:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED:  [2026-05-24 Sun]
:ID:       aa6d062e-a520-5d14-8773-00687ed9c689
:ID:       2f783eb4-638e-5afa-9b59-6224d086a712
:END:
#+title: Moats
#+filetags: :passepartout:economics:moats:competition:lock-in:switching:

Re-evaluated: time is not the primary moat. A Phase 4+ [[id:28c46769-c14b-42aa-ac7a-69d310157f8f][Passepartout]] fed on Wikipedia + Wikidata can build a general ontology in two weeks. The organic growth advantage collapses for general knowledge.

**Actual moats (weaker than initially assumed):**
1. **Domain-specific gate rules** — thin. A few hundred lines of Lisp data. Write once, trivial to copy. Not a real moat.
2. **Empirical decision history** — every HITL decision is a Merkle fact. A fresh instance has none. Makes *your* instance more valuable but doesn't prevent competition — it's a switching cost, not a barrier to entry.
3. **Curated empirical parameter database (provenance store)** — force field parameters, solvation model coefficients, scoring function weights, training dataset descriptors, and validity envelopes accumulated over years of use. Each entry carries a source citation, confidence interval, and validation history. A competitor starting fresh has no curated parameters, no accumulated validation comparisons against experiment, and no community-sourced validity envelopes. This is a data moat that compounds with every deployed instance: each instance contributes new validated parameters and benchmark comparisons to the collective provenance store via the social protocol, making the network's cumulative empirical knowledge increasingly difficult to replicate. See [[id:45258a2d-1675-562c-9024-5d1eb2f1ea56][evaluation harness]] for how the same network effect applies to regression test cases.
4. **[[id:45258a2d-1675-562c-9024-5d1eb2f1ea56][Evaluation harness (regression suite)]]** — thousands of test cases accumulated from every bug fix. Cannot be ingested from public data. Strongest residual moat.
5. **Infrastructure integration** — specific Docker compose layouts, Traefik patterns, Authentik configs encoded as gate rules. A competitor's infrastructure is different.

**Strongest competitor strategy:** Not copying your gate rules — offering the same architecture as a service with their own pre-seeded general knowledge and a consulting engagement to customize gate rules. The AGPL prevents closing the architecture but does not prevent offering it as a service with a customization layer.

**The defensible business is services, not product.** The defensible entity is "the organization that best understands how to adapt Passepartout to your domain" — not "the organization that owns Passepartout." A [[id:827bc546-e887-5b7c-9b65-6392beaf0920][verification monopoly]] on agent safety would change this calculus — competitors would need independent certification. [[id:caaeee11-ba6f-5566-aecd-f171b4c459c0][Patent strategy]] and [[id:67faf52f-9126-50a7-b87e-2bedc610dac7][Licensing]] protect key innovations and create revenue from the open-source ecosystem.

**Infrastructure lock-in and switching costs**

A hospital that runs [[id:28c46769-c14b-42aa-ac7a-69d310157f8f][Passepartout]] with [[id:84fb5f8f-0527-4df0-b6b6-dbf3bcff8a7f][HIPAA]] gate rules ($50K/yr) for five years has accumulated:

- A fact store with a decade of compliance decisions
- A proof forest of verified rules
- An empirical decision history tied to their specific deployment
- Customized gate rules encoding their specific workflows and approvals

Switching to a competitor means discarding all of it. The accumulated value grows as the fact store deepens. Annual revenue per enterprise grows from $250K in year one to $500K-$1M by year five as more [[id:c34940cc-090e-57c4-8020-e78b1d32b96c][domain packages]] are added.

This is the strongest residual moat. The [[id:45258a2d-1675-562c-9024-5d1eb2f1ea56][evaluation harness]] (regression suite) is a close second — it grows with every deployment and cannot be ingested from public data. The [[id:827bc546-e887-5b7c-9b65-6392beaf0920][verification monopoly]] and [[id:29e4dbf3-cf19-589c-8b14-389e8a39d564][upgrade lifecycle]] compound this lock-in: every new regulation encoded as a gate rule deepens the proof forest, making the deployment harder to reproduce elsewhere.

(See the [[id:3b43a9b8-31d1-4479-a35f-22273b74f0c7][Social protocol infrastructure requirements]] for the network topology that creates this lock-in.)
