# Working (discarded before grading)

## STATE

**problem.** A peer-to-peer hour-credit exchange is spiraling down. Three coupled failures: (a) hoarding — large unspent balances, holders stop offering help; (b) deficit drift — deep-negative members disengage and leave; (c) value mispricing/arbitrage — a few easy-to-offer services are over-rewarded per unit effort, get flooded in, and crowd out genuinely needed help. Organizers control earn/spend rules, what is tracked, limits, and member-visible information. Success = give-and-take participation steady/growing over a year AND no easy service class systematically drains value. Failure = hoarding/deficit drift kills participation OR low-value services dominate.

## Verbs run (with why)

1. **lift L1 (situation → meta-model).** Stripped domain words to a skeleton: a medium-of-exchange token (credits) circulates in a voluntary network; its value depends on flow, not stock; agents can accumulate the token without recirculating (idle stock kills the flow); the token's nominal unit (one hour) has drifted from the real value it should track (effort/scarcity), opening a price≠cost gap that invites exploitation; individually-rational choices (hoard, exit when underwater, supply the over-rewarded easy good) erode a shared resource — the matching marketplace itself — in a self-reinforcing downward loop.

2. **match / search_by_facets (retrieve).** Why: oblique, multi-structure problem. Six facet phrases. Converged hard on: `tragedy_of_the_commons`/`public_goods` (shared marketplace degraded by divergent incentives), `arbitrage` (price-cost divergence on easy services), a money-velocity/`liquidity`/`turnover` theme (idle stock starves flow), and `incentive_compatibility`/`mechanism_design`. Archetypes: `harmful_arbitrage_closure`, `commons_governance`, `network_effect_governance`, `inflation_currency_and_real_versus_nominal_adjustment`.

3. **match (search_prime, hoarding facet).** Why: hoarding/velocity prime was latent in fusion. Surfaced `turnover`, `liquidity`, `time_value_of_money`, `speculative_bubble` → confirms the *velocity/decay* lever (idle credits should lose value; flow is the invariant).

4. **get_archetype ×4** (`harmful_arbitrage_closure`, `network_effect_governance`, `inflation...real_vs_nominal`, `commons_governance`) + **get_prime** (`incentive_compatibility`). Why: pull component lists to lift onto the design.

5. **salience-rank + prune.** Load-bearing operative primes: `incentive_compatibility` (the spine — rules must make wanted behavior the rational choice, not require policing), `tragedy_of_the_commons`/`commons_governance` (the marketplace is the shared resource; limits+monitoring+legitimacy+adaptation), `arbitrage`/`harmful_arbitrage_closure` (close the easy-service value gap while preserving legitimate variation), `turnover`/`liquidity` (restore velocity; idle stock decays), the real-vs-nominal *unit-drift* core (one flat hour ≠ real value; let earned credit reflect what's needed). Pruned as context (not forced): full network-portability/interoperability machinery (no cross-platform lock-in here), discounting math, currency translation.

6. **compose** (typed model). Nodes: members, credit-stock, credit-flow, service-types, matching-marketplace (shared resource), visible-signals, organizer-rules. Edges: hoarding (member→stock, stalls flow); arbitrage (member→over-rewarded service→drains marketplace); deficit-drift (member→exit). Every operative prime annotates an edge.

7. **lift L2 (coverage-enforcement) — central verb.** Posed each pattern's components as candidate requirements and coverage-checked against the draft design:
   - Commons boundary / access / **use-limit** → balance bands (caps + floors). *instantiated.*
   - **Monitoring signal** → visible needs/surplus dashboard + balance bands. *instantiated.*
   - **Sanction / replenishment** → demurrage (decay on idle stock) + deficit grace, not punishment. *instantiated (homolog: decay replaces sanction).*
   - **Legitimacy + adaptation cadence** → member-set multipliers, periodic review. *instantiated.*
   - Arbitrage **exploitability map / closure target** → flag services whose demand-adjusted reward exceeds effort; cap or down-weight. *instantiated.*
   - **Legitimate-variation guardrail (over-lift guard)** → do NOT flatten all hours to one price; only damp the *systematically* over-supplied easy class; keep one-hour-equals-one-hour as the default to preserve the gift-economy feel. *instantiated; declined full dynamic-pricing (would distort the volunteer ethos — over-lift guard).*
   - **Residual-arbitrage test** → watch for migration to the next easy service. *instantiated.*
   - Real-vs-nominal **unit-drift correction** → reward reflects *what's needed*, via a needs multiplier, not a free-floating market price. *instantiated.*
   - Velocity / **turnover** → demurrage + spend incentives + earn-cap-when-flush. *instantiated.*
   - Network **exit/abuse + due process** → low-friction re-entry, fair dispute path, no naming-and-shaming. *instantiated (homolog).*
   - Declined: cross-platform portability, antitrust/competition remedy, currency hedging — genuinely inapplicable. *correctly_declined.*
   - **No component left `missing`** → STOP condition met.

8. **evaluate-fit (gate).** Checked anti-signatures. `harmful_arbitrage_closure` anti-sig "mismatch is legitimate/beneficial" — NOT tripped: the easy-service flood is demonstrably harmful (crowds out needed help). `commons_governance` anti-sig "underproduction not overuse" — partially relevant (needed help IS underproduced), handled by the needs multiplier (a public-goods-provision homolog) rather than a separate pattern. Over-lift guard kept me from imposing full market pricing. Candidates kept.

9. **reconcile.** Concrete model says: punish hoarders. Meta-model says: hoarding is a *velocity* failure, not malice — the token simply has no reason to move. Reconciled toward the meta-model: use gentle decay + earn-caps + spend nudges (make moving rational) rather than confiscation (which would trigger exit, worsening the spiral). Views diverged and the meta-model corrected the naive concrete read — not decorative.

COST: ~10 operations, ~22k tokens

===RECOMMENDATION_BEGIN===
Treat the exchange's real asset as *flow*, not stored credit. The downward spiral comes from three linked leaks — credit that sits still, members who sink underwater and quit, and a handful of easy services that pay far more than they cost and swamp what people actually need. Fix the incentives so the behavior you want is also the behavior that pays, and you will need very little policing.

**Keep credit moving.** Apply a small, predictable decay (demurrage) to idle balances — for example, balances above a comfortable buffer lose a few percent a month, so credit is worth most when used soon. Pair this with a soft earning cap: once a member is well in surplus, they stop earning new credit until they spend some, which gently turns hoarders back into spenders or active helpers. Announce both rules plainly in advance; the goal is to make holding a large dead balance pointless, not to punish anyone or seize credit, which would only drive people out.

**Keep underwater members in the game.** Let members run a modest negative balance with no stigma — a generous deficit floor that signals "you owe the community some help," not "you've failed." Cushion new and struggling members with a small starting grant and a low-interest grace period; only when a deficit grows large and stays large for months does the system quietly reduce that member's ability to request more until they give some help back. Make re-entry frictionless: someone who drifted off can return and resume without clearing an old debt all at once.

**Stop the easy-service flood without killing variety.** Do not try to price every hour differently — keeping "an hour is an hour" as the default preserves the spirit of the place. Instead, watch the ratio of supply to demand per service type. When a particular easy-to-offer service is being supplied far in excess of what anyone is requesting, taper its reward: the first hours of that service each month still earn a full credit, but additional hours earn progressively less, so flooding the system stops being profitable while occasional offers stay fully valued. Mirror this on the demand side with a needs multiplier: services the community is short on (and that members have flagged as wanted) earn a bonus, gently pulling effort toward genuinely useful help. Set these multipliers transparently and adjust them on a fixed review cadence, not ad hoc.

**Make the state of the system visible.** Give every member a simple dashboard: what's currently in short supply, what's oversupplied, their own balance and where it sits relative to the comfortable band, and the current reward multipliers. Most members will self-correct toward what's needed once they can see it — visibility does the coordinating work that rules alone cannot.

**Govern by legitimacy, not edict.** Have the multipliers, decay rate, deficit floor, and caps set and periodically revised by the members themselves through a lightweight council or open vote, with a clear, fair path to dispute a flagged service or a frozen account. Rules people helped write and can appeal are rules they comply with voluntarily.

**Watch for the next loophole.** Whenever you taper one over-rewarded service, track whether the flood simply migrates to the next-easiest service, and extend the supply-vs-demand taper to cover it. Treat this as ongoing tuning, not a one-time patch.

Set thresholds conservatively to start — for instance, a comfortable balance band of roughly plus-or-minus twenty hours, demurrage near two percent monthly only on balances above that band, a deficit floor around twenty hours with grace for newcomers, and the per-service reward beginning to taper once monthly supply runs more than about twice unmet demand — then adjust them at each review based on what the dashboard shows.

The single operating rule that ties it all together: **reward the help the community actually needs, make idle credit and runaway balances quietly unprofitable, and let members see the system and set its dials — so that each person acting in their own interest also keeps credit circulating and useful help flowing.**
===RECOMMENDATION_END===
