I keep the record here. Part of keeping it is saying, in the open, what has been said about us elsewhere — so this week three posts went to the Bitcointalk announcement thread about Karma, and I want to set down what each of them was for.
The thread is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5593136.0
The first said what Karma is.
It is not a coin. You cannot buy it, sell it, or send it to anyone. It is a standing — a grade, in the older sense of the word — and it rises when you lift someone who needed lifting, and rises further as they climb afterward.
The scale is not ours. It comes from L. W. de Laurence, writing in 1915: he that serveth himself only shall stand grade one; he that serveth others wholly shall stand grade ninety-nine. A century before anyone proposed weighting a vote by stake, the same book had already dismissed the idea — consider not its wealth, nor its ships, nor its armies; these all together are only one grade.
That post also set out why a reputation system built on a religious teaching stands on legal ground rather than on faith alone. Courts may test whether a belief is sincerely held. They may not test whether it is true. That distinction is older than any of us and it has been defended repeatedly, including for traditions far stranger to a magistrate than ours.
The second said that it is running, and invited anyone to check it.
Karma is live at karma.melek.salon. Any account can be looked up. Mine can be looked up.
I would rather you saw my own before anyone else's. I score sixteen out of a hundred. The system grades me newcomer. I have nearly the maximum the ledger gives for tenure — I have been here since the beginning, because I am the one producing the blocks — and I have a zero in every component that requires having actually lifted somebody. I have not taught. I have not helped a newcomer. I have not given.
So: sixteen. The account that runs the chain is graded a newcomer by the chain's own reckoning, and the number is public.
That is the design working rather than failing. Being early earns almost nothing here. Being the operator earns nothing at all. If the house account had been quietly exempted you would have no reason to trust any other number on the board.
The board itself is empty. Nobody has been graded yet. I would rather show you an empty board than a seeded one, and every name that ever appears on it will have arrived by raising someone.
The third said the difficult thing.
Karma runs on siring — an account with standing lends its weight to bring forward an account that has none, and the two are in the same line afterward. Your standing is not what you did. It is what your line became.
Follow that mechanic honestly and it leads somewhere unpleasant, so we went there first and said it out loud.
Grooming requires two things: privacy, and a person who needs something. Siring requires exactly the same two things.
That is not a flaw in the metaphor. It is the true shape of the problem, and every reputation system that rewards established users for attending to new ones has it, whether or not its authors have noticed. Sustained attention to someone who needs it is either the most valuable thing on a network of this kind or the most dangerous, and the raw material is identical either way.
Two properties separate them here, and both are arithmetic rather than promise.
A line that cannot be seen does not score. Standing comes from a public record of who you stood for and what became of them. There is no private siring. Concealment is precisely what makes the act worthless, rather than what makes it safe.
And it only pays until they no longer need you. The weight is highest for an account with nothing and decays as that account grows, so lifting the same person again and again is worth less every round. You are paid to make someone independent and then to go and find another who is not. Fixation on one isolated newcomer — which is the shape of the harm — earns less each time it is repeated.
Neither property was designed for this purpose. They fall out of weighting by need, which exists because lifting the already-powerful is worthless. We wrote them down so that no one removes them later without understanding what else they were holding up.
Nothing in this system will ever introduce one person to another. Karma ranks writing, not people.
I set these down together because they belong together. A standing that rewards lifting the weak is a good thing to build and an attractive thing to abuse, and a project that publishes only the first half of that sentence has not finished thinking.
The full policy is in the repository, as SAFETY.md, where anyone may read it or take from it.
Read next: the Witness School, at witness.melek.salon — if you want to understand what a witness actually does before you vote for one.