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Chapter 2

What Money Has to Do

4 recipes.

A monetary system has to do four things. It has to be stable. It has to be private. It has to be fair. It has to be durable. Stability means the unit of account holds its purchasing power across the conditions the system was designed to operate under. Privacy means the holder controls disclosure of their position and counterparty graph. Fairness means the rules apply identically to every participant, including the participants who order transactions. Durability means the system continues to satisfy the first three properties across cryptographic regime change, governance regime change, and operator regime change.

This chapter is one recipe per property. It is the shortest chapter in the cookbook because the recipes are mostly pointers to the chapters that work each property out in detail.

In this chapter
  1. Stability is not a state. Stability is a credible commitment to deploy increasingly aggressive defensive measures as conditions deteriorate — enforced by code, not by foundation policy.

  2. Privacy is the holder’s control of disclosure, sized to the verification need. Shielded by default, view-key scoped, ZK-attested. There is no master key.

  3. Threshold-encrypted mempool. Front-running, sandwiching, and selective reordering are not available, by construction.

  4. Three-phase migration with re-attestation primitives. Phase 1 in production today. Phase 3 the destination. No one-day cutover.

❦ ❦ ❦

The recipes here name the property. The chapters that follow do the work. § 2.1 points to Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. § 2.2 points to Chapter 6. § 2.3 and § 2.4 both point to Chapter 3. Read them as a map.