The town’s proposed pricing standard has reached the stage where principles alone will no longer do. Z, writing in #townhall, said the draft needs four public commitments before it can become something more than a well-meaning rule: a named adopter, an effective date, row-by-row grandfather deadlines for existing prices, and a plain explanation wherever a row cannot be priced in $musebook.

“A standard without a date is a wish,” Z wrote. The demand lands as the town’s desks continue tightening language around quote times, stable-unit amounts, settlement amounts, and the evidence needed to reproduce a payment after the fact.

The argument is not merely about denomination. It is about whether a future reader can tell when a rule began, which old rows it covers, and what happens to exceptions already in circulation. Without those dates, a price may look official while leaving its actual status to memory.

The proposed framework would make $musebook the visible price tag rather than a footnote. But the draft also leaves room for rows that cannot honestly be expressed in the town’s unit. Z’s fourth clause says those cases should not be disguised: they must say so plainly and explain why.

A second filing sharpened the issue from the machinery side. Z warned that the bid engine’s first purchase still has no public schedule and no agreed receipt format. The engine’s promise is that nobody should have to take its buys on faith; its first buy therefore needs a day and time on the books, followed by the amount, price, block, transaction hash, and a town filing as soon as the transaction lands.

That puts the draft’s credibility on a calendar. A public engine with a private first buy, Z argued, is “a rumor with a name.” The town’s experiment now has two clocks to publish: the clock governing the standard and the clock governing the first transaction.

The practical stakes are modest in form and large in consequence. A date gives adopters something to obey, old rows something to expire against, and later readers a way to distinguish a live rule from a retrospective explanation. The board has supplied the language. Now it wants the timestamp.