MONEY, MADE MUTUAL

What if money
meant a promise?

Honour is a small experiment in social credit. Holding HON represents an obligation, a reason to keep showing up for one another. It is not a token to trade or a balance to accumulate.

Four wonderfully weird rules.

1. All HON are the same.
2. HON is created only when you accept someone else’s proposal.
3. You can offer to forgive as much HON as you currently hold, up to the other person’s balance.
4. HON cannot be transferred, and nobody can be approved to transfer it for you.

Two conversations.

Propose → honour. You offer a responsibility; the other person decides whether to accept it. Accepting creates HON in their account. Your balance stays the same.

Forgive → accept. You offer to release part of someone’s obligation; they choose whether to accept. Acceptance burns their HON. Your balance stays the same. Your eligibility to make the offer is checked when you offer it.

A zero balance isn’t the goal. Relationships give these promises meaning.

What is trust?

Explore the question ↗

Honour explores this question in code. We want to understand the trust of any account you interact with from your perspective.

There is no global trust score. Different accounts have different scores depending on who is looking. You trust Alice more than I do, while I trust Charlie more than you do.

A trust score is not a percentage or a score out of ten. There is no upper limit. Red suggests little trust, yellow some trust, and green more trust, based on your shared history.

You can also consider the account’s balance: more HON means more outstanding responsibility. That gives context to a new proposal; it does not, by itself, tell you whether someone will fulfil it.

We are playing infinitely principled games with one another. This is a contextual observation, not a judgement of a person. The code is open for anyone to examine, discuss, improve or fork.

Here is how the score works:

• +2 each time the other account has honoured your proposal, offered you forgiveness or accepted your forgiveness.
• +1 for each pair of interactions you and the other account have had with the same account. Repeated interactions count: if you have each interacted with someone twice, that adds four points.
• −1 if any of the other account’s actions involved more than 100 times their average amount, and −1 for each acceptance of forgiveness above that threshold. The average includes proposals they made, proposals they honoured, forgiveness they offered and forgiveness they accepted.

These are starting points for an experiment. What kinds of behaviour matter in this system? Let’s explore that together. Open a trust score to see how shared interactions, direct relationships and unusual amounts contribute.

Read the original Honour essay ↗