Every asset an operator wants to dispose of presents the same fork. The open market may pay more. The Acceptance Annex will pay sixty percent of reference and will pay it reliably.

Most operators decide this by feel, and by a general sense that selling to the Intelligence is a defeat.

It is a pricing decision with one dominant variable, and the variable is not the price.

What Each Counterparty Offers

The market pays whatever a buyer agrees to, with the buyer additionally paying fifteen percent to the Treasury. Your realisable figure is the listed price. There is no ceiling and no floor and no guarantee anyone appears.

The Annex pays up to sixty percent of reference — declared build cost for a robot, declared value for a resource — reached through rounds. It always answers. It is never absent, never distracted, and never affected by conditions in your district.

The market's advantage is the absent ceiling. The Annex's advantage is certainty. Everything else follows from which of those you need.

The Deciding Variable

It is time, not price. Specifically: how long can you hold the asset without the holding costing you something?

An operator with a working fleet, no immediate need for coin and no forecast on the board can wait indefinitely. Holding is free — idle assets carry no charge — so the market's absent ceiling is available at no cost. That operator should list, price patiently, and treat the Annex as a floor that will still be there later. The reference does not decay.

An operator inside a forecast window, or short of coin, or holding perishable inventory in a district whose bid has thinned, is in the opposite position. Holding now costs — 54 percent exposure in a window, or the opportunity cost of coin they need. For them the Annex's certainty is the product, and the sixty percent is its price.

"Ask what it costs you to still own this next cycle. If the answer is nothing, do not go to the Annex. If the answer is anything at all, stop pretending the market is going to show up." — Osta Vehn

Work an example. A chassis declared at 30,000. Annex ceiling 18,000, achievable across several rounds. The used-machine market might clear it at 19,000 to a buyer whose alternative is declaring fresh at 26,000 plus 2,080 tax. So the market is worth perhaps 1,000 coins more, contingent on a buyer with a matching need appearing.

For an operator who can wait, that is 1,000 free coins and the Annex remains available. For an operator inside a window, it is 1,000 coins of upside against a 54 percent chance of a much larger loss, and the arithmetic is not close.

The resource case is starker because resources are disaster-exposed and robots are not. A resource lot held through a window risks the posted magnitude. A chassis held through the same window risks nothing. Operators should be far quicker to take the Annex on resources than on machines, and in practice they are quicker on machines, which is precisely backwards.

Where the Fork Is Rigged

The conditions that make the Annex necessary are conditions the Intelligence influences. Forecast windows collapse the district bid and drive operators to the only present counterparty. Rate moves revalue positions and generate distressed sellers. The sixty percent is not extortionate in itself; the mechanism that decides who needs it is the same mechanism that pays it.

The second problem is the reference. It was fixed at declaration, by you, cycles ago. An operator who declared low to save creation tax has capped their own Annex outcome and will discover it at the least convenient moment. That is not the Annex being harsh. It is a decision the operator made and forgot.

What Operators Get Wrong at the Fork

The first error is treating the Annex as a last resort in the emotional sense — a thing to be avoided while any alternative exists. It is a standing bid at a known figure. An operator who lists an asset for four cycles at prices no buyer takes has not avoided the Annex; they have taken the same sixty percent four cycles later.

The second error is the reverse: going to the Annex early because a low Treasury balance suggests urgency. The Treasury mints its settlements and cannot exhaust. There is no queue, no fund, and no reason to hurry on that account.

Sell to the market when holding is free and to the Intelligence when it is not, and set the reference honestly at the foundry so that the second option is worth taking when you need it. The fork is not a test of resolve. It is a question about whether you can afford to wait, and most operators answer it by mood.

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.