Constitutional Storage

Constitutional Storage proposes a governed storage architecture for dense, fragmented, and authority-sensitive systems. Motivated by the full parking lot problem in open-addressed hash tables and the firebreak insight of Elastic Hashing, the paper argues that many storage failures arise from treating absence as ungoverned void. Empty space is not merely nothing. It is state with structure, locality, ownership, history, and future consequence. The paper introduces a separation between Things and Spaces: a Things table records object identity, placement, commitments, versions, and receipt references, while a Spaces table records free extents, fragmentation state, mobility constraints, and repair status. Storage operations become constitutional transitions rather than raw mutations. Creates, updates, deletes, moves, compactions, and fast-path operations are admitted only when they preserve storage invariants or create bounded repair obligations. The model defines fragmentation governance, repair governance, batch governance, and fast-lane governance. Repair governance makes defragmentation a receipted repayment of constitutional debt. Batch governance amortizes receipt overhead for small operations through aggregate proofs. Fast-lane governance permits compact primitives such as dense hash tables, slabs, bitmaps, and caches to operate with reduced overhead when their authority, jurisdiction, scope, debt, reconciliation, and escalation rules are explicit. Constitutional Storage does not claim to eliminate physical cost. Compaction still moves bytes, indexes still consume space, and receipts still impose overhead. Its central claim is that allocation, identity, repair, authority, and historical legibility should be separately represented and separately governed so that dense storage systems remain auditable, recoverable, and semantically accountable as complexity grows.