Speculum Potestatis · Seira · Paper III of III · In Preparation
Turning the Mirror
The glass ledger faces the treasury
by James Wolstencroft
Turn the glass around. A ledger that can follow a stolen coin through 6 years and 10,000 wallets can follow a public pound from the budget line to the contractor’s invoice. Funds that go where the law says they go, to the penny, the cent, the yen, the yuan. Tax traceable from collection to spending. Sanctions evasion visible in the record rather than alleged in the press.
The paper owns the danger before any critic can raise it: the same glass pointed downwards at citizens is a surveillance state. The principled line is asymmetry: transparency for power, privacy for people, and zero knowledge proofs as the mechanism that lets a payment prove its compliance without exposing its payer.
Hands forward to Setting the Keystone, the door of Psephos: the state that agrees to be seen.
In preparation, unpublished at the time of writing. This page holds the shape of the argument while the paper is written.