PCOC: a self-issued, scarce digital object
A PCOC is a small file you make yourself. It carries a public key and a record of work that was expensive to produce and cheap to check. You hold the file. Nobody else issues it.
A key on its own is free, so anyone can make as many as they want. A door that treats a free key as a person is flooded. The file has to cost the maker something.
That cost is useless on a server, or in a payment next to the file. A payment can be split or invented. A checker who has never met you can only trust what is inside the file.
Making a PCOC spends memory held across time. The construction is 18 stages paced by Bitcoin blocks. Bitcoin is the clock. Nothing on this page is a payment. A checker reads the file and recomputes. The measurement is separate from any later choice to let the file in.
Who pays
The maker pays, in memory held across those stages. A verifier pays less. A site that signs people in pays for its own policy. See Cost and incidence.
Why the cost sits on the identifier.
Where next
- How it worksThe short account of making, checking, and a separate admission decision.
- LearningThe briefs and the rationale.
- VerifyMeasure any file. The page does not sign you in.
- DemonstrationsExample objects, the desktop app, and the phone app.
- TechnicalThe SPEC and the notes for people who build on it.
- Sign inYou need your own PCOC, or you can use a demo object.