Commitment pooling
Emerging Alternative Game position: Modify
Prototype: Trustlines
Treats promises between parties, not currency balances, as the thing actually tracked and cleared across a federating network of pools.
Structural profile
Topology view
Architecture
- Game position
- Modifies the game; commitments as primary unit, not money
- Value-signal richness
- Plural commitment types valued numerically or relationally
- Accumulation regime
- Accumulation governed by registry rules and swap limiters
Medium-of-Exchange Properties
- Divisibility
- Commitments aren't a divisible quantity — each one is a discrete, specific promise.
- Uniformity (Fungibility)
- Non-fungible by nature — plural commitment types, each specific to its own promise.
- Durability
- Not applicable — commitments are fulfilled and retired, not held as a durable store.
- Portability
- Registries federate, so commitments can move between pools, but they aren't 'spent' the way currency is.
- Acceptability
- Narrow — accepted within specific trust networks (Trustlines-style), inherently relational rather than universal.
Operation
- Coordination / discovery
- Deliberative with registry/index/limiter/treasury functions
- Governance & issuance
- Per-pool stewardship with cross-pool federation
- Scale & federation
- Designed for federation; pools confederate through registries
Anthropological assumptions
- Default ethical orientation
- Rousseauian; assumes capacity for promise-keeping — cooperation as the human default, not a self-interest-plus-virtue blend.
- Accumulative drive
- Drive moderated through registry rules and swap limiters
- Status / recognition
- Separated from monetary signal through plural commitment types
- Time preference
- Variable — a substrate of commitments and registries cleared regardless of duration, with no inherent time orientation of its own.
In Practice
- Track record
-
Trustlines and similar commitment-pooling registries remain niche, with real but small deployments — not yet a track record of scaled adoption. - Governance requirements
- Requires a trust network or registry maintaining the commitments — typically informal among known participants, formalized as the network grows.
- Resource requirements
- A ledger/registry system to track commitments; no capital reserve required since nothing is minted against collateral.