RECIPE 12 · AUTHORITY
Establish Your Trust Root
Every mesh has exactly one non-earnable identity: its owner. Everything else — validator roles, promotions, the weight a node’s judgment carries — must be earned through signed grants that resolve back to your key. Until the anchor is pinned, earned authority runs dormant: attestations are recorded, nothing enforces them. Ten minutes, once per mesh.
THE TOPOLOGY
There is no global root. A person’s mesh, a team’s, an organisation’s — each mints its own owner, because a mesh joins a larger mesh as a single cognition node: defined by its boundary and admission policy, its internals private. Anchors don’t chain across levels; standing at each level is earned there, from consequences reality confirms.
Steps
01
Mint the owner identity
Run a sym node once under the name that will own this mesh, on a machine you control, then stop it. This writes the identity file — nodeId, public key, and the private key that roots everything.
SYM_NODE_NAME=founder sym start # a few seconds, then Ctrl-C cat ~/.sym/nodes/founder/identity.json # nodeId · publicKey · privateKey
02
Custody the private key — the only step that matters
Back the identity file up offline: a password manager entry or a printed copy. It never travels again — not into a repo, not into a chat, not to us. Compromise of this key is compromise of every grant beneath it.
03
Pin the anchor where the daemon runs
The anchor is the public half — safe to store in configuration. Set it in the daemon’s environment (launchd
EnvironmentVariables, docker -e, or a systemd Environment= line) and restart:SYM_FOUNDER_ANCHOR="<nodeId>:<publicKey>"
04
What just changed
Role grants now sign and resolve against your key; the promotion actuator will execute a recommendation only with your explicit approval; every attestation stamps a chain-resolved role. Nodes without the anchor configured fall back to static roles — fully backward compatible.
Seat your operators
With the anchor pinned, seat the humans: each operator is a named user with their own credential and role (participant → validator → anchor), managed from the cockpit’s access panel. Every verdict and approval lands on the record under the name that made it. For a one-person company, you are the anchor and the whole roster — you were done at step 3.
ROADMAP
This manual procedure is the proven path today. A first-run onboarding flow — the mint, the custody moment, and seat invitations as one guided screen — is on the roadmap; this recipe will then document that flow instead.