# Six Principles

The Six Principles are the immutable covenant of OpenYield (REQ-001). They
are **Mission-locked**: no Council can amend them, and the fee covenant is
locked alongside them. The mesh exists to hold real production, not
speculation; everything else follows from that.

## 1. Real value

The mesh holds **real production**. The Bread unit is the unit of real value
held in the Storage Pools; the bond market caps coupons so the mesh cannot
become a speculation engine. "Real return" is the metric, not a nominal rate.

## 2. Sustainability

Fees are floored and capped. The fee covenant fixes a ceiling and a floor
(see the Fee Covenant module), and the 1-Grain internal minimum prevents dust
games. The protocol cannot drain its users, and it cannot starve its
Watchers.

## 3. Mission-lock

The Six Principles and the fee covenant are immutable. No Council — Mesh,
Guild, or Stand — can amend them. Mission Lock is a `const` in the council
module, and an invariant test asserts it can never be set to amendable. The
coupon cap on bonds is a mission-locked ceiling, not a parameter a Council
can tune.

## 4. Openness

Anyone may join. The mesh is a public good. A Holder needs only a Reach (an
identity) and a Stash (a storage pool) to begin; there is no gatekeeper and
no custodian.

## 5. Ownership

Holders own their Stash and their Reach. Custody is theirs: the Stash is the
Holder-level storage pool, the Vault is the Stand-level pool, and the
Root-Pool is the treasury. The protocol does not custody user value; it
holds the canonical state that records who owns what.

## 6. Self-service

A Holder can act without a custodian. The Window primitive lets a Holder
delegate a scope-bounded, time-limited, revocable capability to a partner or
a service; the bearers (OY-LR, OY-BLE, OY-WiFi-Direct, OY-SAT, OY-QR) let a
Holder reach the mesh without a phone plan or a custodial on-ramp. The mesh
is jurisdiction-light by design.

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See the [Vision](vision.md) for the covenant in brief, or the
[Lexicon](lexicon.md) for why the docs say "real production" and "Holder"
rather than the words a legacy financial institution would use.