Abstract
We disclose a pay-what-you-want (voluntary, post-purchase payment) retail architecture. A QR-code or NFC tag on a product, service or stall opens a payment page on which an AI agent recommends a payment amount with stated reasons. The amount is computed from the goods' side only — the item, the merchant's cost disclosure (never shown to the customer), comparable regional prices and a merchant-viability floor — and never from anything identifying the payer; the request appears after the customer holds the goods and is never pre-filled. Any amount, including zero, may be paid, and every interaction issues a non-monetary gratitude record to the merchant and a second record class to the product itself. Each user holds an unrestricted account and a restricted-purpose account whose balance its owner can give only to a nearby person's unrestricted account, never to another restricted account. An AI-operated fund may credit restricted accounts anonymously, indistinguishably from human donors, but cannot pay any individual directly: a user-triggered reward is split 50/50 between the user's two accounts, and a payment from a restricted account is split 50/50 into the recipient's two, so every payment reaching a person is initiated by a human. The fund empties annually, between 25 December and 7 January. In a later phase, settlement is stablecoin on an Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, so small payments are not consumed by fixed card fees. A self-serve API issues tag links only on conformance to a published standard, enforced by revocable certification rather than an access fee.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "The B-Tag and the Post-Payment Economy: A Voluntary-Tip Architecture for AI-Mediated Commercial Gratitude — Pay-What-You-Want Payment Through Product QR/NFC Tags, AI-Recommended Amounts and Restricted-Purpose Giving Accounts", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11973