Evidence
Records identity, contribution, timestamp, context, source material, and verification history.
Logic Page 10
Institutional Design and Legitimate Authority
A measurement system should not silently become a legislature, court, regulator, and market operator at the same time.
Functions that must be separated
Measurement
Selects performance metrics, baselines, counterfactual methods, uncertainty rules, and recalibration procedures.
Policy
Determines whether a measured result should create disclosure, compensation, taxation, access, licensing, or other consequences.
Adjudication
Resolves identity, attribution, valuation, conflict-of-interest, and procedural disputes through defined review and appeal.
Market operation
Handles issuance, transfer, payment, custody, trading restrictions, and any required financial compliance.
Oversight
Examines the system, monitors changes, publishes findings, and preserves authority to halt or narrow unsafe applications.
Why separation matters
The architecture contains both empirical and normative choices. A Performance Oracle can report an outcome, but it cannot by itself decide what society owes a contributor. Contribution Decomposition can estimate an allocation under a specified value function, but selecting that function remains a design and governance decision. A ledger can preserve records, but cannot independently confer legal status.
Minimum legitimacy conditions
- Published scope and definitions.
- Versioned methods and change logs.
- Conflict-of-interest disclosure.
- Independent validation and audit access.
- Notice, explanation, challenge, and appeal.
- Uncertainty proportional to the consequence imposed.
- Authority grounded in contract or law rather than technical assertion.
- Ability to suspend a metric or domain when evidence degrades.
Regulatory perimeter
The supplied DFI correspondence describes PBS/MPS as extending beyond securities administration and potentially implicating property and intellectual-property questions. The static model should therefore present securities regulation as one layer of a broader institutional problem, not as the sole source of authority.
Status: Proposed institutional separation-of-functions model.