known by your record, not your name
A reputation you own. A verdict no one can buy.
Portable trust for sovereign individuals. An ownerless protocol with no company, no token, and no one to capture.
Public domain · the Unlicense · a design and research draft
Why it matters
Before passports, a village already knew who to trust. Not from papers, from memory. The baker delivered. The carpenter kept his word. The smith stood behind his work. Nown is that memory, rebuilt for strangers at the scale of the network.
The power to settle a dispute between strangers has belonged to a third party: a lord, a guild, a court, a platform. Each could be bribed, captured, subpoenaed, or switched off, and owned your reputation for as long as it lasted.
Nown removes the third party from both. Your standing you carry yourself. A dispute is settled by a quorum that no one can find, selected for the case and gone when it ends. No one to bribe, no office to raid, no company to capture. It does not ask who you are. It asks what you have done.
The internet solved information. Bitcoin solved money. Nown solves judgment.
Three commitments
Karma
A single measure of how you have actually behaved, earned through costly action and carried between strangers. No profile, no platform, no company. Only a record of what you did. It belongs to you, and it goes with you.
Quorum
An anonymous quorum selected at random from proven peers, several steps removed from both sides, unknown to you and to each other. Those who earned the right decide, for this case only, and gone when it ends. Their verdict is final, because no authority sits above them.
Sovereignty
The protocol rules on the trade, not on the person. Your politics, your beliefs, your life are your own. You are free to act, and you carry the consequences. Your record, kept by no one, speaks for you.
Time over money
Karma accrues under a tenure ceiling. The ceiling rises only with time on the record. Capital lifts an operator toward the ceiling, never through it.
A wealthy attacker buys everything money can reach in a day. It is a low plateau. An honest trader passes it in year three and keeps climbing.
Money exhausts what money can buy. An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
Same conduct. Same capital. Only the start year differs. Move it.
Same conduct, same capital. B joined 3 years later and stands at 81% of A: 57 karma against 70. Nothing but time closes the rest.
An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
Standing earned broadly and slowly compounds. Volume bought quickly does not.
No rulers
Not a platform moderator. Not a government office. Not a corporation. A quorum of proven peers, selected by merit, for one case and no longer.
Authority without permanence. Judgment without violence. Trust without identity.
How a dispute resolves
Every action on the protocol moves your standing, up or down. A settled trade, a verdict served soundly, a vouch that holds, each adds to it; a defection, a broken vouch, a careless verdict, each takes it away. Standing is priced in time and real risk, never in words.
The price and both deposits sit in an account only the buyer and seller control. No custodian. If both agree, it closes and no quorum is called.
An odd number of high-karma peers are selected at random by the protocol, several steps removed from both sides in the web of trust. They are unknown to the parties and to each other.
To sit, each steward posts a bond of capital and their own karma. They read the evidence, weigh it, and vote sealed, without deliberation. The stake ties their own standing to the case: judging costs them, so their verdict is worth trusting.
One signature completes the outcome the quorum reached. The loser's deposit, and the bonds of the stewards who voted against the outcome, pay the stewards who voted with it. The protocol charges no fee, because there is no one to charge it.
A verdict that executes itself. The quorum emits one signature; it completes the matching outcome and no other.
One dispute · start to finish
Alice buys a camera lens from Bob, 0.5 units. It arrives broken. Follow the case. The quorum can do one thing only.
An illustration of the protocol’s dispute path. Amounts are examples, not measurements.
Four exits, one clock no participant can hurry. Whitepaper §10, The deadline.
Try to break it
Six common attacks, rebuilt as experiments. Each states one claim, hands you the attacker’s levers, and computes the outcome from the protocol’s rules in toy units. Guess before you run. Some attacks work here. The ledger shows what they cost.
All six lanes score against the same verdicts your panel produced.
pay = 30 × (matches − M × Σ vote rate(a) × verdict rate(a)) · toy
Six strategies, one batch, same cases. Set your move, guess, then run.
Toy model of the batch scoring rule: hidden true answers, a 97 percent reading signal, invented prices and priors. All units are toy units. All six lanes score against the same verdicts. An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
Seven stewards judge a batch of cases. You are one seat. Six strategies race on the same cases, scored by the paper’s rule: agreement above what your own voting habit would produce by coincidence.
Buys a private signal, right 97 percent, toy.
The same signal, inverted. The seat gets rarer.
A shared surface cue, right 55 percent, toy, identical for every lazy steward. Its misses land together.
Most cases are guilty in this toy. Looks clever.
The safe call is a fixed answer. Fixed answers score zero.
Uniform over the three answers.
Cases in the batch. The load bearing lever: the scoring rule is a batch property.
Predict · pick one to arm the run
Guess first. The run is armed by your prediction.
Means over 10 fresh batches, so one lucky case cannot hide the rule.
What happened · toy units
—
The scoring rule pays agreement above coincidence. Whitepaper §9, The verdict.
Sealed panel, 7 seats, majority 4. Set your move, guess, then run.
Steward prices, the unanimity premium, and the 500 run tally are toy computations, not measurements. The paper states plainly that a signing key can be bribed. The design prices it, it does not prevent it. An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
You are the losing side of a dispute worth 100. There is no roster. No one can name the panel. The only bribe that can land is a standing offer, posted openly, claimable by any drawn steward.
Money for nothing. Votes are sealed, so nothing is owed back.
Payment reads the count, not the ballot. No steward can show it was pivotal.
A shown ballot can be replaced silently before the close. Whitepaper §9.
The steward hands over its key and sealing secret. The paper states this limit plainly. Whitepaper §16.
A 7 to 0 count reveals every vote by subtraction. Full price, in the open. Whitepaper §9.
The stake. The panel grows with it: 7, 15, 31 seats. Bond per seat scales with stake over panel, toy.
Computed for the selected contract, toy units.
Predict · pick one to arm the run
Guess first. The run is armed by your prediction.
What happened · toy units, prize 100
—
Ballots are sealed. Only counts open. Whitepaper §9, The verdict.
Pool of 1,000. Panels of 7, majority 4. Set your move, guess, then run the draw.
Panel draws are real random draws from the pool you built. Account prices, the pool size, the cap numbers, and the bounty rate are toy. The distance filter is not modeled here. An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
Buy into a pool of 1,000 eligible accounts and try to own the panels it draws. Run the same attack with the cap off, then on. One rule changes.
Toy price of one eligible account, 50: the creation sacrifice plus years under the tenure ceiling. The years are the part money cannot compress. Whitepaper §4.
The paper’s third rule of the draw. The 20 percent pool share and 2 seats used here are toy renderings of the cap. Whitepaper §8.
Split into disguised clusters. Plus 60 per account per extra cluster: independent looking standing must be bought from the honest graph. Every member is a witness. Whitepaper §2, §13.
Predict · pick one to arm the run
Guess first. The run is armed by your prediction.
What happened · toy units, prize 100 per case
—
Money can reach accounts. The cap decides what accounts can reach. Whitepaper §8, Sortition.
A 40 account honest graph, and your ring. Karma recomputes on every edit. Set your move, guess, then run.
The karma numbers are computed live by a toy version of the inflow rule, a power iteration over the graph you build. Weights, prices, the decay rate, the tenure ceiling, and the 0.9 detection rate are toy. An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
Build a ring beside a 40 account honest graph. Karma recomputes live on every edit, by the paper’s inflow rule. Then run the fraud and read the ledger.
Pays the creation sacrifice. Joins the ring. Up to twenty.
Every sybil vouches for every other.
Settled dealings inside the ring.
The voucher’s staked standing plus its chargeback risk is its price. Up to five. Whitepaper §3.
Tenure rises one week. Bought inflow decays 15 percent, toy, without fresh counterparties. Whitepaper §4.
Predict · pick one to arm the run
Guess first. The run is armed by your prediction.
What happened · toy units
—
Karma is minted only by inflow from distinct counterparties. Whitepaper §2, Karma.
Years of standing. Deposit per trade: 5 of 100. Cap: 300, three times your locked bond. Set your move, guess, then run.
Units, the times 3 multiple as drawn, and the honest path margin are toy. The bound itself is mechanical: open exposure never exceeds the locked bond times a fixed multiple. Whether a bounded exit beats years of standing is a human choice. The protocol only fixes the bound. An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
You are a seller with years of standing, and deposits priced thin because of it. Open every trade you can, collect the payments, then default on it all.
Adds 100 of counterparty value-at-risk against your cap. Standing prices your deposit down.
Raises the cap by 300. Only capital a verdict can seize moves it. Reclaimable after every deadline, unless you default.
Fills the comparison column at toy margin 3 per trade.
Predict · pick one to arm the run
Guess first. The run is armed by your prediction.
Deposit back to 80 per 100. Cap 0 until a new bond locks. The career ledger keeps counting.
What happened · toy units
Exit now
Keep trading · margin 3, toy
bond locked 100
The cap bounds the whole take at three times the bond. Whitepaper §12, Economics.
You lost a fair verdict worth 100. Appeals are open. Set your move, guess, then run.
The 10 percent panel error and all costs are toy numbers chosen to show the shape of the argument, not estimates. This experiment models the mechanism the protocol deliberately lacks. An illustration of the incentive design, not a measurement. No simulation can predict human action.
You are the rich loser of a fair verdict worth 100. Grind it in a court with appeals, then toggle to Nown and try the same.
Same case, same toy error. One rule changes.
The victim’s purse. Defense costs them 10 per round. At zero they fold.
Predict · pick one to arm the run
Guess first. The run is armed by your prediction.
They accept when the computed cost of continuing exceeds 50.
What happened · toy units, verdict worth 100
—
Finality removes the second roll. Whitepaper §6, The quorum.
Where judgment lives today
| Judged on | A court | A platform | A coin vote | Nown |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who judges? | A judge, appointed | An employee, assigned | Whoever holds the most | Proven peers, drawn at random |
| Who holds the money? | The court, or a bank | The platform | A contract its voters steer | The two traders alone |
| Who owns your reputation? | The public docket | The platform, not you | Your holdings are your standing | You do. It travels. |
| The pressure point | A judge to lobby | An office to subpoena | Whoever buys the most | No one to find |
| How it ends | Years of appeals | A support ticket | A plutocrat majority | Final in days |
| What it costs | Lawyers by the hour | The platform's cut | Fees and governance | The loser's deposit |
Each column judged by its failure mode.
What it stands on
Merit, not equality. Reputation, not identity. Stewards, not rulers.
Nown cannot be proven in advance, only adopted. It claims no more than its axioms support, and it names its own limits.
Before you ask
Answered from the design, not from promises.
They would first have to find each other. The stewards are anonymous even to each other; there is no list to steal, no room to meet in, no colleague to approach. Slashing is majority-relative, so a bloc that errs together loses its bonds together, while a lone honest dissent costs little. To coordinate at all, a steward must reveal themselves to strangers and conspire against the very system their standing lives in.
Because every appeal path ends somewhere, and wherever it ends sits an authority that can be captured. A verdict that is final in days is worth more than one still grinding through instances years later. The patient and the rich win wars of attrition, so here there are none to win.
Because it is paid work. Stewards who vote with the outcome earn the dispute fees, the loser’s deposit, and the bonds of the stewards who voted against it. Serving well also compounds karma, and karma is worth real opportunity: better counterparties, larger trades, future service. The judge is paid by the judged and owned by no one.
They can try to outspend, but the design spends back. Deposits scale with the dispute, and the quorum grows with the stake. Karma is capped by tenure, and no amount of money lifts the cap. Each ballot is sealed and can be silently revised, so a bribed steward can take the money and vote honestly anyway. An unverifiable bribe buys nothing.
Every account begins with the same irreversible creation sacrifice; a thousand accounts cost a thousand sacrifices, with no volume discount. Karma flows only from settled dealings with independent counterparties, so a ring that praises itself has no inflow. Telling persons apart without documents is an unsolved problem. The protocol raises the cost of pretending until it stops paying; it does not claim to make it impossible.
The verdict has a deadline that no one can hurry. Every signing round either completes or names the withholders; a named withholder pays and loses its seat in the retry. Failing every verdict, a pre-signed default becomes valid after a generous delay: the outcome the record itself committed, or, where the record commits nothing, a refund to the two traders. A stall burns the staller and captures nothing.
Claims that rest on facts that cannot reach the record. If the evidence cannot be checked, the quorum cannot weigh it, and the protocol says so rather than guessing. Private, reversible payment rails wait until a checkable proof exists. And it rules on the trade, never on the person: your beliefs, your politics, your life sit outside its jurisdiction.
The quorum attests and never holds funds. The two traders are the only custodians of their own escrow, at every moment. There is no company to sue, no fee-taker to fine, no owner to subpoena. The protocol itself is public-domain text and mathematics.
A harder question? Attack the design.
Contribute
The repository holds one thing today: the whitepaper. Everything else is open, and yours to build. A protocol with no company behind it moves only by the people who decide it should.
No token. No sale. No equity. You contribute because it should exist.
Released into the public domain under the Unlicense. No rights reserved. No owner.