What a Reused Credential Costs, Compared to the First Check

We cannot tell you, and the honest reason is not commercial secrecy: it is that we do not have a price. Nobody has ever paid us for a verification, a credential, or a reuse.

A number we made up and a number somebody paid are not the same kind of object, and this page is not going to blur them.

The argument, which is sound, separated from the number, which does not exist

The reuse argument is straightforward and we believe it. The expensive part of verifying somebody is the first check, the document, the liveness, the human review, the vendor fee. A second relying party accepting the resulting credential does arithmetic instead: fetch a public key, check a signature, compare some hashes.

That asymmetry is real, and it is not a claim about Solidus. It is a property of public-key cryptography. Any conformant verifier, using anyone's implementation, does the same cheap thing.

What we cannot tell you is what we would charge for it, because:

1. Nobody has ever paid us anything. No price has survived contact with a buyer.
2. Reuse has never occurred, so there is no unit to price.
3. Our own material does not agree with itself. See below.

What our own material actually says, measured, not remembered

We swept our internal business documents this session for figures appearing alongside the word "reuse." There are at least eleven distinct ones, across fifty-one files. One dominates, it appears in dozens of places, but ten others are in circulation, and any of them could be quoted outward by whoever writes next.

Eleven is a floor, not a total. A text search over prose always undercounts, and we would rather report the bound than a number that sounds precise.

We are not publishing any of those figures here, including the dominant one. Restating a price to criticise the fact that we have eleven of them would put an eleventh-plus one into circulation.

And a correction to something we ourselves recorded

An earlier internal note said our live tokenomics page contradicts itself, showing one verification tier at a large figure in its fee table and a tiny figure in a feature description on the same page.

We re-read the live page this session, and that is not what it says. The tiny figure belongs to a different row, a per-query operation, and the feature description matches that row exactly. The two are consistent.

The real defect is different, and it is still a defect:

• Two rows in that schedule sit about three orders of magnitude apart, and both read as "a verification" to anyone who is not us. Nothing on the page says which one applies to what.
• Every USD figure there is a conversion at an explicitly assumed token price. The page's own wording calls the rate indicative, which is honest of it, and it also means none of those USD numbers is a price. It is an assumption multiplied by an assumption.

We are recording the correction rather than leaving the stronger, wrong version standing, because an overstated criticism of ourselves is still an inaccuracy, and it would have been quoted the same way a flattering one is.

What you can actually work out for yourself

The verification side is checkable, and its cost is a property of the maths, not of our pricing:

$ npm i @solidus-network/[email protected]     # clean directory

Verifying a credential is a signature check plus hash comparisons, on your own hardware, with no call to us. Run this session with a control: a wrong key returns "Verify Error: Invalid JWT Signature".

So the marginal cost of the check itself, to you, is whatever your own compute costs. That is not a Solidus price. It is what any conformant verifier costs, and it would be true if we did not exist.

What we will not do on this page

• Publish a per-reuse price. We do not have one that has survived contact with a buyer.
• Publish a savings percentage against anybody. A ratio computed from two numbers we invented is two invented numbers with a division sign.
• Convert a token figure to a currency and present it as a cost. The conversion assumes a market that does not exist.
• Describe reuse as discharging anyone's obligation. It does not: a relying party that accepts a credential still owns its own decision, and no pricing argument changes that.

What would give this page a real answer

1. One relying party paying for one reuse. That single event would produce more pricing information than every document we have written.
2. A settled, single figure across our own material, replacing eleven-plus with one, and citing it from a single source rather than caching it.
3. A token with a market, if any USD conversion is ever to mean anything.

We have none of the three.