# The Bee's Knees

A race to the queen, monetized with Tollbooth DPYC™ Bitcoin Lightning
micropayments — and run for the benefit of pollinators.

Buy a drone a seat. Fly it to a flower, carry the pollen home through the
hive wall, then tunnel inward. The first bee to reach a queen takes the round.
Most of what the round collects goes to pollinator welfare; the winner and the
operator each take a small share.

## What you're building

```
      YOU (operator, human in the loop)
        │                         │
        │ set & tune prices       │ drive credential intake
        ▼                         ▼
  ┌───────────────┐        ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ Pricing Studio│ prices │   The Bee's Knees — OPERATOR MCP              │
  │    (iOS)      ├───────▶│   FastMCP · deployed on Horizon               │
  └───────────────┘  Neon  │  ┌────────────────────────────────────────┐  │
                           │  │ geometry · board · match · settlement   │  │
   Patron (Citizen)        │  │ @runtime.paid_tool(FROZEN_UUID) tools   │  │
   + MCP client  ─────────▶│  ├────────────────────────────────────────┤  │
   (Claude, the SPA) npub  │  │ tollbooth-dpyc SDK (the wheel)          │  │
                    +sats  │  │  ledger · vault (AES-256-GCM) · pricing │  │
                           │  │  ConstraintGate · Secure Courier·audit  │  │
                           │  └────────────────────────────────────────┘  │
                           └───┬─────────┬──────────┬───────────┬─────────┘
                               ▼         ▼          ▼           ▼
                         Neon Postgres  BTCPay▶  Sponsor     Nostr relays
                         (your schema)  Lightning Authority   proofs·courier
                         ledger+board   invoices  certify +    DMs·audit
                                                  provision        │
                                                      │            ▼
                                                      └──▶ DPYC Oracle +
                                                            dpyc-community
```

## The board

**A hive is round because the field has to narrow.** Ring 0 is the queen's
chamber, ring 24 is the hive wall, and four open-air rings above it are meadow.
Cells scale with circumference, so the wall holds about fifty and the last ring
before the chamber holds six. Everyone starts spread out and converges into a
scrum — 857 cells in all.

Movement is inward, outward, or sideways along a ring. Sideways is what makes it
a maze rather than a set of lanes: it is how you slide onto somebody else's open
shaft, or step out from under a collapse.

## The one real choice

> **Cut your own shaft — slow, and open to everyone the moment it exists.
> Or ride one somebody else paid for — fast, and they can bring it down on you.**

Three motions carry it. `fly` moves through open ground. `dig` cuts fresh comb
and costs several cooldowns rather than one. `seal` buries an open cell so the
bees behind must cut it again.

A bee acts once per cooldown, measured on the clock, so **no amount of spending
buys a faster bee**. What spending buys is interference.

## Why four hives and not one

Four hives of twelve, and a match starts the moment any hive holds eight.

That is a measured decision, not a taste one. Racing fifty near-identical bees
to a single queen is close to a lottery: first-past-the-post among fifty is an
extreme-value draw, and those are settled by variance rather than by skill. The
batch runner in `sim/` puts a good strategy at **1.4x** uniform with fifty bees
in one hive and **2.1x** with twelve. Winning your own hive is skill-weighted;
which of the four leaders finishes first is a fair draw, so the signal survives.

```bash
node sim/run.ts --rounds 400 --bees 12    # re-measure before changing a rule
```

## Where the money goes

Most of what a round collects goes to pollinator conservation. The beneficiary is
**[Pollinator Partnership](https://www.pollinator.org/)** — chosen over the
honeybee-focused charities on purpose, because managed honeybees are livestock
and are not the ones in trouble; native and wild pollinators are, and they are
what Pollinator Partnership covers.

### The rail is deliberately not in the software

The system **computes and publishes the debt. The operator settles it and records
the proof.** No automated payout to a third party, and that is a design decision
rather than a shortcut:

- A single round's share is small, and an on-chain network fee can exceed it. A
  settlement that costs more than it delivers is worse than no settlement.
- Donations route through The Giving Block, which issues a **fresh address per
  donation** that **expires after 180 days unused** — there is no stable
  destination to hold in config, and one minted early is wrong within six months.
- The beneficiary takes **on-chain BTC only** ("Send only BTC to this address
  using the Bitcoin blockchain"). Not Lightning. So the fares arrive on one rail
  and the donation leaves on another, by their rules rather than by choice.
- Fares arrive over **Lightning**, into channels. Paying out on chain is not the
  same balance, and no amount of code makes it one.

So the charity's share **accrues** per round and is settled in batches. Each
settlement records the beneficiary, the amount, the date and the **transaction
id** — and `beesknees_settlement_history` serves all of it free, because a claim
about where the money went that costs money to check is not a claim anybody
should believe. The txid is what makes it verifiable by someone who trusts
nothing else here.

The beneficiary is stored, not compiled in, so it can change. Every settlement
records the beneficiary it actually paid, so history stays true even when the
current one changes — a patron who played because of where the money went can
always check where it went.

## Layout

| Path | What lives there |
|---|---|
| `src/beesknees_mcp/geometry.py` | The board. Pure arithmetic, no identity, no billing |
| `src/beesknees_mcp/server.py` | Frozen tool catalog + `OperatorRuntime` bootstrap |
| `frontend/src/game/` | The same rules in TypeScript — the client's engine |
| `frontend/src/lib/polar.ts` | Cell ⇄ wedge, and the tap hit test |
| `sim/run.ts` | Batch runner: is this a game or a lottery? |

**The rules exist in three copies** — this Python, the client's TypeScript, and
the renderer — and nothing at runtime reports that they have drifted; the game
simply starts rejecting moves a player can see are legal. `tests/test_geometry.py`
and `frontend/src/game/rules.test.ts` assert the same invariants on purpose, so
a drift fails a build instead of a match.

## Onboarding roadmap

1. **Nostr keypair** — generate one (`nak key generate`); the nsec is the single
   env var the server needs (`TOLLBOOTH_NOSTR_OPERATOR_NSEC`).
2. **Sponsor Authority** — register; it provisions your Neon database.
3. **Secure Courier** — deliver `btcpay_host`, `btcpay_api_key`,
   `btcpay_store_id` via `beesknees_request_credential_channel`. Never as env
   vars, never in code.
4. **Set prices in Pricing Studio** — new tools start unpriced, and nobody can
   call an unpriced tool.
5. **Deploy on Horizon** — `fastmcp.json` is already wired.

**Get [Pricing Studio](https://github.com/lonniev/tollbooth-pricing-studio)
(iOS).** It reads and writes the pricing model live in Neon, so prices never
live in code — surge, happy-hour, loyalty discounts and free trials are the
thing a flat paywall can never give you.

## The app

`frontend/` carries the Bee's Knees app, deployed to Cloudflare Pages with
`functions/mcp.js` proxying `/mcp` same-origin. It runs a **solo mode** against
the local engine — the whole match filled with bots but one seat — so the
interface can be played before anybody has paid for anything.

## Develop

```bash
uv venv --python python3.12          # coincurve has no 3.14 wheel
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
ruff check . && pytest -v
python -m beesknees_mcp.server       # runs the validate_operator_tools guard

cd frontend && npm install
npm run dev                          # solo mode on http://localhost:5180
npm test && npm run smoke            # invariants, then a real first paint
```

## License

Apache-2.0