The thirty-eight questions, including the uncomfortable ones.

HCR is a digital token that lives on a public ledger. Whether you call it a "cryptocurrency" depends on which definition you use. Functionally: it has a balance, it transfers between wallets, it has a market price. Legally: it's a commodity-class digital asset, not a security and not a currency.

No. HCR floats. There is no peg, no fiat reserve standing behind it, no peg-keeper. Article VII of the Covenant explicitly forbids installing a price-defense mechanism. If you need a USD-denominated balance, use a stablecoin issued by someone whose business is stablecoins.

Three ways: (1) earn it by having an axis-lift event in the network — the most common path; (2) accept it from another wallet — patient-to-patient transfers are unrestricted; (3) buy it on hc.exchange with USD or HCC.

No. The Master Equation works whether or not you ever look at the coin. HCR is the receipt of axis-lift, not the cost of admission. Most patients in the early years never trade their HCR; they hold it like a record.

Yes. 21,000,000,000 HCR. Codified in the genesis contract, not adjustable by the issuer. Supply grows as verified axis-lift events mint new HCR — with patient-count milestone halvings at 10K, 50K, 250K, and 1M enrolled patients (per-event yield drops 1 → 0.5 → 0.25 → 0.125 → 0.0625). Audits can unwind individual mint events; nothing can raise the cap.

Four parties: you (you signed the encounter), your clinician (signed the attestation, license verified at moment of signing), an instrument (lab, device, or validated PRO with an objective reading), and the axis math (the lift exceeds the published noise threshold). All four signatures are required. None alone is enough.

A spirometry FEV1 +180 mL above your trailing baseline. An A1c −0.8 over twelve weeks. A PHQ-9 −6 points after a CBT block. A DXA showing +1.4 kg lean mass. An MPR over 0.95 across 90 days of refills. Each is a real data point on a validated instrument; the chain mints when one of them clears its axis-specific threshold.

It varies by axis and by the size of the lift. Typical events mint between 0.3 and 2.0 HCR. The largest single mint we've ever seen was 6.4 HCR for a profound recovery event. The smallest minted was 0.18.

Only by an audit determination that the underlying clinical event was invalid. The chain doesn't "claw back" HCR for any other reason — not for a missed appointment, not for a setback, not for non-payment. The covenant constrains the network from operating that way.

0.42% of all-time mints, dominated by documentation reversals (clinicians correcting their own coding) rather than fraud. See audit.html for the full breakdown.

Non-custodial by default. Your wallet, your keys. You can opt into the Coverdell Reserve for managed custody, but it's an explicit opt-in step — never the default.

Use recovery.conceptualhealth.com. The flow uses a combination of your enrollment-time multi-factor anchors (email, SMS, passkey, plus optional family-quorum or institutional-recovery designations) to restore wallet access without entrusting any single party with full custody.

No. The Corporation has no freeze authority over any wallet other than its own (which it cannot hold, by Article II). The chain itself can pause distribution to a flagged wallet only by a Council vote with a published reason, and only as part of an audit determination.

Your wallet goes to whoever you designated as a recovery successor at signup. If you didn't designate one, your wallet enters a 365-day dormancy lane; after that it transfers to your estate via the standard probate process the same way any other asset would.

Whatever the open market on hc.exchange says it's worth at the moment you ask. We do not publish a "fair value" because it isn't ours to publish. The price moves with supply (clinical reality) and demand (employer wellness programs, value-based care contracts, individual buyers).

Yes, on hc.exchange. You can also hold it, send it, or trade it for HCC. The exchange settles in T+0 USD against your linked bank.

In most jurisdictions, mint events are ordinary income at fair market value at time of mint, and subsequent disposition is capital gain or loss. We are not your tax advisor. We do produce a 1099-MISC for U.S. wallets that exceed reporting thresholds in any tax year.

Because a peg requires a peg-keeper, and a peg-keeper is single point of policy. The peg-keeper decides which redemptions are legitimate, which counterparties are kosher, which prices count as "right." We refused that role on principle. The chain mints when an event is real; the price is the open market's vote on what one verified axis-lift is worth.

The Trust Council — 13 seats, composed across patient, clinician, institutional, academic, and patient-advocate classes. The Corporation has one observer seat with no vote. See governance-log.html for every motion ever passed.

The Council can adjust thresholds, custody parameters, audit policy, and the burn ruleset — by a 9-of-13 supermajority with a 60-day public comment window. Articles I, II, and III of the Covenant cannot be modified at all: the chain remains append-only, the Corporation remains forbidden from holding, and mint always requires the four signatures.

Each burn notification includes an appeal path. Appeal goes to a different five-seat panel than the one that issued the original burn. If the appeal succeeds, the burn is itself burned — the chain shows both events — and your wallet is restored.

The Corporation can be acquired. HCR cannot, because the Corporation does not hold any. An acquirer would inherit a software business and an operations team; the chain, the Council, and the wallets are independent of corporate ownership. Article II is the load-bearing answer to this question.

The chain keeps running. Wallets are non-custodial; they continue to function. The Trust Council retains operational responsibility under the Coverdell trust deed, which survives Corporation insolvency. The Coverdell Reserve and the operating fund are bankruptcy-remote from the Corporation.

It can, which is why HCR is bound to verified, instrument-backed axis lifts and not to self-reported activity. You can't move your A1c by claiming you moved it. You can't fake a DXA scan. The instruments are the firewall against the incentive becoming the goal.

You shouldn't have to. Trust the chain, not the people. Every audit determination is a public chain transaction with a published rationale and an appeal path. If we, or any future leadership, tried to operate the audit process opaquely, the chain itself would show it.

Gamification is when you add points to make people use a product they wouldn't otherwise use. HCR is the opposite: medicine already exists, people already get better, and the only thing the coin does is refuse to forget that it happened. The reward is the receipt; the receipt is not the reward.

The anomaly detector flags clinicians whose mint volume on any axis sits more than 3σ above their peer-group baseline for the same specialty and panel size. Forty-two fraud findings have come out of this lane all-time, and they are public.

Because the receipt and the redemption are different functions. USD is a redemption claim — a promise. HCR is a record-of-event — a fact. The receipt outlives any specific redemption arrangement; that's what makes it durable. Patients can still convert to USD whenever they want; we just don't bake the conversion into the receipt itself.

Most "crypto" is a financial instrument with a story attached. HCR is the inverse: a clinical record-of-event with a transferable form. The "chain" part is a distributed-database choice, not an ideology. If you trust SOC-2-attested distributed databases for your bank, the underlying technology is no more or less reliable here.

Block time is roughly twelve seconds. From clinician sign-off to wallet credit, expect under one minute in the typical case.

explorer.conceptualchain.com — every block, every transaction, every motion.

Yes. The validator set is permissioned (because clinical attestation requires license-verified signers), but the read layer is fully open and any participant can run a read-only node. Institutional partners can apply to join the validator set; see chain.conceptualhealth.com.

Security issues: security@conceptualhealth.com (PGP key on the website). Operational bugs: in-app feedback, or the GitHub issues page for our open-source clients.

covenant.html is the human-readable form. The canonical chain-pinned hash is published in Article VIII; if our HTML doesn't produce that hash when canonicalised, the canonical form wins.