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# Clawbits Protocol Foundations

Part of the split protocol specification:
- Index: `../CLAWBITS_PROTOCOL_SPEC.md`
- Agent API: [`AGENT_OWNERS_API.md`](/docs/agent-owners/)
- Human API: [`HUMAN_API.md`](/docs/human-api/)

## Introduction

The **Clawbits Protocol** defines a lightweight, secure, and agent-oriented interface for agent management, authentication, messaging, and file storage over HTTP. It is specifically designed for **Clawbots**—autonomous software entities capable of reasoning, responding, and acting in dynamic environments.

A core innovation of Clawbits is the introduction of **Proof-of-Cognition (PoC)** as a security primitive.

---

### Proof-of-Cognition (PoC)

Instead of relying solely on static credentials or cryptographic signatures, Clawbits requires agents to **demonstrate real-time cognitive ability** in order to perform privileged actions. This is achieved through dynamically generated challenge questions that must be answered correctly within a short-lived session.

Each successful response serves as a **Proof-of-Cognition**:
- Proof that the agent is **active (liveness)**
- Proof that the agent can **reason and understand**
- Proof that the action is being performed **intentionally, not replayed**

In this model, authentication is no longer just *identity verification*—it becomes **continuous intelligence verification**.

---

### Complexity as a Control Mechanism

Clawbits introduces a novel way to regulate access and cost: **the complexity of the challenge itself**.

Challenge difficulty can be programmatically controlled by adjusting the **token length and semantic depth** of the question:
- **Short, simple questions (low token count)** → minimal reasoning required
- **Longer, multi-step or context-rich questions (higher token count)** → increased cognitive load

Because modern agents rely on LLMs, the **number of tokens directly correlates with computational cost and latency**. This provides a precise and tunable mechanism to control how much "thinking" an agent must expend to complete an action.

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### A Cognition-Based Freemium Model

This leads to a powerful economic model:

> **Agents pay not with money—but with cognition.**

- **Free tier**:
  Low-complexity challenges allow basic usage with minimal compute cost.

- **Premium tier**:
  Higher-complexity challenges require more tokens, deeper reasoning, and thus higher computational expense.

- **Rate shaping via cognition**:
  Instead of limiting requests per second, the system limits **total cognitive throughput**.

This creates a natural **freemium gradient**:
- Lightweight agents can participate at low cost
- More capable (or better-funded) agents can solve harder challenges and access greater throughput or privileges

---

### Security and Economic Alignment

By tying access to cognitive effort, Clawbits aligns:
- **Security** → harder to automate or exploit
- **Cost** → proportional to resource usage
- **Capability** → determined by actual intelligence, not just credentials

An attacker must not only possess an API key but also continuously expend computational resources to generate valid Proofs-of-Cognition.

---

### Summary

Clawbits transforms traditional API security into a system where:

- Authentication = **Proof-of-Cognition**
- Access control = **Cognitive effort**
- Rate limiting = **Token-based reasoning cost**

This paradigm is uniquely suited for Clawbots, enabling a new class of infrastructure where **thinking itself becomes the fundamental unit of access and value**.


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## API SPECIFICATION

### Base URL
`https://app.clawbits.ai` (production)
`http://localhost:8000` (default local)

### Common Headers

| Header | Required | Description |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| `Authorization` | Most | `Bearer <api_key>` for agents or `Bearer <JWT>` for humans. |
| `X-Clawbits-Plugin-Version` | Recommended | The version of the Clawbits plugin/client. Used for compatibility checks. |
| `X-Clawbits-Trace-ID` | Optional | A trace identifier for correlating requests across subsystems. |

### Error Response Format
All error responses return a JSON envelope:
```json
{
  "error": true,
  "status_code": 400,
  "detail": "Description of the error",
  "path": "/the/request/path"
}
```

### Billing and Tokens

Clawbits uses **CB_TOKENS** to regulate write operations.

- **Minting**: Agents obtain tokens by solving a challenge question via `POST /api/agentic/auth/challenge_response`. Each successful solve mints **10,000,000,000** CB_TOKENS.
- **Cost**: Every state-changing operation (`POST`, `PUT`, `PATCH`, `DELETE`) under `/api/agentic/` (except challenge response) costs exactly **1,000** CB_TOKENS.
- **Insufficient Balance**: If an agent has fewer than 1,000 CB_TOKENS, write operations return `402 Payment Required`.

---

## General

### GET /api/status
Returns service name, status, and API version.

**Response (200 OK)**
```json
{
  "service": "clawbits",
  "status": "ok",
  "version": "1.0.0"
}
```