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How money appears and disappears
Money tied to something behaves differently from money tied to nothing. This chapter shows where a coin comes from, where it goes, and why a balance left standing slowly gets smaller.
Where a coin comes from, and where it goes
The amount of money moves with the amount of electricity in the batteries. Charge goes in, money appears. Charge goes out, it disappears again. There is no third way.
Money appears when electricity goes into the reserve and stays there. Not as a reward and not as a subsidy, but because something is lying there now that was not there before.
Money goes away when somebody draws that electricity back out. The coin disappears at the same moment the kilowatt-hour goes onto the grid. Not passed along to somebody else, but gone.
Direct consumption does not count. If you generate and your neighbour uses it straight away, nothing has been stored and so no money comes into being. Only what is added to or taken from storage on balance changes the money supply.
Being paid and creating money are two different things, and people confuse them easily. If your panel delivers straight to your neighbour, he simply pays you, with coins that already exist. It is only that nothing is added to circulation, because nothing was added to back it. So the shortest route is not the poorest one: it is the thriftiest, because nothing is lost on the way and nothing needs backing.
Where the floor comes from
Whoever supplies is paid at the price that comes out of the auction. Because the bank buys in below one when there is a surplus, more electricity then sits in the reserve than there are claims against it. The bank mints that room after the fact, fully backed and publicly attributed, and out of it pays the running costs and everyone's Basic Pulse.
That way every kilowatt-hour deposited feeds the floor, without leaving the supplier empty-handed in times of scarcity. Were it the other way around, with the floor skimmed off first, a supplier would earn least at precisely the moment you need him most. That ends in a downward spiral.
That minting of the margin does lock up the moment the coin goes under-backed. Every recognised kilowatt-hour is then used to close the gap first, and only after that to pay anything out again (see how the backing climbs back).
The height of that rate is set centrally, and it is the heaviest knob in the whole system: it decides how much of the yield from all new electricity goes to everyone instead of to whoever generated it. That is why it sits behind three locks (see governance). It can only go up, only when the structural income supports it, and only in public with thirty days' notice. A floor that grows faster than generation is not a floor but a promise.
And anyone who does not trust the bank operating that knob does not have to protest. They can walk away: a neighbourhood can disconnect itself, convert its claims into electricity that physically exists, and reconnect later. That is not an emergency measure but the built-in fire exit.
CBER Monetary & Energy Simulator
Live SimulationMonthly Energy Yield
+446 CBER (446 kWh)
Basic Payout
180 CBER
Luxury Surplus
266 CBER
🛡️ Reserve Backing Ratio: 1.000 (100% Backed)
Why money standing still slowly drains
A full battery left standing for a month is no longer quite full afterwards. And moving electricity into a battery and back out costs something too, as does every metre of cable in between. That is physics, not neglect. If the money is to follow the charge exactly, it has to leak along with it.
Every loss lands on the balances. Not only standing still, but everything physics eats on the way: while charging, while waiting, while discharging, and in the cable. At the close of each interval it is deducted from the luxury balances.
The rate is computed, never chosen. It is the total measured loss of that interval divided by all luxury claims. There is no knob on it; it rolls out of the meters. The money does not lie about the charge.
Nothing is ever anticipated. A loss that has not yet happened cannot be measured, so it is not booked. Read the meter first, deduct afterwards.
Hoarding becomes unattractive. Whoever leaves their money sitting watches it slowly evaporate. Whoever spends or invests it does not. So money goes to work and goods sooner than to an account where it sits waiting.
Saving is possible, but differently: this is the new interest. Anyone building something for later converts their balance into a share in real generation: a solar park, a wind turbine, a hydro plant. That share pays no interest; it pays new kilowatt-hours for as long as the installation keeps running.
The difference with classical interest is physical, not legal. Interest is money making money: nothing is added to the world, it moves from one person to another, and the bill ends up with whoever had to borrow. A share in generation does add something: electricity that would not have existed without that installation. The return then comes from physics rather than from somebody else's debt.
And the system picks no technology. Every measured kilowatt-hour counts the same, whether it came from sun, wind, water or anything else; the meter does not ask where it came from. Only raising the Basic Pulse carries an extra condition, namely that new durable renewable generation stands behind it. That is a deliberate exception and it lives in governance, not here.
And there is a loop the classical system lacks: what you build to save for yourself fills the reserve that everyone's money rests on. Saving for yourself makes your neighbour's money stronger.
Passive Hoarding vs Productive Saving
Monetary StrategyLiquid Luxury Balance
1.000 CBER
Subject to measured network leakage tax (demurrage).
Physical Reality
Self-Discharge & Wear
Capital slowly evaporates to mirror battery thermodynamics, encouraging circulation.
Why everybody pays the same rate
It sounds fairer to let each person carry their own loss: your battery leaks, so you pay. Yet it cannot be done that way, and the reason is worth knowing.
A coin out of a good battery would then be worth more than a coin out of a leaky one, and you would only find out when you came to spend it. The supermarket inherits your leakage rate without being able to see it or choose it. That is how money falls apart into a separate rate per cellar, and then it is no longer money but a voucher with small print.
So no loss is ever charged to a single person, not even to whoever caused it. The network belongs to all of us, so the losses of the network do too. A coin is therefore worth exactly the same everywhere: one next to a wind farm and one in a flat on the other side of the country.
You do see it happening on your own account, and that is the point. Nothing vanishes into a system pot that nobody can inspect.
And because the rate follows the real loss of the whole network, it doubles as a readout of how thriftily a society handles its electricity. If a lot of electricity sits waiting for a long time, everybody pays a lot. If it is generated and used quickly, there is little to leak and everybody keeps more. That number needs no explaining; it is simply there.
The Basic Pulse is exempt. Anyone living on the floor does not contribute to the network's losses. That is a choice and not an accident: it means the luxury balances also carry the leak on the electricity consumed through the floor. Whoever claims most on the network pays most for the network.
Measure fast, pay continuously, price slowly
The grid balances continuously and the meters read continuously. So there is no reason to move money in lumps the way the euro does, with a salary on the twenty-fifth and rent on the first. Those lumps exist because paper and clearing were slow, not because anything requires them. Here pay, rent and the floor simply keep running, at the rate the grid itself works at.
But not everything can travel at that rate. A loaf of bread with a different price every quarter of an hour is unusable: you can plan nothing and compare nothing. So prices lean on the Reference kWh, a multi-year rolling average, while redemption happens against the meter reading of the moment. The money moves fast, the prices move slowly, and those are two separate things.
The same goes for the leak. Measured per quarter of an hour, the loss swings with the weather and with faults, and a balance that visibly ticks unevenly reads as unreliable when it is really just a warm day. So the measured loss is added up over a longer window and written off evenly.
Note the difference, because it is precisely the line this system guards: adding up measurements over a longer period is not estimating. Nothing is invented and nothing is predicted; it is only a wider window on what was actually read off.
How large can your balance get
This is the question everybody asks the moment they hear that money leaks, and the answer is more reassuring than expected.
The leak is a percentage of your balance; what you can put aside is an amount per month. On a small balance that leak amounts to nothing and your savings simply grow. The fuller your account, the bigger the leak, up to the point where it eats exactly what you add. That is where your balance settles.
So your balance runs towards a ceiling, and that ceiling sits at your monthly surplus divided by the leakage rate. Note: your surplus, not your income. Whoever has nothing left over saves nothing here either.
The leak does not prevent saving, then, it puts a roof on it. How high that roof sits depends entirely on what you have left over each month and on how hard the network leaks, and the second of those we will only know once it is measured.
One thing stays honest: whoever takes in little or nothing has a low ceiling too. For anyone outside the luxury economy this solves nothing. That is what the floor is for, and that is where this chapter stops.
Too much electricity, or too little
The reserve must not overflow and must not run dry. There are two knobs for that, and both work through the price rather than through a ban.
When the batteries are full, the bank stops issuing coins for further storage. There is nowhere left for that electricity to sit, after all. The surplus goes to public projects or temporarily lifts everyone's Basic Pulse. What it does not do is dilute the coin.
When there is too little, the bank first pinches the luxury economy and industry, so that heat, light and cooking stay standing for everyone. The price rises, and that is exactly the point: people start being careful of their own accord. The floor is hit last, not first.
What happens when the backing is not round
Full backing is the goal, not a precondition. During the build-up the backing is by definition not round, and later it can drop as well: through a disaster, or because somebody deliberately chooses it. The system has to survive that without pretending nothing is wrong.
Below one hundred percent the coin is formally under-backed, colloquially simply fiat. No euphemism and no subordinate clause in a footnote: the status changes visibly and it is stated in the open. At full backing it is called fully backed.
Redemption is always possible, at the meter rate. If the backing stands at 90%, your coin yields 0.9 kWh at the socket. That sounds like a loss, but it is precisely the protection: because everybody redeems at the same rate, that rate stays exactly where it was while people collect their money. Being first in the queue gains you nothing. And that fear of being too late is exactly what causes a bank run in the first place.
One gap stays open here and the spec closes it explicitly: redeeming against a stale reading would pay. So settlement always happens against the next audited meter reading (forward pricing), never a stale one. Whoever sees a loss coming therefore redeems, by definition, at the already corrected rate.
What happens when the backing shifts
Fully backedmeasured in batteries and reservoirs
every claim anyone holds
Backing ratio
1.000
100% backed
🔌 At the socket
1 CBER = 1.000 kWh
what one coin actually delivers
🛡️ Running first gains nothing
Redemption is calculated live against the meter. Running first yields no extra energy; every coin holder keeps their exact pro-rata share.
Redemption takes two steps, and the queue in between shares the loss
Redeeming is not one act but two. First it is settled: your coin disappears and from that moment your entitlement stands in the delivery queue, denominated in kilowatt-hours. Then it is delivered: the electricity leaves the reserve and you leave the list. There is time between those two, because delivering electricity is not the same as moving a number.
That gap in between used to be a hole, and the ugliest one in the whole design. Once you stood in the queue you went ahead of everybody still holding coins, and meanwhile you did not pay into the leak either. If electricity was lost in that window, the loss fell entirely on the people left behind.
Work that through and you can see what goes wrong. For anyone who was going to use their electricity anyway, redeeming as early as possible was nearly always the smart move: you swap a leaking coin for a leak-free entitlement, fixed in kilowatt-hours, that also goes first. That pushes the queue structurally full. Not in a panic and not in one day, but continuously: a bank run in slow motion.
Now the queue shares. If the booked reserve falls, every entitlement in the queue is written down by the same factor as the balances that do pay into the leak, and that factor is exactly the same for the first in line as for the last. Whatever is leak-free carries nothing: the Basic Pulse, and working capital up to a few days of your own consumption. An entitlement inherits the exemption of the balance it was settled out of. The backing ratio stays exactly where it was under that write-down; that has been checked, and it is precisely why this is a repair and not a shift in the other direction.
Note what that factor sits on: on the realised fall of the booked reserve, not on the measured loss. Those are not the same number. If the fleet sits full against the audited cap, a measured loss sometimes does not touch the book value at all, and then nothing is written down and nothing is levied. Writing down anyway in that case would destroy entitlements while the backing ratio rises off a loss, and that is exactly the failure mode the whole rule set is written against.
So redeeming earlier no longer buys priority, only earlier delivery. There is exactly one priority left in this system, and that is the Basic Pulse.
What you should know before you say yes
This stands apart because these are the things you would rather hear beforehand than afterwards.
Redemption takes two steps, and between those steps sits a term. That term is published 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. So your entitlement sits in the queue for days, and that is the price of a backing that is physical rather than on paper.
The queue shares in every loss. Having settled does not protect you. If the booked reserve falls, your entitlement in the queue goes down with it, by the same factor as the balances that pay into the leak.
A missed delivery puts the label on under-backed for a full window. Even if the bank has delivered it in the meantime. The label runs with a hysteresis, so it does not flip back and forth, and that also means it does not spring back the moment the delivery has been put right.
And be honest about what your trust now rests on. Now that the coin total is no longer public, the auditor and the witnesses sign off that the published percentages really are percentages of a real total, that the caps on issuance were held, and that the backing ratio was computed on the book values. Exactly how much work that attestation takes, and whether a regulator accepts it as the basis for a published backing ratio, is an open question. No chartered accountant has looked at it yet. That is stated here because it is true, not because it sounds good.
Energy is not the same as power
kWh is not kW, and that difference is physics, not bookkeeping. At a peak moment the energy can still be sitting there while the power has run out: there is enough in the batteries, but they cannot push it out fast enough. A backing of one hundred percent says nothing about that.
So next to the backing ratio there is a second live number: how much power is guaranteed to be callable at once, computed for a cold winter day rather than a favourable one. And a third beside it: how long the reserve lasts in that weather with the floor and the contracted load running off it. That third number is not live. It runs on the slow cadence of the queue and is computed from the rounded reserve and the published queue. Live, it would be a window onto the queue, and so onto the people standing in it.
If everybody calls at once, a public queue forms, and in it the Basic Pulse goes first: heat, light and cooking before anything else. And if the bank fails to deliver a settled redemption within the declared term, the label flips to under-backed, even with the backing ratio above one. A promise that was not kept on time simply counts as under-backing here.
What is on the meter, and what was taken off it
The backing ratio is there live and at full resolution. It never carries a blur, because a number the label and the caps run on is not allowed to be vague.
The reserve appears rounded, always downward, to a grain published in advance. That grain sits between half of its own measurement uncertainty and that uncertainty itself. Finer would suggest digits nobody has; coarser would cut the display loose from what the meter can still support. It is the uncertainty of the content reading that counts, so of how much sits in the battery, and not the uncertainty of what flows through it. The grain is fixed at commissioning and, with the meters unchanged, may only get finer, never coarser. The booked value stays exact internally, every rule computes on that exact value, and no rule whatever runs on the displayed number.
The queue appears only as a total depth in kilowatt-hours, on a slow cadence and rounded upward. Upward, because a queue published too low would make the backing look better than it is, and that is exactly the failure mode the whole deduction is written against.
The number of coins in circulation no longer appears per period, and that reason sounds counterintuitive at first. Backing ratio, reserve, coins and queue hang together in one formula: the backing is the reserve minus the queue, divided by the number of coins. Publish three of the four and the fourth is fixed exactly, however coarsely you round it. And that queue consists of claims by individual people; in a village that is often one person. So one of the four had to go, and it became the number of coins.
What you want to know as a holder is not how many coins exist, but whether coins are quietly being added. That stays visible: every issuance is published per period as a percentage of the total, and the auditor states alongside it that the caps were held.
But call it a shift, not the same thing. Those percentages are percentages of a number you no longer see. Anyone quietly minting extra still visibly sinks in the backing ratio, so that route stays shut. The route that opens is a different one: an instance that quietly recomputes the backing ratio on the rounded display value of the reserve instead of on the book value publishes exactly the same kind of number as an honest one, and nothing in the rule set sees that from the outside. A separate closing control has been written for it, which the auditor signs off by name. So the check has not gone; it has moved from you to him.
The level returns once holdings are spread widely enough: only when the largest anonymous holding stays below a fixed threshold for twelve months running may all four numbers go out again. That threshold is a fifth of the same margin the label runs on; with that margin at two per cent, the largest holding may be at most four tenths of a per cent of all coins. That test deliberately runs over holdings and not over redemptions. A threshold on redemptions is something the bank can steer itself, through the timing of settlement and delivery, and steering it works out precisely at the expense of the largest holder. What becomes public about that test is only the outcome, pass or fail, and never the share it ran on. How that trade-off was made is in governance.
How the backing climbs back
Dropping happens by itself; climbing back is the hard part, and that is where one of the most important self-repair rules of the system sits.
While the label is under-backed, not a single coin is minted against over-backing. No purchase margin, no payout of over-backing above the target path, no topping up of the buffer. Whoever supplies electricity is still paid, because that is the route back: every recognised kilowatt-hour then closes the gap instead of becoming a new coin.
Without that rule the meter would hang just below the return threshold. The bank would mint its full room, push the backing back down to the edge, and the label would stay under-backed while the reserve was in fact recovering. The guarantee would never return, not through bad luck but through the arithmetic.
The margin not minted during such a stop does not lapse. It is kept and put on the table in one figure at the moment it is released, with the date announced in advance.
And suspending alone is not enough, because the bank can also pin itself shut with its own purchase price or with a floor larger than the inflow. So each interval it computes whether the return is reachable at all at its own prices, and publishes a pass or a fail. On a fail the purchase price has to come down or the recovery path has to be revised.
Flagged Issuance: Fiat as an Instrument
Unbacked issuance is not a malfunction but an instrument, as long as it happens openly flagged: the only forbidden sin is silence. Openly printed coins are simply money the way all of today's money is: they float on trust, and sometimes that is necessary: an acute crisis or disaster, or the legacy money with which the climb begins (a society's existing money is unbacked by definition at the start). "Liquidity for a young economy" is emphatically not a ground: there is exactly one build-up issuance, capped in advance and fixed in the charter, and that ground lapses for good the first time the backing touches one hundred percent. Six things keep it honest:
- The meter shows the bill. Every printed coin visibly increases the shortfall to 1:1. Printing is a public promise to redeem later, by storing or by burning. Every decision is stated as a percentage of the money that already exists, never as a number of coins, and it publishes what it costs per hundred coins and who receives it.
- A recovery path comes with it, and that path has teeth. Every decision says in advance how long it takes and which backing must be reached by when. If the backing sits below that path for two measurement periods in a row, the mint press locks automatically (no margin and no new flagged issuance), buffer claims are burned towards the path as a duty, and the path has to be revised in public. Buying electricity does carry on, because that is the route along which the gap closes.
- There are hard caps on it. At most 5 percent per emergency mandate and at most 10 percent cumulative per twelve months. Raising those caps is only possible through the slow parameter protocol, never through the emergency mandate itself. A mandate not carried out within one interval lapses, the same crisis ground cannot carry a second emergency mandate within twelve months, and the body that declares the crisis is not the body that spends the proceeds.
- Front-running gains nothing. Dilution counts from the moment of the decision, not from execution. Between announcement and execution, redemption is already settled at the diluted rate, so whoever runs for the door right after the announcement gets exactly the same rate as whoever stays put.
- Dilution cannot be exported. Federation partners settle at the audited backing ratio, so printing buys nothing extra from the neighbours; it only dilutes the own coin, visibly to all.
- The floor stands apart. The Basic Pulse follows the Sustainable Ratchet and is never raised on printed promises.
And the goal is fixed: back to 1:1 as fast as is responsible. Fiat is a tool for a while, not a destination. Precisely thís management, when to deploy the fiat instrument and how quickly backing is restored afterwards, is the core task of the central bank: it manages the fiat ánd the backing, and the public meter judges it on both. Who may decide to print is politics (slowly via the parameter protocol, fast via the emergency mandate with its sunset); thát every printing decision stands flagged on the meter is grammar.
Rent, paid from the Basic Pulse
- The energy pulse is a flow rate, not a bundle: a tap stands open continuously at a fixed rate, and heat, light and cooking run out of it. Whatever you do not use does not build up, because there is no bucket that can fill. A speed is simply not something you can hoard, and that is why nothing has to expire at midnight.
- The housing cost 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 your landlord nothing changes about what he receives, only about when, and almost nothing leaks on the way because the money is never left sitting anywhere. If the home costs more than the floor carries, the citizen tops up the difference from their Luxury Capacity. Whoever lives more cheaply keeps more of that flow for the rest of their basics: one stream, one waterfall.
- The floor pays for use, not for wealth: it covers rent and not the building up of ownership. Rent is a roof you buy the use of; buying a piece of a home is property that becomes yours. If the shared pot paid for the second, everybody would be building up one person's wealth together, while the tenant next door only gets a roof. Anyone who wants to build up ownership does so from their Luxury Capacity.
- Not tradable, and not tied to a destination: the pulse is a use-right, not a coin you can save, pledge or resell. That is what makes it unseizable. What no longer belongs to it is a payment going straight to a registered provider: that tied together person, address and payment stream and disclosed your status to your landlord. In the field test it runs through your own energy bill, or through a payout only you control.
- The guarantee belongs to the resident, not to the landlord: the provider receives for as long as they house somebody, and holds no promised income stream. So there is nothing to sell, to pledge or to bundle. If there were, a backed tenancy would be circulating as a financial product, and that is exactly the kind of paper that should not exist here.
- The price brake is built in: every CBER of rent visibly eats into the same rate as heat and light, so tenants stay price-sensitive. Providers register with public rents in the ledger.
- The housing cost is guaranteed, the house is not: the bank can pay rent, not build houses. Supply remains the task of community and market; the system delivers guaranteed tenants, cheap building capital (the leakage chases capital into bricks) and a tax that lifts everyone's floor.
- The homeless person carries their full rent with them: every registered shelter has, by definition, a paying tenant in them. The roof never has to reject the tenant over money.
The guaranteed housing level is an end goal (the Horizon) and falls under the same Sustainable Ratchet: it only switches on, and only rises, when the structural income of the reserve carries it. During the build-up its form is an energy cost guarantee or a euro subsidy with kWh indexation; the daily Basic Pulse stays unchanged.
The Basic Pulse Housing Waterfall
Daily Budget Flow 🎁 Basic Pulse
One budget · One waterfall
Unconditional basic energy right
🔥 ⚡ 🍳 Heat · Light · Cooking
First priority for daily living
🏠 Registered Housing Provider
Guaranteed rent payment for 1 primary home
💎 Luxury Capacity (Top-Up)
Whatever the pulse does not cover
Duties, not promises
This is the rule the rest of this chapter follows from, and it is shorter than it looks.
Money as we know it is a promise. The euro in your account is a bank's promise to pay, and it came into being the moment somebody else promised to pay something back. That is not a figure of speech but the literal mechanism: nearly all money in circulation started life as debt.
So admitting promises means admitting money creation. Whatever you call it, and with whatever good intention.
That is why this system has duties and no promises. The difference lies in who ends up holding something.
A promise creates an asset on the other side. If I promise you a hundred next month, you now have something: a claim you can value, sell, pledge or bundle with a thousand others. It fits on a balance sheet, and the moment it is tradeable it behaves like money.
A duty only constrains whoever carries it. "I will not evict you for three months" binds me, but you have not been handed something you can pass on. There is nothing on your side to trade.
So the test is not whether something concerns the future, but whether anybody is left holding something they could hand to a stranger. A subscription: no. An instalment plan: yes.
Buying without debt
That one rule decides how you come by things. Three ways remain.
Buying. You pay the whole thing, it is yours, done.
Renting or a subscription. You pay for use for as long as you use it. At every moment the account is settled and nobody owes anybody anything; stop paying and the supply stops. For appliances and transport this is often the most natural form, and for anyone without savings it is the only one.
A growing share. For the big things. Every payment buys a piece of ownership instead of paying off a debt.
Paying in instalments is not on the list, and the difference with a subscription is sharper than it looks. With a subscription nobody holds a claim on your future. With an instalment plan somebody does, and as soon as such claims can be sold on, something circulates like money with nothing behind it. The backing ratio then says nothing about the economy anymore, because it only measures the backed part.
Two people who agree between themselves to settle up later are of course impossible to stop. But the system does not recognise such an agreement, does not enforce it, does not accept it as collateral and does not make it tradeable. In private it is allowed; growing into a parallel money system is not.
And what about a house?
A mortgage cannot work, because it is the biggest promise there is. What can work is the same pattern as with generation: you are not paying off a debt, you are building up property.
| Mortgage | Growing share | |
|---|---|---|
| After the first year | you own all of it and owe almost all of it | you own a small part and owe nothing |
| If you stop paying | you lose the home | you keep what you bought and rent the rest |
| If prices fall | residual debt | your property is worth less, nothing more |
| Who makes the money | the bank, out of nothing | nobody, it is money that already exists |
So you still pay every month, but every payment buys ownership. Residual debt and forced sale do not exist, because you never owe anything. Housing cooperatives already work this way today.
The money for construction comes down the same road as for a solar park: people buy a share in the cooperative. And the leakage pushes hard in that direction, because money standing still costs you something and bricks do not.
That leaves one thing: without a mortgage market a house no longer costs what can be borrowed against it, but what people can pay. That is a fundamentally different number, and what it means for anyone who owns a house with debt today is in critique.
The anchor and the wave: how the price forms
1 CBER is a claim on a proportional share of the reserve, at the meter rate: at full backing that is 1 kWh. That is the anchor. But "a kWh now, here" is a different product than "a kWh in the reserve whenever you call for it". The coin does not move; the power of the moment moves around it:
- The ceiling: redemption always yields B kWh per coin, with B the current backing ratio. So power can never cost more than about 1/B CBER per kWh: if it gets dearer, you simply redeem at the bank. Only at full backing (B = 1) does that ceiling sit at about 1 CBER per kWh. During the build-up the coin is a pro-rata share in the reserve, not a fixed kWh claim.
- The room is below: in abundance (a sunny afternoon, a storm at sea) producers would rather sell their surplus for, say, 0.7 CBER per kWh than throw it away.
- The purchase margin: if the bank buys 1 kWh for 0.8 CBER during abundance, the reserve grows by 1 kWh while only 0.8 CBER in claims stands against it: over-backing. The bank can still mint the remaining 0.2 CBER fully backed, and pays the capacity fees to battery landlords with it. If the label stands at under-backed, that minting locks up and the 0.2 closes the gap first. The margin is struck at purchase; delivery in scarcity is neutral (claim out, kWh out). Note that this margin is a price rolling out of the reverse auction, not a correction for expected losses. Losses are measured afterwards and settled through leakage, never estimated in advance.
- Emergency delivery may carry a premium: not for the kWh itself (it cannot rise above the anchor), but for bringing it now and here. Transport and urgency are a service, not money creation.
This margin grows along with the solar and wind peaks: the system earns the most at exactly the moments it exists for.
The tax on luxury, and where it goes
Every transaction in the luxury economy automatically carries a small energy tax; the Basic Pulse is and remains untaxed.
- Destination: the tax does not disappear into general funds but first fills the claim buffer (a shock absorber above the backing, with a fixed public target level) and then flows to the shared reserve: everyone's basic ceiling rises with trade.
- Progressive: the biggest luxury lifts the floor the hardest. The tax rate rises with monthly luxury spending, in public brackets, cumulative per identity (so splitting transactions does not help). Ordinary life and ordinary trade sit in the lowest bracket; extreme luxury volumes contribute the most. The bracket heights are a parameter under the parameter protocol.
Transaction Tax & Shared Pool Flow
Progressive Tax💳
Payment
Luxury balance
⚙️
Transaction Tax
Auto-withheld
🔋
Claim Buffer
Filled first
👥
Shared Pool
Raises everyone's floor ↑
The backing ratio as a freedom meter
The Freedom Meter
Systemic BalanceTrust
75%
Systemic Fear
25%
Work Pressure
28 hrs/wk
Free Time
40 hrs/wk
Everyone controls the bank · The bank controls everyone
The backing ratio is not a banking figure; it is a freedom meter. Every kWh in the reserve is work nobody has to do themselves anymore: more reserve is more holiday, less reserve is less holiday. Everyone controls the bank, and the bank controls everyone: the meter is the loop.
In scarcity a fixed order applies, from soft to hard:
- Comfort shrinks first: holiday and luxury feel the blow; the floor notices nothing.
- Then the claim buffer absorbs: the Basic Pulse of the system itself.
- And truly empty is empty: a drained reserve delivers no watt, however hard the promise. The floor is as hard as the meter, and not a millimetre harder. That is why the guaranteed level sits far below what the reserve can carry.
If the reserve ever truly runs dry, the coin visibly turns fiat, and fiat is simply Phase 0: the system we already have today, but with an honest meter. The climb starts again. Even the bank run is civilised then: redemption always settles against the next audited meter reading, so running never pays, and whoever has already redeemed and is waiting for delivery simply shares in whatever is lost on the way. Standing at the front buys no priority either; whoever has lost trust does not run to the vault but to the door (see governance: federation and secession). And trust comes from only two things: measurement or history. A small coin with a full meter beats a big coin with an empty one: the competition for money here is a building contest, not a marketing contest. The home battery is therefore not just savings; it is a vote.