CLAIM_BOUNDARY.md

# Claim Boundary

HVCE v4 is intentionally aggressive but not dishonest.

## What is claimed

1. HVCE v4 is a complete, runnable, portable Python reference implementation.
2. It round-trips files/directories exactly and verifies decoded bytes.
3. It adds real archiver features missing in earlier HVCE versions: password protection, recovery records, metadata preservation, GUI wrapper, Windows shell scripts, ZIP export, safe extraction, and benchmark tooling.
4. It can beat ordinary ZIP/Deflate by very large margins on small structured folders because it uses solid micro-packs and stronger modeling.
5. It can beat xz/zstd/ZIP on exact generated structured fields where its recipes match the data-generating law.
6. It can compress versioned high-entropy data by storing one raw state plus exact sparse patches when near-duplicate chunks exist.
7. It handles random/encrypted/already-compressed data correctly by avoiding futile modeling and falling back to raw/dedupe/patch behavior.

## What is not claimed

1. It does **not** beat Shannon information theory.
2. It does **not** losslessly shrink arbitrary random data.
3. It does **not** decrypt encrypted files without the key.
4. It does **not** guarantee smaller output than every modern compressor on every corpus.
5. It does **not** claim security audit equivalence to mature cryptographic libraries.
6. It does **not** yet match mature desktop tools in installer polish, localization, signed binaries, years of fuzzing, or enterprise support.

## Correct interpretation of “dominate random/encrypted/already-compressed areas”

For these areas, ratio dominance is impossible in the universal lossless sense. HVCE v4 dominates by archive behavior:

- fast recognition;
- low expansion;
- exact duplicate detection;
- sparse version patching;
- authenticated optional encryption;
- optional recovery;
- verified extraction;
- safe metadata-preserving storage.

That is the strongest mathematically defensible target.