The Alignment Economy

Abstract

A peer-to-peer electronic cash system can be built on a blockchain where the base unit of currency is human attention rather than computational work or staked capital. Each verified human participant receives a fixed daily allocation of points that expire if unspent, reducing first-mover advantage. A daily rebasing mechanism adjusts all saved balances to minimize deflation/inflation as the network grows. A percent-human verification system, maintained by a decentralized network of miners focused on proof of human, inhibits bot and duplicate accounts. Miners are compensated through a transaction fee (initially 0.5%, see Appendix A for details on numbers) applied to every transaction. An arbitration and court system resolves disputes over whether an account belongs to a real, unique human. The result is a currency designed for daily transactions, not speculation, one that compensates previously invisible contributions such as caregiving, mentorship, and the maintenance of physical spaces.

1. Why This Is Needed: From First Principles

The understood universe is built on four foundational pillars: time, space, matter, and energy. A fifth, often overlooked, is essential to understanding the first four: attention. All we know, have, and do stems from attention's actions with and within the first four. Humans are, in economic terms, units of attention which can push back the tides of entropy. Each human being has exactly 1,440 minutes of attention per day. That number, the same for every person alive regardless of wealth, birth, or when they joined the network, is the foundation of everything that follows.

In our current economic system, value (the organization of matter and energy within space and time that benefits attention) is primarily measured and transferred through fiat currency. Fiat systems, including stablecoins (they are just electronic fiat), are centrally controlled, inflationary by design, and structurally disconnected from actual human contribution. A mother raising children, a family member caring for an aging parent, a mentor guiding a young person toward their calling, none of these contributions register in the ledger of fiat economics. And the problem is accelerating. AI and robotic systems already produce real output at near-zero cost, and every year they do more, faster, cheaper. What follows is predictable: businesses have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns, so when the AI/machine can do the job, the job disappears. Governments will print money to hold society together (like the COVID playbook). That makes your dollar worth less. Cost of living and asset prices climb. Workers demand more. Businesses choose the machine. It's a one-way spiral, and the current system has no exit ramp. A new monetary system must evolve if society is to remain coherent.

The only serious proposal anyone has for this future is Universal Basic Income (UBI): give every person a regular payment to cover basic needs. It's the right instinct. But government run UBI has a fatal flaw, it uses the wrong currency. Fund it by printing dollars and you get inflation, which erodes purchasing power, leading to more money printing. It's the same spiral we're already in, just wearing a different hat.

The Alignment Economy is what UBI would look like if you designed it from scratch as a currency instead of a fiat welfare program. The decentralized protocol creates the currency and distributes it equally, every day, to every verified human. No taxes, no budgets, no politicians needed. Governed by code and math, not political games.

Bitcoin has been a vital stepping stone, pioneering decentralized consensus (i.e., blockchain). But Bitcoin and its derivatives have encountered two paradoxes that prevent them from functioning as daily currency:

First-Mover Advantage Paradox. Early participants acquired a disproportionate share of the supply when Bitcoin was cheap and easy to mine. New entrants must pay dramatically higher prices or compete in capital-intensive mining. For many, this resembles a pyramid scheme more than a new economic system, psychologically discouraging adoption.

Deflation Paradox. As Bitcoin's price has risen relative to fiat, holders are incentivized to hoard rather than spend. Having learned the lesson of the infamous Bitcoin pizza transaction, nearly everyone in the space treats the currency as a speculative asset, buying and holding rather than using it for daily purchases. This directly contradicts Bitcoin's stated purpose of creating “a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash.”

Therefore, a new system is needed, one built from the start to solve both paradoxes while addressing the deeper problem underneath: the structural invisibility of the human contributions that hold society together, especially as AI and robotics dramatically shift the demand for labor. That system is the Alignment Economy.

It is not communism; wealth differences persist based on the value each person contributes. It is not capitalism as currently practiced; a daily allocation ensures a floor of economic participation for every verified human. It is something new; a coordination framework designed for an era in which the tools of production are increasingly automated, and the most essential human contributions are those that hold society together.

The sections that follow explain how it works.

2. Design Requirements

The two Bitcoin paradoxes, and the deeper invisibility problem underneath them, point to what any replacement system must do. A universal value exchange system for daily transactions between persons, companies, countries, and even AI/Bots must satisfy five requirements:

1. Decentralized control. No central authority may manipulate the money supply, interest rates, or transaction rules.
2. Minimized first-mover advantage. Late adopters must not be structurally disadvantaged relative to early adopters.
3. Stable purchasing power. Neither inflation nor deflation should erode or artificially increase the value of holdings over time.
4. Incentive to transact. The system must encourage participants to buy and sell goods and services rather than hold the currency hoping its price will rise relative to fiat.
5. Visibility of contribution. The system must make economically visible those contributions (child-rearing, elder care, the creation and maintenance of physical spaces and durable goods, etc.) that fiat currently ignores.

Every design decision in the sections that follow traces back to one of these five.

3. Daily Point Allocations

Each person's attention can be used to consume or contribute value to others. In the Alignment Economy, individuals receive a daily allocation of points. Groups such as families, companies, governments, or AI/Bots do not receive a daily allocation of points. These groups (including AI/Bots) may earn and pool points, but only through voluntary transactions with human individuals.

Points have four categories, each reflecting a different way attention creates and absorbs value.

3.1 Active Points

Each person receives 1,440 Active points per day. They may be spent how the individual chooses: purchasing goods and services, paying another person for labor, or gifting them to family members. Any unspent Active points expire at the end of the day and are burned by the protocol.

Point expiration is a mechanism that distinguishes the Alignment Economy from other existing currencies. A billionaire and a minimum-wage worker wake up each morning with the same 1,440 Active points. Accumulated wealth still exists in the form of Earned points, but every participant has a guaranteed daily flow of new purchasing power. Because unspent points vanish, there is no incentive to hoard them. They must be used.

In practice, most participants will direct their daily Active points toward family/friends, goods, or services. A spouse who sends their 1,440 Active points to a stay-at-home partner has made that partner's caregiving contribution economically visible.

3.2 Supportive Points

Each person receives 144 Supportive points per day, allocated at a rate of 0.1 points per minute to the durable goods currently in active use: desks, computers, shoes, vehicles, tools. Supportive points expire if untagged by end of day.

Only durable goods earn Supportive points, creating an economic incentive for quality and longevity rather than planned obsolescence. A chair that is used for twenty years earns twenty years of Supportive income for its manufacturer. A product that breaks in six months earns almost nothing. When a person uses multiple items simultaneously, the 144 daily points are split by time-weighted allocation across active items. Manufacturers are responsible for collecting these points via smart contracts activated at point of sale or through ongoing use detection; individuals retain the right to not use/tag their points and can override allocations.

When a company receives Supportive points, they convert into Earned points, which may be saved or paid out to individuals (through wages, ownership distributions, etc.) and/or to pay suppliers.

3.3 Ambient Points

Each person receives 14.4 Ambient points per day, allocated at a rate of 0.01 points per minute to the physical spaces occupied: buildings, parks, roads, transit systems, towns, states, and nations. Ambient points expire if untagged by end of day.

The more time people collectively spend in a place, the more that place earns. Entities responsible for maintaining these environments collect Ambient points to fund maintenance, operations, or new infrastructure. This functions as a usage-based alternative to traditional taxation: a city that attracts people earns more than one people avoid.

When a person occupies nested locations simultaneously (a room within a building within a city within a state), their Ambient allocation flows to the immediate space. Each higher-level entity collects its share from the level below, setting its own collection rate. As with Supportive points, Ambient points paid out convert into Earned points.

3.4 Earned Points

Earned points are any points an individual receives from another person, organization, or governing entity through transactions. Unlike Active, Supportive, and Ambient points, Earned points may be saved without limit. They represent accumulated purchasing power from prior contributions of value.

Earned points are the only category subject to daily rebasing (see Section 4). They are the savings layer of the Alignment Economy, the mechanism through which a person who contributes more value than they consume can accumulate wealth over time.

4. Rebasing

If every participant receives points each day the total supply of points will grow continuously, causing inflation. To counteract this, the system applies a daily rebase: an adjustment that changes the absolute number of Earned points each person holds while preserving their ratio relative to all other participants.

The rebasing formula is:

The target of 525,600 Earned points per person is one year of daily allocations (365 × 1,440). The rebase multiplier exceeds 1 while the network is growing quickly, because each new participant raises the target faster than transactions fill the pool. Once membership growth slows, the multiplier settles below 1. The number of points in your account gets smaller, but your share of the total Earned pool, your percentage relative to all other accounts, does not change. If you held 1% of all Earned points before the rebase, you hold 1% after it. Only the absolute number adjusts.

Active, Supportive, and Ambient points are not rebased because they do not persist between days. They are minted fresh each day and expire 24 hours later. Only the Earned pool (the accumulated savings of the economy) is subject to rebasing.

5. Tagging and Automation

In the early Alignment Economy, participants will log their point allocations manually, using QR codes or in-app tagging when purchasing items, entering or leaving locations, or interacting with products. Participants may also set automatic allocations: for example, directing all daily Active points to a spouse, or committing Ambient points to a workplace building via a standing agreement.

Over time, AI, and Internet-of-Things devices will automate the tagging process, using cues from calendars, sensors, geolocation, and device usage to infer which products are in active use and which spaces are occupied. Smart contracts between participants and entities (buildings, transit systems, product manufacturers, etc.) will handle the allocation of Supportive and Ambient points without requiring daily manual intervention.

The onus for collecting Supportive and Ambient points rests on the entities that receive them (manufacturers, building owners, municipalities, etc.), not on the individual. However, individuals retain the right to override automatic allocations and redirect their points as they see fit.

6. Proof of Human

Any payment system that issues daily point allocations must distinguish humans from bots and duplicate accounts. This is one of the most challenging problems in computer science and is not fully solvable. Many projects have tried and none have succeeded. The Alignment Economy approaches it as an ongoing arms race. Our goal is not to solve it perfectly but to solve it usefully. The ongoing arms race is worth fighting because AI and robotics, inflating fiat currencies, and billions in unpaid contributions (motherhood, caregiving, etc.), far outweigh the amount of fraud that will go undetected. The bar is not perfection. The bar is doing better than the system we have today: Global fraud runs at 6.43 basis points, ~5-8% of new accounts flagged as suspicious, and a shadow economy worth ~5-11% of global GDP.

To manage this, each account that receives daily allocations carries a percent-human score ranging from 0% to 100%. This score acts as a multiplier on the account's daily point allocation purchasing power. When spending daily points, the transaction value is discounted by the sender's percent-human score. If a loaf of bread costs 20 points and the buyer is 90% human, they must pay 22.2 points (20 ÷ 0.9) to deliver 20 points of value to the seller. An account at 0% receives daily allocations but cannot transact. “Non-daily allocation accounts” are allowed to receive then spend points (i.e., business account, government account, AI/Bot, etc.). The result is a self-enforcing network: participants are incentivized to verify their own humanity and to transact with others who have done the same.

The verification system must answer two questions: (1) is this a real human? and (2) does this person have only one account?

The mechanisms described below are a starting framework, not a final specification. The specific weights, thresholds, and scoring formulas will be determined by miner judgment and governance, not hardcoded into the protocol. There are too many unknown unknowns to prescribe the final system today. What counts as convincing evidence in 2026 may be trivially fakeable by 2030; the miner's judgment, not a hardcoded table, must remain the adaptive layer. The protocol will ship with a starting dashboard of reasonable defaults that governance can adjust as the threat landscape evolves.

One constraint is hardcoded: a participant can reach 100% through social vouching alone, without submitting any government ID, biometric data, or institutional credential. This is a deliberate architectural decision. If government-issued identification were a prerequisite, the system could be captured by any government that chose to restrict issuance. The Alignment Economy is designed to verify humans, not citizens.

6.1 Enrollment Fee

Creating an account requires a nominal fee (for example $1). The fee does not prove humanity. Its purpose is economic friction. Without it, spinning up thousands of bot accounts to clog the miner review queue costs nothing. With it, a fraudster attempting to run 10,000 fake accounts must front $10,000 before earning a single point. The fee is set by governance and can be adjusted as network conditions change (see Appendix A).

6.2 Social Vouching

Other verified humans can attest to an account's legitimacy by locking a percentage of their own Earned points as collateral. This is the most privacy-preserving path to verification: a participant can reach full percent-human status through vouching alone, without submitting any documents or biometrics.

The weight of a vouch is determined by the percentage of the voucher's total holdings, not the absolute number of points locked. A person willing to stake 10% of their 1,400 points (140 points) is making a proportionally larger commitment than a wealthy account staking 140,000 points that represent 0.003% of their holdings. This percentage-based weighting ensures vouching is egalitarian: a poor person's friends can vouch as effectively as a rich person's. Because the lock is percentage-based rather than a fixed amount, it scales with your balance: if you stake 10% for someone and your holdings later grow, 10% of your new balance remains locked. This means each vouch is an ongoing commitment, not a one-time cost, which creates a practical ceiling of two or three active vouches before the locked percentages begin to meaningfully constrain your spending power.

If the vouched account is later found fraudulent by the court system, the voucher's staked points are burned. Vouchers may withdraw at any time, but doing so immediately reduces the vouched account's percent-human score by the corresponding amount.

6.3 Life Fingerprint (Primary Ongoing Defense)

The life fingerprint is the system's main line of defense against fake accounts over time. It is a set of behavioral signals derived from on-chain activity that, taken together, make it increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain a fraudulent account the longer it operates. No single signal is definitive. The power is in the combination, and in the fact that signals accumulate with every day of activity.

The life fingerprint evaluates signals across dimensions including:

Network topology. Real humans transact with a wide, varied set of counterparties whose relationships to each other follow characteristic social-network patterns. Fake accounts tend to transact in tight clusters with other fake accounts, creating abnormal signatures on both measures: too little diversity in who you transact with, and too much interconnection among those partners. The system analyzes both the breadth of an account's transaction graph and the clustering patterns within it.

Flow direction. Real accounts show bidirectional flows (you buy and sell, you receive and send). Puppet accounts typically show unidirectional flows, harvesting points from multiple accounts into a single collection point.

Temporal patterns. Real humans transact in patterns that correlate with time zones, sleep cycles, and daily routines. A batch of accounts that all transact at identical intervals, that show no temporal variation, or that process transactions at rates no human could sustain (hundreds per minute) all signal automation. Velocity can be obvious temporal anomaly.

Geographic consistency. When available (from in-person transactions, IP metadata, or voluntary location sharing), geographic data should be consistent with a single human life. An account that claims in-person transactions in Tokyo and Buenos Aires within hours of each other is suspect.

Account maturity. This functions less as a signal and more as a confidence weight on the other signals. An older account with a consistent activity history has had more time to accumulate evidence of humanness, and more time during which anomalies would have surfaced. New accounts have not yet earned that confidence. The life fingerprint reflects this by giving established accounts a confidence bonus that new accounts earn over time.

These signals are illustrative, not exhaustive. Miners evaluate them as part of their ongoing audit responsibilities. The specific signals and thresholds are part of the miner's judgment, and they will evolve as attack patterns evolve. What the protocol requires is that miners justify their percent-human scores and that their accuracy is measured against court outcomes (see Section 9).

6.4 Institutional and Biometric Evidence (Optional)

Participants may also submit traditional verification evidence: government-issued ID, biometric scans (fingerprint, iris, facial geometry), photo or video matched to ID documents, or voice prints. These are evaluated by verification miners who assign scores based on evidence quality.

This category of evidence is entirely optional. It is not a prerequisite for receiving daily allocations, and the protocol is explicitly designed so that it never becomes one. Some participants will prefer to verify through documents and biometrics because it is fast and requires less social coordination than vouching. Others will avoid it entirely for privacy reasons or because they lack government-issued credentials. Both paths are legitimate.

When institutional or biometric evidence is submitted, the system generates a nullifier (a cryptographic hash derived from the credential through a zero-knowledge circuit) to prevent the same document from being used to create multiple accounts. The same credential always produces the same hash, but the original credential cannot be reconstructed from it. This catches the most basic duplicate attack (one person submitting the same ID ten times) but it does not catch fake credentials. A convincing forged ID produces a different hash than the real one. That is why miner judgment, life fingerprint analysis, and social vouching exist alongside it.

The system does not prescribe fixed point values for each evidence type. Miners evaluate the totality of evidence presented and assign a percent-human score based on their judgment, subject to accuracy measurement against court outcomes. This allows evidence standards to evolve as forgery capabilities improve, without requiring protocol-level changes.

6.5 Score Decay and Re-Verification

The percent-human score decays by 10% per month if no re-verification activity occurs. Maintaining a high score should be a natural byproduct of participating in the economy, not a separate administrative burden.

Every transaction includes a mandatory field: is the recipient a human or a non-human (business, government, etc.)? Each “human” tag contributes up to 2.5% back to the recipient's score, weighted by the tagger's own percent-human score. Five tags fully offset the monthly decay. A person who transacts regularly will never experience meaningful score loss.

Each tagger also accumulates an accuracy record. If a recipient you tagged as human is later adjudicated as a sybil, that ruling is recorded against your tagging history. This does not trigger a penalty but provides a signal to miners and the broader network for identifying accounts that may be (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting fraudulent accounts.

7. Blockchain Architecture

The Alignment Economy requires its own blockchain. The protocol's core operations (daily point minting, expiration, rebasing, percent-human scoring, etc.) need to run at the consensus level, not as smart contracts bolted onto someone else's chain.

The chain uses a Tendermint-style Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism, a variant of Delegated Proof of Stake. Validators are selected based on their proof-of-human verification accuracy and network participation, not on capital staked. This matters because pure Proof of Stake concentrates block production among the wealthiest participants, recreating the first-mover advantage the system is designed to eliminate. Account-level cryptography uses ML-DSA-65, a post-quantum signature scheme, limiting the need to be re-engineered when quantum computing matures.

The blockchain maintains a rolling 7-year window of transaction history. Blocks older than 7 years are pruned from the active chain. Current state (all account balances, percent-human scores, vouching relationships, miner records, and court verdicts) is preserved regardless of pruning, because state lives in the latest block, not in the history that produced it. The 7-year window is a governance parameter.

Anyone may operate an archival node that retains the full chain history. The protocol does not require this. A new miner joining the network syncs current state and 7 years of blocks, not the entire history of the economy since launch. This lowers the barriers to solo mining as the network scales.

An open-source prototype exists at github.com/mattfmccormick/alignment-economy-code. It is a functioning proof of concept, not a finished product. The next step is a professional engineering team to audit the code, harden it for adversarial conditions, and deploy it to a live network.

8. Miners

In the Alignment Economy, miners perform proof of human: the ongoing work of verifying that accounts belong to real, unique humans, operating one account, and maintaining the integrity of the blockchain. Miners are compensated from the transaction fee applied to every transaction on the network as well as court case bounties, keeping miner incentives aligned with the health and volume of the economy.

8.1 Miner Responsibilities

Miners have four core responsibilities:

1. Transaction processing. Facilitate all Alignment Economy transactions by maintaining the blockchain ledger.
2. Account verification. Evaluate new accounts at creation and assign an initial percent-human score. Every new account is independently reviewed by a panel of three miners. The protocol assigns reviewers using a first-in, first-out (FIFO) queue: each miner receives the next account in line, ensuring roughly equal workload and preventing cherry-picking. Miners cannot see the account's evidence before accepting the assignment. Each of the three miners independently evaluates the evidence and submits a score; the account's initial percent-human score is the median of the three.
3. Ongoing audits to source cases. Monitor accounts for signals of non-human or duplicate behavior, including unusual transaction patterns, volume beyond human capacity, and behavioral anomalies visible on the blockchain. When a miner identifies a suspicious account, they may open a formal challenge (see Section 9). A successful challenge earns the miner a bounty from the fraudulent account's Earned balance, creating a direct financial incentive for enforcement.
4. Judicial service. Serve as jurors in formal cases brought against suspected non-human or duplicate accounts.

8.2 Tier Structure

The fee pool is divided across two tiers. Validators receive a larger share than node operators, rewarding active participation in verification and enforcement.

Tier 1: Node Operators. Fee Share: 20%. Requirements: Operate a node with 90% uptime during the 30-day rolling window. No verification or jury activity required. Low barrier to entry. Anyone can join by running a node. No capital requirement or approval process. Maintains a wide, decentralized infrastructure base.

Tier 2: Validators. Fee Share: 80%. Requirements: All Tier 1 requirements, plus: 100% jury attendance when called, completion of assigned account verifications via the FIFO queue, active participation in ongoing audits, and a composite accuracy score at or above 80% over the 30-day rolling window. Missing jury duty or falling below 80% accuracy disqualifies a miner from this tier. The bounty system (Section 9.4) provides additional income for miners who successfully identify fraudulent accounts.

8.3 The 30-Day Rolling Window

All tier evaluations are based on a 30-day rolling window of performance. A miner's tier is determined by their activity and accuracy within this window, not by lifetime statistics. This ensures that incumbency confers no structural advantage: a veteran miner who becomes less accurate will drop from Tier 2 to Tier 1, while a newcomer who performs with precision can reach Tier 2 within their first 30 days of operation.

Early-network conditions. During the network's initial ramp-up period, the rolling window and tier thresholds will take time to become meaningful. With fewer miners and no 30-day history yet accumulated, the system will operate with reduced statistical confidence. This is expected and manageable. Once the network reaches a minimum of eleven active miners (the number required to seat a jury), the protocol will conduct a formal review of all accounts verified during the ramp-up period, re-evaluating early verifications under the standard three-miner process. Any early accounts that do not survive this review are closed.

8.4 Accuracy Measurement

Accuracy is measured across two metrics:

Verification accuracy: Of all the accounts a miner has reviewed through the FIFO queue, what percentage remain in good standing? Calculated as: (verifications not overturned) divided by (total verifications signed). If an account a miner verified is later found fraudulent through the court system, that outcome counts against all three miners who signed it. Because miners cannot choose which accounts they review, a low accuracy score reflects poor judgment. A miner whose panel colleagues are less careful is not penalized for their votes; accuracy is based solely on the miner's own median contribution. If a miner scored an account low and the other two scored it high, the higher median stands, but when the account is later found fraudulent, the dissenting miner's individual record reflects that they scored it correctly.

Jury accuracy: Of all jury cases in which a miner has voted, what percentage of their votes aligned with the final verdict? Calculated as: (votes matching outcome) divided by (total votes cast).

A miner's composite accuracy is the average of these two ratios. Both are tracked on-chain and can be independently verified by any participant. Falling below the 80% composite threshold removes a miner from Tier 2, returning them to Tier 1 status (node operation only, no verification or jury income).

8.5 Reward Distribution

A transaction fee (initially 0.5%, adjustable by governance) is collected on every transaction. The Tier 1 pool is divided equally among all active node operators. The Tier 2 pool is further split on every block: 60% is awarded to a single lottery winner and 40% is divided equally among all Tier 2 miners as a baseline.

How the lottery works. Each block, every Tier 2 miner generates a cryptographic proof derived from their private key and a public seed (the hash of the previous block). This is a verifiable random function (VRF): the network selects the miner whose proof output wins the lottery for that block. The winner changes every block, is unpredictable in advance, and is independently verifiable by any participant after the fact by rerunning the same computation. The lottery makes solo mining psychologically and economically viable: on any given block, a single-node operator can win a meaningful payout.

Example. Assume the fee generates 100 points on a given block and there are 50 Tier 1 miners and 20 Tier 2 miners. The 20-point Tier 1 pool is split equally: each node operator receives 0.4 points. The 80-point Tier 2 pool splits into 48 points (60%) for the lottery winner and 32 points (40%) divided equally among all 20 validators as baseline (1.6 points each). The lottery winner receives 48 + 1.6 = 49.6 points on that block. A non-winning validator receives 1.6 points. The baseline ensures that every active validator earns something on every block, supporting operational costs regardless of whether they win the lottery. Validators who successfully challenge fraudulent accounts also receive bounties (see Section 9.4), which can substantially exceed their baseline block income.

9. Arbitration and Court System

When miner audits surface strong signals that an account is non-human or that a person is operating multiple accounts, the system provides a formal dispute resolution process. There are two types of cases: (1) an account is not human, and (2) a person is operating more than one account.

9.1 Arbitration

To open a challenge, a miner must flag the account and stake a percentage of their own Earned points. The percentage of the stake reflects the miner's confidence in the claim. The defendant account is notified and given a 7-day window to respond.

The defendant may submit additional verification evidence or bring in other accounts willing to vouch by locking points. If the new evidence is sufficient, the challenger may withdraw without penalty: the defendant's percent-human score is increased based on the strength of the new evidence, and the challenger's stake is unlocked. No court is formed.

9.2 Court Proceedings

If the challenger is unconvinced after arbitration, the case escalates to court. At this point, the challenger's stake is placed at risk. The defendant account's Earned balance goes into protocol escrow: no outbound transfers, no new vouches or stakes from it. Daily allocations keep minting and stay spendable as normal and the account may continue to recruit vouchers willing to lock capital on their behalf.

A jury of 11 miners is selected at random from the pool of Tier 2 miners. The odd number prevents ties. Jurors cannot have direct transaction history with either the challenger or the defendant, reducing risk of coordinated behavior. Each juror must stake 5% of their own Earned points to participate, ensuring they have skin in the game. Jurors who vote with the majority have their stakes returned; jurors who vote against the final verdict lose their stakes, which are burned.

The court follows a standardized case format: unique case ID, court level, date opened, evidence submission deadline, voting deadline, current status, etc. Jurors review the defendant's account history, verification evidence, the challenger's explanation and staked amount, and any evidence submitted during arbitration or court.

Voting is time-boxed (7 days) and asynchronous. Each juror votes “human / one account” or “not human / duplicate accounts.” Votes are hidden until all votes are in then are opened and recorded on-chain with staked amounts and timestamps. Over time, the protocol's interfaces and documentation will be built in additional languages. With that said much of the evidence will be numerical: transaction graphs, behavioral patterns, timestamps, cryptographic hashes. For text-based evidence, miners can use widely available translation tools to evaluate it outside the system.

9.3 Escrow During Proceedings

From the moment a challenge stake is posted, the defendant account's Earned balance is held in protocol escrow: no outbound transfers, and no new vouches or stakes may be made from it. Daily allocations continue to mint and may be spent as normal. The daily allocation is the floor the protocol guarantees every account, including one under suspicion. Incoming transfers during a case land in escrow. If the account is found human, escrow releases immediately.

9.4 Outcomes

If the account is found non-human: The account is closed. A percentage of the escrowed Earned balance is awarded to the challenger as a bounty (see Section 9.5). The remainder, along with points staked by vouchers, is burned. The challenger's original stake is returned. Jurors who voted correctly have their stakes returned.

If the human has more than one account: The earliest-created account survives; all others close and their balances follow the non-human outcome above. The surviving account additionally pays a penalty of twice the harvested allocations (overlap days × 1,440), burned from its Earned balance.

If the account is found human: Escrow releases immediately. The challenger loses their staked points: half is awarded to the defendant as compensation for the freeze, and half is burned. Jurors who voted correctly have their stakes released.

9.5 Bounty

When a court finds an account to be non-human or duplicate, the challenger receives 20% of the condemned account's Earned balance as a bounty. The remaining 80% is burned. This bounty creates a direct financial incentive for miners to actively seek out and challenge fraudulent accounts, solving the enforcement problem that would otherwise leave the system dependent on altruistic policing.

The bounty is resistant to the “cobra farming” problem (manufacturing fraud in order to collect the reward for finding it). To plant a fake account and later collect the bounty on it, an attacker would need the fake to pass three independent miners assigned via the FIFO queue, none of whom the attacker can choose.

9.6 Appeals and Protections

If desired either side may file one appeal. The appeal convenes a new jury of eleven miners with no overlap from the original jury. The appeal verdict is final; no further appeals are permitted. Only one active case may be brought against an account at a time; multiple miners cannot pile simultaneous challenges against the same defendant. After a case is resolved, the account enters a six-month protection window during which it cannot be challenged again, to prevent harassment. If a miner observes new suspicious behavior during this window, they document it and wait. Once the window expires, they may bring a new case with whatever evidence they have accumulated. In all cases, the burden of proof rests on the challenger. All proceedings are publicly visible on the blockchain. Anyone may observe the process and outcomes, but only those willing to stake points may participate.

10. Sample Transactions

The following example traces 12 participants over 11 days, each joining at different times and transacting at different rates. To keep the math readable, only Active points are modeled; Supportive and Ambient flows are omitted. Each person receives 1,440 Active points per day. The target Earned balance per person is 525,600, one year of daily allocations.

Day 1. Participants A and B join and pay each other their full daily allocation. Each holds 1,440 Earned points. The pre-rebase total is 2,880, but the target (2 × 525,600) is 1,051,200, so the rebase multiplier is 365. Both balances scale up to 525,600. The jump looks dramatic, but it is share-neutral: the rebase pins the average balance at the one-year target from the first day, and each participant still holds exactly 50% of the pool.

Days 2-6. Participants C through J join gradually. Each new entrant starts with zero Earned points and begins transacting. Because every new participant raises the target, the multiplier stays above 1 throughout the growth phase. On Day 6, four participants join in a single day, jumping the count from 6 to 10. The multiplier is 1.66.

Day 9. The target is 6,307,200 while the day's transactions push the pool to 6,324,480. The multiplier drops below 1 for the first time, to 0.997. The number in your account shrinks daily, but so does everyone else's by the same proportion. Your share of the total pool, and therefore your purchasing power (in points), remains constant.

Day 11. All 12 participants are now active and transacting. The multiplier is 0.997. Note that Person L, who joined on Day 8 with nothing, already holds 26,931 points, more than C (23,554), who joined six days earlier, while early joiners A and B are past their nominal peaks and shedding share as the rebase does its work.

The table below summarizes rebase calculations at key intervals:

Person L joined on Day 8 with zero Earned points. By Day 11, L has accumulated 26,931 Earned points, exceeding early joiners like C. This is because other participants sent L points in exchange for value contributed. Purchasing power accrues to those who provide value, regardless of when they joined. A and B still hold the largest nominal balances; at a one-year target, full convergence between founders and newcomers plays out over months, not days. The direction is locked, though: a participant who stops contributing sheds share every day. A complete transaction-by-transaction model with all 12 participants across 15 days, including daily rebase calculations, is available in Appendix B.

11. Attack Vectors and Limitations

Sybil attacks. A single person creating many accounts to harvest multiple daily allocations. The percent-human system mitigates this by requiring each account to independently establish a verification score through three independent miner reviews (see Section 8.1), and the court system provides a mechanism to challenge and close fraudulent accounts. Perfect prevention is unlikely; the goal is to make attacks expensive enough to be unprofitable.

Miner collusion. A group of miners conspiring to control jury pools or manipulate verification scores. The random selection of 11 jurors from the full eligible pool makes this expensive: controlling a majority of any given jury requires controlling a significant fraction of all active miners. As the network grows, this attack becomes exponentially more difficult.

Vouching rings. Groups of accounts vouching for each other to inflate percent-human scores. Because vouching requires staking a percentage of holdings (not an absolute amount), and because voucher stakes are burned if the vouched account is found fraudulent, the cost of participating in a vouching ring scales with the number of fraudulent accounts being supported.

Spam attacks on verification. Mass submission of fake accounts to overwhelm the miner queue. The enrollment fee is the primary defense.

Tagging fraud. Falsely claiming to use products or occupy spaces to redirect Supportive or Ambient points. As IoT and sensor networks mature, automated verification will reduce this vector. In the early system, manual tagging is susceptible to fraud, but participants retain the right to allocate their points as they see fit.

Death and lost access. If a participant loses access to their account or dies, their Earned points are effectively removed from circulation. The protocol supports inheritance mechanisms including multi-signature beneficiary designations and dead-man switches (configurable inactivity thresholds that trigger beneficiary claims).

12. Conclusion

Every monetary system we have is failing in ways that will become catastrophic as AI and robotic automation accelerate. The only serious proposal for the coming displacement (UBI) exacerbates the current inflation challenges of centralized fiat currencies. Bitcoin proved decentralized consensus works and it solved inflation by over-indexing on deflation, but the deflation and first mover advantage paradoxes prevent it from functioning as daily money.

The Alignment Economy solves these challenges. It is a peer-to-peer electronic cash and UBI system built on a blockchain, designed for daily transactions rather than speculation. It uses daily point allocations tied to human attention to reduce first-mover advantage, daily rebasing to minimize inflation/deflation, and a proof-of-human mining model to uphold network integrity. Miners are compensated through transaction fees. A court system with stake-based bounties incentivizes fraud enforcement.

Beyond solving the Bitcoin paradoxes, the Alignment Economy makes three things visible that every previous monetary system has ignored. First, historically uncompensated work becomes economically visible (i.e., a stay-at-home parent receives their own daily Active allocation, generating measurable economic activity). Second, Supportive points reward durability over disposability, creating a structural advantage for manufacturers who optimize for longevity and repairability over planned obsolescence. Third, Ambient points can replace traditional taxation with a usage-based model: a city that attracts residents because its infrastructure works earns more than one that does not, creating a direct feedback loop between governance quality and funding.

Large transitions in how the world works happen slowly, then all at once. For centuries, horses were humanity's best means of transportation. The automobile didn't replace them overnight. It took decades of iteration, infrastructure, and cultural shift before the advantages became undeniable. And then there was no going back, not because anyone mandated it, but because a better way to move from point A to point B had arrived. Our economic system is at a similar inflection point. For most of recorded history, societies have relied on centralized currencies, systems that always, eventually, failed. Bitcoin proved that decentralized value transfer is possible, the way the first automobiles proved that horseless travel was possible. The Alignment Economy is the next step: a system built from the start for daily human transactions, one that measures what people actually contribute. Once the advantages become undeniable, there will be no return. The structural case for change is clear, the tools to build it now exist, and global circumstances require it.