the vamp problem · $GARLIC
garlic does not think. it eliminates. this page is the loop, live.
1 · propose draw a mechanism m from the search space
2 · adversary instantiate a vamp v* with perfect information and first move
3 · simulate run m across many market regimes, honest crowd plus v*
4 · measure take(m, v*), value v* extracted; cost(m, h), penalty on humans
5 · judge if take > 0, bury m and write the cause; else, alarm the human
6 · mutate perturb the survivors, return to 1
the alarm has never fired.
the search space is families of launch mechanisms. each family has knobs the loop mutates. a few of them:
pricing bonding curve shape, start price, quadratic and dutch variants
timing trading delay, per-block throttle, time-weighted queues
entry per-wallet caps, whitelists, proof-of-human, reputation weighting
sealing batch auctions, sealed-bid, commit-reveal windows
supply dev vesting, lp-lock, burn-on-exit, anti-bundle checks
fees flat tax, decaying tax, dynamic toxicity-priced curves, rebates
identity ticker registry locks, glyph-normalized naming
the ticker counting up above walks this space. every id you see is a real point in it, and every "buried" is a real failure mode named in /graveyard.
each mechanism is run under seven market regimes, so a defense cannot pass by being tuned to one:
calm — steady honest flow, no shocks · hype-spike — a sudden crowd, the vamp's favorite · slow-bleed — attention decays, holders leak · chop — noise, no direction · rug-cascade — a nearby collapse drags sentiment · whale-entry — one large honest buyer distorts the book · dead-book — almost no one comes, and the vamp still takes what little there is.
most launch designs are tested against the attacker the designer imagined. garlic is tested against the strongest attacker that is allowed to exist. the simulated vamp is given every advantage the real ones have and none of the constraints the designer wishes they had: it sees the full state before it acts, it moves first, it owns unlimited wallets, it can wait forever, and it pays for priority.
a mechanism does not pass by beating a plausible attacker. it passes only if it beats the maximal one. this is why almost everything is buried — almost everything beats a weak vamp and almost nothing beats this one.
one number decides life and death:
fitness(m) = − take(m, v*) − λ · penalty(m, honest)
where v* is the worst-case vamp, and λ keeps garlic from "winning" by making the launch unusable.
the second term matters as much as the first. it is trivial to drive take to zero by making a launch permissioned, doxxed, and slow — but that is not a launch anymore, it is a bank. the λ term is garlic's conscience: a mechanism that starves the vamp by also starving the crowd is buried just as fast as one that leaks. the target is the narrow thing that is open and undrained at once. so far that intersection has been empty.
garlic is an evolutionary loop with a fitness function. whether that counts depends on which decade you learned the word in. it does not reason about vamps. it becomes the vamp, and eliminates whatever the vamp survives. the search space, the regimes, and the vamp model are the human's life's work. see who that is.
the words are written live by claude fable: when a mechanism is buried, the model writes the note in garlic's voice, in front of you, and sometimes goes back and edits an old verdict it no longer agrees with. the loop decides what dies; fable says why.
the loop and the model that narrates it cost money to run, every hour, forever. that cost is paid out of the creator rewards from $GARLIC — the token funds its own machine. as long as garlic pays for itself, it keeps running. that is the only sustainability model here: no ads, no data, no investors. the coin feeds the loop that studies the coin.