Abstract

A payment-system design is specified in which an autonomous, rule-governed fund places money into every verified user's non-withdrawable, give-only balance (a restricted-use balance that can only be given to another person) without ever selecting a payee. Users give from that balance anonymously to verified people physically near them, verified per action by passkey and Bluetooth or ultra-wideband proximity, one at a time or to everyone present in one action. Every give-only balance, and the fund, empties on a fixed annual date (7 January): unspent value is reclaimed to the fund, and the user's own withdrawable account is never touched, so the funded balance has no use except a gift chosen by one person for another. The paper decomposes the capacity to give into means, occasion and safe channel, and identifies the annual expiry, attached to funded capacity, as the component that makes giving universal; whether everyone in fact gives is stated as a hypothesis, tested by whether giving persists as incentive payments taper toward zero. An incentive split between spendable and give-only balances is the on-ramp, and the overjustification (motivation crowding-out) objection is met with four structural responses and an acknowledged residual. An extension funds giving in kind: the fund issues item-level gift vouchers that their first holder can only pass on, credits the consenting shop owner's give-only balance at the posted price, and selects shop and holder by a sealed, recomputable random draw. Donor anonymity removes the creditor that social pressure to give requires.

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

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