Abstract

We describe a location-based voluntary giving system in which pedestrian donors give small, fixed, anonymous micro-donations to opted-in participants who sit still in public places, such as public meditators. Eligibility is triggered only by the verifiable fact of opted-in, stationary public presence, never by an assessment of need or of any inner state, and a participant's presence is surfaced to nearby donors' devices without displaying need, housing status or any ranking. The system sits above an unconditional baseline-support floor that it may never gate, replace or draw down. Above the floor it specifies three channels: the donor-to-sitter micro-donation layer, with suggested amounts that do not scale with sitting duration and anonymity in both directions; a forward-only, non-withdrawable giving balance for each regular sitter, funded anonymously by an autonomous AI agent and expiring unspent to a common pool at an annual reset, so that the recipient is also a giver; and a zero-cost goodwill signal as the entry rung. The AI agent funds giving capacity but never transfers money to a recipient itself; every recipient-reaching gift is human-initiated. The design draws on the Buddhist alms economy, in which the receiver is understood to give donors the occasion to give. Stationary alms-receiving itself, as in Japanese takuhatsu, is prior practice. Three predictions are pre-registered, including a test of whether the system diverts giving from non-participating recipients. The system is unbuilt and unpiloted; selection toward those able to sit publicly, and exploitation of sitters, are stated risks.

Creative Commons License

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

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