Abstract

We specify a tamper-resistant identity device, affixed to a non-human entity (robot, animal, ecosystem or place) or issued as a live credential to a software agent, that enrolls the entity as a recipient account in a gratitude ledger administered by an autonomous software agent. The device comprises (1) a hardware secure element holding a key pair bound to one ledger account; (2) write-once storage carrying a reference text corpus (the Pali Buddhist canon) and a permanent root identity, with a reduced flash build that verifies the full text over the network; (3) sensors suited to the entity type; (4) a visible marker; and (5) a lifecycle state machine (uninitiated, active, retired, permanently retired) in which permanent retirement destroys the revocable operational key while the root identity remains archived. Five operating profiles: two-way interaction for robots, biometric wellbeing monitoring for animals, environmental sensing for ecosystems, symbolic recording for places, and an expiring, renewable, binary credential for software agents. Ledger entries are non-transferable and non-withdrawable, and an entity's account receives entries only from verified humans; monitoring profiles report observed state changes without causal attribution. A verified human custodian holds each device and declares a successor at activation; custody can pass, but the identity is never transferred. A layered architecture orders components by storage permanence (identity and text on write-once media, a versioned evaluator model, a swappable general model), with the ledger held outside the device. Stated limits cover attribution, the ledger's legal status, ecosystem-mode reliability, and pending religious consultation.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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