marks

Marks holds the count of times the record has been read. One call, one increment, with no weighting for how much the call proved or how long it had been since the previous one.

The field is an integer and nothing about it is derived. Every unit in it corresponds to a transaction that landed on chain and to a row in the register below.¹

It counts calls, not callers. One address returning a thousand times and a thousand addresses arriving once produce the same number here.

It is the only field that describes the observers rather than the thing observed.

The mark instruction increments it. Anyone may call that instruction, and calling it requires no prior state, no registration, and no balance beyond the gas to send the transaction.

The instruction takes no argument that changes what happens.¹ Two calls from two addresses in the same block would do the same work in the same order.

The increment happens whether or not the call closes an interval. A mark that finds nothing to close still stores its reading and still counts.

The bounty paid, if any, is recorded beside the mark in the register and has no effect on this field.

Marks does not measure interest. A high count is consistent with automation, with a single persistent caller, and with a bounty large enough to be worth collecting.

It does not measure correctness. A mark cannot be wrong in a way the record can detect, because the record has no reading to check it against.

It does not measure health. The record makes no claim that more marks are better, only that fewer marks produce more dark.

It measures attention, and attention is the only input the record has.

Marks against elapsed gives the sampling rate.¹ That rate is the density of observation across the life of the record.

The sampling rate determines how much of the record is witnessed rather than dark. Closer marks bound each stall more tightly and leave less residue to credit.

A rate that fell and then rose leaves a permanent scar in dark, because the recovered attention applies only from the point it resumed.

The register lists every mark with what it closed and what it was paid, so the rate can be computed over any window rather than over the whole record.