About

Next‑Gen Store of Value: Privacy, Proofs, Compute

A versioned thesis on monetary primitives for the AI era

About This Work

Next-Gen Store of Value: Privacy, Proofs, Compute is a long-form research thesis by Jason St George.

It advances a concrete claim: three cryptographic capacities — Privacy, Proofs, and Compute — can function as monetary primitives for a dense digital civilization under stress.

The argument begins from a change in the world, not from a branding exercise. Post-Bretton Woods money is increasingly stabilized through compliance, surveillance, and administrative enforcement rather than through reserves or convertibility. At the same time, synthetic media, platform mediation, and machine-generated content erode the social default that seeing is believing. In that environment, stores of value that rely on custodians, gatekeepers, reputation, or soft guarantees become increasingly brittle.

This thesis proposes a different basis for durability: censorship-resistant settlement, portable verification, and useful work wrapped in succinct guarantees. It develops that proposal through a seven-layer cypherpunk stack, a formalized account of verification asymmetry, a telemetry program built around VerifyPrice / VerifyReach / VerifySettle, and a set of implementation sketches intended to make the claims falsifiable rather than merely suggestive.

This is not a token pitch, a protocol whitepaper, or a claim of inevitability on behalf of any single chain, company, or ecosystem. It is a map, a framework, and a research agenda.

The canonical version of this work lives on this site as a versioned web edition and printable PDF. Substantive revisions are logged in Updates. Corrections are logged in Errata. References and supporting materials are collected in Sources and Appendices.

Author

Jason St George · ORCID · Google Scholar — is a writer and researcher working at the intersection of philosophy, money, cryptography, AI, and civilizational systems. His work explores how conditions of truth, agency, and value shift under accelerating technological and institutional change. He publishes Eschatology Report and is the author of Next-Gen Store of Value: Privacy, Proofs, Compute.

Scope and posture

This thesis is written for builders, researchers, investors, operators, and serious readers trying to understand what kinds of monetary and verification systems remain durable when soft guarantees degrade.

The goal is not neutrality in the empty sense. The goal is explicit assumptions, visible tradeoffs, and claims that can be checked against the world.

License

© 2026 Jason St George.

Text and original diagrams are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

You may share and adapt the material for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

What is not licensed

Third-party content: All third-party trademarks, images, and excerpts are the property of their respective owners and are used under fair use or by permission where applicable. They are not covered by the CC license unless explicitly stated.

Trademarks: "Next-Gen Store of Value," "VerifyPrice," "VerifyReach," "VerifySettle," "Work Credits," and related marks are trademarks/service marks of the author and are not licensed under CC BY 4.0.

No endorsement: Use of the licensed material does not imply endorsement by the author.

How to Attribute

Code

Any code artifacts are licensed separately under the MIT License.

About the wider project

AfterFiat is one flagship research track within Eschatology Report, a broader publication on philosophy, culture, AI, meaning, and civilizational systems. If you want the wider interpretive frame around this thesis, join the publication.

Acknowledgments

This thesis stands on the shoulders of giants—Satoshi, Chaum, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, Goldwasser, Micali, Naor, the cypherpunks, and countless researchers in cryptography, consensus, and privacy-preserving systems.