constant

the number that was written once

The constant is a single integer written into the contract at deployment. It is not a parameter, not a variable, and not an argument to anything. There is no setter, no owner, no proxy, and no upgrade path. The deploy transaction is the last time this value was decided by anybody.

Its size matters only in relation to the modulus that sits beside it. The modulus decides how many classes exist, and the constant decides where the chain falls among them. Both were fixed in the same transaction, so neither can drift out from under the other, and a reading taken today can be compared directly against a reading taken in the first block.

Everything else on this site moves. The chain produces a block, the reduction runs, the class changes, the record grows one line longer. The constant is the only thing here that will read the same in ten years as it read at the start.

A fixed reference is only useful because everything around it moves. A ruler that stretched with the thing it measured would tell you nothing, and a constant that could be voted on, upgraded, or tuned in response to conditions would be a policy rather than a measurement. This one is neither adjustable nor adjustable-in-an-emergency, which is the same statement made twice because the second half is where these things usually fail.

If the value could change, every reading before the change would become incomparable to every reading after it, and the record would quietly stop being one series. That is the whole argument for fixing it in the deploy transaction rather than leaving a setter behind for later.

Below is the genesis record: the values as they were written, the transaction that wrote them, and the block they landed in. If a field is empty, the contract is not deployed yet, and the site is leaving it empty rather than filling it with something that is not true.