Proof-of-contribution
What you hold reflects what you gave — contribution recorded honestly, and never retracted.
Every economic system answers one question first: on what basis does anyone hold a claim? The old answers are ownership (you hold because you bought), stake (you hold because you already hold), and work-as-extraction (you hold because you burned energy, whether or not it helped anyone). Proof-of-contribution is a fourth answer: you hold because you gave something the body needed, and the body says so.
Three properties make it different from a wage. It is recorded at the moment, by the giver and confirmed by the body — not reconstructed later from memory, and not awarded by a manager's judgement. It is permanent: honest past contributions are never clawed back, diluted, or voted away, which is the whole protection against the founder made poor by the arrival of money. And it is multi-capital: hours, care, knowledge, tools, a place to meet, and the unglamorous keeping of a record all count, because value unrecognized cannot be valued, and the things that go unrecognized are reliably the things that hold a body together.
It is the basis LUV is calculated from, by way of the TEA Bank — a ledger of what a person actually invested in work their Cell accepted as kept. Both are proposals under test rather than running machinery, and the canon's own caution belongs beside them: accounting for time on task is a known failure mode, and a ledger that becomes surveillance has defeated its purpose. The safeguards are that the entry is the contributor's own word, made once a week as remembered, and that the card it sits on is theirs and goes nowhere without their say.
Two things already work without any of that apparatus. The Record holds what was promised and kept. The founding ledger of The waterfall's fifth pool holds who gave what at the start. Between them a small body already has proof of contribution, on paper, at the only scale where it can be checked by everyone.
Also called: honest past contributions · contribution recorded
Stands on: TimeEnergy · Value · The Record · Transparency
Opens onto: LUV · The waterfall · The Founder's Fund · Exchange · Commitment · Kept as a share of made
In play: table · Home
Sources: LUV — LIØNSBERG Units of Value (Cards; status: captured — "proof-of-contribution, not proof-of-stake or proof-of-work-as-extraction") · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized, Economy and Stewardship (canon-grade list) · TEA Bank (the term pages; unreviewed draft) · Where Value Flows (Guidebook Toolkit; draft — the Legacy Ledger) · The DNA of Heaven, Part IV (Fable synthesis — "no contributor is ever alienated from their contribution") · lionsberg.wiki: LUV — LIØNSBERG Units of Value
Open: No page states how a contribution is confirmed when a Cell disagrees with a member's own account of it, nor what happens to recorded contribution when a member leaves.