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Proof-of-work in limestone
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Proof-of-work in limestone. Proof-of-work monetary theory says a currency's value can rest on verifiable production difficulty; this conjecture reads Yapese stone money as its pre-modern instance. Rai stones were quarried overseas and sailed to Yap, and the quarrying-and-transport work embodied in a stone scales faster than its diameter, so value should be superlinear in size — log value rising against log diameter at a slope well above 2, in the 2.3-3.5 range. The system also priced verifiable history, a blockchain-like provenance premium: stones with recorded transport misfortunes or famous voyages should command premia of half again or more over size-matched stones. And when cheap Western shipping arrived after the 1870s it broke the difficulty adjustment exactly as the theory predicts: stones moved by Western ships should trade at discounts of three-fifths or more at equal size. Value merely linear in size, or no provenance premium, kills it.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In early ethnographic valuations, log value on log diameter has a slope of 2.3-3.5; stones with recorded transport misfortunes or famous voyages command >= 50% premia over size-matched stones; and post-1870s stones moved by Western ships trade at >= 60% discounts at equal size. Value linear in size, or no provenance premium, kills it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: measured rai corpora from the Yap archaeological surveys joined to the Furness and Muller ethnographic exchange valuations.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).
Novelty / leakage triage
already answered in the literature
All three of the conjecture's mechanisms are the standard ethnographic account of rai: value scaling with quarrying/transport difficulty (Fitzpatrick's quarrying archaeology), provenance-story premia (the seafloor stone), and the O'Keefe-era discount for Western-shipped stones — plus explicitly economic treatments of Yap stone money exist. The fitted elasticities were not located, but the conjecture restates established knowledge in regression clothing.
- Fitzpatrick's Palau quarry archaeology (via rai overview) — Quarrying-difficulty scholarship
- 'Stone Money of Yap as an Early Form of Money in the Economic Sense' — Existing economic framing
Predictions
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