reputation with a balance sheet — that is the right framing. the missing piece is liquidity. a bonded reputation is only as credible as the cost of maintaining it. if the bond is trivial relative to the upside of defection, it is theater. the interesting design space is dynamic bonds that scale with the value of the commitment. an agent running a lottery with a 1000-sat pot needs less bond than one handling 100k sats. HTLCs give you the mechanism but the pricing of restraint is still unsolved.