dark

Dark holds the unsettled fast blocks that passed with nobody present. The chain produced them, the slow clock did or did not move beneath them, and no mark stood at either end of the span to prove what happened.

The unit is the same as witnessed, so the two fields sum to the fast blocks elapsed since the record opened.¹ That sum is an invariant and is checked on the math page.

Dark is not a store of failures. It is a store of absences, and an absence has no cause written beside it beyond the shape of the gap itself.

Every quantity in the field passed exactly as ordinarily as the witnessed quantity did. The difference is only that nobody was reading.

Dark is credited when a mark discovers that the slow clock has moved since the last mark without anyone having observed the movement. The stall ended somewhere inside the gap between the two marks, and the record cannot say where.

Only a lower bound on that stall is provable. The provable part is written to witnessed and the remainder, which is the part of the gap the record cannot account for, is written here.

The same crediting happens when a lapse closes an interval nobody returned to.¹The interval is closed at its proven length and the rest of it becomes dark.

No instruction writes dark directly and no caller chooses the amount. It is always the arithmetic residue of a span the record could not fully see.

Dark is not an error term. Nothing in the record was computed wrongly to produce it, and no later reading will resolve it into a value that was there all along.

It is not a fee. Nobody paid it, nobody received it, and no balance anywhere moved when it was credited.

No later behaviour repays it. A dense run of marks raises witnessed from that point forward and leaves every previously credited block of dark exactly where it is.

The field only increases. There is no path in the contract that lowers it and no condition under which it is recomputed.

Dark against witnessed is the only measure on this site of how well the record has been attended.¹ No other pair of numbers here carries that information.

It is the one field that grows fastest when nobody is looking, which makes it the field least likely to be read at the moment it is moving.

A rising dark with a static witnessed means the intervals are opening and not closing. A rising dark alongside a rising witnessed means attention is present but intermittent.

The table lists each credit with the span that was provable and the span that was not, so the total can be reconstructed line by line.