Sources

Standards and sources

Public standards, data, and history that make the rules practical. Floor first, public tape, same rules for state, firm, and person.

Provenance and records

• W3C PROV - a standard vocabulary for who did what, when, and from what; the shape of a line on the tape.
• OASIS Data Provenance Metadata - origin, lineage, and integrity fields for records that must be checked later.
• Hedera Consensus Service docs - how a message gets a public, ordered timestamp; the write behind the tape.
• Open Contracting Data Standard - a public schema for planning, tender, award, and contract, so a state purchase can be read later.
• C2PA / Content Authenticity - a way to bind media to its provenance, so a picture on the tape can say where it came from.
• Hedera fees - a network write is paid in HBAR. Not collected on this desk. It is not a second printer.

Identity and personhood

• W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 - prove an act or a status without handing over a dossier.
• Open Badges 3.0 - a public way to record proof of completed work. Peer attestations sit alongside safety licensing; they do not replace it.
• W3C DID 1.0 - identifiers a person controls, without a central gatekeeper.
• Open Ownership Beneficial Ownership Standard - a public way to say who controls a legal person, so a firm on the tape is not an unnamed box.
• Proof of Personhood review (arXiv) - a survey of ways to tell one real person from many fake accounts; backs one verified person, one vote.

The floor

• EPI Family Budget Calculator - a place-specific basket for food, rent, care, and transport; a cited floor instead of an invented one.
• MIT Living Wage Calculator - a second, county-level estimate of basic living costs.
• BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys - what households actually spend; a check on the basket.
• HHS ASPE Poverty Guidelines - the federal poverty guidelines, a public floor figure beside local baskets. A guideline is not this desk's basket.

Cooperatives and governance

• ICA Cooperative Identity - one member, one vote, as a long-standing working principle.
• Ostrom Nobel lecture - shared resources hold when rules are equal, visible, and monitored.
• Platform Cooperativism Consortium - member-owned digital platforms in practice.
• Open Collective docs - public budgets where every expense is shown.
• TimeBanks.org - recording unpaid community work between neighbors.
• Bank of England, Money creation in the modern economy (2014) - banks create money when they lend, and who receives new money first matters.
• Grassroots Economics - Community-issued currencies for mutual aid in Kenya with open ledger data; a working example of floor-first, cooperative exchange.
• ValueFlows - a vocabulary for flows of resources, work, and exchange, so a mutual-credit line can say what moved.
• Doughnut Economics Action Lab - a social foundation met before growth; the floor-first idea at city scale.

Law and tax

• Federal Rule of Evidence 902 - parts (13) and (14) cover self-authenticating electronic records and hashes; firm footing for a public tape.
• U.S. Constitution, Article I (LII) - Section 10 holds the Contract Clause, which limits states from impairing existing contracts, and no more.
• IRS Topic 420, Bartering Income - traded labor is still reportable income.
• SEC digital asset framework - why a metering/receipt token is not an investment product.
• FSB, crypto-assets and global stablecoins - the Financial Stability Board's public work on crypto-assets and global stablecoins. A reading, not a product of this site.
• Reves v. Ernst & Young, 494 U.S. 56 (1990) - the family-resemblance test for when a note is a security. A named bill on this tape is a bill, not an investment contract.

History

• Panic of 1907 (Federal Reserve History) - private clearinghouse certificates and what happened before the Fed.
• Treasury-Fed Accord (Federal Reserve History) - the March 1951 accord that ended the wartime rate peg. The 1942 event was the peg itself. The Accord ended it.
• From Wittenberg to Bitcoin: a timely agreement - a reading of Becky Reed, "From Wittenberg to Bitcoin: Are We Living Through Another Great Reformation?", The Cooperative Edge, LinkedIn, 31 October 2026. The press, a reformation rather than a revolution, and the warning that a token is not influence. Source.

Common knowledge

• Common Knowledge and Egonomic Psychology - a reading. Four pillars: the Emperor's New Clothes, the Keynesian beauty contest, Schelling focal points, and Aumann agreement. Banks create money as credit. Mutual credit lets balances clear without a lender in the middle. The ledger is a public tape. Same rules for state, firm, and person.
• Keynes, General Theory, chapter 12 - the beauty contest (1936).
• Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1960) - focal points without a command from above.
• Aumann, "Agreeing to Disagree" - Annals of Statistics 4, no. 6 (1976).
• Andersen, "The Emperor's New Clothes" (1837).
• Chwe, Rational Ritual (Princeton University Press, 2001) - public ritual as common knowledge.
• Bank of England, Money creation in the modern economy (2014) - banks create money as credit. Also listed under Cooperatives and governance.

Links are references, not endorsements. Design research. Not an offer.