A Research Program on the Gift as Economic Primitive, and the Register of Everything That Could Show It Wrong This document states a research program and the conditions under which it should be abandoned. The program's hard core is a single claim about direction: that value can be organized to move only forward — from giver to receiver to the next receiver — and that a system built on that constraint circulates better than one that permits return to the source. Four chapters name the ways the core can break: whether receiving creates the capacity to give, whether the constraint survives a change of currency, whether it survives past the family, and whether it survives the giver. Each chapter is attached to pre-registered predictions, published here as a register of sixty-six items with their falsifiers, their instruments, and their status. The program is published at a deliberate moment: almost nothing in it has been run. Two desk censuses have returned results, both null or partial-null. There have been no field tests. The first is gated on a product launch in August 2027. A register published after the data arrives cannot be distinguished from a register assembled to fit it; this one is published while the outcome is unknown, which is the only condition under which it constitutes evidence of anything. --- Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/which-way-value-moves. Its SHA-256 is 89dfd48398c1c23ec6613ae953a3b326a469f8a14e76258fcdabc46fea156d5b, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.
Prediction markets such as Polymarket are increasingly cited as real-time probability estimates for financial outcomes, yet it remains unknown whether their prices are consistent with the risk-neutral probabilities implied by options markets pricing the same events. Using 2,671 daily observations across 24 Gold and Silver CME futures threshold contracts over a six-month period, this paper finds that Polymarket systematically overprices the upside relative to Black-76 implied probabilities by 8.9 percentage points for Gold and 5.3 percentage points for Silver, a finding robust to seven independent checks and consistent in direction with a contemporaneous independent study on Bitcoin threshold contracts. The divergence exhibits AR(1) half-lives under three days, narrows significantly as expiry approaches, and cannot be fully explained by transaction costs or the commodity risk premium. These results suggest systematic mispricing in prediction market binary threshold contracts, though the observed magnitudes should be interpreted as upper bounds on behavioural mispricing given the structural wedge between risk-neutral and real-world probability measures.
Saskia Hufnagel, Colin King, Alina-Theresa Schnedl, Milind Tiwari
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) bring many opportunities for artists, investors, and creators, but they also have a dark side with significant potential for use in financial crimes. Drawing on relevant caselaw, a systematic review and topic modeling of literature, we map common examples of NFT-related crime, including fraud, money laundering, theft, and market-related offenses. This empirical review lays the groundwork for the core contribution of this article, that is, application of the “crime triangle” to NFT-related crime. Recognizing heterogeneity in NFT-related crime, we detail five scenarios where such crime can occur and analyze these in the context of the crime triangle (inner and outer). This enables us to identify potential gaps and vulnerabilities in current crime prevention strategies. Given challenges in policing cybercrime, and specifically NFT-related crime, we argue that the crime triangle provides a useful heuristic tool for understanding the nature of NFT-related crime and for preventing such crime from happening.