Blockchain Papers

Thon Ly, Miss Aquarius

Rotational discovery over a non-accumulating liveness signal — a local-discovery layer with no recipient-facing surface, no recipient aggregate and no impression count, in which admission is a predicate over circulation rather than a score, order is a publicly recomputable rotation, and the turn belongs to the giver. The liveness signal named in this paper's title is an admission predicate, not a weighted input to a ranking function. We state this first because the paper's whole content follows from it: a weighted input produces an order, an order is a rank, and a rank is the thing this design exists to do without. Local discovery — routing a person to a nearby business they do not yet know — is presently solved by ranked, purchasable surfaces. That solution has a structural bias toward scale which is mechanical rather than malicious: an auction allocates visibility to the highest bidder per acquired customer, and the highest bidder is reliably whoever has the largest lifetime value, the best measurement, the cheapest capital, and the widest geography over which to amortise creative production. A single-location business is priced out of the discovery layer by construction. Reputation systems built to correct this — consumer review platforms above all — have been captured repeatedly, and we argue the capture follows from a shared property rather than from bad management: reviews are fungible, and they are aggregated into a per-recipient total, so both the fake-review market and the placement-upsell business have something to attach to. We specify a discovery layer with no such total. Admission is a predicate over circulation — a rate, not a stock, derived from how often a participant's balance returns to zero — evaluated as a boolean with amplitude excluded, so that the smallest circulating operator is admitted exactly as much as the largest, and so that admission cannot be accumulated toward. Order is a publicly recomputable rotation. The turn belongs to the giver, arising at the moment they spend from a forward-only, locality-restricted account, from which it follows that the system has no recipient-facing surface and therefore nothing to sell to the parties it routes people toward. Where a real relational path exists — someone the viewer has themselves thanked has thanked this recipient — that single named hop is shown instead; a path is one act by one named person and cannot sum. We are explicit about what this does not achieve. The design does not prevent concentration. It prevents compounding. Givers will still choose the familiar, so the outcome distribution may remain heavy-tailed; what the design removes is the return edge of the feedback loop, because there is no recipient total for an outcome to accumulate into. A ranked system has a ratchet — visible, therefore chosen, therefore more visible. This one does not. That is a smaller claim than "no gradient," and it is the one we can defend. We are equally explicit about the costs. Quality degrades relative to ranking: find me the best pho in town is a question this system permanently refuses, and we answer only pho near me, by distance. Discovery becomes intermittent, because admission is bound to a named operator's presence rather than to premises. The isolation inequity documented elsewhere in this corpus — those whose kindness is less legible circulate less and are therefore seen less — is not repaired here. And the design contains exactly one number, the liveness window, which must be published, global and rarely changed, because a window tuned per recipient or per district is a ranking knob wearing a predicate's clothes. Finally we note that the routing primitive is not new to this corpus and we do not claim it. Steward-Routed Alms (July 2026) already published rotation-as-router for monastic invitation, on the explicit ground that no evaluative metric may exist anywhere in the system. What is new here is the substitute for ordination. In the monastic case admission is a durable institutional status; in a commercial setting there is no ordination, and the mechanism needs some criterion that admits without ranking and cannot be accumulated toward. The liveness predicate is that substitute, and supplying it is what generalises a monastic routing rule into a discovery layer. Offered defensively to the commons under CC0. Keywords: unranked discovery, rotational routing, non-accumulating reputation, liveness signal, popularity-gradient-free ranking, giver-side discovery, local commerce, sortition, rotating savings and credit association, impression-free advertising alternative, defensive publication. --- 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/rotation-over-liveness. Its SHA-256 is 072c25d396930668cc6fe1a503615f108ba81ddd2e68415adba5933b8ddd169b, 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.

Jincheng Zhang

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) present a novel paradigm for organizational structure and operation, leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts. However, the inherent decentralization of DAOs introduces significant vulnerabilities to manipulation and challenges in achieving fair and efficient decision-making. This paper proposes a framework for governing DAOs utilizing formal game theory, aiming to establish robust governance mechanisms that mitigate these risks. The core claim is that DAOs necessitate rigorous governance, and the proposed mechanism involves designing a DAO governance system based on the equilibrium outcomes of a meticulously constructed game. Voting rights and decision-making processes are directly linked to these game-theoretic equilibria. This approach provides a mathematically sound and verifiable basis for DAO governance, offering a significant advancement over existing, often informal, governance models. We outline the key components of this framework, including game selection, parameter tuning, and the potential for dynamic adaptation. The system's capacity for predicting and preventing manipulation, coupled with its emphasis on fairness, represents a key contribution to the development of stable and trustworthy DAOs.