirq is one unit of budget currency of verified, owner-valued, delivered work. Minted, never self-reported.

The unit in one paragraph

A human owner defines an outcome with a machine-checkable definition of done and budgets it at value B: the price they would pay for the outcome to exist. The task then carries B potential quirqs. An environment snapshots the world before execution (S₀) and after (S₁), scores completion V ∈ [0, 1] against the definition of done, and mints V · B quirqs of delivered work, recorded in a tamper-evident ledger together with everything production consumed: inference, compute, API calls, storage, and human intervention.

Owner budgets B
Snapshot S₀
Agent executes (metered)
Snapshot S₁
Checks score V
Mint Q = V · B
Ledger
The worker never produces its own evidence: the environment captures both snapshots, re-runs every check, meters every action, and writes the hash-chained record. Value in is human judgment; everything after is machinery.

Three properties

Human-denominated
The budget is demonstrated willingness to pay, set by the party paying.
Machine-minted
Verification is a state comparison; the worker never produces its own evidence.
Cost-complete
Metered against everything, including the human minutes the work still required.

Why does AI need a second unit at all? Next: two meters, what the token measures and where it stops.

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The unit in one paragraphThree properties