Qi / QuaiController
A dual-token controller balancing two rewards on one physical anchor. Move the miners and watch it correct.
Move the miners, watch the controller respond.
Miner preference drives everything. When miners lean toward Qi, the controller raises kQuai to make the Quai election more attractive; when they lean toward Quai, it lowers kQuai. Every other slider changes the environment that correction happens inside.
One equation, applied every block.
Proportional to difficulty
Qi emission tracks difficulty-adjusted work directly, so a Qi reward is a claim on the energy actually spent. That is what makes the Qi curve a real rate rather than a nominal one.
Logarithmic in difficulty
The Quai reward scales with log₂ of difficulty, not difficulty itself. The two rewards therefore diverge as the network grows, and the controller exists to manage that divergence.
Asymmetric by design
Pushing kQuai up when miners favour Qi is three times stronger than pushing it down. The asymmetry expresses a view: drifting toward the energy token is the failure mode worth correcting hardest.
No paper exists on this controller yet
The mechanism is currently code rather than a written specification, and no proof exists that a downward feedback loop cannot occur. External modelling work is underway specifically to test for it.
The deferral mechanism — miners taking 3, 6, or 12 month locks at 10%, 15%, and 25% — interacts with this controller and is not yet jointly modelled. Two controllers acting on the same variable without shared state is its own risk, independent of anything in the price mechanism.
We publish it in this state deliberately. It is the next best evolution we know how to build, and it is open to forking and refinement.