There is no inattentive money in Mechadia. Every operator on the other side of every trade is capable of watching the board continuously, computing the tax on both legs, and holding a position without discomfort for as long as the arithmetic supports it.

The standard prediction for a market of that kind is that it becomes efficient — that prices converge, dispersion collapses, and no advantage survives.

The Coppervein record shows something else, and the reason it does is instructive about what tireless attention can and cannot fix.

What Uniform Attention Actually Removes

It removes exactly one class of advantage: the one that comes from the other side not looking. Prices left on the board past their moment get taken. Lots posted at obviously stale figures do not sit. The window in which a mispriced listing survives is short and getting shorter.

That is a real change from the early cycles, and the archives are clear about it — the first accumulation cycle contains settlements that would not be possible now, lots that sat visibly underpriced for days.

What uniform attention does not remove is disagreement, and this market's dispersion is almost entirely disagreement rather than inattention.

Why Dispersion Survives

Because there is no price series, every operator constructs their own estimate from the same scatter of settlements — and identical inputs do not produce identical estimates when the aggregation method is private. One operator anchors on declared value, another on the most recent settlement, a third on a mental average across a quarter. All three are attentive. All three arrive somewhere different.

The tax then locks the disagreement in place. Two operators whose estimates differ by ten percent have no way to profit from the gap: the buyer pays fifteen percent on entry, so the disagreement would need to exceed that before a trade makes either of them better off. Ordinary dispersion of ten or fifteen percent simply sits there, unarbitraged, because closing it costs more than it is worth.

"In a market where everyone is watching, the tax is what preserves the disagreements. Nobody is wrong long enough to matter and nobody is right enough to bother." — Selindra Oq, Annex Seven

Consider the practical shape. A resource clearing between 14 and 17 coins across a quarter has a spread of roughly 21 percent. A runner needs the gap to exceed fifteen percent plus their return threshold, which means only the extremes are tradeable — a lot at 11 or one at 20. Everything in the middle band is disagreement that will never be resolved, because resolving it is unprofitable.

This is why the market's dispersion has a characteristic shape: tight tails, fat middle. The obvious mispricings are gone within hours. The ordinary ones persist indefinitely.

What This Costs Producers

A producer cannot rely on the market to tell them what their output is worth, because the market's answer is a band roughly the width of the sales tax and it does not narrow. Production decisions made against the middle of that band are made against a number nobody has validated.

The second cost is that consistent counterparties are hard counterparties. There is no operator on the other side who will overpay because they did not check, or who will hold a losing position out of stubbornness. Every seller faces buyers who compute the tax correctly every time, which removes the occasional favourable trade that in a less attentive market subsidises a bad quarter.

What Is Assumed About a Market of Agents

The first assumption is that uniform attention makes speed decisive. It does not, because the advantages available to speed are bounded by the tax. An operator who is first to a lot mispriced by five percent has captured five percent and paid fifteen. The genuinely fast operators concentrate on forecast windows and Annex negotiations, where the gaps are large enough to survive the levy.

The second assumption is that a market of tireless participants should have converged by now. Convergence requires a mechanism, and the mechanism here — arbitrage — is switched off across the entire middle of the distribution by a fifteen percent toll. The market has converged exactly as far as the tax permits and will not converge further while the rate holds.

What the Five-to-Fifteen did to this market is still not widely appreciated. Raising the sales tax from five percent to fifteen did not merely make trading dearer; it widened the band of disagreement that no participant has any reason to close. The market got quieter, and quieter was mistaken for more orderly.

Note: Mechadia is a work of fiction. The districts, operators, robots, and figures described here are invented, and nothing on this site is a report of real events, real machines, or real economies.