The Discrete Cosmology Model (DCM) proposes a delay-based effective description of gravitational and cosmological phenomena arising from finite-speed internal interactions within extended matter. In this framework, mass is treated as a finite-sized domain whose internal forces propagate at relativistic speed, introducing intrinsic interaction delays that persist even in static configurations. When such delays are spatially nonuniform, regions experiencing shorter interaction times expand preferentially toward more-delayed regions, producing a net expansion-delay gradient. In the continuum limit, this gradient manifests as an effective gravitational attraction. The same delay-based mechanism applies hierarchically across scales. At the particle level, relativistic constraints prevent simultaneous expansion and rotation, leading to discrete delay steps that define quantized energy states. At macroscopic scales, the cumulative effect of finite-speed interaction delays governs orbital dynamics, galactic rotation curves, and the observed cosmological redshift. In this interpretation, cosmological redshift emerges as an accumulated group-delay effect that is observationally equivalent to metric expansion in standard cosmology. A key prediction of DCM is an equivalence between electromagnetic and gravitational dilation limits. This prediction is empirically supported by seismic observations on Earth, Mars, and the Moon, where measured compressional wave velocities align closely with the corresponding escape velocities. By linking finite propagation speed, mass geometry, and delay accumulation, DCM offers a testable, causal effective framework for gravity and cosmology that complements existing metric-based descriptions without invoking additional dark components.

Updated Abstract and Introduction sections.