Reputation not for sale.

Rep is a stake, not a score

Most reputation systems compute a number about you. Rep isn't computed — it's held. It sits in the ledger as yours, it moves only under rules, and it is conserved: the whole supply exists from the first block, and nothing is created or destroyed after it. What changes is where it sits — with you, with someone you liked, or in the shared pool that every invitation draws from. There is no formula weighing your behaviour, no model deciding what you're worth.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A score can be recalculated; a stake has to be spent. When rep leaves you it goes to a person or back to the pool, and either way the ledger shows it.

The protocol's job is to keep rep conserved, honestly recorded, and legible — not un-gameable. It never tries to detect fake accounts or judge suspicious patterns. It records who did what, and leaves interpretation to clients and indexers. A protocol that punishes suspicious behaviour inevitably punishes people who merely look suspicious, and starts an arms race it can't win.

Getting in costs someone else something

Rep reaches a new person through exactly one door: invitations. Not everyone holds the key, and no one holds an unlimited number of them.

Only a member can invite — and membership is earned or conferred, never bought. It is earned when enough members who were here before you have vouched for you, and enough members have liked what you wrote; both bars grow slowly with the size of the network. It is conferred when one of the founding keys invites you directly: the founders' own stake stands behind you, and that membership never lapses. An earned one can — if the vouches it rests on are withdrawn, you are a resident again until they return.

Once you're a member, your invitations are an allowance you earn and then spend: one for every bar's worth of vouches the network has placed on you, and every invite draws that allowance down for good. The reach you have is a measure of how much of the network stands behind you.

Each invitation locks a bond of the inviter's own rep; the newcomer receives a grant of exactly that size, paid from the shared pool — enough to post a few times and start receiving likes. Thirty days later the bond settles, once, against one number: how many likes the newcomer has received. One rep of the bond comes back to the inviter for every three likes; whatever hasn't vested returns to the pool. So an invitation spends two things at once: a unit of an allowance you had to earn, and a slice of your reputation held at risk on someone else.

Why this stops fake accounts without checking anyone

Notis never verifies identity — no phone numbers, no documents, nothing. It doesn't need to, because the one input a fake account can't manufacture is other people vouching for it.

A vouch only counts when it comes from a member who became one before you did. Endorsement runs one direction — from the older, established network toward the newer — so every vouch that means anything traces back, member by member, to the founders. Your invite allowance is that counted endorsement divided by a figure that grows with the network: no endorsement, no allowance; no allowance, no invites.

That is what a ring of fake accounts runs into. They can vouch for each other all day and it buys them nothing — none of them is an older, established member, so none of those vouches count. To raise a puppet's allowance you need real members, already inside, to stake their own rep on it, and that is the one thing you cannot fake.

The bond does a quieter job — it's a supply dial. Priced equal to the grant, it sets how much of a completed invite's rep stays in circulation versus drains back to the pool, tuned by how many of the invitee's likes vest it back. It meters circulation; the allowance is what keeps the population honest.

Two things follow. For everyone but the founders, growth is bounded by real endorsement, not by anyone's balance, so the population can't explode. The founders invite on their own stake alone, without an allowance — that is how a network is seeded at all — and their membership never lapses; but their rep decays like everyone else's if they stop showing up.

A like has to hurt

A like costs the liker 1 rep, and it does not come back.

This is the part people find surprising, so it's worth being blunt about why. A free like is cheap talk. It costs nothing, so it says nothing, and it can be produced without limit. A like that hurt to give is information — you spent something you cannot buy more of, on someone else.

It also means a ring of accounts liking each other bleeds — there's no arrangement of accounts that makes it pay, because every like sends real rep to the pool on the way through. Liking your own post isn't an arrangement at all: the network refuses it.

What the author gets

Not one rep per like. Likes accumulate, and for every 5 received the author is paid 4. The fifth goes back to the pool.

Most of a like's value reaches the person who earned it; a slice returns to the pool. That return is one of the forces holding circulation steady against the rep that invitations draw out of the pool — decay is another, and so is the price of a post.

The remainder waits for you, it isn't lost

Likes don't arrive in neat multiples of five. Whatever is left over stays on your account and counts toward your next payout. It's one running tally across everything you've ever written, not a separate one per post.

That sounds like an implementation detail and isn't. Counting per post would mean every post that never quite reaches a multiple leaves its leftovers stranded forever — a slow, invisible drain that scales with how much people write rather than with how much they're liked. One tally per person means the most that's ever outstanding is four rep, and it's waiting rather than gone.

Reputation decays if you stop showing up

An account that has posted nothing for four weeks starts losing five rep a day, counted from its last post, down to a floor of ten. One that keeps posting loses nothing at all.

Two reasons this exists. It stops entrenchment — you can't earn reputation once and coast on it for years; you keep it by continuing to be someone people endorse. And it keeps the books honest: if dormant hoards never shrank, the amount of rep that's actually in play would drift further and further from the amount that exists, and every measure built on circulation would quietly become a lie.

Note what it doesn't do: tax everyone. Punishing active participants to control the supply is a tax on exactly the people you want. The clock is reset by posting — a thread or a reply — and by nothing else: a like, a vouch, an invite or a claimed name spends rep and leaves the clock where it stood, and nothing you merely receive touches it. So decay is aimed at silence: one post a month is enough to be counted as present, and someone who reads and likes without ever writing is the one it reaches.

Why posting isn't free

A post pays a price in rep — a fixed amount that leaves your balance for the shared pool and does not come back. A thread costs more than a reply, and a third of a reply's price goes to the author being answered.

The price is not a test of who you are; it's rent on the commons — a flat charge for occupying the shared record, paid the same by everyone, because a post costs the network the same whoever wrote it. Nothing is locked up to rescue and nothing to game: the price is spent the instant you post, the same whether the post is seen a thousand times or never at all. A post is charged for occupying the network, not judged for being worth reading.

You might ask why a like doesn't reset the clock instead — given or received, it seems simpler. A received like would let a second account keep your clock running for a single rep, and a given one would make presence cost one rep a month. A post's price, paid by you every time, puts a real floor under what a reset costs.

Removing things

There is one act an author has over a published post: I regret writing this. It is yours alone, and it costs nothing.

Withdrawing your own words

Withdrawing removes your post's content while every reply beneath it survives. What's left is a marker: the conversation still hangs together, your words are gone. It costs nothing — you're destroying nothing of anyone else's, and you already paid to post.

It's worth being precise about what "withdrawn" means, because it's easy to overpromise. A post is identified by the transaction that created it, not by its words, so the record keeps its place in the thread and a fingerprint of what was said — never the words themselves once they are withdrawn. Honest nodes drop the content and stop passing it on. But anyone who already saved a copy can still republish it — that's true of anything ever sent over a public network, here and everywhere else. What the protocol guarantees is that it stops spreading and that your decision is permanent and attributable. It cannot un-publish.

That's why the interface says withdrawn and never deleted.

Why there is no “remove the whole thread”

Nothing you can do reaches other people's replies — not even the replies under your own post. A cascade would protect nothing: the post was archivable the moment it went public, and the replies leak nothing it didn't already give away. It would be a batch bounded only by the thread's size. It would hand whoever started a thread a way to delete a discussion other people wrote. And every one of those replies paid to be posted, with nothing returning. Withdrawal — your words, your call, free — is the whole of it.

The numbers, such as they are

The register's values on the main network. The bond range is per network, and the testnet's is wider so a tester arrives with enough rep to try everything. Marked provisional unless ruled.

The same move, every time

Read the social mechanisms together and they're one idea in different clothes: make the identical action cheap for honest people and worthless for everyone else.

A like costs the same whether it's sincere or manufactured — but the sincere one was going to be spent anyway. An invitation draws the same allowance for a person or a puppet — but only real endorsement grants you that allowance, and a puppet can hand you none. The protocol never decides who is genuine; it makes the inputs a faker needs — attention that would have been spent, endorsement from members who mean it — the exact inputs a faker can't produce.

The post price sits a little apart, by design. It isn't a test of who you are; it's rent on the commons — a flat charge for occupying the shared record, paid the same by everyone, because a post costs the network the same whoever wrote it.