Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
Impact: The Currency That Must Die
Why your contribution to humanity should have an expiration date
The Problem With Money (And Its Replacements)
Here’s a thought experiment: What if everything you ever earned—every dollar, every promotion, every line on your résumé—started evaporating the moment you stopped working?
Sounds terrifying, right? That’s the point.
Money has a design flaw so fundamental we’ve stopped noticing it: it doesn’t care about time. A dollar earned in 1950 is still a dollar today (well, adjusted for inflation, about $12.50—but the principle holds). Wealth accumulates. Interest compounds. Fortunes pass to children who did nothing to earn them.
This was fine when we needed dynasties to maintain complex projects across generations—cathedrals, trading empires, libraries. Someone had to fund the long game.
But here’s the problem: we’re about to live in a world where robots build everything, AI thinks everything, and fusion powers everything. The old game—“accumulate stuff faster than it decays”—stops making sense when stuff has zero marginal cost. When you can print a house like you print a document, hoarding houses becomes… weird.
So money dies. Or rather, money becomes irrelevant for survival. The Foundation handles the basics—food, shelter, healthcare, energy—like infrastructure. Like gravity. You don’t earn gravity. It’s just there.
But humans are terrible at sitting still. Three billion years of evolution shaped us to want things, strive for things, compete for things. Take away the survival game and we don’t become Buddha. We become the “beautiful ones” from John Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment—sleek mice who did nothing but groom themselves, having lost all purpose in mouse utopia.
We need a new game. A new currency. One that rewards contribution without enabling dynasties. One that keeps ambitious humans climbing mountains without letting them become permanent mountain kings.
Enter Impact.
What Impact Actually Is
Impact is the non-transferable, decaying measure of recognized contribution to human (and eventually, all conscious) flourishing. Think of it as karma made mathematically rigorous. Or reputation you can actually audit.
Three iron rules define it:
Rule 1: Impact is Non-Transferable
You cannot sell your Impact. You cannot give it to your kids. You cannot buy it from someone else.
This sounds harsh until you realize what it prevents: the “nepo baby” problem, but for civilization. In the old economy, Warren Buffett’s grandchildren will be billionaires who never worked a day in their lives. In the Impact economy, Buffett could have massive Impact for his philanthropy and investment decisions—but his grandkids start at zero, like everyone else.
No one inherits their parents’ six-pack abs. Impact works the same way.
Rule 2: Impact Decays
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your contribution to humanity has a shelf life.
The framework uses a 3.41% annual decay rate, which translates to a 20-year half-life. A thousand Impact points today becomes 500 in twenty years, 250 in forty. Einstein doesn’t get to govern physics based on a paper from 1905. That paper was brilliant. It also was a century ago. The field moved on.
This is the mechanism that prevents the Stack Overflow problem—where early contributors accumulate so much permanent reputation that newcomers can’t compete. (More on this catastrophe later.)
Rule 3: Impact is Universal
The old economy had a brutal blind spot: it only valued what could be sold. Poetry? Worthless. Parenting? Unpaid. Caring for your dying mother? “That’s nice, but it doesn’t move the GDP needle.”
Impact doesn’t care about markets. It cares about contribution to flourishing. A caregiver who spends forty years helping dementia patients die with dignity earns Impact just as real as the fusion engineer who lights up a city. The Diversity Guard validates both.
Why Decay Matters: A Tale of Two Platforms
Let me tell you about the aristocracy of Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow is the programmer’s Q&A site—arguably the most important resource in software development for twenty years. It has a reputation system: answer questions, get upvotes, earn points. Sounds fair.
Here’s the design flaw: reputation never decays.
As of 2024, Stack Overflow has over 29 million registered users. But only about 1,159 people have crossed the 100,000 reputation threshold. The top 0.46% of users hold disproportionate influence over a platform millions rely on daily.
Worse: many of these high-reputation users effectively retired from active contribution years ago. They answered questions about Java 6 (released 2006) or Oracle 8 (1997), accumulated points, and now sit on permanent thrones. Questions asked in early 2025 dropped to under 30,000—down 77% since November 2022.
Why the collapse? Partly AI tools like ChatGPT give faster answers. But also because Stack Overflow became a gerontocracy. New contributors face a 68% non-participation rate—they don’t even bother engaging. Why compete in a game where the scoreboard was locked before you were born?
This is what happens when influence doesn’t decay. Early contributors accumulate advantages that compound forever. Newcomers can’t catch up. The platform stagnates. The experts who remain are experts in yesterday’s technology.
Contrast this with Reddit’s “Hot” algorithm, which aggressively decays post visibility. A viral post must keep gaining votes just to maintain ranking—there’s roughly a 10× decay every 12.5 hours. Result: constant content turnover. Fresh voices get front-page access. Yesterday’s viral post is today’s forgotten thread.
But Reddit made a critical error: user karma doesn’t decay at all. Users who farmed karma in 2015 still have it in 2025. They can influence moderation, access exclusive features, and—since Reddit’s 2024 IPO—even convert karma into stock purchase opportunities.
Reddit understood that content should decay. They failed to understand that influence should too.
Impact gets both right. Every contribution decays. Every contributor must keep contributing to maintain standing.
The Technology Stack: How Impact Actually Works
“This sounds nice,” you’re thinking, “but who decides what counts? How do you prevent people from gaming it?”
Fair questions. The answer involves three interlocking technologies: the Wallet, the Shield, and the Ledger.
The Wallet: Your Digital Backpack
You already carry a smartphone that knows more about you than your mother does. Now imagine that device actually worked for you instead of selling your attention to advertisers.
In the Impact system, every citizen carries a “Digital Backpack”—a secure digital wallet managed by their own Personal AI Agent. If you’ve used ChatGPT or Claude, you’ve glimpsed the prototype. Now imagine that companion knowing you better than your therapist—and being constitutionally incapable of gossiping about you.
Its job: be your scribe and coach. When you spend three hours cleaning a beach, you don’t fill out a form in triplicate. Your agent notices (via location, photos, whatever), verifies with you (“Hey, did we just spend the morning picking up plastic?”), and drafts a “Claim.” It handles the bureaucratic nonsense so you can focus on actually living.
This Claim sits in your backpack as a draft. To become real Impact, it needs verification.
The Shield: Zero-Knowledge Proofs
“If my contributions need verification, can everyone see my entire life?”
No. This is where cryptography performs actual magic.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) let you prove a fact without revealing the underlying data. Think of a bartender checking your ID: they need to know if you’re over 21. They don’t need your name, address, or exact birthday. A ZKP proves the fact (“I am over 21”) without exposing the data (“I was born February 14, 2002, my name is Derek, and I live at 42 Maple Street”).
In the Impact system, you can prove you earned Impact for “Community Service” without revealing exactly where you live or which specific family you helped. Credit without surveillance. The math vouches for you without showing your homework.
This isn’t theoretical. ZKPs are already deployed in cryptocurrency systems like Zcash. Worldcoin uses them for identity verification. We’re applying proven technology to a new purpose: making reputation verifiable without making life surveillance.
The Ledger: The Global Public Record
Reputation has a problem: people lie. Résumés are fiction. LinkedIn profiles are fantasy. In the old world, you trusted institutions—universities, employers, governments—to vouch for people. Those institutions could be corrupted, hacked, or simply wrong.
Blockchain technology replaces trust in institutions with trust in math.
The Ledger has three critical properties:
Append-only. You can write new lines, but you can never erase old ones. Your contribution record is permanent—no Ministry of Truth can rewrite history.
Selectively transparent. The Shield and Ledger work together: the Ledger records that you contributed, what category it fell into, how much Impact you earned, and who verified it—but not intimate details. Anyone can see “Maria earned 500 Impact for Eldercare, verified by four independent councils.” No one can see “Maria helped Mr. Rodriguez at 123 Maple Street with his dementia every Tuesday.”
Decentralized. The record exists on millions of computers simultaneously. A hacker can’t boost their score by breaking into one server—they’d have to compromise millions at once.
The Ledger replaces trust in people (who lie) with trust in math (which couldn’t care less about your feelings or political connections).
The Diversity Guard: Who Decides What Counts?
This is where most reputation systems die. Some committee decides what’s valuable, and suddenly you have gatekeepers, politics, and corruption.
Impact solves this with the Diversity Guard—a verification system that requires consensus across genuinely diverse validators.
For the Engineer: Objective Contributions
Some contributions are easy to measure. If Kenji optimizes fusion reactor code and improves efficiency by 3%, validation is straightforward. AI auditors verify the math, confirm the gain, award Impact automatically. The data speaks for itself. No committees. No arguments about whether 3% is “really” 3%.
For the Poet: Subjective Contributions
Here’s where it gets interesting.
Yua is 31. She writes a collection of poems helping her community process grief from a recent flood. People read her work at memorial services. Teachers assign it in schools. Therapists recommend it to clients.
In the old economy, Yua earned nothing for this. Poetry doesn’t have a business model.
In the Impact system, her AI assistant (with her approval) submits her work to the Diversity Guard. The system’s AI selects four culturally distinct councils—not randomly, but optimized for relevant expertise AND maximum diversity. Her work might go to:
- Artists in Lagos who specialize in grief literature
- Psychologists in Oslo studying collective trauma
- A historian in Kyoto expert in communal lamentations
- A community council in Rio who’ve lived through similar floods
They review independently, unable to coordinate or collude.
The psychologists note a measurable drop in depression rates in communities reading the poems. The artists praise the innovation of form. The historian connects her work to a long tradition of communal lamentations. If these diverse groups independently agree that the work provided genuine value, Yua earns Impact.
The consensus is digitally sealed and permanently recorded. Her contribution is now as verifiable as Kenji’s 3% efficiency gain.
This isn’t social media “likes.” This isn’t a popularity contest. It’s rigorous, cross-cultural peer review anchored in mathematical truth. It ensures care work, art, and philosophy are valued as highly as engineering. It makes the invisible visible—and valuable.
The Impact Trust: Saving for Big Dreams
“Wait,” you’re asking. “If my Impact decays 3.41% every year, how do I ever save up for something huge? A seat on the Mars colony ship? Life-extension treatment?”
Good question. The answer is the Impact Trust.
You can “commit” your Impact to a specific, validated life mission. When you do, your Impact stops decaying—but it also becomes locked. You can’t use it for anything else. It sits in escrow until you reach your goal.
Consider Elara, from Chapter 2.
Elara isn’t a scientist or engineer. She’s a caregiver. For forty years, she dedicated herself to specialized care of elders with complex dementia, helping them navigate final years with dignity. In the old economy, she would have been paid minimum wage, invisible, exhausted, probably forced to retire into poverty.
In the Impact system, her contribution is recognized. Every year, diverse councils evaluate her work—medical teams, family advocacy groups, cultural historians. They consistently rate her impact as “Transformative,” noting how her methods have been adopted by caregivers across the region.
At 75, Elara applies for life extension. She wants twenty more years to train a new generation of caregivers. The treatment is genuinely scarce; we can’t yet offer it to everyone.
Back in her thirties, Elara committed her career to an Impact Trust—declaring her life mission and locking her future earnings to that goal. The Trust paused the usual decay rate, letting her accumulate a lifetime of Impact. Now, at 75, she has a verifiable record of making the world better—and the preserved Impact to show for it.
The community reviews her application. Because her life was spent serving others, the system serves her. She gets the treatment.
This is the promise: it’s not about who has the most money (money doesn’t exist for these things anymore). It’s about who has given the most to the human story.
Different Contributions, Different Half-Lives
Not all contributions age the same way. The paper that changes medicine probably becomes obsolete faster than the sculpture that moves souls.
Here’s the proposed framework:
| Contribution Type | Half-Life | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Crisis Response | 6 months | Heroism in the moment; rapidly obsolete |
| Governance Service | 1-2 years | Should reflect current engagement |
| Technical Infrastructure | 2-3 years | Systems require ongoing maintenance |
| Educational Contribution | 3-5 years | Knowledge evolves; methods improve |
| Community Building | 2-4 years | Relationships require maintenance |
| Scientific Discovery | 5-7 years | Matches academic citation patterns |
| Artistic Creation | 10-15 years | Cultural impact persists longer |
| Foundational Theory | 15-20 years | Like mathematics fundamentals |
These aren’t arbitrary. They’re derived from observable decay patterns in existing systems. Academic citations, Reddit’s content ranking, social capital research—they all point to similar timescales.
The person who coordinated evacuation during a hurricane deserves recognition. But that recognition shouldn’t make them permanent Secretary of Emergency Management forty years later. Crisis heroism ages out fast.
The person who proved a new theorem in mathematics deserves recognition that persists longer—because the theorem itself persists. Pythagoras is still right.
The Founder’s Discount: Making EXIT Work
One exception to the 3.41% decay rate: Founder Credits earned through the EXIT Protocol decay at 5% annually instead of the standard rate.
Why slower? Because you’re asking billionaires to trade real assets for imaginary points. If those points evaporated too fast, nobody would take the deal.
The slower decay gives legacy elites a multi-generational adjustment period—their grandchildren will still feel the benefit—while still ensuring eventual power diffusion. It’s not perfectly fair. It’s strategic. And it’s better than the alternative: civil war between those who have and those who will.
Richard Castellano, the $23 billion logistics mogul from Chapter 8, trades his empire for Founder Credits through the EXIT Protocol. At 68, he converts wealth into influence—influence that will last long enough to watch his grandchildren grow up in a world he helped build, but not long enough to create a new aristocracy.
Gaming the System: Attack Vectors and Defenses
Any system gets gamed. Impact introduces new attack surfaces:
Attack 1: Sybil Swarms
Create multiple identities, earn Impact across many accounts, aggregate influence.
Defense: Proof-of-Personhood ties accounts to verified individuals. Social graph analysis detects fake-account clusters. Meaningful contributions require time investment, making mass farming expensive.
Attack 2: Timing Games
Stockpile contributions, dump them before major decisions, maximize influence at critical moments.
Defense: Rolling windows. Influence calculations use 30-90 day averages, not point-in-time snapshots. You can’t game timing if the system averages timing out.
Attack 3: Fake Refresh
Generate fake “citations” to slow decay on existing Impact.
Defense: Refresh events must come from independent accounts with no prior connection. Quality thresholds filter low-value citations. Diminishing returns—each refresh helps less than the last.
Attack 4: Low-Quality Maintenance
Pad contributions with garbage work to maintain “active” status.
Defense: Peer review gates new Impact issuance. Diversity Guard validation requires multiple independent perspectives. Low-quality work decays faster.
The Meta-Defense: Transparency
All Impact calculations, decay rates, and gaming detection are publicly auditable. Bad actors can’t game a system they don’t understand—but neither can good actors trust such a system.
This is Axiom II: Truth Must Be Seen. The ledger is public. The algorithms are published. Community detection of novel attacks becomes possible. Trust through visibility.
What Impact Prevents
Let’s be concrete about the dystopias Impact is designed to block:
The Permanent Aristocracy Problem. Without decay, early contributors accumulate advantages that compound forever. Stack Overflow’s reputation system created a gerontocracy. Facebook’s early employees became permanent billionaires while later employees got stock options worth nothing. Impact’s decay ensures every generation gets a fresh start.
The Relevance Drift Problem. Knowledge has a half-life. Scientists who study citation patterns found the average “cited half-life”—time for citation rates to drop by half—is 6.5 years. More than 70% of citations are to papers published within the last 10 years. A groundbreaking 2010 paper on social media algorithms is nearly worthless for understanding TikTok in 2025. Impact’s decay acknowledges what we all know but refuse to admit: expertise expires.
The Goodhart Problem. Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Every single-metric system gets gamed. Impact doesn’t use a single metric—it uses diverse validators with different values who must independently agree. Gaming one validator provides no advantage with different validators.
The Coercion Problem. In the old economy, “work or starve” wasn’t a choice—it was a hostage situation. Impact completely separates survival from contribution. The Foundation handles survival unconditionally. Impact handles status and influence for those who want them. No one is forced to earn Impact. No one loses their home for having zero.
The Ascent: What Impact Buys
If Impact can’t buy food or shelter—those are Foundation guarantees—what can it buy?
Access to the genuinely scarce. The things that remain rare even in abundance:
A seat on the Mars colony ship. There are only so many ships. Someone has to decide who goes first.
Experimental life-extension treatments. We can’t offer immortality to everyone simultaneously. Early adopters are chosen by Impact—not by wealth.
Priority for consciousness augmentation experiments. Not everyone can be a guinea pig at once.
Influence over civilization’s direction. Voting rights on major decisions scale with Impact. The people who’ve contributed most have more say—but their say decays if they stop contributing.
This is The Ascent—the 10% of civilization that remains competitive, scarce, and earned. The game that gives ambitious humans mountains to climb.
The Foundation handles the 90% that’s become infrastructure. Impact handles the 10% that still requires selection.
Why Impact Must Die
Here’s the uncomfortable philosophical core: Impact must decay because everything must decay.
The Romans understood this. When barbarians were at the gates, they could appoint a Dictator with absolute power. The catch? Six months. After 180 days, the Dictator handed back the keys and became a regular citizen again. Cincinnatus saved Rome, then went back to farming. Twice.
The Maya understood this. Their cacao-bean currency literally rotted. You couldn’t hoard wealth because your fortune would decompose into compost. Built-in decay. Nature’s expiration date on hoarding.
We understood this and forgot.
Every system without turnover becomes brittle. Knowledge without refresh becomes dogma. Power without expiration becomes tyranny.
Impact decay isn’t punishment for past contributors. It’s acknowledgment that:
-
Contributions matter, but current contributions matter more. The person solving today’s problem should have more influence than the person who solved yesterday’s.
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Different contributions warrant different decay rates. Crisis response ages out faster than foundational mathematics. Both are valuable; neither is eternal.
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Ongoing engagement should slow, but not stop, decay. The Trust mechanism and Refresh rules reward sustained relevance, not one-time heroics.
-
The future deserves fresh voices at the table. Your glory must fade so tomorrow’s heroes can emerge.
Conclusion: Karma Made Mathematical
Impact is the attempt to encode an ancient truth into modern infrastructure: you are what you contribute, not what you accumulate.
The old economy measured worth by what you could extract. Impact measures worth by what you add.
The old economy let contributions compound into dynasties. Impact lets contributions fade into history.
The old economy ignored care, art, philosophy, and community because they didn’t have business models. Impact values them equally through diverse validation.
The old economy said “make money or die.” Impact says “survive unconditionally; contribute if you want to matter.”
This is the second half of the Unscarcity equation. The Foundation solves survival. Impact solves meaning. Together, they answer the question that haunted John Calhoun’s mice: What do you do when you no longer have to do anything?
You contribute. Not because you must. Because you want to. Because humans are weird creatures who need games to play, mountains to climb, ways to leave a mark on the world.
Impact is the game. The scoreboard resets. The mountain stays climbable.
Your glory must fade. That’s not a bug. That’s the feature that saves civilization from itself.
Further Reading
- Impact Decay Curves — The mathematics of why your glory must fade
- Diversity Guard — How diverse validators prevent gaming
- EXIT Protocol — How legacy elites transition into the new system
- Goodhart’s Law and AI Governance — Why single metrics always fail
- Chapter 2: The Ascent — The full vision of the meaning economy
References
- Stack Overflow Statistics 2025
- Stack Overflow Decline Analysis (GitHub)
- 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
- Academic Citation Half-Life Research
- Reddit Karma Mechanics 2025
- Bourdieu, P. (1986). “The Forms of Capital”
- Coleman, J.S. (1988). “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital”
- Parolo, P.D.B., et al. (2015). “Attention decay in science.” Journal of Informetrics
