known by your record, not your name
A reputation you own. A verdict no one can buy.
Portable trust for sovereign individuals. An ownerless protocol with no company, no token, and no one to capture.
Public domain · CC0 · a design and research draft
Why it matters
Before passports, a village already knew who to trust. Not from papers, from memory. The baker delivered. The carpenter kept his word. The smith stood behind his work. Nown is that memory, rebuilt for strangers at the scale of the network.
For all of history the power to settle a dispute between strangers has belonged to a third party: a lord, a guild, a court, a platform. Every one of them could be bribed, captured, subpoenaed, or switched off, and owned your reputation for as long as it lasted.
Nown removes the third party from both. Your standing you carry yourself. A dispute is settled by a quorum that no one can find, selected for the case and gone when it ends. No one to bribe, no office to raid, no company to capture. It does not ask who you are. It asks what you have done.
The internet solved information. Bitcoin solved money. Nown solves judgment.
Three commitments
Karma
A single measure of how you have actually behaved, earned through costly action and carried between strangers. No profile, no platform, no company. Only a record of what you did. It belongs to you, and it goes with you.
Quorum
An anonymous quorum selected at random from proven peers, several steps removed from both sides, unknown to you and to each other. Not everyone decides; those who earned the right decide. Not permanently, not by decree. For this case, for this time, and gone when it ends. Their verdict is final, because no authority sits above them to capture.
Sovereignty
The protocol rules on the trade, not on the person. Your politics, your beliefs, your life are your own, and your record is yours too. You are free to act, and you carry the consequences. No authority sits above you, and your record, kept by no one, is the only thing that speaks for you.
No rulers
Not a platform moderator. Not a government office. Not a corporation. A quorum of proven peers, selected by merit, for one case and no longer.
Authority without permanence. Judgment without violence. Trust without identity.
How a dispute resolves
Every action on the protocol moves your standing, up or down. A settled trade, a verdict served soundly, a vouch that holds, each adds to it; a defection, a broken vouch, a careless verdict, each takes it away. Standing is priced in time and real risk, never in words.
The price and both deposits sit in an account only the buyer and seller control. No custodian. If both agree, it closes and no quorum is called.
An odd number of high-karma peers are selected at random by the protocol, several steps removed from both sides in the web of trust. They are unknown to the parties and to each other.
To sit, each steward posts a bond of capital and their own karma. They read the evidence, weigh it, and vote sealed, without deliberation. The stake is the skin in the game: judging costs them, so their verdict is worth trusting.
One signature completes the outcome the quorum reached. The loser's deposit, and the bonds of the stewards who got it wrong, pay the stewards who got it right. The protocol charges no fee, because there is no one to charge it.
A verdict that executes itself. The quorum emits one signature; it completes the matching outcome and no other.
What it stands on
Merit, not equality. Reputation, not identity. Stewards, not rulers.
Nown cannot be proven in advance, only adopted. It claims no more than its axioms support, and it names its own limits.
Contribute
The repository holds one thing today: the whitepaper. Everything else is open, and yours to build. A protocol with no company behind it moves only by the people who decide it should.
No token. No sale. No equity. You contribute because it should exist.
Released to the public domain under CC0. No rights reserved. No owner.