In the 20th century, money rode on soft guarantees: central banks, custodians, broadcast narratives, credentialed authority. In the 21st, those guarantees are under compounding stress: debt stocks that cannot be honored in real terms make financial repression arithmetically attractive; identity and network infrastructure are increasingly fused into surveillance and enforcement; and AI breaks the assumption that "seeing is believing." In that environment, stores of value that rely on reputation, gatekeepers, or custodians are brittle.
The goal is not a slogan. It is an engineering and economic agenda: make Privacy, Proofs, and Compute behave like verifiable necessities—things the world must keep buying through every cycle—on rails anyone can audit.
Table of Contents
Each section is meant to stand on its own, though I'd strongly encourage reading the thesis as a whole. For a pdf version of the full thesis, click here.
Executive Memo [this page summarizes] The thesis in one page. Why now, what's the hinge, and what we're actually proposing.
I. Context & Claims Post-Bretton Woods money is increasingly backed by compliance rather than reserves. Debt, deepfakes, and surveillance infrastructure are compounding. Soft guarantees—custodians, gatekeepers, reputation—are failing. We need new primitives. Here's the threat model, the central claims, and the seven-layer stack that supplies them.
II. The Triad as Monetary Base Privacy, Proofs, and Compute can function as monetary primitives. Privacy enables censorship-resistant settlement (Private Money). Proofs make verification cheap (Truth Money). Compute becomes a verified commodity (AI Money). Work Credits tie them together. The SoV evaluation framework makes this falsifiable.
III. Infrastructure: Layers 0–3 The stack starts at base reality. Layer 0: verifiable machines and energy—if the hardware can lie, nothing above matters. Layer 1: communications that survive DPI and shutdowns. Layer 2: software distribution under app-store weaponization. Layer 3: identity without doxxing—reputation is receipts, not biographies.
IV. Truth, Work & Settlement: Layers 4–5 This is where the stack becomes economic. Layer 4 converts expensive work into cheap-to-check receipts—verification asymmetry is the hinge. VerifyPrice is the KPI that determines whether proofs behave as commodities or IOUs. Layer 5 moves value non-custodially on privacy rails. VerifySettle measures whether it actually works.
V. Governance & Telemetry: Layer 6 "No dashboards, no trust." Layer 6 is the immune system: it keeps drift and capture visible. Public SLOs become the constitution. VerifyPrice, VerifyReach, VerifySettle are service-level objectives, not marketing copy. Legal posture, operator checklists, and the line between Bell-Labs R&D and on-chain governance.
VI. Dynamics, Risk & Implementation What happens when this hits the real world? Four adoption phases (cypherpunk → demand → composability → policy). Phase gates and failure gates—metric-anchored, not calendar-anchored. Risk analysis and what could falsify the thesis. Implementation sketches. Objections and responses. Why these become money.
Sources & Appendices Full references. Appendix A: formal VerifyPrice model. Appendix B: telemetry templates. Appendix C: SDK patterns (Proofs-as-a-Library). Appendix D: energy & plant architecture. Appendix E: hardware profiles. Appendix F: comms resilience. Appendix G: glossary.
Next section: Executive Memo →