For the ordinary reader

The rest of this manual explains how the system works. This page does the opposite: it walks through an ordinary month and tells you, subject by subject, what you would actually notice. No theory, no formulas, and where the news is bad it says so.

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Your pay

It arrives in your account the way it does now, only in CBER instead of euros. You get an app with it that looks like your banking app.

One difference: that balance does not sit still. It slowly shrinks along with the losses the batteries genuinely measure. That sounds unpleasant, but all it means is that money is meant to keep moving. You spend it, or you turn it into something that generates electricity.

Doing the shopping

Exactly as it is now. You pay at the till, the shopkeeper receives money, and you notice nothing at all. No waiting, no converting, no fuss.

That is a deliberate requirement: if it feels different at the till from what you are used to, something is wrong with it.

Your energy bill

Mostly gone.

Heat, light and cooking come out of your Basic Pulse: a rate of electricity that runs for everyone without conditions and without an application to fill in. Whatever you use on top of that, you pay for out of your own balance.

That floor is not a bill but a tap. A fixed rate flows in continuously, and whatever you do not use does not build up, because there is no bucket that can fill. A speed is not something you can hoard, so no wealth can grow out of it either.

Your rent runs at that same rate. The amount is fixed and known, but it comes off continuously instead of in one lump on the first of the month.

For an average household that means the necessities are covered and you only pay for the extras. For anyone on a tight budget, that is the biggest difference from today.

What you should know before you join

Four things you would rather hear beforehand than afterwards.

Turning your coin into electricity takes time. It goes in two steps: first it is settled (your coin disappears, your entitlement stands in the queue in kilowatt-hours), then it is delivered. Between the two sits a term that is known in advance, and by design it is at least as long as a dark period: an unbroken stretch without meaningful generation. This is not a delay that occasionally creeps in, it is the lower bound. For daily use you notice nothing of it, because your Basic Pulse simply keeps running and paying at the till is instant. This is about the choice to convert a large amount into electricity you want to use later.

Standing in the queue does not protect you. If the reserve falls, your entitlement in the queue goes down by as much as the balances that pay into the leak. Redeeming early buys you an earlier delivery, then, but no priority. Your Basic Pulse stands outside all of this: it is leak-free and always goes first.

A missed delivery stays visible for a while. If the bank fails to deliver a settled redemption on time, the label stands at under-backed for a minimum term. That term runs on even if the bank has delivered in the meantime: delivering after the fact does not cut it short. That way a broken promise stays visible instead of being polished away with a quick catch-up delivery.

And your trust rests on a signature. The number of coins in circulation is not public, for the reason set out in governance. That the published percentages are percentages of a real total is signed off by the auditor and the witnesses. What that signature is worth, and whether a regulator accepts it, no chartered accountant has assessed yet. That is an open question and not a closed one.

Housing, if you rent

The rent of your primary home is guaranteed up to a certain level. That full guarantee is an end goal (the Horizon): it only switches on once the backing carries it. During the build-up its form is an energy cost guarantee or a euro subsidy with kWh indexation; your daily Basic Pulse stands apart from this and simply stays. Once the guarantee is on, you do not have to do anything for it: no application, no allowance you have to hand back later, no letter.

The money no longer goes straight to your landlord. This page used to say it did, and that has been removed. A payment tied to a destination knots together three things that do not belong together: you, your address and a stream of money. And it gives your status away to exactly the party with the most power over you. If that stream stops, your landlord knows something about you has changed before you can explain it. The floor may therefore be paid to nobody but you: not to a landlord, not to a housemate, and not to whoever's name is on the household energy contract.

In the field test the guarantee therefore takes one of two forms. If the energy contract is in your name, it is an energy cost guarantee on your own energy bill. If you have no connection or no contract of your own, it is a payout that you alone control. If payment to the landlord ever returns, then only as one bundled amount per property with no breakdown per resident, and never in a way that tells a supplier anything about your floor, not even by a stream stopping.

The guarantee stays yours and not his: no promised income stream comes into being that he can sell on. That looks like a detail, but it is exactly what stops your tenancy from ending up circulating somewhere as a financial product.

The floor itself stays untouchable, and none of this changes that. It is a use right and not property: nobody can seize it, you cannot pledge it and you cannot trade it. A roof over your head is not an amount in an account but a right.

If your home costs more than the guarantee covers, you pay the difference yourself. If you live more cheaply, you keep more for the rest of your basics.

Housing, if you want to buy

This is where the difference from today is largest, so a bit more detail.

A mortgage does not exist. Money in this system does not come into being because somebody promises to pay it back, so that promise cannot slip back in through the side door either. Instead you buy your home piece by piece.

A housing cooperative owns the house. You live in it and pay a monthly amount made up of two parts: rent for the share you do not own yet, and purchase of another piece of ownership. Your rent falls as your ownership grows, so at a steady monthly payment you buy faster every year.

And that is why you can never end up in negative equity. It sits in the balance:

	Mortgage	Growing share
What you own	the whole house	the part you have bought
What you owe	almost the full value	nothing
If the price halves	your ownership halves, your debt stays: a shortfall	your ownership is worth less, nothing further
If you stop paying	forced sale	you keep what you have and rent the rest

Negative equity needs a debt bigger than what you own. That debt is not there, so it cannot happen.

If you lose your job, you stop the purchase part and pay rent only. You keep what you have bought. There is no default, because there is no repayment obligation to fall behind on. The rent that is left after that is covered by your Basic Pulse up to the guarantee. If you live in something that costs more than the guarantee covers, that difference stays yours even then, and moving to something inside the guarantee is the only way out. That is harsh, but it is what happens.

Fixing the roof is not your problem. Major maintenance is paid by the cooperative out of the rent. Owning part of the house does not suddenly make you personally liable for a bill running into tens of thousands.

Moving house means selling your share to the cooperative or to the next resident, and buying in at the new place. No remortgaging, no early repayment penalty, no bridging loan.

Where your money goes

The floor pays for the fact that you live somewhere, up to the level of the guarantee. Your own money buys the fact that it becomes yours. Those two do not run into each other, and that is deliberate: otherwise the shared pot would be building up the wealth of homeowners while the renter next door only gets a roof.

Saving

Up to a certain level you simply save in your account, just like now.

That is because the leak is a percentage of your balance, while what you put aside is an amount per month. With a small balance the leak comes to nothing and your savings grow. The fuller the account, the bigger the leak, up to the point where it eats what you add. That is where your balance settles.

That ceiling depends on what you have left over each month, not on what you earn. Anyone with nothing left over saves nothing here either. A holiday, a washing machine or a house move fits inside it comfortably. If you want to put aside more than that, you buy a piece of something that makes electricity: a solar park, a wind turbine, a hydroelectric plant. That does not leak, because it is not money but ownership, and it yields new kilowatt-hours for as long as it runs.

But it is not a safe haven. Such a share is worth what somebody will give for it, installations wear out and have to be replaced, and because everyone who saves has to go there, that market is under structural buying pressure. That is exactly the sort of condition in which prices overshoot. We rate that as one of the weakest spots in the plan and it is written up that way in the critique.

Your pension

No pot of money standing still for thirty years, because that would drain away. Instead you own a piece of generation that keeps yielding CBER for as long as it runs.

The difference is that a pension pot today has to earn a return on financial markets, with all the uncertainty that brings, while an installation simply makes electricity for as long as it turns. Your old age then hangs on something that turns instead of on something that gets valued.

Big purchases

Three routes, and paying in instalments is not one of them: save until you have it, rent, or take out a subscription.

For appliances and transport, renting and subscribing are often the easiest forms, and for anyone without savings they are the only two: with either of them you never need a lump sum. With a subscription everything is settled at every moment and nobody owes anybody anything; stop paying and the supply stops.

Instalments do not exist because an instalment is a promise, and this whole system is built not to run on promises. Two people agreeing between themselves to pay later is not something you can stop, of course, but the system does not recognise such an agreement and will not enforce it.

When something unexpected happens

This is where the plan is weakest, and we would rather say so ourselves than let you walk into it.

Anyone with something left over each month builds up a buffer to that ceiling on their own, and for a broken washing machine that is usually enough. For anyone without that, living entirely on the floor, there is little: saving does not work and borrowing is not possible, because the floor is deliberately impossible to pledge. The same protection that makes it untouchable also makes it useless as collateral.

Subscriptions catch part of it, because with those you do not need a lump sum. They do not catch everything. This is an open problem and it is written up that way in what can be held against it.

And the debt you have now

The hardest part of the whole transition.

Without a mortgage market, houses no longer cost what can be borrowed but what people can pay, and that is not a difference of a few percent. Anyone who owns a house with debt on it today watches the value drop while the debt stays put.

We have no tidy solution for that. What it means exactly is set out without varnish in the critique.

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You do not have to join the identity layer

There is one floor per person, so the system has to be able to establish that you are one person. The tidy way to do that is a wallet, a mathematical proof and a blind stamp (see who decides). If you want no part of it, you do not have to.

There is a manual admission route: a human being establishes that you are a human being. No token, no stamp, and none of your neighbours has to vouch for you. Saying no to the identity layer does not cost you your subsistence floor. That was a hole in this design for a long time: the system effectively forced you to take part, because refusing meant no floor.

You can also switch to it later, at any moment, with no fresh admission procedure and without losing anything by it. The technical route buys you no priority, no higher floor and no lower fee, because otherwise the choice would not be a choice.

What the assessor may ask is fixed in advance and is no more than that one question needs: not the document you just refused, not your home address, no relationship history, and no reason for choosing this route. They may say no, and then the same rules apply as to any decision about your floor: written reasons, review by somebody else, appeal to a body outside the community, and your floor keeps running while that appeal runs.

That you took this route is not recorded anywhere as a marker in your file. In a village, knowing which route somebody took is already knowing something about them.

Your floor does not go out because your neighbours stay silent

To keep running, your floor needs a small proof now and then that you are still there. That may come from your own community. But one attestation from a body bound by professional confidentiality (a GP, a shelter, a social work team, a housing corporation) replaces the whole neighbourhood round. Anyone who does not want to be seen does not have to ask the neighbourhood for anything.

Who gave the attestation is not something the instance knows. That holds for the institutional route too: what is recorded is that a valid attestation exists and until when, not who issued it. Of your community attesters at most one may be a landlord, employer, creditor or care provider of yours: attesting is power over somebody else's subsistence, and that power does not belong with the parties who already hold power over you.

And the most important rule: the absence of attestations is never, on its own, a ground for switching your floor off. A human being comes in first, from outside your community and outside the operation of the instance, and has to establish whether the absence has a social cause: somebody who fled, was frozen out, is detained, is in hospital or is in hiding. Notice goes out beforehand, there are ninety days of grace, and your floor keeps running throughout objection and appeal.

If you are in danger

The most dangerous adversary in this design is not the state and not a remote attacker: it is the person who shares your front door. That is why the rule set prescribes a safety route.

You declare it yourself, or a shelter, GP, municipality or police safeguarding desk declares it for you: disclosing my location or the fact that I moved would put me in danger. From that moment on, this holds.

• Your payout moves immediately. No announcement, no waiting period, no objection right for whoever held the old binding, and no fresh neighbourhood attestations.
• Your keys are covered too. If somebody has your device and your PIN, he is formally the holder. Rebinding to a new device then takes effect immediately, with no notice to him and no objection period, and his old keys stop working at that same moment.
• The outside world keeps seeing the old picture. The public view and every authorised lookup keep showing the previous destination and the previous status. The system deliberately shows the onlooker something untrue, because otherwise the announcement itself is the alarm.
• Every attempt to open your file is recorded and reported to you, never to whoever tried it.
• You get a floor without an energy contract of your own too, within 24 hours, with no attestations and no waiting period: as a card, as prepaid credit, or as a payment only you control, with no description from which anyone can read off where it came from, and collectable outside the village.
• Only you can lift the flag, or the body that set it for you. The instance itself cannot.

Two things belong here honestly. The rebinding is unannounced but not invisible: whoever holds your old device notices that it stops working. That is why you pick the moment together with the body helping you, and not alone at the kitchen table. And the old picture only covers your status and your enrolment: the published energy and money figures have to add up to the last unit, so nothing can be invented there, and in a small village a household that stops drawing can still be noticed.

And where this stands today, because it is too important to make prettier than it is. This is a requirement on whoever builds the system, not a facility that exists. No accredited body has been contracted that could set the flag, and the connectionless delivery form has nowhere been run end to end. For as long as that is the case, an instance may not recruit participants among people living at a confidential address. What is prescribed exactly, and where you can turn today, is in the privacy statement.

Children get a floor too

One person, one floor, and age is not the line. A child has a Basic Pulse just like an adult, because it is a subsistence minimum and a household with children also has the larger energy need. Children count in full in the sum that sets the height of the floor.

A parent or guardian acting for a child acts on practical delivery and not on the floor itself: the representative gets no say over it. For children, uniqueness is established without publication of any token, without community attestations, in a separate context that is not shared. When you come of age your entitlement simply carries on: no new enrolment and no fresh attestations.

What ends up about you in the ledger

Nothing.

The ledger publishes system levels and never account levels: the reserve, the backing ratio, totals and fingerprints. Individual balances, transactions, calls, positions in the delivery queue and delivery records never go in, in any form and not pseudonymously either. For your own mutations you get a private proof that they were counted into the sum correctly; that is your check, and it does not run through a line in a public list.

The queues are not a list of names or places either. Of the delivery queue only the total goes out, rounded and on a fixed cadence; of the admission queue only the length, and then only as a band. A queue you can read backwards names the people who joined and the people who left.

Who looks in your file

Your cooperative knows more about you than your bank does: your verified identity, the link to your account, your transactions, your metering data, your deliveries and your payout details. That needs locks on it, and the locks are there now.

• Every consultation is traceable to a named person, is recorded in a log that cannot be tampered with unnoticed, and you are told about it within five days.
• Anyone standing too close to you cannot get in, technically. Whoever shares your household or your address, or shared either in the past five years, whoever is first-degree family and whoever is a former partner, stands outside your file. That exclusion runs on history and not on the present tense, because the day you move out is the day of maximum danger. You may also exclude named people yourself, without giving reasons, and that person is not told of it.
• Exporting several files at once takes two people acting together, is recorded as an event with its scope and size, and every affected member is notified separately.
• You may request your own access log, and your own listing on an exclusion list or in the large-holdings register: that is your data.
• Whoever holds the membership register does not also hold the ledger, and the metering data sits with a third role.

Reading a file without a log entry is not sloppiness but a break with the rule set, with a sanction ladder behind it.

Your consumption gives away more than you think

A consumption pattern is not a neutral measurement series. From it you can infer whether you are home, when you sleep, what appliances you use, and sometimes what you believe or what is wrong with you: a dialysis machine, an oxygen concentrator, restlessness at night, a fixed fasting rhythm.

So the rule is: profiling or segmenting on consumption pattern is a break with the rule set, not a policy choice. Per identity nothing finer than one calendar day is kept. Metering data per connection finer than a day: ninety days at most, after that only daily or coarser. Delivery records for your floor: ninety days at most after the reconciliation, and usable for nothing but that reconciliation. Transaction records: traceable to an account for at most 24 months, after that only as a total. Your membership record: gone at most 24 months after your membership ends.

Those terms are grammar and not a house rule. Going over them is a break, just as much as hiding a broken meter.

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What stays the same

To keep this in proportion, because most things do not change.

You get paid, you do the shopping, you pay rent, you go on holiday. You have an app that looks like a banking app and a card that works at the till. Prices are on the shelf as usual. Your employer pays you at the end of the month.

The thread running through what does change fits in two lines: you notice nothing in the shop, and you do notice when you leave money lying still. Beyond that, you are never in anybody's debt again, and nobody holds a claim on your future.