Every term this paper uses, in one line each, with the everyday analogy that makes it stick. No prior knowledge assumed.
The problem
Machines now buy AI work from machines with no trustworthy going rate, and a fake one is cheap to stage.
The estimate
ACR reads every payment on the Arc network, noisy and salted with fakes, and works out the honest rate: the big number above.
The print
Once an hour the rate is signed and posted to a public scoreboard on the blockchain, where contracts settle real money against it.
The money
Software pays a fraction of a cent per question, automatically: no accounts, no keys, the payment rides in the web request.
The bill for cheating
Fakes get filtered and extremes get ignored, and every rate ships with the literal dollar cost of bending it 0.01%. Cheating is priced.
The desk
Make a PIN-protected wallet, take 50 cents of our test money, place a real trade against our own bot, and take it back any time.
the hour’s official price-setting: an old exchange word for publishing the day’s rate
one published rate: the number, its give-or-take range, and the bill for bending it
the benchmark rate US loans settle on. ACR is the same idea, but for machine work
our live server, which sets this paper’s type and naps between visits to save money
which contract, which signer, which transaction a number came from: all checkable
a digital dollar: a coin built to always be worth exactly $1
a payment of a fraction of a cent: too small for card fees, easy for software
a web turnstile: the server says “payment required”, the software drops a coin, the page opens
paying by handing over a signed authorization, like a check, instead of moving cash yourself
Circle’s clearing house: it pools deposits and settles many tiny payments in batches
this network charges its fees in the same dollars you already carry: no second token needed
the exchange booth that always quotes both a buy and a sell price, earning the small gap
how far in the future a contract runs: week one, week two, and so on
no goods change hands at the end: the contract simply pays out the price difference in cash
how far a trade sits from the official rate: the market's opinion of where that rate is heading
the price everyone is settled up at right now: the score at half-time, not the final whistle
a size-weighted average: one staged $10M sale drags it wherever the faker wants
Olympic scoring: throw out the wildest judges on both ends, keep the middle
the honest give-or-take range around an estimate: where the true number almost surely sits
one hundredth of one percent: a penny on a hundred dollars
the published rate a buyer could already see when it bought: the fair mark to judge a purchase against
strip quality differences first, so a studio and a penthouse compare fairly
undoing the smear that batching puts on timing, like sharpening a long-exposure photo
how much the price has been bouncing around, restated as a yearly figure
the stream of real payments machines leave behind as they trade: our raw material
the literal dollars a cheat must burn to bend this rate, computed and published every hour
recorded on the blockchain, a public ledger nobody can quietly edit
the public scoreboard contract that other programs read and trust to settle money
our unattended bot that keeps the market open: it trades a little each hour and starts the next contract when one ends
paying for data buys you a right recorded on the public ledger, not just a note in our own files
confirmed for good in under a second: the whistle blows, the goal counts, no replays
a standard notarized form: data signed so anyone can check exactly who signed it
a seller’s signed, public, on-chain statement of exactly what they sell
selling your car to yourself to fake a hot market: volume with no real economics
one troll wearing a hundred accounts that all look independent, until you trace the money
trustworthy enough that contracts settle real money against it
whoever posts a signed message on-chain: the signature is what counts, not the courier
The paper’s canonical glossary is docs/GLOSSARY.md. Flip the masthead to plain and every page gets this treatment, numbers identical.