Reference Fee Ratchets: A Reproducible Study of Caller Gating and Persistent Usage Counters

A repeated-call surcharge can target concentrated use of a contract while imposing different costs on occasional callers. This report studies a standalone Go implementation that combines a global per-block reference counter, a caller-specific eligibility gate, and a longer-window caller counter. It documents the implementation, reproduces five existing unit tests, and adds one comparative scenario test. In a workload of thirteen addresses making two references each in one block, the supplied caller gate produces zero surcharge across all twenty-six references. Lowering the gate from three own references to one, with every other parameter fixed, charges twenty-four references a total of 123,920,000 surcharge gas. One address making a single reference in each of seventeen blocks incurs 115,600 surcharge gas on its seventeenth reference. These are deterministic outputs of the accounting library, not executable block traces or measurements of market impact. The results expose a policy tradeoff: protecting occasional addresses also permits distribution of activity across addresses. The release includes the evaluated source, tests, and reproducible commands. The study motivates explicit fee disclosure, distributional evaluation, and accountability for enrollment and settlement; it establishes neither human identity discrimination nor improved financial inclusion. Preparation of this report was assisted by Codex. The research programme is directed toward human agency, financial inclusion, and evidence-based accountability. Intended social benefits are distinguished from measured technical results in the manuscript. The manuscript and newly authored analysis are offered under CC BY 4.0. Any supplied source files retain the license terms stated in the supplement; the record license does not replace third-party source licenses.