Writing

The Register

Writing on counterparty identity, entity resolution, and the registers markets rely on.

• Who Stands Behind the Agent When the other side of a transaction is a piece of software acting for someone, the oldest question in the market does not go away. It acquires another layer, and the answer has to be kept where machines can read it.
• On Inclusion A register is defined as much by what it declines to record as by what it holds, and a threshold kept with discipline is what turns inclusion into a credential.
• The Coordination Tax As the cost of moving context falls, firms contract, transactions multiply, and the market's oldest institutional form becomes more necessary.
• On Maintenance A record of a moving world begins to be wrong the moment it is written down, and the strength of a register is measured not by how much it holds but by how fast it heals.
• The Register as an Institutional Form Across centuries, markets that trade at a distance keep reinventing the same institution: an independent body that keeps a canonical record so strangers can transact.
• On Counterparty Identity A name on a contract is a label, not an identity, and the distance between the two is where risk lives.
• The Register of Registers A market navigates by a single authoritative record, and the work of building one is the work of resolution.