This is NOT a file format that corrupts itself. This is a file reader that corrupts files. There's a big difference. Nothing about the format itself causes or requires corruption. A better tagline would be "decayfmt is a social contract enforced by pinky promise".

Reminds me of Tie::Hash::Cannabinol:

  Tie::Hash::Cannabinol is a completely useless demonstration of how to use Tie::StdHash to 
  pervert the behaviour of Perl hashes. Once a hash has been tied to Tie::Hash::Cannabinol, 
  there is a 25% chance that it will forget anything that you tell it immediately and a 
  further 25% chance that it won't be able to retrieve any information you ask it for. Any 
  information that it does return will be pulled at random from its keys.
  
  Oh, and the return value from exists isn't to be trusted either :)

> This is a social contract

What's the other side of the contract? Why would a reader oblige to corrupt?

Seems like there is no mechanism to allow non-corrupting reads from authorized processes? Begs the question then of what the point of this is. Pure novelty, or truly something that could be used in practice?

Kind of like how human memory works, if I understand correctly.

Should have patented it and licensed it to Snap

You might look into (Norbert) Weiner functions.

I thought something like this should be part of the file system to make it even more laborious to by pass

Would you please stop inventing more ways to enshittify the world?