I’ve read your Pegged white paper with genuine interest. It is both original and thought-provoking, an attempt to design a monetary protocol that redistributes value through provably fair lotteries, stripped of governance, narrative, or intervention. The elegance of its neutrality is clear, and it advances an important conversation about how money can be structured differently.
That said, I want to offer a critique that comes less from technical design and more from praxeology and anthropology, from the standpoint of how humans act, organize, and construct legitimacy.
From a praxeological perspective, money and capital are not ends in themselves; they are means to purposeful human action. Exclusion from finance is indeed a structural constraint, but it is not an empty space. Where formal banking and credit fail, people already build institutions to mitigate risk and create access: families and kin networks, savings circles, reciprocal lending, remittances, microfinance groups. These institutions exist because they counter randomness. They convert uncertainty into predictability through reciprocity, trust, and mutual obligation.
Pegged, by contrast, elevates randomness as its principle of fairness. This is technically ingenious, but anthropologically brittle. In real communities, repeated random outcomes are rarely interpreted as neutral. If the same individual wins twice, suspicion of foul play arises, no matter how strong the cryptographic proof. Without narrative legitimacy or embedded trust, structural neutrality risks being read as arbitrariness or collusion.
Moreover, excluded populations often place the highest value on reliability, continuity, and competence. A chance-based redistribution system may feel less like access and more like a casino. By design, Pegged refuses the social institutions that humans rely on to transform windfalls into sustained capital. The result is a profound cultural mismatch: what appears mathematically fair may be experienced socially as illegitimate.
My question, then, is whether randomness can ever serve as a sufficient foundation for money. Pegged is an experiment in radical neutrality, but fairness in human terms usually requires more than chance. It requires narrative, reciprocity, and competence. Without these, a protocol may function flawlessly in code yet fail as a human institution.
I offer this not as dismissal but as engagement. Pegged opens a fascinating design space. My critique is that it risks mistaking exclusion for emptiness, overlooking the dense institutional logics that already govern access to capital. I would be very interested to hear how you see Pegged addressing this cultural dimension.
With respect,
Richard Martin
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