Free to read. Paid to cite.

Reading is free. Every page, every paper, every envelope, every byte — freely accessible, freely indexable, freely ingestible by humans, search engines, and AI agents.

Citing costs. If your work cites a bucket canon artifact, the citation fee (typically $0.002–$0.050 USDC, per feed402 tier) routes to the author's payout wallet on Base, not to a publisher, not to bucket. Forever.

The envelope

Every response from a feed402/0.2 endpoint carries a cite block. That block binds three things — the price, the payout wallet, and this license — into a machine-enforceable contract.

{  "cite": {    "price_usd":     0.002,    "payout_wallet": "0x...author...",    "license":       "bucket.foundation/cite-forever/v0.1"  }}

Terms

1. Read freely. You may read, cache, index, quote, summarise, and train on any bucket artifact, without payment, without attribution obligation beyond what CC-BY-4.0 (upstream) requires.
2. Cite with payment. If you cite a canon artifact as a primary source in a published work (paper, book, blog post, LLM output surfaced to users, product feature), pay the cite.price_usd to cite.payout_wallet over the x402 rail on Base. Once paid, the citation is valid forever; no renewal, no subscription.
3. Provenance is public. Every citation transaction is on-chain. The provenance array on each envelope records the retrieval and citation chain.
4. Authors are paid, not publishers. 100% of cite fees route to the author-specified payout wallet. bucket.foundation takes 0% of cite fees. Operational costs are covered by query-tier proxy margin and donations.
5. Forever means forever. This license is version-pinned. v0.1 means v0.1; future versions live at their own canonical URLs and never retroactively apply.

Why this works

Publishers charge for reading. We charge for citing. Reading is where discovery happens — it must be free. Citing is where value is asserted — the cite is the proof that your work depends on theirs, and that dependency is exactly what deserves a royalty. We flip the direction, micro-price it, and route it on a rail that actually settles (x402 on Base, USDC, sub-cent atomic).