Qui adest, habetwho is present, has
Every sounder carries this file. Compare yours with a neighbour's. If they match, you are reading what everyone else is reading. Nobody can change it for you from far away, because nothing here comes from far away.
Somebody has to keep a radio on
Everything you use to reach another person goes through somebody else's machine. A bookkeeper, a cable, a company, a country. It works beautifully, right up until it does not, and the day it does not is the day you needed it.
The fix is old and it is not clever. Somebody on your street keeps a radio on. Not for an emergency, not waiting for one. Every night, the way a light is kept.
That is a job. It is a small job and most nights nothing comes of it, which is also true of a lighthouse. And nobody does a job forever for nothing.
So this pays.
What the work actually is
You keep a radio on. You give it a place where the street passes it, antenna up, and you leave it on. You pay the little electricity it uses. You keep the thing running and you stay reachable.
That is the whole job. It is mostly sitting there. Being reachable is the work, because a network of radios that might be there is worth nothing, and one that is there is worth a great deal on one night in ten years.
You are not paid per message. There is no toll on this street. You are paid to keep the station, which is exactly why the mail is free.
Where the wage comes from
Two radios that can hear each other share something nobody else has: the air between them.
Each one measures how loudly the other arrives, once a second. Because the path from one to the other is the same path in both directions at the same instant, the two of them get nearly the same numbers without ever telling each other what they were. Someone listening from across the room measures a different path, their own, and learns nothing.
A room with life in it moves those numbers. A person crossing, a door, a car outside. What is left after the two radios quietly agree on what they both heard is a handful of bits that only they hold.
That is the money. One bit, one baud.
Why the wage cannot be faked
Other money is made by burning electricity. Electricity can be bought, so that work went to whoever could buy the most of it, which is how mining left people's homes within three years and never came back.
You cannot buy being somewhere.
A shelf of radios in a locked room earns almost nothing, and this is measured, not hoped: the same hardware in an empty office produced nine baud in a day, and in a room where people were moving, five hundred and sixty-nine. A farm is the worst place to put one. A home is the best. Nobody designed that. It falls out of the physics, which is a sturdier thing than a rule.
And the wage is not one radio's to claim. A sounding needs both ends to sign it, so nobody earns alone, and the founder cannot get ahead of anyone by turning up early with more machines.
The tank and the pot
A wage that only ever goes up is not a wage, it is a flood. Two rules hold it down, and neither one ever takes anything off you.
The first is the tank. A station holds about a month of the watch, 65,536 baud, and the screen shows how full it is rather than a running total. Past the top it keeps earning, at a tenth of the rate, so a light that is lit is always paid for being lit. Spend some and the full rate comes back. Nothing melts, nothing is deducted, and no number here ever goes down on its own.
The second is the pot. You can burn a hundred baud for a ticket in the week's draw. Burned means destroyed: it is a payment to nobody, there is no house, no cut, no operator and nothing to refund. What everyone burned this week is the pot, and the pot is not kept anywhere. Every sounder adds up the same burns off its own ledger and reaches the same number, which is why there is no treasury to raid and nobody to ask for it.
The sky picks the winner. The draw is made out of the bits that week's soundings found in the air, which no station can predict and none can steer alone, so every board replaying the same records names the same winner without consulting anybody. A win pays at most one tank. When the pot is bigger than that, the rest is never made, and that is the only way money leaves this world.
Your tickets are worth more if your neighbours are real. Every soundkeeper you traded baud with this week multiplies them, up to five times over. You cannot invent a neighbour to do it, because the baud they pay you had to be earned first by two real radios standing apart in a real place. Bringing the street in is worth more than bringing another radio in, which is the same thing the wage already said.
There is no price here and there will be no chart. A tank has no chart, it has a level. What a baud is worth is whatever the person on the other side of the counter says it is worth, and we are not that person and never will be.
It works when the internet does not
No account, no app store, no server, no update that arrives on its own. The network is the sounders in people's windows and the boxes that keep the book, and nothing else.
A sounder reaches a few streets. A message reaches further the way things always did before the wire: it waits, and it is carried. By a neighbour's sounder if one is in the way, and by a person walking or driving if not. It is slower than you are used to and it is not a chat. It is a post office, and a post office that has never once been switched off from somewhere else.
While there is a wire, the boxes that keep the book may use it to compare their pages, the way a courier uses a road. The wire carries. It never decides. Cut it, and the book still lives in every window that keeps one, and travels the old way: it waits, and it is carried.
On the bad day, that is the entire point. On every other day it is a way to say are you there to the street with nothing else running, and it costs nothing to leave on.
Nobody is in charge
Not one baud existed before the first honest sounding. There is no treasury, no founder's share, no premine, no admin key, and no number anybody can see that you cannot. The people who wrote this are soundkeepers, on the same terms as you, earlier.
There is nothing to buy from us and nothing was ever sold. What a baud is worth is decided at a till by two people agreeing, and the first coffee bought with one will matter more than the first million.
We do not know how many sounders there are, and we never will. We only ever hear our neighbours, and we did not build a way around that on purpose.
The words
We call the act listening. We call the record a sounding, the old sailors' word for sending a wave down and learning where you are from what comes back. We call the people the Sounding Society, and they sign with two L's facing each other, : the same shape from both ends, which is the whole physics of it. Written after a name it says this one listens. Asked on its own, ?, it means are you one? Before a number it is the sign of the coin: a coffee is 5.
The rest are plain, and each one does a single job.
- A sounder is one board. It listens, it measures, it signs its half.
- A station is you, named once and for good. It owns a wallet — a sounder in your pocket — and it may also own a bookkeeper: a box that stays on, with an antenna on the street, keeping the book for everyone in earshot. Most stations are a wallet and nothing else. The station is the thing that earns.
- A soundkeeper is you, and anyone else who keeps one lit. There is no rank and nobody grants it.
- An accountant is a soundkeeper whose box stays on and keeps the whole book. Anyone may be one. Nobody has to be. The first one was only the first.
- A sounding is the record both sounders signed, and neither could have made alone.
- Baud is the money. One baud is one bit of secret the two of them share.
This is not against machines. The sounders are machines and this text was written with one. There is simply something in this work a machine cannot bring for you: another person's radio, in a real place, near yours. And if the wire is ever cut, the neighbour whose machine still answers becomes the library of the street, and this is what the street pays her with.
What it asks of you
- Keep your sixteen words on paper. They are your wallet. There is no reset and no support, and nobody can restore them for you. That is the price of nobody being able to take them.
- Put your bookkeeper where the street passes it. A window, a counter, a doorway. What earns is motion near your antenna, so height and a clear view of where people go are worth more than anything you can buy. Your own wallet in your own pocket at home is too close to count, which is correct: the counterpart that pays you is somebody else's, walking past.
- Leave them on. That is the job. Most nights nothing will happen and you will be paid anyway, because being there on the night something does is the thing that was worth paying for.
- Pay each other. A coin that only sits is a collection. Buy something small from someone near you. Tip. Take it for something you sell.
- Carry it on. It spreads by hand and by radio: you flash a stranger's board from yours, you tell someone, they tell someone. Nobody will advertise it.
- If you can, keep the book. A box that stays on in your window is the library of the street, and the street pays you with the draw.
What you are trusting
Not us. Hash this file and compare it with a neighbour's. Read the source, it is short. Every sounding is signed by both sounders that made it, and every sounder checks every record it is handed before it keeps it.
We can stop, get bored, get hit by a bus, or turn out to be fools. None of that reaches your wallet, because your wallet is sixteen words on your own paper and a ledger on your own board, and there is no door here for anyone to knock on.
And do not take our word for any of that either. VERIFY.md is every claim this software makes about itself with the command that tests it printed underneath, and at the end a question to hand to whatever machine you use for reading code: not is this safe, which invites a yes, but assume it is lying and prove it. Treat this page the same way. A promise you cannot check is only a nicer kind of asking to be trusted, and we would rather be caught than believed.
Where it is going
One street at a time, because that is the only speed a thing like this has. First two windows, then a corner shop that takes it, then the street behind. There is no launch that changes this and no number of people elsewhere that helps.
If it works, it will not look like a revolution. It will look like a light on in a window, and another one further down, and somebody you have never met knowing that you are there.
Listen near me and we both earn.
In strepitu, audiin the noise, listen
the plain text of this page is MANIFEST.md, carried by every board · compare yours with a neighbour's