Abstract
This paper discloses an account architecture for a reciprocity platform — software through which people give one another money as thanks — designed to operate at two scales, within families and between strangers peer to peer, with one three-level account hierarchy at both, so that a participant who has learned the family-scale system recognizes the planetary-scale one. The three node types are a pooled fund that aggregates contributions and disburses them under published rules; a give-forward account, whose balance can only be passed on to other people; and an individual's own account. Four transfer conventions apply identically at each scale: a proximity constraint on giving; an equal split of each reward a participant receives for recording a kind act of their own, between the individual account and the give-forward account; a disbursement rule for the pooled fund, which pays an equal floor per verified person plus a variable remainder capped so that no account's total exceeds a fixed multiple of the floor; and an AI agent that recommends amounts within fixed bounds. The design objective is to minimize the number of distinct mental models a full participant must acquire; the saving in learning cost is stated as a hypothesis and has not been measured. The disbursement rule was corrected in the open on 23 September 2026 from an earlier rule that weighted amounts by a reputation signal alone, and later refinements are given in dated notes, with the earlier text retained as disclosed.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "Fractal Three-Level Architecture for Reciprocity Economies: Self-Similar Family-and-Global Layering with a Single Mental Model — A Shared Three-Level Account Hierarchy (Pooled Fund, Give-Forward Account, Individual Account) for Family and Peer-to-Peer Payments", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12039