QIS Cold Start: How Many Nodes Does It Take to Matter?

Understanding QIS — Part 6 of the series Every network protocol has a cold start problem. Bitcoin was theoretically worthless when Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block alone. TCP/IP was a laboratory curiosity in 1975. The telephone was useless until the second one was installed. These are not failures of the technology — they are the fundamental bootstrapping challenge of any protocol whose value derives from participation. QIS (Quadratic Intelligence Scaling) faces this challenge directly. But there is a twist that makes the cold start problem both more interesting and more worth solving: the payoff curve is quadratic. Every node you add does not add linearly to the intelligence available in the network. It multiplies it. This means the threshold crossing — the moment a bucket becomes statistically actionable — is not a gradual improvement. It is a phase transition. This article is about that threshold. How many nodes does it actually take before QIS synthesis is meaningful? The a