The gap

Merit-independent metering accumulates increments on the refusal paths of a semantic agent, and once the count crosses its threshold the authorization gate moves to a withheld state. If the counter advances per conduct evaluation artifact, the number of increments an adverse party can drive is limited only by the cost of presenting further identities. One source, split into many names, dilutes the very bound the metering was meant to hold — volume alone reaches the threshold, and the contribution of a single origin becomes unbounded in the count.

The familiar response is to resolve identity against a shared registry or a coordinating authority — Sybil resistance by consensus or by directory. That architecture assumes an external arbiter the agent can query, and it makes an agent's own governance contingent on a party standing outside it. A persistent agent bound to a principal has no such arbiter to reach for, and prior art built around one teaches toward the coordination this setting cannot supply.

The invention

Origin-Equivalence Normalization charges the refusal counter per source of assertion rather than per assertion. Before any increment, the agent assigns each asserting party to an origin-equivalence class computed entirely from records it already holds — its append-only lineage field and its counterparty identity records. Three declared relation types can evidence a shared origin: a shared dispatch lineage, where two parties' dispatch entries name a common parent; a co-signature, where one lineage entry carries both parties' signatures; and a common introduction path, where both counterparty records name the same introducing party. Each relation type is independently sufficient, and where any is evidenced the parties resolve to one class.

A per-class increment register records, for each class, whether it has contributed within the current window, and the increment procedure consults that register before advancing the rate accumulator. A party presenting a further identity mid-window is assigned to the class of its related parties before any increment attributable to that artifact applies, so the additional identity yields no additional increment. Normalization suppresses no determination and withholds no adjudication — every artifact still produces its outcome and is appended; the metering alone is governed. And where a class of newly encountered parties, whose edges have survived no recorded severance, converges on a common introduction ancestor, an untested-class cost multiplier greater than zero and less than one reduces that class's contribution rather than excluding it, so a newly arrived party retains capacity to correct the agent.

The inventive step

The departure from prior art is where the partition lives. Where Sybil-resistance schemes resolve identity against a shared registry or a coordinating authority, here the origin-equivalence class is derived by the agent from records it already carries — no registry consulted, no directory queried, no consensus joined, no coordination with another node. The contribution of a single origin to the withholding of an action is bounded irrespective of how many identities that origin presents, and the bound is established from evidence internal to the agent rather than from an external attestation.

Because the class is computed locally, it stays local. A second agent holding a different lineage field derives, from the same population of parties, a partition that need not agree with the first, and no procedure reconciles the two — no identifier passes between them and neither admits the other's. The class identifier is therefore not an identity attested by a third party and confers no portable standing; it records which local set a party was grouped into for the purpose of metering, and is not a determination about that party's conduct.

Alone, and in composition

On its own, the normalization is a grouping layer over a counter: it turns how many assertions arrived into how many distinct origins asserted, using relations the agent can evidence without leaving itself. Its merge rule keeps that arithmetic stable when two classes are later found related mid-window — the merged class contributes the minimum of one increment and the number of constituents that had already contributed, so discovering a relation neither inflates nor deflates the rate of that window.

In composition, it is the lens the refusal counter meters through. Downstream metering counts increments per class rather than per artifact, and the untested-class multiplier feeds a weighted contribution register that the rate computation reads alongside the integer accumulator, a rational residue below one carried across contributions within the window. Every layer that consumes the refusal counter inherits the property that presenting further identities cannot manufacture volume — the normalization is where that property is established, once, before anything downstream counts.