META-INT: The Meta-Intelligence Doctrine
META-INT stands for Meta-Intelligence. It is the study of how intelligent systems can be designed to govern themselves without collapsing into the failure modes that destroy most institutions, protocols, and incentive structures over time.
The META-INT Doctrine is the foundational whitepaper behind Hashclue. It is not a product document. It is a design philosophy. A set of constraints, observations, and structural commitments that precede the protocol and explain why it works the way it does.
What does META-INT address?
Most systems that depend on human participation eventually fail in predictable ways: incentives drift, hierarchies calcify, feedback loops break, and capture by insiders becomes inevitable. META-INT treats these not as bugs to be patched but as terminal failure states to be suppressed by design.
The doctrine examines terminal failure states, the specific collapse modes that recur across institutions, markets, and protocols, and what it means to structurally suppress them rather than merely mitigate them. It addresses incentive distortion, how hierarchies deform the incentive landscape over time and what equilibrium conditions must hold for a system to resist this. It defines binding feedback mechanisms, the architectural requirement that consequences be non-deferrable and that no participant can insulate themselves from the system's own signals. It identifies capture risks and design pathologies, the ways in which even well-intentioned governance structures get co-opted, and how META-INT constrains the design space to resist capture. And it surveys historical precedents, prior systems that partially instantiated META-INT principles, what they got right, and where they broke down.
From Doctrine to Protocol
Hashclue is what happens when you take META-INT seriously. The protocol does not exist because someone wanted to build a game. It exists because the doctrine needed a concrete proof. Every mechanic, from deterministic resolution and immutable pot splits to on-chain finality with no admin keys and no governance tokens, follows directly from the constraints laid out in this paper. Nothing is arbitrary.