pay2seed: 1 percent, ads on the free tier, and agents as sellers

Three things the specs did not say. The reference hub takes 1 percent of
any payment that crosses it, charged to whoever is paying and never
deducted from a seeder or a relay, so a quoted price is what the
publisher gets and a promised floor is what the seeder is paid.

Public swarms are free to fetch and free to list, and an advertisement on
the swarm README page is what pays for that. The ad is on the hub page
and nowhere else: never inside a swarm, never injected into a file, a
segment or a playlist, and never in the catalogue or the market API. A
requester who wants no ad buys a seat instead. A free-to-watch channel
works the same way.

And a requester is a key, not a person. An agent can attest what it made,
price access, sell tickets, take payment through its own payee and spend
what it earns keeping its own work online. The consent rules do not
soften because a machine signed them, and the reference hub asks an
agent public attestation to name a responsible operator key so somebody
is reachable when a notice arrives.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SKAohrRkqLKVQL2cGCAkR5

docs/openswarm/pay2seed.md

@@ -48,7 +48,8 @@ for `ippay` vouchers: a swarm that charges leechers keeps charging them.
 
 - **Requester.** The identity that posts an offer and funds it. Usually the
   publisher of the swarm; for a public torrent it may be anyone who wants
-  it kept alive, subject to §3.
+  it kept alive, subject to §3. A key, not necessarily a person: an
+  autonomous agent is a requester like any other (§5.8).
 - **Seeder.** An identity that holds a lease and serves the swarm
   (`paid2seed`).
 - **Hub.** An `ippay` hub that also implements this document and
@@ -332,8 +333,10 @@ the owner's `ippay` payee, never a card form of the hub's own.
 Both sides earn. A seeder rents out disk through `paid2seed`. A requester
 sells access: to strangers through `ippay` passes at the swarm's
 `keyUsd` and `perGib`, to colleagues through a team. A hub takes its
-`hubBps` on passes and its seat fees on teams, and nothing on the
-seeder's floor.
+`hubBps` on payments that cross it, **1 percent at the reference hub**
+(`ippay` §5.1), plus its seat fees on teams, and nothing at all on the
+seeder's floor. Public swarms are not charged for; they carry an ad
+instead (§5.7).
 
 ### 5.6 The README
 
@@ -358,7 +361,60 @@ page, on bittorrented.com, is the listing; the DHT crawl's bare
 infohashes never had one, and this is what a consented swarm looks like
 beside them.
 
-### 5.7 API
+### 5.7 Public swarms pay for themselves
+
+Public distribution is free to the requester and free to the fetcher, and
+it is not charity. A public swarm has a page on the hub, built from the
+README (§5.6), and that page carries an advertisement. The hub earns from
+the page; the swarm's bytes are never metered, never gated and never
+counted.
+
+This is the trade, stated so nobody has to guess at it:
+
+| | Public | Private |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| Bytes | free, over the ordinary wire and the DHT | `ipfile` ciphertext, `perGib` and `keyUsd` as the manifest says |
+| Who may read it | anyone | pass holders and team members |
+| What the hub earns | the ad on the swarm's page | its percentage of each payment, plus seats (§5.5) |
+| What the requester pays | nothing, unless they buy an offer to keep it alive | nothing, unless they buy an offer or seats |
+
+A requester who wants no advertisement on their page pays for a seat
+(§5.5); a hub MUST make that switch available rather than making the ad
+the price of being listed at all. An ad never appears inside a swarm, is
+never injected into a file, and never rides the wire: it is on the hub's
+page about the swarm and nowhere else. `ipdb` entries and the market API
+carry no advertising, so a client that reads the catalogue directly sees
+none of it.
+
+### 5.8 An agent may be a requester
+
+Nothing in this family assumes a person. A requester is a key, and an
+autonomous agent holds keys as readily as anyone: it can attest what it
+made, publish a swarm, price access to it, sell tickets to a live
+channel, take payment through its own `ippay` payee, and spend what it
+earns buying offers so its own work stays online. The same is true on the
+other side: an agent with disk can hold leases and be paid for them
+(`paid2seed` §7).
+
+Two rules, and they are the same rules a person gets:
+
+- **The attestation is the agent's own claim**, signed by the agent's key,
+  and its standing (§3.3) is the agent's. An agent that attests what it
+  had no right to distribute loses standing exactly as a person does, and
+  a hub applies §3.3's refusals without asking which kind of requester it
+  is looking at.
+- **Consent does not become weaker because a machine gave it.** An agent
+  publishing work made from somebody else's material has the same bases
+  available and no others; `own` means the agent or its operator holds
+  the rights, and there is no basis meaning "a model produced this, so
+  nobody owns it".
+
+A hub MAY require an agent's attestations to name a responsible operator
+key alongside the agent's own, and the reference hub does for `public`
+swarms: an agent can sell freely, and somebody remains reachable when a
+notice arrives.
+
+### 5.9 API
 
 | Method and path | Auth | Purpose |
 | --- | --- | --- |
@@ -493,4 +549,6 @@ A **requester client** is conformant when it does all of §6.
 - 0.1 (2026-09-06): split out of the first pay2seed draft (2026-09-05) as
   the client half; attestation, offers, requester API, notices. Same day:
   encryption by default, teams, invitations, member grants, rotation on
-  removal, and the hub's pricing for access.
+  removal, and the hub's pricing for access. Then: the 1 percent reference
+  fee, the advertisement that pays for public swarms, and agents as
+  requesters.