W4-030 · Condition 03 — Redeemable value
Pay policy
A pay policy is a human-set, machine-enforced bound on what an agent may spend — amount, purpose, expiry and counterparty — under which value moves automatically and outside which it does not move at all, each child policy only ever narrower than its parent.
Value moves under a human’s policy, or it does not move.
An agent that can spend is a liability the moment its authority is stated as a guideline rather than a bound. A pay policy makes the bound structural: money moves inside it without a human in the loop and cannot move outside it at any speed, amounts are whole integer units so nothing rounds a holding away, and a delegated policy can only narrow what it inherited — never widen it.
This keeps the studio’s two hard boundaries intact. No reward or incentive mechanic is ever an input to the policy, and a value transfer always sits downstream of a human-set rule rather than of an agent’s judgement. The risk the thesis prices is that a payments incumbent ships portable agent spend policy first and owns the rail; the estate specifies the open format ahead of that.
The canonical definition is planned at https://flashyos.com/defined/pay-policy and does not resolve yet; until it does, this builder’s entry is the reference and says so.