The essay that follows is an attempt to bring science fiction - storytelling about a data structure - into an operational, open source software project. As a design or set of specifications, this essay is insufficient and incomplete. This is a story about a data structure. This essay proposes new software tools for the data structures we use for time, including the replacement of timestamps with graph objects that have universally coordinated durations, and the establishment of Clock Zero, a decentralized, singular time anchor, and a normalizing time format translation system called xpayz time. All of these ideas emerge from one belief: institutions will not eternally control time itself.

The clockchain can be for time what Ethereum is for contracts and governance, or Bitcoin is for money and currency. In this way, it could be a universal nuerome, the way Ethereum is a universal computer and Bitcoin a universal bank. The nuerome reveals our true nature: we are a set of individual souls who are also synchronized in layer after layer of subgraphs of mimetic memetic superorganisms, including the prime graph, an emergent, singular superorganism that integrates humans, and our digital analogs.

The following quotation does a succinct job of explaining what inspires me about working in the time space. My next steps for the clockchain are to circulate this essay, then host group chats and calls. After talking to prospective collaborators, I intend to setup bounties for multiple developers to participate in building a prototype. This is a side project from my work at Sundial, which I intend to be the first adopter of the clockchain into an app.

Sean

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Francis Bacon

The scaffolding of the human experience is our contemporary consensus structure for time.

At first, consensus was endogenous. For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens roamed as nomadic tribes, fully regulated by time of day as a framework of circumstance. They did not have a synchronized point in measured physics. The safe time of day to eat was when there were no animals around, nor lightning, nor hungry Homo sapiens there to compete for food — not noon. Lunch couldn’t be for 60 minutes, as minutes were yet to exist. When to go to the bathroom? At urgency, again checking circumstance. To sleep? To mate? Mostly when the weather and sun allowed, and — again — circumstance.

Then, for millennia, agricultural clocks regulated human behavior. Crops and livestock, as well as herds to hunt, regulated society. Some cultures were still regulated by these patterns when my grandparents were born, although they become fewer by the year.

Time was something of a magic phenomenon, both irrefutable, and unregulated. Over time, civilizations started to use the giant lunar clock in the sky, and to make use of shadows to divide time. Sundials emerged. Then hourglasses. The Mayans and many other cultures built elaborate temples to align with the patterns of the sun, and the days within. From Stonehenge to the Temple at Karnak, solar worship reigned eternal. Thousands of years later, candles were mass manufactured in such a way that they burned for exactly an hour, or exactly eight hours. When the candle was out, the time had passed.

Soon, control of time became power. Over a long history of different time models - including ones where hours change in length based on season, and other localized mechanisms for tracking time - great leaders emerged in institutional structure, and they took control of time. In the end, pharaohs and kings, railroad companies and satellite companies, religions and governments — they are all participating in an eternal jiu jitsu match, grappling with one another over who determines what time is. Even in 2022, hundreds of legislators debated changing time for hundreds of millions of people, at a random point in the shared timeline that small group choose and mandated. Now, in 2023, there will be no more daylight savings time in the United States, and subsequently in corporations around the world.

All of that sits on what is so obviously true from a first principles perspective: time is what we make of it. This essay is a proposal to make time distributed. Distribute consensus has emerged as a fundamental tool on which humans build the future. Time belongs on a set of distributed tools, not in the volatile hands of whomever is currently in power. Those who provide the mining services, the code, and the governance over the clockchain will be responsible for establishing a new era. We will be the keepers of the timeline, if you will.

Caesar’s most enduring feat was, perhaps, to disassociate us from the clock in the sky. There’s little evidence that, prior to the change to the Roman lunar calendar, anybody had given thought to making an abstracted human-designed calendar that didn’t recognize the lunar and solar cycles. In 46 BC, the Julian reform of the calendar was introduced. We have used an algorithmic leap-year-accounting calendar ever since.

Why did he do this? Perhaps because he thought it was scientifically more valid, but it’s more likely that it was to seize control of all of the systems of documentation, especially in ports and receipts. By changing the calendar, his empire’s workers all knew if they were dealing with someone conforming to the empire or not, based on their calendar. If it was 12 months and 365 days, they were already acculturated; if not, they soon would be changing calendars, perhaps at sword point.

Caesar essentially forced everyone to switch from indigenous time to government time. Like forcing a switch from linux to corporate-controlled operating systems, a time time model forces every single interaction for everyone everywhere to adapt and comply, or be left behind. Or worse. History may be written by the victor; but the future of time itself is also written so.

Calendar reform - and the battle for determining time and schedules - was just getting started. Rome would prove to be the garden not just of Caesarian time, but would also yield, in the exact same place many years later, Pope Gregory VIII, who would change time yet again. The Gregorian calendar is the twelve-month leap-year-corrected calendar we mostly use today.

This reform had the astonishing feature of deleting the days October 5th through 15th that year to make the new leap year model work. Everyone complied — and showed up for mass on time that weekend, right?

Today, a rich Wikipedia page is filled with calendar reform efforts. Gurus and zealots, religious leaders, and scientists alike have all tried to solve for time. But they never solved for adoption or adaptation, and we mostly use the Gregorian calendar in the Western and financial worlds, and just two or three other principal calendars, perhaps most notably the Chinese calendar, as most other alternative calendars are religious in nature.

In his seminal work, Thomas S. Kuhn documents how science changes, from his perspective and data set. It’s a sequential process where drift from the original model and taxonomy used in a type of science - or in our case, all science - has fractured or faulted. Time theory as we apply it today is riddled with faults.

For example, who among us believes that humans on other planets will agree to use the Gregorian calendar, forever adapting their way of life to terran time? We know it won’t work in any sustainable way. Days on Mars need to be days on Mars, not some absurdity where settlers wake up irrespective of local night and day to stay in sync with a planet so distant it takes minutes of delay to communicate from one to another. They will have their own time, and the time we need to prepare for this reality hastens, as humans will soon live on alien planets themselves.

It may seem like cell phones and GPS have given us global synchronized time. They have not. They’ve given some corporate boards and military satellites high centrality in information networks. Could your cell phone provider change your world by changing your clock, to, for example, make a minute 59 seconds? Yes, the could. That is not to say they would, but to highlight only a handful of humans have an actual mechanism to track time that doesn’t depend on an institutional authority disseminating it.

There are multiples times at play today. There is Lunar Standard Time for things on the moon. There are multiple time models for satellites, all under the categories of time bending realities stemming from gravitational time dilation. Time is faster further away. Movies have made this famous by showing a year on one planet being a day on another, and the sense of emotional loss that stems from that if your loved ones age a year while you spend a day away.

We have lunisolar calendars. These include the literal moon and sun; as well as a vast range of religious models of time. The Chinese calendar; the Solar Hirji calendar, an Islamic calendar; the Hebrew calendar; the Celtic calendar; the Ptolemaic Egyptian calendar; the Babylonian and Ancient Macedonian calendars; the Japanese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Korean calendars; and dozens more over history.

People still use sundials.

Farmer’s almanacs, folklores, and indigenous parables all offer unique models of time. Some go so far as to imply there’s a day after the day squirrels start making louder sounds while chewing acorns, and that’s when you should harvest fall crops.

Video games have their own time; and own dimensions of time. Some games are emerging with features like clocks that respond to how fast you move — further breaking and bending the rules of time.

Amidst all of this, most computers are doing their own thing on synchronizing time. They check in, phone home to corporate time synchronization. Servers handshake time signatures. But the rate of loss and data problems is incredible. Time series management data is a necessary ingredient in sensor and IoT-based business models as well as many of the emergent structures within AI research. New time models will open new doors in AI, and we’re in an early stage of working at the scale required to address time itself.

Time reporting is a mountain of problems. Are employees honest? Are devices working right? Do honest people using properly functioning devices understand the time logging software? Are incentives such that time management correlates to time tracking? Does any business of a threshold scale of growth have thorough knowledge into how time is spent?

Races are won at the time when using an analog film race camera, sometimes still in use, based on a mind-bending intersection of physics, photography, and timekeeping where the film and the photo and the photons collaborate to mark a bit of spacetime, completely un-synchronized to any other global source of time, but commemorated by light trapped in special paper.

Are the clocks in your house right? What about after the power goes out? Do you set them all to the same millisecond? Do they line up with your neighbors? If you live on a state boundary, does someone in shouting distance to you live in a different time zone?

How much of your time tick tocks away each day, mindlessly scrolling social media?

We’re stuck in the era of fuzzy, disparate time models. We must unify our time model to a single time model to be prepared to be solar system citizens. We must fix our broken model of time to enable people to be as they blossom, not as they coordinate with precision.

That’s not to say precision isn’t important. The model of time proposed in this essay would be the most precise ever made.

That’s why it’s time to mimic a scientific revolution. Time for a new time.

New models like DAO’s will bring some fairness to how systems are formed; but still provide a highest-bidder-takes-the-prize approach to governance, in many cases. Validating that a human did things is the real identity, even beyond biometrics and institutional verification processes.

Time is a permutation, co-evolved as an idea, a memespace, perhaps, that with Homo sapiens provides an invisible structure to our mental models. Time surely (?) passes, and we know that to be true intuitively; but we don’t typically apply a meta scrutiny to our day-to-day interactions, questioning whether our model of time is the right one. Our tools reinforce this willful ignorance of obvious faults. Calendar apps don’t offer a “work off the timing of the lunar cycle instead” button for Tuesday meetings.

“Sally, can you meet at sunrise on the new moon? We have a new HR software system I want to train you on.” It would be fun, and funny to most. To some cultures it would, perhaps, feel just right.

As a child I spent time on the Dineh reservation in Northeast Arizona, and things started when people got there. I found it “weird” and confusing at first. Now, a part of me still longs for that way. It, too, had it its faults. Try repairing a roof whenever the crew gets there; dealing with stores that open whenever the owner arrives that day.

This tension may appear to be part of a battle that’s already won. We appear to be on track to use the Gregorian calendar forever and ever.

But on a first principles analysis, we know it won’t be forever forever. Our models of time have hardly held on for generations, being devoured by more efficient mechanisms and tools of time. The sundial was replaced by the church bell; the bells by clock tower; and now nearly everything by GPS or time derived by the rate of decay of radioactive materials.

Today, block height or start / finish blocks signify time as much as institutional time. Many argue that bitcoin is the best way to track time; I would position bitcoin as a principal validation node in the clockchain + DTI.

New and extraordinary things have emerged from software. Bitcoin has established a reserve currency that is plainly a revolution in plain sight. Ethereum has established a global supercomputer that can run on wildly disparate types of hardware and be programmed by anyone with very minimal functional society around them. Distributed media is going to enable censorship-resistant information sharing. dApps will make our virtual selves the earnest possessors of digital goods.

And now, it’s time to do for time what has been done for money, computing, and media. It’s time to distribute time, taking away the queen’s Greenwich, England time.

A grand trick of the calendar is to present a user interface that treats a scarce resource as renewable. Need more time? It seems like you’ve got tons in here, there is nothing here. That’s not true. You have to go to the bathroom many, many times during those open days. You don’t have most of that free time. It’s on you to record every single detail if you want to see your real time.

Time is not renewable. It’s scarce. You get a set amount of it, and it’s shockingly predictable how much you have, within a modest range of error. Every hour you spend is a draw-down from a set bank account. Your calendar is a time budget.

You aren’t going to live to 7,000. You might live to 200 in a flight of imagination. You probably aren’t 3 years old reading this. You probably have about 15-50 years in front of you, if you’re reading this. If you are reading this in the future, I hope you have 200 years in front of you. That’s still not much on a cosmic scale though, and is easy enough to map in a database.

This is true for actions and activities, as well. Nobody has eaten for 900 hours consecutively. Nobody has meditated for 4,000 hours consecutively. Women don’t have babies in their late 80’s. Men don’t finish triathlons at the age of 18 months.

Same for relationships: no couple is married for 2 minutes, nor for 200 years.

A sidenote on fate, determinism, and free will:

A natural consequence of modeling global first-principles time models is that the limits of free will quickly conform to a parameterized and filtered set of free will options. At my age, I cannot become a fighter jet pilot, nor can I go back and spend more time walking my kids in a stroller when they are tiny enough for strollers. We have free will within the limits of physics — and millions of operational nuances.

We should have fun with that, and perhaps we extract a new philosophical model based on evidence at scale from the late stage clockchain?

It’s all the things we can really do, not all the things. All the possible realities, not all the realities.

PoHT

Which is more valuable: a social media page about your professional identity where you say you worked someplace for 5 years, or a graph-validated quasi-Bayesian model of social proof verifications that someone showed up at an office for 5 years, with twelve first degree validators, and three types of paid independent validators? Math is on the side of the latter, in a dramatic way.

The clockchain has to have Proof of Human Time (PoHT) to create an honest and earnest record of time that can last in perpetuity for all future time. “History is written by the victor” can fall quickly to PoHT of our shared objective reality.

Because humans are applying an artificial, human-contrived time system on top of what we call Planck lengths of time, not monitoring and tracking something that actually exists, we need a central ledger of what we call time. From millisecond 0 to millisecond omega. (1)

That record can include entries from very specific to very fuzzy. Perhaps a quantum physics lab records a reaction that took place for 100 milliseconds, and records that time range. Perhaps a colleague confirms someone does a task for 100-200 hours. That is also placed in the DTI. The end user accessing it can determine what types of events and what level of time granularity is necessary.

Human actions will be the most common entrant, so the time in the near future and near past are the most important to early adoption and success. People can record that they did something for 100 hours, like a training program, and get it verified by colleagues. Because that record references the DTI, it is clear for eternity when that person did that thing, with very high statistical likelihood that it’s true. It can easily be cross-referenced with other data from the DTI to check for credibility. Did this account ID report contradictory simultaneous accounts? Then it’s a bogus record. Many such exceptions can be made, with a very important one being fraudulent creations supported by scam networks who serve as validators.

The clockchain infrastructure requires a different type of validator. There is a classic blockchain validator, which is checking the math of the records, system integrity, etc. This is critical for the clockchain, but more types of validators are needed.

This is a monetization engine for the clockchain. Validators, in many cases, can get paid or otherwise benefit from supporting the clockchain. Software with API’s like fitness tracking systems can offer to serve as a validator for exercise. This wouldn’t enable the user to report to the clockchain just based on that validation, but instead for the user to report using another person to validate first, then using this API as secondary support.

Paid validators must include formal time tracking. Colleges and universities can validate a student’s time in a lab. Employers can validate employees’ time. It should be that objective measurements can serve as validators as broadly as possible. If a marathon management company can push data from their tracking system and stopwatch system so runners have eternal proof of their time spent and time achieved, they should be able to do so as easily as possible.

Further paid validators could be identify verifiers in the real world, who attach private but verified identities to accounts.

Before any of this, the most simple validation is asking one other person to validate that you spent that time that way. The system has to start there and be based there.

There is good reason to do reputation ranks, perhaps both Ethereum miner style, and Yelp style.

The fee structure could, perhaps, encourage good reputation. The better the reputation the more pay you get? Too simple? Maybe a model like the higher your reputation the higher your power to pipe revenue with autonomy, including some to yourself. i.e. you get paid X amount of ETH to validate and store in a blockchain distribution all graphs in the DTI. But then you get a pipe of revenue to control, perhaps to reward other users, to fund recapitalization and investment cycles, to increase hardware capacity, stake for future protocols, etc. So the model is reward persistently, and direction and management progressive to reputation.

Imagine a situation where a clockchain entry supports a trigger that pays a bounty based on a certain validation. Perhaps an employer pays 1 ETH to an employee who gets a personal trainer to validate 100 hours on the treadmill, with the secondary validation coming from the treadmill app account?

tApps will emerge as products that can write to or read from the clockchain.

Imagine a job interview for a master carpenter position at a prestigious Miami design firm, where the employee will handle thousands of dollars of woodworking per hour, installing cabinets in yachts. Two candidates with the same basic qualifications apply. The job starts tomorrow, due to someone quitting by surprise yesterday, leaving a crew two short, not just the one position that was open. The employer receives a resume with references from one candidate. The other candidate provides a clockchain entry validating 10,000 hours of woodworking with dozens of validators. Which person would you hire if you were that manager and had to hire someone right now?

tApps will enable low-trust and zero-trust interactions that require that someone spent time doing something; or that some time was spent somehow. Many types of calendars could exist, ranging from payroll problem-solving to altogether replacing most training that isn’t tested, like corporate training where there is no final quiz or exam. Beyond those practical and enterprise use cases, there are infinite benefits to science.

Imagine a geologist trying to understand what was happening in another part of the world at the exact moment a rare worm fossil was buried with volcanic ash in the dirt in its belly, preserved that way until today. With the clockchain, a query tApp will be able to pull all geological events from the bracket of time ranges possible, and get ever more specific about how things are all interconnected.

tApps in the legal domain will be a full-fledged revolution. High validation alibis, records of business transactions, proof of acceptance, and so on.

I can imagine the most powerful apps combining government-backed contracts with the crypto-backed contracts that require clockchain validations to trigger bounty payments. These tApps will replace a lot of HR work, for example.

There’s nothing about the clockchain and the Deep Time Index that requires the inputs to be stored in Western / Gregorian time. A popular tApp will be a converter API that takes any time format and puts it into clockchain / DTI format, and vice versa. Converting from Hebrew time to Brooklyn time should be a snap; converting from Honk Kong Chinese dates to San Francisco Gregorian dates will just be an API call or a simple function in a standardized open library.

To reconcile the clockchain with the variations in time across the galaxy, and in this example, the moon, we need a clockchain-compatible algorithm set.

A core model will be XPAYZ time, which can convert lunar time to earth time easily. In theory, it handles any two disparate time modalities, ideally normalizing time units, accepting for and accommodating Planck lengths, but maintaining the dramatically more workable and earth-system-compatible (99.9999% of all systems) milliseconds as clockchain default. In that way, I dream of the clockchain as the lingua franca of time for all time, and hope you want to be a part of starting that as much as I do.

The name signifies this: x = payz

X = Time in a new format.

P = Permissions. Inbound data from one or more sources and outbound data from one or more sources may have different permissions systems. For example, a user may encrypt their clockchain entry using plain text. A XPAYZ hook will check all of this before decrypting and sharing with what may be a public entry.

A = Adjustments. This references as set of adjustments in time scale. This library will grow over time. One example is converting “days” to “milliseconds” which could include multiple types of days. Another adjustment could be going from lunar time to Earth time; or going from satellite time to ground time. Lag is a classic adjustment, with minutes between communications between Earth and Mars, as a practical example. Adjustments can be called in sequence, and should be able to be forked.

Y = Why? Why are you doing this operation? Determine the type of output. If Z is in Gregorian time, Y would include a variable to convert to Chinese lunar time, for example. This includes category taxonomy and notes. It must include rules for formatting final results, from am/pm vs. 24 hour to text encoding type. This should be called from a library of results.

Z = Ze’Time. The initial clockchain entry or query set.

Any entry can be run through a XPAYZ time adapter and come out in a new entry envelope that presents the entry in a different format. These are not new clockchain entries, but functionally child nodes with only limited access possible.

From the defense industry to day-to-day calendar operations, a core part of the clockchain protocol has to be shortcake XPAYZ time codes that enable rapid implementation in functional sandbox and production code stacks, worldwide.

(It may be that the clockchain and DTI have to be forked in the future to move to some better measure of time. In this case, the whole system will rely on a colossal XPAYZ time conversion. As such, it should be considered not just a practical tool, but the source of portability that protects the whole system.)

A sub-node of a clockchain entry is a consequence attribute. For example, did a certain amount of time earn a certain amount of money? While this could be a bounty, the meta data tracking, for example, how much was earned per hour, is a separate outcome. Tracking emotional outcomes, financial outcomes, and physical health outcomes enables PoHT to be tied to a new type of learning about the consequences of our behavior.

We are mimic monkeys and need to be able to fork each other's effective behaviors to our calendars the way you patch a new library into code.

We live at a time of profoundly increased needs, expectations, and capacities. But we need the healthiest, most open approach to mimicry we can have. That involves transparency about allocation of time and capital. Clockchain and blockchain, arm in arm.

Layers of clockchain entries must be private and only visible to key holders. Key holders should essentially have multi-sig access to secrets within public entries.

At the same time, public entries must be accessible to anyone using the protocol, any time, any place.

Validators, commercialized tApps, and submission / mining fees are all required for the ecosystem to flourish.

The clockchain should be managed by a DAO. Those members will probably use an ownership coin independent of the clockchain to regulate governance.

That governance should include how much time the member has filed working on the clockchain on the clockchain, as well as how much they actually utilize the clockchain, and how much use they bring to it. It is likely a centrality score that best indicates that user’s moral rights to stake and control within the DAO.

Because the clockchain will last for all time, which could be what is to a human eternity, it needs to be perpetual. A grid down or another problem should not disrupt it any more than the blockchain.

Emergence may be increasing it its complexity, if we are in fact in a system with assembly theory at its core. Conceivably, the clockchain will have some impact on our notion of time itself, and thereby must continually update to reflect our model.

The clockchain code should consider that multiple clockchains may already exist in other galaxies, and that we may need to recognize seniority in integrating our clockchain with an obviously superior version. Its also possible ours is the superior and will need to ingest a different form of data, such as time measured at the molecular level rather than the conscious level. In that case, individual atoms experience linear time as perpetual reincarnation and conceivably different rules apply.

Practically, what this means is simply that the clockchain is better off taking an unstructured data approach to secondary data appended to time, and taking careful account from day one of how to convert to Planck-length time. This is probably a long-term collaborative project to handle floating point complexity at the hyper scale of Planck numbers.

As an important note, the clockchain should be prepared for the advent of mathematics that fall into three domains that could impact time storage: the progression of mathematical theory towards equivalence instead of equality in handling numbers, potential for quantum projection similar to Randonauting for geolocation for time and calendar functions, and radical changes in perception of Deep Time that may be enabled by the James Webb Space Telescope.

An advantage of an open source DAO model is establishing vetting and consensus structures.

Test chains have to exist, and side-chains may be possible. Perhaps there is an incentive to become a verified side chain through some massive action, like a thousand users verify that you should be verified?

While fraud detection will be essential; it’s also possible that the nature of the clockchain and Bases-like emergent eigen-structures is that it’s very hard to commit fraud programmatically if a certain amount of users and validators are doxxed. While this enables identity detection on the clockchain, in theory, it would be non-obvious and a hack of the system to do so. Many validators will want to be doxxed, such as universities, or martial arts training centers.

The integrity of the clockchain requires that highly skilled technicians maintain its code, it requires that people like lawyers and judges, all types of professionals, even spiritual and community leaders — that they all trust the integrity of the system. Communications is a core tenant of maintainership here and things like real-time visualization dashboards should emerge as early tApps to promote clear understanding of the benefits of the clockchain.

It’s critical that the clockchain core software provide an open API. From XPAYZ time conversions to tApps, the API is the system.

What’s different is it probably requires a secondary service to convert from clockchain-based time protocols to all the others; and that probably has to persist across all variables. Similar to an ETH to USD model, but with dozens more parameters, thus orders of magnitude more diversity in possible results.

In this way, huge amounts of processing can be done client side; but many things need to be processed in advance, especially to optimize computing time and to avoid negative environmental effects from brute force processing of records in a blockchain.

Perhaps API’s rely on sidechains which tap the main chain from day one? It seems dramatically more computationally efficient.

The system must provide a persistent, perpetual, free API to let anyone anywhere get the time, at all times.

Imagine clockchain-based contracts, combining Ethereum and government contracts that synchronize to protect your future time by giving it a contract to yourself. Surely, no employer can take that from you?

No protocol or service can thrive without having a personality, in the new market to come. The clockchain is full of jokes. From referencing rappers famous for wearing clocks as necklaces, to stodgy old white dudes whose clock chain is attached to a pocket watch — it’s a branded stack that can have fun with itself.

Creating the permanent record of time memorial will take some meaningful percentage of that time itself. Maybe it’s 1%. Maybe we can get it down to .001% or even small enough to see meaningful gains in my mortal lifetime. In any case, it is an inevitable technological step on our path to wherever it is we are emerging.

So, to conclude this introduction, I leave with this question:

How can clockchain entries be bulk populated using historical data, so that we achieve as much of historical data recording to the clockchain as we can in our lifetimes? What types of AI’s can do that?

There’s a long history of clock chains. Be it the heavy, custom-weighted and gauged clock chains of a bell tower, controlling timing themselves; or the chain holding a precious timekeeping device worn by the privileged of certain generations, their pocket watch.

A Bayesian graph of how you spent time. You - or someone else - says person A spent time on Activity Z. You may be person A, or not. You say you spent 100 hours working on Sundial. Then you send that to me, person B. I look at it and I either say no, suggest a change, or I approve. If I approve, I can also send a request to my wife, person C. She validates not that you spent that time, but that I have spent time on the same thing, my 1000 hours on Sundial.

So we end up with 4 nodes and 4 edges, a complete triangle with one branch. That is a minimum eigenvector compounding into single point of centrality, or in broad conceptual terms, a sort of cousin of a minimum Bayes graph; which in this case, is the activity of working on Sundial.

(This raises the question if our data structure needs a non-person actor -- a company basically? It's not an Activity or a User, although it could kind of be a fork of a user?)

Once a minimum graph (MG) is established, it serves a Proof of Time (PoT). The broader the graph gets, the more powerful the software grows, and the less likely it is that it's untrue. Of course you can commit fraud, but it's very hard. We can use ETH wallets to validate, for example, that it's a person who isn't making tons of entries.

I believe we could pretty easily build an index of all time. Start with say 10,000 years ago and build up to 10,000 years from now. Build a central index of time, and have MG's attach to a time period in a single, centralized time database. Like Wikipedia, a person can go in and say that dinosaurs existed from x milliseconds to y milliseconds; another can say T-rex was in North America from x to y; another can say a sub species was in California from x to y; a paleontologist can say a specific skull was from x to y.

It's 6.31152e+14 milliseconds, which seems a storable amount of data these days. By having a single time record and timezone irrelevance, it slowly becomes the de facto record of time. The more MG's point to the Deep Time Index as a reference of shared objective time, then put time zones and other human adaptations on top of it, the people have to use it. Eventually a whole legal system could be built on high validity MG's stored on the clockchain referencing a shared objective Deep Time Index.

A lot of people say Bitcoin is time, and they are right, sort of. But, really, time is time.

While clockchain MG’s enable entries from any point in time, the DTI features need to be scoped to the functional time that’s relevant to most user. That is, in most cases, within the past year or next year; or within the past lifetime or next lifetime. The range of use cases - practically - outside of those ranges become science, speculative investment, and creative applications.

In this light, the DTI will need these initial features:

Like GMT, dti_Prime is a reference point that other references points are based off. Just as most software uses GMT+/- systems to track time zones, then appends labels to those, dti_Prime+/- allows a single point of reference.

dti_Prime is also clock height zero, when that millisecond arrives — sometime soon.

Maybe Clock Zero should take place at some specific moment, like a solar eclipse?

By providing and updating - likely via popularity contest algorithms - the taxonomical structure of the MG labels, the DTI can first analyze what people are submitting, then navigate disambiguation by offering an emergent definition called in real time to clockchain queries, as well as the initial taxonomical label and the user written label, should it differ.

duration_ms == stop_anchor - start_anchor

If that doesn’t computer, it’s a corrupt entry. This is one of many such back-checks the systems needs.

Clockchain MG’s need to overlap. When we drive somewhere and listen to music, we are both driving and listening to music that whole time. Each MG can have precise integrity and overlap.

Because of this, the DTI has to be able to reconcile how much time an activity takes. In the example of driving and listening, let’s imagine someone who is active in the military reserves of their nation, and needs to listen to audio updates provided by squadron leaders, in conjunction with mission briefings. These “internal podcasts” have to be registered on the clockchain for tracking, and a convenient way to do that is carpooling with other reservists and listening on the way to work.

The ability to discern that both actions were possible, and to what extent they each consume time, is a key abstraction from large scale clockchain data; and perhaps, and key set of guesses to calibrate the system prior to launch. In this case, it’s plausible that the recordings were listened to, the reservists inter-validate they participation, and for mileage reimbursements, all also validate drive time on various employer accounts each year. Is this fraud? That’s unlikely, for reasons already established.

The DTI needs to create multiple feedback loops to assess each type of activity in a broad taxonomy of activities. Activities in the DTI themselves need emergent boundary conditions, established by a combination of statistical patterns in the data, and logical boundaries established in queries trained against the DTI, as well as its meta data.

Because many activities occur on a regular basis, or some recurring pattern, the clockchain data schema enables an object to drill infinitely down on the specificity of a behavior. While a user or developer could, in theory, put a separate entry for every time they do yoga, it would make the DTI wildly inefficient, both practically - especially for queries - but also from an energy use and computational (thereby also real) cost basis.

In the example of doing yoga for a year, a clockchain entry might best be expressed as something that took a year, with the start and stop times the beginning and last class of this activity. Rather than store every activity in between, the schema uses the following structure to record recurring behaviors:

Asymptotic (A) variable

A represents whether or not a behavior stops; and if so, on what curve. Some behaviors, like breathing, take place at a “1” — meaning that they last until your final breath, without ever stopping. Some, like doing yoga for a year, have a decay to “0” because they end.

While 1 would be forever and 0 would be fully stopping when it stops. The closer to zero the score is, the more unattainable the event is, in most cases. For instance, solar eclipses would be A = 0 because when they are not happening, they are definitely not happening. Something like watching television may be A = .5 because describing watching behavior is describing something that stops, but sometimes does not.

Duration (D) variable

This is the unit duration of an instance of an activity. It can be input as a static amount in xx.xxE+y, or can be derived from the start and stop anchors. This can also be externalized, or erratic. It should accept structured exceptions, but not unstructured.

Period (P) variable

Distance is basically period. It’s how far between events is mandated by the nature of the event. For example, New Year’s Eve can only arrive once every 365 terran-Gregorian days.

This is stored as a function of how many events there, which in turn can be divided into gross_duration, the total amount of time for the graph object, which is derived from start_anchor and stop_anchor — this derives R, recurrence.

This is stored as a simple number. The count of instances.

P = x instances.

Recurrence (R) variable

Recurrence is the amount of milliseconds between each object; and holds several exception states, which is why it has to be recorded, not derived on demand. The first exception state is when the event recurs on an external pattern. This would include holidays. Some on an institutional calendar, like Christmas; and some on solar calendars, like Easter. The second exception is when the recurrence is unknown or to be determined. There are likely more exceptions.

This is recorded in xx.xxE+y format, again, with exceptions:

R = ! signifies to be determined

R = ? signifies unknown or unknowable

R = [logic] signifies that recurrence will take place when some external event takes place, for example some other incomplete clockchain event

Spread (S) variable

This is a self-reported - and possibly derived - metric of how precise the APR model is. When S = 1, the APR model is exactly right. Something happened, recurred, and stopped exactly as described. Imagine an event where two world leaders meet for one hour and never meet again, with massive amounts of n>3 degree deep validator graphs. Then, on the other hand, when S = 0, it is highly imprecise, and the mid range of S = .5 might be some reliable but faulty model. In that case, some person obsessed with tracking their behavior might record that they run for an hour a day and can prove it with their watch; but the time is all over the place, and the clockchain submission is not of such importance that each run needs to be an individual clockchain graph.

It’s unclear how to recursively derive this; and equally unclear how to derive it consistently in any such way. Perhaps the DTI v2 includes a mechanism to weight S? Perhaps it is as simple as standard deviation of the incoming data, or some other simple and friendly analysis model?

Or perhaps (S) and PR are miscategorized in schema assignments, and S should be the social ranking of the contributing node?

By our powers combined.

ADPRS is the formula to make a wave form. Similar to synthesizers, the raw input data of the activity combined with these behaviors turns time models back into the waveform that they truly are.

Calendars have told a lot of lies, but the lack of acknowledgment of the wave properties of time is, in my opinion, the most ignoble.

DTI queries could be simple; or DTI queries could be complex graph conditions. Does the clockchain + DTI require a unique query structure? Perhaps not, as many graph search models have now become - basically - black box AI functions.

This is hard to discern without testable models to learn from. New models of language and AI together with DTI data will reveal the best search models, I would expect.

The list of compatible time models is by definition infinite, since the clockchain + DTI will exist as long as things exist, in theory. But the important ones for a v0 prototype are:

XPAYZ Time - All branches

Gregorian Time - 24 hr and am/pm

Sundial Time - human-lifespan personalized time

Sundial Time formats - milliseconds —> clockchain

Time Layers - two or more time models with a synchronizing function

Time in Space - galactic, solar, and geo positioning coordinates of the timestamp

Records its own time of recording a network and a cohort.

Cohorts are strength. The more inter-referential information the blockchain MG provides, the better. This is especially true in time stamping when the entry was made, which should be an account of the highest centrality time validation possible.

Perhaps streams of all the nuclear clocks, etc. are brought to a unified place that serves like the international kilogram for time, and that must be tapped. Perhaps it syncs across all devices active on the network at that time.

In practical terms, we need something better than we have. What time is it? Who knows. It could be just about anything. Either the sun is facing you or it’s not right now, that’s for sure.

As the clockchain becomes active enough, and validators for “what time it is” exist across billions of entries, a new strong emergence phenomenon arises — a consensus time with statistical majority consensus for human time.

We will never perceive Planck lengths, and they are nonfunctional units of time for Homo sapien consciousness. AI’s will need to understand this. The clockchain and DTI enable that.

Eventually, the clockchain becomes the L1 for time itself.

This means the clockchain + DTI drip of the dti_Prime+x = now timestamp will be the timestamp to replace all timestamps.

clockchain create minimum graph { 
      user_id: xxxxxx 
      user_note: lorem ipsum
      cumulative_time: YY.YYe+Z
      start_anchor: dti_Prime +/- AA.AAE+B
      stop_anchor: dti_Prime +/- CC.CCE+D
      waveform: [ADPRS code] 
      active_duration: FF.FFE+G
      anchor_validator_class: [select list] "bitcoin"
      anchor_validator_start: [secondary anchor] "block height"
      anchor_validator_stop: [secondary anchor] "block height"
      user_activity_label: [text input]
      user_dti_taxonomy_label_select: [search select]
      validator_graph_i: {matrix of validators and statuses}
      validation_score: [calculation]
      linked_user_ids: {hhhhhh, jjjjjj,...}
      clock_height: kkkkkk
      {{object_id}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{emergent_dti_label}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{shortcode}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{legible_code}}: [callback from clockchain]
}

user_id: This could be many types of unique id of sufficient complexity, but it should probably start as ETH / BTC wallets.

cumulative_time: The clockchain’s core unit is milliseconds, as this is the smallest application within the short tail of time uses. of coures microseconds, nanoseconds, and up to megaHertz and gigaHertz are used throughout computer - and all - science, but the vast majority of practical applications use millisecond or larger time units. If there is an employer who tracks paid time in milliseconds, it is surely for some anomalous reason, and costs quite a bit in overhead to manage. There’s no reason a xpayz time transformation can’t take place to the main chain, should the tDAO approve the conversion, so it could move from milliseconds in the future, just in case.

The system will require a protocol for handling floating point choices, and many such protocols exist as precedent. It’s probably better to keep to “hours” on the left of the decimal and “minutes” on the right side, so a human can read it at a glance. That means transforms would have take place for each input, or that a standardized format emerges. This is probably true throughout.

start_anchor / stop_anchor: Each moment needs a start anchor. That anchor critically synchronizes with all the other entries. This enables the DTI. A microservice converting “current time” from whatever source the data stream is coming from into start_anchor and stop_anchor format will be very helpful.

The format is similar to GMT+/- time formats. Evolving from that into a dti_Prime+/- format enables consistency across all software systems.

waveform: [ADPRS code]: This data contains the waveform pattern necessary to model behaviors and time itself as waveforms. As earlier described, each variable has rules and unique components.

The format is {A,P,RR.RRE+x,S}, or, as an example: {1,2.71e1,10,3.14E+10,.5}

A = 0 through 1

D = DD.DDe+G:

P = i

RR.RRE+xe.g. 12.34E+10 milliseconds

S = 0 through 1

anchor_validator_class: [select list]: An anchor validator is the third-party reference point used to validate not the graph but the anchor. In most cases, something like a reference to an API to a nuclear clock, or block height on Bitcoin will be sufficient to record when the anchor happened on some point external to the clockchain + DTI. This ensures the entry synchs to globally recognized times, and maintains the health of the clockchain through constant comparison.

_start and _stop are stored in the indigenous time format of the validator. As such, using exclusively crypto block heights and nuclear clocks might be better.

user_activity_label: Taxonomy is the trickiest part of the DTI. While the clockchain has no requirement for consistent labeling, the DTI is built upon a taxonomical structure that allows strong emergent functions. Many of the most powerful functions of the clockchain + DTI come from seeing how whole populations spend time, and to analyze that data - even with the best systems - some categorization has to take place.

It’s critical that the user be able to have freedom of speech when it comes to submitting labels. Just as entries to all blockchains contain dark or horrible things, the clockchain may be spammed; but the incentives are low, if existent at all, for the worst kinds of things harming children or whole populations.

user_dti_taxonomy_label_select: At an inflection point of scale, the DTI can be used as a recursive self-informing source of taxonomical structure. The user can start to select descriptions and labels they agree with easily and quickly.

I may release a taxonomy to kickstart this process, which has been designed and funded by my private company. Perhaps the clockchain enables someone to benefit from the taxonomy they provide, when other users fork it they pay some fee to use it.

validator_graph_i: There are many types of validators, and each type has a simple graph. At minimum, a validator graph has a

validator_id -- The clockchain id of the validator.

validator_timestamp -- The clock height when the validation was recorded.

validator_value -- 0 to 1 value representing certainty.

validator_reputation_rank -- 0 to 1 value representing recursive reputation of validator’s use and credibility, likely through centrality scoring.

validator_method -- Initial options should be human judgment or trust, smart contract, external validation with proof, and consensus. The first representing “I said so” - basically - and the second relying on something like a photo proving an activity being done, then the last simply listing other user ids that subsequently validated it.

validator_method_proof -- For validators that have proof, either an explanation or something like a url to a photo serves as proof. It’s possible the clockchain needs file storage or some type encoded file snippets to manage proof of validation.

validator_reward -- Smart contract to reward payments.

validator_legible_label -- Human readable label or title for the validator.

validator_notes -- Because validations can be very imprecise, there needs to be the ability to explain what’s happening.

Each validator can be expressed as a {x,…,y} entry. It’s also possible the clockchain needs two types of nodes; Activities and Validators. Any user, presumably self-validating the entry precipitating their participation in the clockchain, is a Validator.

There is no reason there can’t be a very large number of validators, but there should, perhaps, be a limit on the number of validator graphs that can be linked. Over-linking the nodes of the DTI dramatically increases the computational cost of graph queries, and in that way over-linking is not helpful. Perhaps there is a statistical threshold after which more Validator graphs are not contributing much, chasing an asymptotic curve that never reaches 0.

validation_score: Because the validation graph structure is complex, a simple score will contribute a lot of functionality to the DTI. This should be a centrality score with “weighted force direction” (not exactly, more recursive, but similar) based on the compounding strength of the validator graphs. This score incentivizes growth in validator networks. Each user / Validator may have a recursive score derived from this, aggregating their score across all entries, so that the higher integrity the higher integrity.

linked_user_ids: Because many activities include multiple people, this value store allows infinite additional users to validate they participated. There must be a system for unclaimed user accounts.

(One of the most fascinating aspects of the DTI is that a person’s whole life could be mapped out by others, and with inference graphing, a full model of that person may be derived -- without them knowing the clockchain exists. That’s unlikely, but it’s plausible as a thought experiment.)

clock_height: Because the clockchain is a blockchain, it has a block height. This is recorded with each entry.

For fun, it’s called the clock height -- a reference to the clock towers built by monarchs, which the clockchain evolves past. As a metaphor, Clock Zero is taller than the tallest royal tower.

{{object_id}}: Received when the graph is submitted.

{{emergent_dti_label}}: As the DTI begins to have an emergent recursive taxonomy, labels can be appended automatically.

{{shortcode}}: Because computer programmers don’t want to starting putting complex in their databases to replace the old standby local timestamp, each clockchain entry needs to have a shortcode entry that complies human time. This is a GMT+/- time/date code; possibly two; possibly multiple.

{{legible_code}}: Because humans read human time, this simple function states the label of the graph and how many hours and how many years the activity takes place, cumulatively. For example: yoga_100_1 would signify yoga, for 100 hours, for 1 year. This references the emergent_dti_label.

//////

Missing from all of this are Miners and the data structures Miners need, including payments. That is an intentional omission, in part because it’s unclear what type of hardware best mines the clockchain + DTI; and mostly because those interested in pioneering this work should have a voice in the structure from the first moment of public discussion. I will share my opinions when the first meeting of prospective Miners takes place. The same is true for paid validators who might build a model off of validating, similar to how notaries public make their livings in the US.

//////

Because the full graph is onerous for many uses cases, especially for app developers wanting to push clockchain entries out of their existing model, which is unlikely to include so much information when they decide to do so. A minimum graph approach should be accepted, with a simplification and possibly bifurcation in post types. An “mg” is the equivalent of using an address and note pair on an ETH payment.

The best mg may be:

user_id start_anchor stop_anchor waveform

As a clockchain + DTI emerges, a large portion of early adopters will be academic. The correlation abilities of the DTI to any data set - combined with cultural comfort with statistical models invoking Bayes-like certainty, centrality, and inference models - makes an ideal use case. Many of the best developers still participate in graduate research, and researchers across all fields want to carve our their role in the crypto revolution.

As such, a great early market to approach is academic use cases. The first is to circumvent the institution and create social-graph-validated models of credentials.

The PoHT vs. the PhD.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where only one credential can be presented on hiring for a top tier staff engineer at a big tech company. In 2025, would a candidate be better to present their PhD from the University of Maryland, or to show a peer-validated network of 3,000 hours of coding time on projects in the past six years, with all the validating nodes being students or staff of the university. Would the smart candidate provide that clockchain-verified Bayes-like history to this company built on computer science and AI research, or a piece of paper signed by an institution head?

Let’s explore why the smart candidate will use the clockchain + DTI records.

It’s easy to lie, manipulate, change, or cheat about time. What percentage of time tracking is honest? On first principles, manual time tracking through paper or digital entries is rife with consequences. That, in part, is why students are tested. We credential not what gets done, per se, but a long chain of small moments of human judgment on the part of the instructor, the institution, and the student.

Because of the mechanisms discussed as Bayes-like in this essay, fraud is hard in the clockchain + DTI. Spam detection is heavily-reliant on Bayes functions to work so well, which should serve as ample proof to merit the hypothesis it will work here.

Having a page with a glamorous headshot of yourself, listing all the places you’ve worked, amidst a sea of tech company recruiters, and AIs designed to grasp your attention — that is a solution for a better phonebook, one that has a TV in it.

Proving how you have spent time leads to an ocean of insights.

Can a person keep doing the job of mowing lawns for 30 years if they don’t know how to mow a lawn? Can a person be ignorant to how a surgical operating room works after 1,000 verified hours in one? The answers to both are likely no; the broader their graph of validation, the more certain the no.

Over time, the clockchain + DTI becomes a trustworthy source, where other platforms are built on truths that are, at best, castles made of sand.

The range of new market models ranges from replacing PhD certificates to changing the way professional sports are telecast. Imagine a professional athlete’s stats including their total game and training time, as well as a score of how likely those stats are to be true.

Imagine a history channel that explores one millisecond in history each episode. The DTI enables anyone to grab all these events in a query.

Imagine a legal system where legal assistants - like stenographers, paralegals or dossier developers - have a new skill set of sourcing validators for alibis.

Imagine a calendar that shows you as a character running along a limited slice of time eternal, rather than a perpetually renewing empty sheet to fill in each week end.

The clockchain is inevitable. We can - and do - record a lot of our lives and activities. Digital copies of us exist write large. Most big companies have one of most people in their markets, at this point.

Our time is recorded.

Also, we now know that all time exists. We can perceive and visualize what has and will happen, with great certainty. Thinking, social species evolved before us. Dinosaurs roamed. Supernovae will explode in the future.

The phrase “time immemorial” is purported to have emerged over a thousand years ago in English law to refer to time outside of known time. That no longer exists.

The clockchain + DTI are the inflection point of intellectual evolution where we stop pretending we can’t know most things, and begin to take account of all time.

We tend to analyze time as thought time spent has direct consequence. Going to the gym builds muscle. But really, eating the right food before and after, sleeping the right way, and so on — it all compiles to a sequence of performance outcomes, not a one-to-one set of behaviors and outcomes. It’s matrix to matrix math to look at inputs and outcomes in life.

In this way, time as a mechanism of AI in fields like bioinformatics can look not just at behaviors, but at sequences. A superstructure like the human genome could emerge, like the human action-outcome model map. But that’s probably more of a thought experiment for now, until clockchain + DTI data exists at such scale an AI can be trained to consider how this might really be implemented.

The library at Alexandria was burned many times. Gold has been stolen from many empires. Land, the same. We are at the dawning of a a new ear of things being immutable through scale of distribution. The clockchain + DTI offer more than a record of time. By correlating outcomes to the entries therein, maps and models of how humans succeed and fail can be derived, analyzed, and crystalized into new plans that are most effective. Everything from business strategy to meme crafting can be back-tracked to behaviors that spent time.

This protects the legacy of learning across time better than any monolithic store of information. The clockchain + DTI thus protects our knowledge, as a species, and as consciousness emergent from the stardust.

As previously mentioned, this also accelerates our ability to mimic effective strategies, further enabling the best actions at a time where environmental changes threaten mass migrations and permanent supply chain restructuring.

As time takes place on different scales, we will create infinite branches of time. New VR games use movement as a clock. Some use external clocks as clocks. Some set time on other planets.

As these experiences and accomplishments become more valuable as digital goods and avatar add-ons, as well as NFT’s and other proof of ownership models, the time spent to do them, time spent winning, losing, collaborating, even using a certain weapon or spell, does too — the need for timestamps that are smarter soars.

Rich with digital assets, and able to be up at any of the 24 hours in a “day,” the metaverse is not tied to earth time. Gamers have, for decades, played into the early morning hours, with other gamers on the other side of the planet, hitting the game during a lunch break. They exist on — for now — server time, not a central synchronized time. That server may itself synch to a centralized time, but only clocks at precisely the same altitude, and possibly inside the same stratification of the magnetosphere, are truly synchronized, otherwise the millisecond and the second are, a fine resolution, very rough consensus acceptance of an equivalence of functional time units, not an equal measure of the same thing.

VR also inevitably creates metaverse-time. The clockchain + DTI is the bitcoin to that fiat.

Many DAO’s already reward human time through provable actions. Promote your DAO - two governance points, tokens, coins, or whatever denomination it may be.

PoHT can decrease and, in rare cases, end problems endemic in the world of DAO’s. Nepotism and controlled / slow drip information release enables people to reward real-world friends and trade favors in launching DAO’s, protocols, and currencies.

PoHT can show work and commitment instead of Discord popularity.

A tApp like Sundial can show how much of someone’s life has gone to that DAO, which should be a meaningful metric, as much so as their budget.

Each viable minimum clockchain post to the DTI is valuable unto itself as a PoHT asset; valuable to the DTI in revealing more of the shared synchronized time record; and is a slow contribution into something like a savings account, which will threshold one day to the point that things that are unreasonable to derive from one record will be easy to derive from millions or billions of records.

For example, how much time does it take to start a startup that succeeds, given the history of the founder, the market conditions, the industry type, and so on? Given one clockchain post to the DTI, it’s absurd to wager a guess. But among the billions of entries perhaps thousands of data points exist, from which a complex sub-graph can be filtered.

This sub-network continues to exist as it did with in the whole, but can be isolated for computational focus; many types of inference and prediction graphs can be used to manipulate these data from there.

Perhaps the holy grail - by which I mean object of desire that may or may not actually exist, not the thing on which we should focus - is to derive perfectly crafted products designed based on market needs found in the DTI.

Imagine that someone has to self-report behavior in a psychology research assessment that is part of a multi-year study. The person isn’t living and working from a lab, so self-reporting of how they behave is critical.

The clockchain requirement of time report means the person has to build a quasi-Bayes graph of social proof about their behavior. Fraud patterns are likely to occur, and to be caught in many cases with basic detection.

Years later when the findings of the paper come into play, it’s not a question of how honest the participant “seems” but how high a score, but of some metric like clockchain reputation + sub-graph of reputation into a centrality score, to determine veracity of reporting.

Did a researcher actually work 10,000 hours in the lab according to themselves, or according to a three-deep network of validators with high reputations?

My favorite daydream about the magic of data synchronized on the clockchain is to root out synchronicities and make them clear. Does the social science of economics actually have the answer to a recession, or can the business school’s market dynamics research from the exact same time periods offer more clear trajectory-mapping? When we backtrace and back-propagate models that can coordinate off of a central handshake of shared, reconciled time frame, we can build a new model of research where a quasi-open centralized database exists not around subjects but just around time itself.

We have immutable ledgers of money.

We have immutable ledgers of computation.

We do not yet have immutable ledger of human action.

This represents a new legal system, wholly acceptable within the current system. What once was an affidavit is now a series of six-tier deep validations of behaviors built by a defense, offering an alibi with a hypothetical nine zero’s of statistical certainty.

People can say anything. At a certain scale, the DTI limits what they could have plausibly done. In fact, it eliminates most things. A person who has never been on the clockchain and does not show up in the DTI will still have to reconcile with all the things adjacent to their actions.

For example, someone cannot claim that they were at a restaurant when no clockchain entries exist from that restaurant in the past ten years at that time of day. No record is needed to know what time they are open, past a certain amount of data.

Voter fraud would be nearly impossible through clockchain-style ledgers that include multiple identity checks. In cases like some from the distant future intergalactic economy, you are the sum of who you are validated to be. How could any institutional verification out-perform that statistical model of certainty of identity? (2)

Time is emergent on top of a framework of priors. That network is both discernible and can be inferred, to a large extent.

Current AI research accounts for time in linear models; not a singular model. But surely the particles that make up the screen on which you read this were doing something when the dinosaurs roamed this world.

A synchronized universal time exists, we have just not started using it.

To a machine, our carbon atoms are temporarily human.

What sets of human assumptions will be wholly replaced when multiple AIs are analyzing time-synchronized petabytes of data? “Economics” will seem like a cute joke, early Homo sapiens pontificating on their behaviors with rudimentary data. The butterfly effect should be able to be put to the test, at scale, with substantial-enough AI.

In Assembly Theory - as loosely referenced for this essay having nothing to do with it (surely poorly), the intellectual equivalent of a baboon trying to open a coconut - consciousness emerges at a threshold of priors, a level of trailing aggregate complexity or interconnectedness.

The clockchain and DTI - in theory - enable tracking of individual atoms or molecules, on their journey across time. Then, perhaps, their centrality score would be the measure of potential for consciousness?

Or perhaps that’s all wrong and the clockchain + DTI prove it? We’ll see.

tApps are novel things only possible because of the clockchain + DTI.

Validators are integrated with the application in its roots.

Integrations are third parties that play nice, and have mutually-beneficial goals. As discussed, DAO’s are a natural fit, and are inspiration to the clockchain design. New protocols are of most interest to me as partners, so to speak:

While apps may change over time, a few of interest today are:

Proof of Attendance Protocol PoAP. This allows event organizers to prove attendance. It’s already permitting into “honorary” ones that organizers give to community members who miss events, and so on.

Superlocal and CityCoins enable different levels of stacks where people can earn tokens, NFT’s, and similar digital assets by being places.

Of course, Ethereum is a natural tie-in to use clockchain records as timestamps, to use XPAYZ time conversions across planets, and to settle time scales on bets, for example. Bitcoin is, in its own way, as pointed out by many before me, time. The minting and proven work cycles are time scales unto themselves. Perhaps XPAYZ time converts to chain height at timestamp or some novel conversion like that to serve as a dually-immutable hyper-graph of authenticity of some moment.

Users cannot permission ownership of their clockchain entries with other users, other than as activities that can be forked to be repeated — templates to reuse, basically. But users will want to share in some cases, just as cultural artifacts. In this case, they should be able to mint their time as an NFT. Perhaps it’s a grandfather giving his grandson his time climbing Everest; or a mother giving a daughter her first startup venture round closing as a memory that inspires her daughter in her new job managing a billion dollar fund; or something more sentimental, like a last moment together of long-lost grandparents. Or a famous athlete receiving a gold medal for 3 minutes.

It’s a creative ocean of options with that kind of feature, and early efforts should focus on where these things create joy, more than value, in my opinion.

From the Way, one emerged.

From one, two emerged.

From two, three.

From three, all things emerge.

—Tao Te Ching, verse 42

The leadership structure of the tDAO needs to be based on a deep commitment to and deep incentive for the integrity of the DTI. Rather than being the equivalent of Bitcoin maximalists, the keepers of this timeline will emerge into those responsible for the structural integrity of software, human coordination, and new structures of thought, philosophy, and science. This should not be governed by an elected board, but by a consortium of differing interests. Similar to checks and balances, the clockchain and DTI need systems to maximize the benefit of integrity and scale to all stakeholders.

These mechanisms should be formed by consensus within the TAO. One such mechanism may be that the centrality scores are integrated into all functions. This could enable, as an example, paying higher validator rates to validators whose users refer the most validations. This in turn motivates validators to design, tailor, and market their services to those users most likely to grow quickly in scale. Age-out mechanisms of rewards ensure ongoing opportunity and lack of access to perpetual market dominance tactics, which could erode the integrity of the system over time.

Perhaps a scenario emerges where many factors add bias to rewards. Integrity of clockchain filings; integrity over time; link-backs like eigenvector reference scoring used in search; redistribution of share efficacy; participation in other community points-type systems; or even efficacy of governance proposals or some other measurable but subjective contribution.

The best thing is probably a Proof of Work for the system; and Community as another domain. Perhaps these are the two houses of commons in voting. One ruthlessly mathematical; the other chaotically human.

The way of the tDAO should be gentle, yet immeasurably strong. Time crystalized down to a true abstraction, perfect in the way that each moment can be a full and complete story — yet able to grow and permeate and emerge complexity upon complexity to reveal yet another focused lens by which we can understand the reality in which we operate this system.

The first 100 supporters of clockchain protocol and DTI will receive Time Guardian NFT’s. I made this art, bending time. It shows dozens of portraits of people, with one collective human experience emerging across time. C’est la vie.

This NFT signifies you as a keeper of the timeline. As such, you will receive access to unique and important discussions and events.

It’s critical protect Intellectual Property in order to honor the TAO, in this case.

In the open budget, a percentage of engineering and legal resources go to this work. The tDAO owns all.

Time is scarce. Time is limited. Time is brutal. Time is now. We don’t know what time is. We make up time. There is nothing in the laws of physics that requires a sexagesimal system (60-based), nor is there anything in physics, nor biology, nor chemistry that dictates that we can’t contrive some entirely new model of time, using perhaps 12-based systems of hours, where minutes are about 5 of our current minutes.

All of these are strange truths to consider when you think about your life, your work, your time with family, or your bank account. But all is time, and time is all. Most of us care more about time than anything; and when people lose their ability to cherish their time, we recognize it as a mental health problem, not a logical conclusion.

We must further accept that we don’t have infinite choices. We have very limited choices. Most options we can conceive of are impossible. We cannot think of being in Paris, and be in Paris. We cannot think of being in the year known now as 1850, then be there. But we also cannot invent a water-to-wine machine simply because we can conceive of it. We cannot be in New York at noon and Dehli an hour later. We cannot write twenty books in a year. The limits themselves are finite, but a massively long list.

None of this is counter-intuitive. It’s counter cultural.

We, the people, own time.

Our infrastructure must be fully consistent with that absolute truth.

Housing and time emerged together. As the context of our daily lives became more and more safe from daily threats and distracting insufficiencies, we had the freedom to deeply synchronize and coordinate our time and labors with other humans.

But we have a full philosophical barbell arch here, where we can return to responding to our context. This extraordinary liberty will be the soil from which our higher forms emerge.

Owning the means of production may not be as important as it was once regaled to be; owning time itself can be what sets us free.

In a future world, where suffering and strife are solved due to rapid mimicry of essential behaviors in high resolution, enabled by the clockchain + DTI, how we spend our time is how we spend - and cultivate - our love.

In the end, the love expressed when you align your intentions and your impact, is the love you take.

//////

Thank you.

Sean

//////

(1) Is the universe immortal? Let’s figure out! But until then, we’ll go with ‘not for storage costs’.

(2) A highly-sophisticated highly-coordinated PoHT attack where the conscious being does not agree with their chained identity — would be a great sci-fi script. It should also be theoretically impossible because fraud can only span so many nodes deep in the DTI past the scale of roughly 10B entries. That admittedly arbitrary point represents a threshold at which so many real things exist that a whole artificial history would have to be contrived, and so long as each clockchain entry records its own time of recording.

These updates are made after the first draft circulated editors, colleagues, friends, and family. Thank you all for your help and feedback. Thank you to my family for your love and support.

Nothing stated herein should stop the user from posting encrypted data; although it would probably break DTI label look up and taxonomy functions, in at least some of the cases. The ideal encryption system would have multiple zones: user management, clockchain meta management, encrypted clockchain graphs, and encrypted variables within graphs. There should be another set of encryption tools, which include the ability to decrypt-on-time-trigger and perhaps smart decryption contracts, the former being of more prescience and portent -- and inter-referential to the clockchain.

A critical point of feedback is that there are many reasons to include a mutability function - whether ticker or trigger - that ages entries out of the clockchain. It’s not clear how that would work, or how archived versions could possibly be handled. But, it’s a good subject for debate. Perhaps there is some asymptotic curve value over time like ADPRS; there is a trigger; there is user command; or some other function that stops including an entry. I’m skeptical, but optimistic.

Among the good reasons to have optional mutability: people may do things they regret and want to hide; fraudulent entries have to be stopped somehow; no clear mechanism exists to stop group-level deception, creating a statistically-likely yet entirely false entry; and the storage costs of all entries, over time, becomes very large. Perhaps the mindset of optional mutability is wrong altogether, and all entries should de factor age out, but can be set to perpetuity. Perhaps these entries have higher or residual mining fees?

My brilliant friend and past collaborator Alex offered up the brainstorm that clockchain miners monitor our position in space to record time. By analyzing data from a variety of prospective sources - satellite data, eclipses, orbital data, local basic telescope data, and dozens more - the miners could develop a consensus on where in space they are. This would exactly position us in time, as well. Appending POPS to clockchain entries would show exactly where in the universe the entrant was when the entry was entered, which would show exactly when. This is a superior time format to what is described in my essay, and in the official first version of this essay, I will replace my ideas with this one. Combined with nuclear time, it is a system the whole universe should be able to agree upon.

Another brilliant friend, Rakshak, pointed out that “term limits” on the governance of the clockchain are important. To be clear: I’m working to build the clockchain in a decentralized way that does not put me in a long-term exclusive position of power, but rather ages me out of the power structure entirely, becoming a self-sustaining emergent phenomena with rewards to all contribute to its success, not just a founding handful.

It’s not clear how to do that, but it should be recursive, in my opinion. Perhaps it is a count of the number of graphs posted to the clockchain. I can be on the tDAO with voting power for the first billion? Then the second billion I start quadratic scaling down in power, but never reaching zero on my returns. Whatever the mechanism should be, the design should enable incentives that last perpetually (i.e. revenue share that goes asymptotically towards zero but never reaches it), but also prevent governance power from suffering nepotism, unbreakable dominance, x% attacks, and other crippling problems faced by the battleground of failed crypto initiatives.

As a clarification, I can’t imagine that people benefit put “brushing my teeth” on the clockchain, with maybe some very outlier cases like research at a dental college. It’s not a calendar or behavioral quantification tool, any more than bitcoin is a mortgage broker.

The essay that follows is an attempt to bring science fiction - storytelling about a data structure - into an operational, open source software project. As a design or set of specifications, this essay is insufficient and incomplete. This is a story about a data structure. This essay proposes new software tools for the data structures we use for time, including the replacement of timestamps with graph objects that have universally coordinated durations, and the establishment of Clock Zero, a decentralized, singular time anchor, and a normalizing time format translation system called xpayz time. All of these ideas emerge from one belief: institutions will not eternally control time itself.

The clockchain can be for time what Ethereum is for contracts and governance, or Bitcoin is for money and currency. In this way, it could be a universal nuerome, the way Ethereum is a universal computer and Bitcoin a universal bank. The nuerome reveals our true nature: we are a set of individual souls who are also synchronized in layer after layer of subgraphs of mimetic memetic superorganisms, including the prime graph, an emergent, singular superorganism that integrates humans, and our digital analogs.

The following quotation does a succinct job of explaining what inspires me about working in the time space. My next steps for the clockchain are to circulate this essay, then host group chats and calls. After talking to prospective collaborators, I intend to setup bounties for multiple developers to participate in building a prototype. This is a side project from my work at Sundial, which I intend to be the first adopter of the clockchain into an app.

Sean

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Francis Bacon

The scaffolding of the human experience is our contemporary consensus structure for time.

At first, consensus was endogenous. For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens roamed as nomadic tribes, fully regulated by time of day as a framework of circumstance. They did not have a synchronized point in measured physics. The safe time of day to eat was when there were no animals around, nor lightning, nor hungry Homo sapiens there to compete for food — not noon. Lunch couldn’t be for 60 minutes, as minutes were yet to exist. When to go to the bathroom? At urgency, again checking circumstance. To sleep? To mate? Mostly when the weather and sun allowed, and — again — circumstance.

Then, for millennia, agricultural clocks regulated human behavior. Crops and livestock, as well as herds to hunt, regulated society. Some cultures were still regulated by these patterns when my grandparents were born, although they become fewer by the year.

Time was something of a magic phenomenon, both irrefutable, and unregulated. Over time, civilizations started to use the giant lunar clock in the sky, and to make use of shadows to divide time. Sundials emerged. Then hourglasses. The Mayans and many other cultures built elaborate temples to align with the patterns of the sun, and the days within. From Stonehenge to the Temple at Karnak, solar worship reigned eternal. Thousands of years later, candles were mass manufactured in such a way that they burned for exactly an hour, or exactly eight hours. When the candle was out, the time had passed.

Soon, control of time became power. Over a long history of different time models - including ones where hours change in length based on season, and other localized mechanisms for tracking time - great leaders emerged in institutional structure, and they took control of time. In the end, pharaohs and kings, railroad companies and satellite companies, religions and governments — they are all participating in an eternal jiu jitsu match, grappling with one another over who determines what time is. Even in 2022, hundreds of legislators debated changing time for hundreds of millions of people, at a random point in the shared timeline that small group choose and mandated. Now, in 2023, there will be no more daylight savings time in the United States, and subsequently in corporations around the world.

All of that sits on what is so obviously true from a first principles perspective: time is what we make of it. This essay is a proposal to make time distributed. Distribute consensus has emerged as a fundamental tool on which humans build the future. Time belongs on a set of distributed tools, not in the volatile hands of whomever is currently in power. Those who provide the mining services, the code, and the governance over the clockchain will be responsible for establishing a new era. We will be the keepers of the timeline, if you will.

Caesar’s most enduring feat was, perhaps, to disassociate us from the clock in the sky. There’s little evidence that, prior to the change to the Roman lunar calendar, anybody had given thought to making an abstracted human-designed calendar that didn’t recognize the lunar and solar cycles. In 46 BC, the Julian reform of the calendar was introduced. We have used an algorithmic leap-year-accounting calendar ever since.

Why did he do this? Perhaps because he thought it was scientifically more valid, but it’s more likely that it was to seize control of all of the systems of documentation, especially in ports and receipts. By changing the calendar, his empire’s workers all knew if they were dealing with someone conforming to the empire or not, based on their calendar. If it was 12 months and 365 days, they were already acculturated; if not, they soon would be changing calendars, perhaps at sword point.

Caesar essentially forced everyone to switch from indigenous time to government time. Like forcing a switch from linux to corporate-controlled operating systems, a time time model forces every single interaction for everyone everywhere to adapt and comply, or be left behind. Or worse. History may be written by the victor; but the future of time itself is also written so.

Calendar reform - and the battle for determining time and schedules - was just getting started. Rome would prove to be the garden not just of Caesarian time, but would also yield, in the exact same place many years later, Pope Gregory VIII, who would change time yet again. The Gregorian calendar is the twelve-month leap-year-corrected calendar we mostly use today.

This reform had the astonishing feature of deleting the days October 5th through 15th that year to make the new leap year model work. Everyone complied — and showed up for mass on time that weekend, right?

Today, a rich Wikipedia page is filled with calendar reform efforts. Gurus and zealots, religious leaders, and scientists alike have all tried to solve for time. But they never solved for adoption or adaptation, and we mostly use the Gregorian calendar in the Western and financial worlds, and just two or three other principal calendars, perhaps most notably the Chinese calendar, as most other alternative calendars are religious in nature.

In his seminal work, Thomas S. Kuhn documents how science changes, from his perspective and data set. It’s a sequential process where drift from the original model and taxonomy used in a type of science - or in our case, all science - has fractured or faulted. Time theory as we apply it today is riddled with faults.

For example, who among us believes that humans on other planets will agree to use the Gregorian calendar, forever adapting their way of life to terran time? We know it won’t work in any sustainable way. Days on Mars need to be days on Mars, not some absurdity where settlers wake up irrespective of local night and day to stay in sync with a planet so distant it takes minutes of delay to communicate from one to another. They will have their own time, and the time we need to prepare for this reality hastens, as humans will soon live on alien planets themselves.

It may seem like cell phones and GPS have given us global synchronized time. They have not. They’ve given some corporate boards and military satellites high centrality in information networks. Could your cell phone provider change your world by changing your clock, to, for example, make a minute 59 seconds? Yes, the could. That is not to say they would, but to highlight only a handful of humans have an actual mechanism to track time that doesn’t depend on an institutional authority disseminating it.

There are multiples times at play today. There is Lunar Standard Time for things on the moon. There are multiple time models for satellites, all under the categories of time bending realities stemming from gravitational time dilation. Time is faster further away. Movies have made this famous by showing a year on one planet being a day on another, and the sense of emotional loss that stems from that if your loved ones age a year while you spend a day away.

We have lunisolar calendars. These include the literal moon and sun; as well as a vast range of religious models of time. The Chinese calendar; the Solar Hirji calendar, an Islamic calendar; the Hebrew calendar; the Celtic calendar; the Ptolemaic Egyptian calendar; the Babylonian and Ancient Macedonian calendars; the Japanese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Korean calendars; and dozens more over history.

People still use sundials.

Farmer’s almanacs, folklores, and indigenous parables all offer unique models of time. Some go so far as to imply there’s a day after the day squirrels start making louder sounds while chewing acorns, and that’s when you should harvest fall crops.

Video games have their own time; and own dimensions of time. Some games are emerging with features like clocks that respond to how fast you move — further breaking and bending the rules of time.

Amidst all of this, most computers are doing their own thing on synchronizing time. They check in, phone home to corporate time synchronization. Servers handshake time signatures. But the rate of loss and data problems is incredible. Time series management data is a necessary ingredient in sensor and IoT-based business models as well as many of the emergent structures within AI research. New time models will open new doors in AI, and we’re in an early stage of working at the scale required to address time itself.

Time reporting is a mountain of problems. Are employees honest? Are devices working right? Do honest people using properly functioning devices understand the time logging software? Are incentives such that time management correlates to time tracking? Does any business of a threshold scale of growth have thorough knowledge into how time is spent?

Races are won at the time when using an analog film race camera, sometimes still in use, based on a mind-bending intersection of physics, photography, and timekeeping where the film and the photo and the photons collaborate to mark a bit of spacetime, completely un-synchronized to any other global source of time, but commemorated by light trapped in special paper.

Are the clocks in your house right? What about after the power goes out? Do you set them all to the same millisecond? Do they line up with your neighbors? If you live on a state boundary, does someone in shouting distance to you live in a different time zone?

How much of your time tick tocks away each day, mindlessly scrolling social media?

We’re stuck in the era of fuzzy, disparate time models. We must unify our time model to a single time model to be prepared to be solar system citizens. We must fix our broken model of time to enable people to be as they blossom, not as they coordinate with precision.

That’s not to say precision isn’t important. The model of time proposed in this essay would be the most precise ever made.

That’s why it’s time to mimic a scientific revolution. Time for a new time.

New models like DAO’s will bring some fairness to how systems are formed; but still provide a highest-bidder-takes-the-prize approach to governance, in many cases. Validating that a human did things is the real identity, even beyond biometrics and institutional verification processes.

Time is a permutation, co-evolved as an idea, a memespace, perhaps, that with Homo sapiens provides an invisible structure to our mental models. Time surely (?) passes, and we know that to be true intuitively; but we don’t typically apply a meta scrutiny to our day-to-day interactions, questioning whether our model of time is the right one. Our tools reinforce this willful ignorance of obvious faults. Calendar apps don’t offer a “work off the timing of the lunar cycle instead” button for Tuesday meetings.

“Sally, can you meet at sunrise on the new moon? We have a new HR software system I want to train you on.” It would be fun, and funny to most. To some cultures it would, perhaps, feel just right.

As a child I spent time on the Dineh reservation in Northeast Arizona, and things started when people got there. I found it “weird” and confusing at first. Now, a part of me still longs for that way. It, too, had it its faults. Try repairing a roof whenever the crew gets there; dealing with stores that open whenever the owner arrives that day.

This tension may appear to be part of a battle that’s already won. We appear to be on track to use the Gregorian calendar forever and ever.

But on a first principles analysis, we know it won’t be forever forever. Our models of time have hardly held on for generations, being devoured by more efficient mechanisms and tools of time. The sundial was replaced by the church bell; the bells by clock tower; and now nearly everything by GPS or time derived by the rate of decay of radioactive materials.

Today, block height or start / finish blocks signify time as much as institutional time. Many argue that bitcoin is the best way to track time; I would position bitcoin as a principal validation node in the clockchain + DTI.

New and extraordinary things have emerged from software. Bitcoin has established a reserve currency that is plainly a revolution in plain sight. Ethereum has established a global supercomputer that can run on wildly disparate types of hardware and be programmed by anyone with very minimal functional society around them. Distributed media is going to enable censorship-resistant information sharing. dApps will make our virtual selves the earnest possessors of digital goods.

And now, it’s time to do for time what has been done for money, computing, and media. It’s time to distribute time, taking away the queen’s Greenwich, England time.

A grand trick of the calendar is to present a user interface that treats a scarce resource as renewable. Need more time? It seems like you’ve got tons in here, there is nothing here. That’s not true. You have to go to the bathroom many, many times during those open days. You don’t have most of that free time. It’s on you to record every single detail if you want to see your real time.

Time is not renewable. It’s scarce. You get a set amount of it, and it’s shockingly predictable how much you have, within a modest range of error. Every hour you spend is a draw-down from a set bank account. Your calendar is a time budget.

You aren’t going to live to 7,000. You might live to 200 in a flight of imagination. You probably aren’t 3 years old reading this. You probably have about 15-50 years in front of you, if you’re reading this. If you are reading this in the future, I hope you have 200 years in front of you. That’s still not much on a cosmic scale though, and is easy enough to map in a database.

This is true for actions and activities, as well. Nobody has eaten for 900 hours consecutively. Nobody has meditated for 4,000 hours consecutively. Women don’t have babies in their late 80’s. Men don’t finish triathlons at the age of 18 months.

Same for relationships: no couple is married for 2 minutes, nor for 200 years.

A sidenote on fate, determinism, and free will:

A natural consequence of modeling global first-principles time models is that the limits of free will quickly conform to a parameterized and filtered set of free will options. At my age, I cannot become a fighter jet pilot, nor can I go back and spend more time walking my kids in a stroller when they are tiny enough for strollers. We have free will within the limits of physics — and millions of operational nuances.

We should have fun with that, and perhaps we extract a new philosophical model based on evidence at scale from the late stage clockchain?

It’s all the things we can really do, not all the things. All the possible realities, not all the realities.

PoHT

Which is more valuable: a social media page about your professional identity where you say you worked someplace for 5 years, or a graph-validated quasi-Bayesian model of social proof verifications that someone showed up at an office for 5 years, with twelve first degree validators, and three types of paid independent validators? Math is on the side of the latter, in a dramatic way.

The clockchain has to have Proof of Human Time (PoHT) to create an honest and earnest record of time that can last in perpetuity for all future time. “History is written by the victor” can fall quickly to PoHT of our shared objective reality.

Because humans are applying an artificial, human-contrived time system on top of what we call Planck lengths of time, not monitoring and tracking something that actually exists, we need a central ledger of what we call time. From millisecond 0 to millisecond omega. (1)

That record can include entries from very specific to very fuzzy. Perhaps a quantum physics lab records a reaction that took place for 100 milliseconds, and records that time range. Perhaps a colleague confirms someone does a task for 100-200 hours. That is also placed in the DTI. The end user accessing it can determine what types of events and what level of time granularity is necessary.

Human actions will be the most common entrant, so the time in the near future and near past are the most important to early adoption and success. People can record that they did something for 100 hours, like a training program, and get it verified by colleagues. Because that record references the DTI, it is clear for eternity when that person did that thing, with very high statistical likelihood that it’s true. It can easily be cross-referenced with other data from the DTI to check for credibility. Did this account ID report contradictory simultaneous accounts? Then it’s a bogus record. Many such exceptions can be made, with a very important one being fraudulent creations supported by scam networks who serve as validators.

The clockchain infrastructure requires a different type of validator. There is a classic blockchain validator, which is checking the math of the records, system integrity, etc. This is critical for the clockchain, but more types of validators are needed.

This is a monetization engine for the clockchain. Validators, in many cases, can get paid or otherwise benefit from supporting the clockchain. Software with API’s like fitness tracking systems can offer to serve as a validator for exercise. This wouldn’t enable the user to report to the clockchain just based on that validation, but instead for the user to report using another person to validate first, then using this API as secondary support.

Paid validators must include formal time tracking. Colleges and universities can validate a student’s time in a lab. Employers can validate employees’ time. It should be that objective measurements can serve as validators as broadly as possible. If a marathon management company can push data from their tracking system and stopwatch system so runners have eternal proof of their time spent and time achieved, they should be able to do so as easily as possible.

Further paid validators could be identify verifiers in the real world, who attach private but verified identities to accounts.

Before any of this, the most simple validation is asking one other person to validate that you spent that time that way. The system has to start there and be based there.

There is good reason to do reputation ranks, perhaps both Ethereum miner style, and Yelp style.

The fee structure could, perhaps, encourage good reputation. The better the reputation the more pay you get? Too simple? Maybe a model like the higher your reputation the higher your power to pipe revenue with autonomy, including some to yourself. i.e. you get paid X amount of ETH to validate and store in a blockchain distribution all graphs in the DTI. But then you get a pipe of revenue to control, perhaps to reward other users, to fund recapitalization and investment cycles, to increase hardware capacity, stake for future protocols, etc. So the model is reward persistently, and direction and management progressive to reputation.

Imagine a situation where a clockchain entry supports a trigger that pays a bounty based on a certain validation. Perhaps an employer pays 1 ETH to an employee who gets a personal trainer to validate 100 hours on the treadmill, with the secondary validation coming from the treadmill app account?

tApps will emerge as products that can write to or read from the clockchain.

Imagine a job interview for a master carpenter position at a prestigious Miami design firm, where the employee will handle thousands of dollars of woodworking per hour, installing cabinets in yachts. Two candidates with the same basic qualifications apply. The job starts tomorrow, due to someone quitting by surprise yesterday, leaving a crew two short, not just the one position that was open. The employer receives a resume with references from one candidate. The other candidate provides a clockchain entry validating 10,000 hours of woodworking with dozens of validators. Which person would you hire if you were that manager and had to hire someone right now?

tApps will enable low-trust and zero-trust interactions that require that someone spent time doing something; or that some time was spent somehow. Many types of calendars could exist, ranging from payroll problem-solving to altogether replacing most training that isn’t tested, like corporate training where there is no final quiz or exam. Beyond those practical and enterprise use cases, there are infinite benefits to science.

Imagine a geologist trying to understand what was happening in another part of the world at the exact moment a rare worm fossil was buried with volcanic ash in the dirt in its belly, preserved that way until today. With the clockchain, a query tApp will be able to pull all geological events from the bracket of time ranges possible, and get ever more specific about how things are all interconnected.

tApps in the legal domain will be a full-fledged revolution. High validation alibis, records of business transactions, proof of acceptance, and so on.

I can imagine the most powerful apps combining government-backed contracts with the crypto-backed contracts that require clockchain validations to trigger bounty payments. These tApps will replace a lot of HR work, for example.

There’s nothing about the clockchain and the Deep Time Index that requires the inputs to be stored in Western / Gregorian time. A popular tApp will be a converter API that takes any time format and puts it into clockchain / DTI format, and vice versa. Converting from Hebrew time to Brooklyn time should be a snap; converting from Honk Kong Chinese dates to San Francisco Gregorian dates will just be an API call or a simple function in a standardized open library.

To reconcile the clockchain with the variations in time across the galaxy, and in this example, the moon, we need a clockchain-compatible algorithm set.

A core model will be XPAYZ time, which can convert lunar time to earth time easily. In theory, it handles any two disparate time modalities, ideally normalizing time units, accepting for and accommodating Planck lengths, but maintaining the dramatically more workable and earth-system-compatible (99.9999% of all systems) milliseconds as clockchain default. In that way, I dream of the clockchain as the lingua franca of time for all time, and hope you want to be a part of starting that as much as I do.

The name signifies this: x = payz

X = Time in a new format.

P = Permissions. Inbound data from one or more sources and outbound data from one or more sources may have different permissions systems. For example, a user may encrypt their clockchain entry using plain text. A XPAYZ hook will check all of this before decrypting and sharing with what may be a public entry.

A = Adjustments. This references as set of adjustments in time scale. This library will grow over time. One example is converting “days” to “milliseconds” which could include multiple types of days. Another adjustment could be going from lunar time to Earth time; or going from satellite time to ground time. Lag is a classic adjustment, with minutes between communications between Earth and Mars, as a practical example. Adjustments can be called in sequence, and should be able to be forked.

Y = Why? Why are you doing this operation? Determine the type of output. If Z is in Gregorian time, Y would include a variable to convert to Chinese lunar time, for example. This includes category taxonomy and notes. It must include rules for formatting final results, from am/pm vs. 24 hour to text encoding type. This should be called from a library of results.

Z = Ze’Time. The initial clockchain entry or query set.

Any entry can be run through a XPAYZ time adapter and come out in a new entry envelope that presents the entry in a different format. These are not new clockchain entries, but functionally child nodes with only limited access possible.

From the defense industry to day-to-day calendar operations, a core part of the clockchain protocol has to be shortcake XPAYZ time codes that enable rapid implementation in functional sandbox and production code stacks, worldwide.

(It may be that the clockchain and DTI have to be forked in the future to move to some better measure of time. In this case, the whole system will rely on a colossal XPAYZ time conversion. As such, it should be considered not just a practical tool, but the source of portability that protects the whole system.)

A sub-node of a clockchain entry is a consequence attribute. For example, did a certain amount of time earn a certain amount of money? While this could be a bounty, the meta data tracking, for example, how much was earned per hour, is a separate outcome. Tracking emotional outcomes, financial outcomes, and physical health outcomes enables PoHT to be tied to a new type of learning about the consequences of our behavior.

We are mimic monkeys and need to be able to fork each other's effective behaviors to our calendars the way you patch a new library into code.

We live at a time of profoundly increased needs, expectations, and capacities. But we need the healthiest, most open approach to mimicry we can have. That involves transparency about allocation of time and capital. Clockchain and blockchain, arm in arm.

Layers of clockchain entries must be private and only visible to key holders. Key holders should essentially have multi-sig access to secrets within public entries.

At the same time, public entries must be accessible to anyone using the protocol, any time, any place.

Validators, commercialized tApps, and submission / mining fees are all required for the ecosystem to flourish.

The clockchain should be managed by a DAO. Those members will probably use an ownership coin independent of the clockchain to regulate governance.

That governance should include how much time the member has filed working on the clockchain on the clockchain, as well as how much they actually utilize the clockchain, and how much use they bring to it. It is likely a centrality score that best indicates that user’s moral rights to stake and control within the DAO.

Because the clockchain will last for all time, which could be what is to a human eternity, it needs to be perpetual. A grid down or another problem should not disrupt it any more than the blockchain.

Emergence may be increasing it its complexity, if we are in fact in a system with assembly theory at its core. Conceivably, the clockchain will have some impact on our notion of time itself, and thereby must continually update to reflect our model.

The clockchain code should consider that multiple clockchains may already exist in other galaxies, and that we may need to recognize seniority in integrating our clockchain with an obviously superior version. Its also possible ours is the superior and will need to ingest a different form of data, such as time measured at the molecular level rather than the conscious level. In that case, individual atoms experience linear time as perpetual reincarnation and conceivably different rules apply.

Practically, what this means is simply that the clockchain is better off taking an unstructured data approach to secondary data appended to time, and taking careful account from day one of how to convert to Planck-length time. This is probably a long-term collaborative project to handle floating point complexity at the hyper scale of Planck numbers.

As an important note, the clockchain should be prepared for the advent of mathematics that fall into three domains that could impact time storage: the progression of mathematical theory towards equivalence instead of equality in handling numbers, potential for quantum projection similar to Randonauting for geolocation for time and calendar functions, and radical changes in perception of Deep Time that may be enabled by the James Webb Space Telescope.

An advantage of an open source DAO model is establishing vetting and consensus structures.

Test chains have to exist, and side-chains may be possible. Perhaps there is an incentive to become a verified side chain through some massive action, like a thousand users verify that you should be verified?

While fraud detection will be essential; it’s also possible that the nature of the clockchain and Bases-like emergent eigen-structures is that it’s very hard to commit fraud programmatically if a certain amount of users and validators are doxxed. While this enables identity detection on the clockchain, in theory, it would be non-obvious and a hack of the system to do so. Many validators will want to be doxxed, such as universities, or martial arts training centers.

The integrity of the clockchain requires that highly skilled technicians maintain its code, it requires that people like lawyers and judges, all types of professionals, even spiritual and community leaders — that they all trust the integrity of the system. Communications is a core tenant of maintainership here and things like real-time visualization dashboards should emerge as early tApps to promote clear understanding of the benefits of the clockchain.

It’s critical that the clockchain core software provide an open API. From XPAYZ time conversions to tApps, the API is the system.

What’s different is it probably requires a secondary service to convert from clockchain-based time protocols to all the others; and that probably has to persist across all variables. Similar to an ETH to USD model, but with dozens more parameters, thus orders of magnitude more diversity in possible results.

In this way, huge amounts of processing can be done client side; but many things need to be processed in advance, especially to optimize computing time and to avoid negative environmental effects from brute force processing of records in a blockchain.

Perhaps API’s rely on sidechains which tap the main chain from day one? It seems dramatically more computationally efficient.

The system must provide a persistent, perpetual, free API to let anyone anywhere get the time, at all times.

Imagine clockchain-based contracts, combining Ethereum and government contracts that synchronize to protect your future time by giving it a contract to yourself. Surely, no employer can take that from you?

No protocol or service can thrive without having a personality, in the new market to come. The clockchain is full of jokes. From referencing rappers famous for wearing clocks as necklaces, to stodgy old white dudes whose clock chain is attached to a pocket watch — it’s a branded stack that can have fun with itself.

Creating the permanent record of time memorial will take some meaningful percentage of that time itself. Maybe it’s 1%. Maybe we can get it down to .001% or even small enough to see meaningful gains in my mortal lifetime. In any case, it is an inevitable technological step on our path to wherever it is we are emerging.

So, to conclude this introduction, I leave with this question:

How can clockchain entries be bulk populated using historical data, so that we achieve as much of historical data recording to the clockchain as we can in our lifetimes? What types of AI’s can do that?

There’s a long history of clock chains. Be it the heavy, custom-weighted and gauged clock chains of a bell tower, controlling timing themselves; or the chain holding a precious timekeeping device worn by the privileged of certain generations, their pocket watch.

A Bayesian graph of how you spent time. You - or someone else - says person A spent time on Activity Z. You may be person A, or not. You say you spent 100 hours working on Sundial. Then you send that to me, person B. I look at it and I either say no, suggest a change, or I approve. If I approve, I can also send a request to my wife, person C. She validates not that you spent that time, but that I have spent time on the same thing, my 1000 hours on Sundial.

So we end up with 4 nodes and 4 edges, a complete triangle with one branch. That is a minimum eigenvector compounding into single point of centrality, or in broad conceptual terms, a sort of cousin of a minimum Bayes graph; which in this case, is the activity of working on Sundial.

(This raises the question if our data structure needs a non-person actor -- a company basically? It's not an Activity or a User, although it could kind of be a fork of a user?)

Once a minimum graph (MG) is established, it serves a Proof of Time (PoT). The broader the graph gets, the more powerful the software grows, and the less likely it is that it's untrue. Of course you can commit fraud, but it's very hard. We can use ETH wallets to validate, for example, that it's a person who isn't making tons of entries.

I believe we could pretty easily build an index of all time. Start with say 10,000 years ago and build up to 10,000 years from now. Build a central index of time, and have MG's attach to a time period in a single, centralized time database. Like Wikipedia, a person can go in and say that dinosaurs existed from x milliseconds to y milliseconds; another can say T-rex was in North America from x to y; another can say a sub species was in California from x to y; a paleontologist can say a specific skull was from x to y.

It's 6.31152e+14 milliseconds, which seems a storable amount of data these days. By having a single time record and timezone irrelevance, it slowly becomes the de facto record of time. The more MG's point to the Deep Time Index as a reference of shared objective time, then put time zones and other human adaptations on top of it, the people have to use it. Eventually a whole legal system could be built on high validity MG's stored on the clockchain referencing a shared objective Deep Time Index.

A lot of people say Bitcoin is time, and they are right, sort of. But, really, time is time.

While clockchain MG’s enable entries from any point in time, the DTI features need to be scoped to the functional time that’s relevant to most user. That is, in most cases, within the past year or next year; or within the past lifetime or next lifetime. The range of use cases - practically - outside of those ranges become science, speculative investment, and creative applications.

In this light, the DTI will need these initial features:

Like GMT, dti_Prime is a reference point that other references points are based off. Just as most software uses GMT+/- systems to track time zones, then appends labels to those, dti_Prime+/- allows a single point of reference.

dti_Prime is also clock height zero, when that millisecond arrives — sometime soon.

Maybe Clock Zero should take place at some specific moment, like a solar eclipse?

By providing and updating - likely via popularity contest algorithms - the taxonomical structure of the MG labels, the DTI can first analyze what people are submitting, then navigate disambiguation by offering an emergent definition called in real time to clockchain queries, as well as the initial taxonomical label and the user written label, should it differ.

duration_ms == stop_anchor - start_anchor

If that doesn’t computer, it’s a corrupt entry. This is one of many such back-checks the systems needs.

Clockchain MG’s need to overlap. When we drive somewhere and listen to music, we are both driving and listening to music that whole time. Each MG can have precise integrity and overlap.

Because of this, the DTI has to be able to reconcile how much time an activity takes. In the example of driving and listening, let’s imagine someone who is active in the military reserves of their nation, and needs to listen to audio updates provided by squadron leaders, in conjunction with mission briefings. These “internal podcasts” have to be registered on the clockchain for tracking, and a convenient way to do that is carpooling with other reservists and listening on the way to work.

The ability to discern that both actions were possible, and to what extent they each consume time, is a key abstraction from large scale clockchain data; and perhaps, and key set of guesses to calibrate the system prior to launch. In this case, it’s plausible that the recordings were listened to, the reservists inter-validate they participation, and for mileage reimbursements, all also validate drive time on various employer accounts each year. Is this fraud? That’s unlikely, for reasons already established.

The DTI needs to create multiple feedback loops to assess each type of activity in a broad taxonomy of activities. Activities in the DTI themselves need emergent boundary conditions, established by a combination of statistical patterns in the data, and logical boundaries established in queries trained against the DTI, as well as its meta data.

Because many activities occur on a regular basis, or some recurring pattern, the clockchain data schema enables an object to drill infinitely down on the specificity of a behavior. While a user or developer could, in theory, put a separate entry for every time they do yoga, it would make the DTI wildly inefficient, both practically - especially for queries - but also from an energy use and computational (thereby also real) cost basis.

In the example of doing yoga for a year, a clockchain entry might best be expressed as something that took a year, with the start and stop times the beginning and last class of this activity. Rather than store every activity in between, the schema uses the following structure to record recurring behaviors:

Asymptotic (A) variable

A represents whether or not a behavior stops; and if so, on what curve. Some behaviors, like breathing, take place at a “1” — meaning that they last until your final breath, without ever stopping. Some, like doing yoga for a year, have a decay to “0” because they end.

While 1 would be forever and 0 would be fully stopping when it stops. The closer to zero the score is, the more unattainable the event is, in most cases. For instance, solar eclipses would be A = 0 because when they are not happening, they are definitely not happening. Something like watching television may be A = .5 because describing watching behavior is describing something that stops, but sometimes does not.

Duration (D) variable

This is the unit duration of an instance of an activity. It can be input as a static amount in xx.xxE+y, or can be derived from the start and stop anchors. This can also be externalized, or erratic. It should accept structured exceptions, but not unstructured.

Period (P) variable

Distance is basically period. It’s how far between events is mandated by the nature of the event. For example, New Year’s Eve can only arrive once every 365 terran-Gregorian days.

This is stored as a function of how many events there, which in turn can be divided into gross_duration, the total amount of time for the graph object, which is derived from start_anchor and stop_anchor — this derives R, recurrence.

This is stored as a simple number. The count of instances.

P = x instances.

Recurrence (R) variable

Recurrence is the amount of milliseconds between each object; and holds several exception states, which is why it has to be recorded, not derived on demand. The first exception state is when the event recurs on an external pattern. This would include holidays. Some on an institutional calendar, like Christmas; and some on solar calendars, like Easter. The second exception is when the recurrence is unknown or to be determined. There are likely more exceptions.

This is recorded in xx.xxE+y format, again, with exceptions:

R = ! signifies to be determined

R = ? signifies unknown or unknowable

R = [logic] signifies that recurrence will take place when some external event takes place, for example some other incomplete clockchain event

Spread (S) variable

This is a self-reported - and possibly derived - metric of how precise the APR model is. When S = 1, the APR model is exactly right. Something happened, recurred, and stopped exactly as described. Imagine an event where two world leaders meet for one hour and never meet again, with massive amounts of n>3 degree deep validator graphs. Then, on the other hand, when S = 0, it is highly imprecise, and the mid range of S = .5 might be some reliable but faulty model. In that case, some person obsessed with tracking their behavior might record that they run for an hour a day and can prove it with their watch; but the time is all over the place, and the clockchain submission is not of such importance that each run needs to be an individual clockchain graph.

It’s unclear how to recursively derive this; and equally unclear how to derive it consistently in any such way. Perhaps the DTI v2 includes a mechanism to weight S? Perhaps it is as simple as standard deviation of the incoming data, or some other simple and friendly analysis model?

Or perhaps (S) and PR are miscategorized in schema assignments, and S should be the social ranking of the contributing node?

By our powers combined.

ADPRS is the formula to make a wave form. Similar to synthesizers, the raw input data of the activity combined with these behaviors turns time models back into the waveform that they truly are.

Calendars have told a lot of lies, but the lack of acknowledgment of the wave properties of time is, in my opinion, the most ignoble.

DTI queries could be simple; or DTI queries could be complex graph conditions. Does the clockchain + DTI require a unique query structure? Perhaps not, as many graph search models have now become - basically - black box AI functions.

This is hard to discern without testable models to learn from. New models of language and AI together with DTI data will reveal the best search models, I would expect.

The list of compatible time models is by definition infinite, since the clockchain + DTI will exist as long as things exist, in theory. But the important ones for a v0 prototype are:

XPAYZ Time - All branches

Gregorian Time - 24 hr and am/pm

Sundial Time - human-lifespan personalized time

Sundial Time formats - milliseconds —> clockchain

Time Layers - two or more time models with a synchronizing function

Time in Space - galactic, solar, and geo positioning coordinates of the timestamp

Records its own time of recording a network and a cohort.

Cohorts are strength. The more inter-referential information the blockchain MG provides, the better. This is especially true in time stamping when the entry was made, which should be an account of the highest centrality time validation possible.

Perhaps streams of all the nuclear clocks, etc. are brought to a unified place that serves like the international kilogram for time, and that must be tapped. Perhaps it syncs across all devices active on the network at that time.

In practical terms, we need something better than we have. What time is it? Who knows. It could be just about anything. Either the sun is facing you or it’s not right now, that’s for sure.

As the clockchain becomes active enough, and validators for “what time it is” exist across billions of entries, a new strong emergence phenomenon arises — a consensus time with statistical majority consensus for human time.

We will never perceive Planck lengths, and they are nonfunctional units of time for Homo sapien consciousness. AI’s will need to understand this. The clockchain and DTI enable that.

Eventually, the clockchain becomes the L1 for time itself.

This means the clockchain + DTI drip of the dti_Prime+x = now timestamp will be the timestamp to replace all timestamps.

clockchain create minimum graph { 
      user_id: xxxxxx 
      user_note: lorem ipsum
      cumulative_time: YY.YYe+Z
      start_anchor: dti_Prime +/- AA.AAE+B
      stop_anchor: dti_Prime +/- CC.CCE+D
      waveform: [ADPRS code] 
      active_duration: FF.FFE+G
      anchor_validator_class: [select list] "bitcoin"
      anchor_validator_start: [secondary anchor] "block height"
      anchor_validator_stop: [secondary anchor] "block height"
      user_activity_label: [text input]
      user_dti_taxonomy_label_select: [search select]
      validator_graph_i: {matrix of validators and statuses}
      validation_score: [calculation]
      linked_user_ids: {hhhhhh, jjjjjj,...}
      clock_height: kkkkkk
      {{object_id}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{emergent_dti_label}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{shortcode}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{legible_code}}: [callback from clockchain]
}

user_id: This could be many types of unique id of sufficient complexity, but it should probably start as ETH / BTC wallets.

cumulative_time: The clockchain’s core unit is milliseconds, as this is the smallest application within the short tail of time uses. of coures microseconds, nanoseconds, and up to megaHertz and gigaHertz are used throughout computer - and all - science, but the vast majority of practical applications use millisecond or larger time units. If there is an employer who tracks paid time in milliseconds, it is surely for some anomalous reason, and costs quite a bit in overhead to manage. There’s no reason a xpayz time transformation can’t take place to the main chain, should the tDAO approve the conversion, so it could move from milliseconds in the future, just in case.

The system will require a protocol for handling floating point choices, and many such protocols exist as precedent. It’s probably better to keep to “hours” on the left of the decimal and “minutes” on the right side, so a human can read it at a glance. That means transforms would have take place for each input, or that a standardized format emerges. This is probably true throughout.

start_anchor / stop_anchor: Each moment needs a start anchor. That anchor critically synchronizes with all the other entries. This enables the DTI. A microservice converting “current time” from whatever source the data stream is coming from into start_anchor and stop_anchor format will be very helpful.

The format is similar to GMT+/- time formats. Evolving from that into a dti_Prime+/- format enables consistency across all software systems.

waveform: [ADPRS code]: This data contains the waveform pattern necessary to model behaviors and time itself as waveforms. As earlier described, each variable has rules and unique components.

The format is {A,P,RR.RRE+x,S}, or, as an example: {1,2.71e1,10,3.14E+10,.5}

A = 0 through 1

D = DD.DDe+G:

P = i

RR.RRE+xe.g. 12.34E+10 milliseconds

S = 0 through 1

anchor_validator_class: [select list]: An anchor validator is the third-party reference point used to validate not the graph but the anchor. In most cases, something like a reference to an API to a nuclear clock, or block height on Bitcoin will be sufficient to record when the anchor happened on some point external to the clockchain + DTI. This ensures the entry synchs to globally recognized times, and maintains the health of the clockchain through constant comparison.

_start and _stop are stored in the indigenous time format of the validator. As such, using exclusively crypto block heights and nuclear clocks might be better.

user_activity_label: Taxonomy is the trickiest part of the DTI. While the clockchain has no requirement for consistent labeling, the DTI is built upon a taxonomical structure that allows strong emergent functions. Many of the most powerful functions of the clockchain + DTI come from seeing how whole populations spend time, and to analyze that data - even with the best systems - some categorization has to take place.

It’s critical that the user be able to have freedom of speech when it comes to submitting labels. Just as entries to all blockchains contain dark or horrible things, the clockchain may be spammed; but the incentives are low, if existent at all, for the worst kinds of things harming children or whole populations.

user_dti_taxonomy_label_select: At an inflection point of scale, the DTI can be used as a recursive self-informing source of taxonomical structure. The user can start to select descriptions and labels they agree with easily and quickly.

I may release a taxonomy to kickstart this process, which has been designed and funded by my private company. Perhaps the clockchain enables someone to benefit from the taxonomy they provide, when other users fork it they pay some fee to use it.

validator_graph_i: There are many types of validators, and each type has a simple graph. At minimum, a validator graph has a

validator_id -- The clockchain id of the validator.

validator_timestamp -- The clock height when the validation was recorded.

validator_value -- 0 to 1 value representing certainty.

validator_reputation_rank -- 0 to 1 value representing recursive reputation of validator’s use and credibility, likely through centrality scoring.

validator_method -- Initial options should be human judgment or trust, smart contract, external validation with proof, and consensus. The first representing “I said so” - basically - and the second relying on something like a photo proving an activity being done, then the last simply listing other user ids that subsequently validated it.

validator_method_proof -- For validators that have proof, either an explanation or something like a url to a photo serves as proof. It’s possible the clockchain needs file storage or some type encoded file snippets to manage proof of validation.

validator_reward -- Smart contract to reward payments.

validator_legible_label -- Human readable label or title for the validator.

validator_notes -- Because validations can be very imprecise, there needs to be the ability to explain what’s happening.

Each validator can be expressed as a {x,…,y} entry. It’s also possible the clockchain needs two types of nodes; Activities and Validators. Any user, presumably self-validating the entry precipitating their participation in the clockchain, is a Validator.

There is no reason there can’t be a very large number of validators, but there should, perhaps, be a limit on the number of validator graphs that can be linked. Over-linking the nodes of the DTI dramatically increases the computational cost of graph queries, and in that way over-linking is not helpful. Perhaps there is a statistical threshold after which more Validator graphs are not contributing much, chasing an asymptotic curve that never reaches 0.

validation_score: Because the validation graph structure is complex, a simple score will contribute a lot of functionality to the DTI. This should be a centrality score with “weighted force direction” (not exactly, more recursive, but similar) based on the compounding strength of the validator graphs. This score incentivizes growth in validator networks. Each user / Validator may have a recursive score derived from this, aggregating their score across all entries, so that the higher integrity the higher integrity.

linked_user_ids: Because many activities include multiple people, this value store allows infinite additional users to validate they participated. There must be a system for unclaimed user accounts.

(One of the most fascinating aspects of the DTI is that a person’s whole life could be mapped out by others, and with inference graphing, a full model of that person may be derived -- without them knowing the clockchain exists. That’s unlikely, but it’s plausible as a thought experiment.)

clock_height: Because the clockchain is a blockchain, it has a block height. This is recorded with each entry.

For fun, it’s called the clock height -- a reference to the clock towers built by monarchs, which the clockchain evolves past. As a metaphor, Clock Zero is taller than the tallest royal tower.

{{object_id}}: Received when the graph is submitted.

{{emergent_dti_label}}: As the DTI begins to have an emergent recursive taxonomy, labels can be appended automatically.

{{shortcode}}: Because computer programmers don’t want to starting putting complex in their databases to replace the old standby local timestamp, each clockchain entry needs to have a shortcode entry that complies human time. This is a GMT+/- time/date code; possibly two; possibly multiple.

{{legible_code}}: Because humans read human time, this simple function states the label of the graph and how many hours and how many years the activity takes place, cumulatively. For example: yoga_100_1 would signify yoga, for 100 hours, for 1 year. This references the emergent_dti_label.

//////

Missing from all of this are Miners and the data structures Miners need, including payments. That is an intentional omission, in part because it’s unclear what type of hardware best mines the clockchain + DTI; and mostly because those interested in pioneering this work should have a voice in the structure from the first moment of public discussion. I will share my opinions when the first meeting of prospective Miners takes place. The same is true for paid validators who might build a model off of validating, similar to how notaries public make their livings in the US.

//////

Because the full graph is onerous for many uses cases, especially for app developers wanting to push clockchain entries out of their existing model, which is unlikely to include so much information when they decide to do so. A minimum graph approach should be accepted, with a simplification and possibly bifurcation in post types. An “mg” is the equivalent of using an address and note pair on an ETH payment.

The best mg may be:

user_id start_anchor stop_anchor waveform

As a clockchain + DTI emerges, a large portion of early adopters will be academic. The correlation abilities of the DTI to any data set - combined with cultural comfort with statistical models invoking Bayes-like certainty, centrality, and inference models - makes an ideal use case. Many of the best developers still participate in graduate research, and researchers across all fields want to carve our their role in the crypto revolution.

As such, a great early market to approach is academic use cases. The first is to circumvent the institution and create social-graph-validated models of credentials.

The PoHT vs. the PhD.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where only one credential can be presented on hiring for a top tier staff engineer at a big tech company. In 2025, would a candidate be better to present their PhD from the University of Maryland, or to show a peer-validated network of 3,000 hours of coding time on projects in the past six years, with all the validating nodes being students or staff of the university. Would the smart candidate provide that clockchain-verified Bayes-like history to this company built on computer science and AI research, or a piece of paper signed by an institution head?

Let’s explore why the smart candidate will use the clockchain + DTI records.

It’s easy to lie, manipulate, change, or cheat about time. What percentage of time tracking is honest? On first principles, manual time tracking through paper or digital entries is rife with consequences. That, in part, is why students are tested. We credential not what gets done, per se, but a long chain of small moments of human judgment on the part of the instructor, the institution, and the student.

Because of the mechanisms discussed as Bayes-like in this essay, fraud is hard in the clockchain + DTI. Spam detection is heavily-reliant on Bayes functions to work so well, which should serve as ample proof to merit the hypothesis it will work here.

Having a page with a glamorous headshot of yourself, listing all the places you’ve worked, amidst a sea of tech company recruiters, and AIs designed to grasp your attention — that is a solution for a better phonebook, one that has a TV in it.

Proving how you have spent time leads to an ocean of insights.

Can a person keep doing the job of mowing lawns for 30 years if they don’t know how to mow a lawn? Can a person be ignorant to how a surgical operating room works after 1,000 verified hours in one? The answers to both are likely no; the broader their graph of validation, the more certain the no.

Over time, the clockchain + DTI becomes a trustworthy source, where other platforms are built on truths that are, at best, castles made of sand.

The range of new market models ranges from replacing PhD certificates to changing the way professional sports are telecast. Imagine a professional athlete’s stats including their total game and training time, as well as a score of how likely those stats are to be true.

Imagine a history channel that explores one millisecond in history each episode. The DTI enables anyone to grab all these events in a query.

Imagine a legal system where legal assistants - like stenographers, paralegals or dossier developers - have a new skill set of sourcing validators for alibis.

Imagine a calendar that shows you as a character running along a limited slice of time eternal, rather than a perpetually renewing empty sheet to fill in each week end.

The clockchain is inevitable. We can - and do - record a lot of our lives and activities. Digital copies of us exist write large. Most big companies have one of most people in their markets, at this point.

Our time is recorded.

Also, we now know that all time exists. We can perceive and visualize what has and will happen, with great certainty. Thinking, social species evolved before us. Dinosaurs roamed. Supernovae will explode in the future.

The phrase “time immemorial” is purported to have emerged over a thousand years ago in English law to refer to time outside of known time. That no longer exists.

The clockchain + DTI are the inflection point of intellectual evolution where we stop pretending we can’t know most things, and begin to take account of all time.

We tend to analyze time as thought time spent has direct consequence. Going to the gym builds muscle. But really, eating the right food before and after, sleeping the right way, and so on — it all compiles to a sequence of performance outcomes, not a one-to-one set of behaviors and outcomes. It’s matrix to matrix math to look at inputs and outcomes in life.

In this way, time as a mechanism of AI in fields like bioinformatics can look not just at behaviors, but at sequences. A superstructure like the human genome could emerge, like the human action-outcome model map. But that’s probably more of a thought experiment for now, until clockchain + DTI data exists at such scale an AI can be trained to consider how this might really be implemented.

The library at Alexandria was burned many times. Gold has been stolen from many empires. Land, the same. We are at the dawning of a a new ear of things being immutable through scale of distribution. The clockchain + DTI offer more than a record of time. By correlating outcomes to the entries therein, maps and models of how humans succeed and fail can be derived, analyzed, and crystalized into new plans that are most effective. Everything from business strategy to meme crafting can be back-tracked to behaviors that spent time.

This protects the legacy of learning across time better than any monolithic store of information. The clockchain + DTI thus protects our knowledge, as a species, and as consciousness emergent from the stardust.

As previously mentioned, this also accelerates our ability to mimic effective strategies, further enabling the best actions at a time where environmental changes threaten mass migrations and permanent supply chain restructuring.

As time takes place on different scales, we will create infinite branches of time. New VR games use movement as a clock. Some use external clocks as clocks. Some set time on other planets.

As these experiences and accomplishments become more valuable as digital goods and avatar add-ons, as well as NFT’s and other proof of ownership models, the time spent to do them, time spent winning, losing, collaborating, even using a certain weapon or spell, does too — the need for timestamps that are smarter soars.

Rich with digital assets, and able to be up at any of the 24 hours in a “day,” the metaverse is not tied to earth time. Gamers have, for decades, played into the early morning hours, with other gamers on the other side of the planet, hitting the game during a lunch break. They exist on — for now — server time, not a central synchronized time. That server may itself synch to a centralized time, but only clocks at precisely the same altitude, and possibly inside the same stratification of the magnetosphere, are truly synchronized, otherwise the millisecond and the second are, a fine resolution, very rough consensus acceptance of an equivalence of functional time units, not an equal measure of the same thing.

VR also inevitably creates metaverse-time. The clockchain + DTI is the bitcoin to that fiat.

Many DAO’s already reward human time through provable actions. Promote your DAO - two governance points, tokens, coins, or whatever denomination it may be.

PoHT can decrease and, in rare cases, end problems endemic in the world of DAO’s. Nepotism and controlled / slow drip information release enables people to reward real-world friends and trade favors in launching DAO’s, protocols, and currencies.

PoHT can show work and commitment instead of Discord popularity.

A tApp like Sundial can show how much of someone’s life has gone to that DAO, which should be a meaningful metric, as much so as their budget.

Each viable minimum clockchain post to the DTI is valuable unto itself as a PoHT asset; valuable to the DTI in revealing more of the shared synchronized time record; and is a slow contribution into something like a savings account, which will threshold one day to the point that things that are unreasonable to derive from one record will be easy to derive from millions or billions of records.

For example, how much time does it take to start a startup that succeeds, given the history of the founder, the market conditions, the industry type, and so on? Given one clockchain post to the DTI, it’s absurd to wager a guess. But among the billions of entries perhaps thousands of data points exist, from which a complex sub-graph can be filtered.

This sub-network continues to exist as it did with in the whole, but can be isolated for computational focus; many types of inference and prediction graphs can be used to manipulate these data from there.

Perhaps the holy grail - by which I mean object of desire that may or may not actually exist, not the thing on which we should focus - is to derive perfectly crafted products designed based on market needs found in the DTI.

Imagine that someone has to self-report behavior in a psychology research assessment that is part of a multi-year study. The person isn’t living and working from a lab, so self-reporting of how they behave is critical.

The clockchain requirement of time report means the person has to build a quasi-Bayes graph of social proof about their behavior. Fraud patterns are likely to occur, and to be caught in many cases with basic detection.

Years later when the findings of the paper come into play, it’s not a question of how honest the participant “seems” but how high a score, but of some metric like clockchain reputation + sub-graph of reputation into a centrality score, to determine veracity of reporting.

Did a researcher actually work 10,000 hours in the lab according to themselves, or according to a three-deep network of validators with high reputations?

My favorite daydream about the magic of data synchronized on the clockchain is to root out synchronicities and make them clear. Does the social science of economics actually have the answer to a recession, or can the business school’s market dynamics research from the exact same time periods offer more clear trajectory-mapping? When we backtrace and back-propagate models that can coordinate off of a central handshake of shared, reconciled time frame, we can build a new model of research where a quasi-open centralized database exists not around subjects but just around time itself.

We have immutable ledgers of money.

We have immutable ledgers of computation.

We do not yet have immutable ledger of human action.

This represents a new legal system, wholly acceptable within the current system. What once was an affidavit is now a series of six-tier deep validations of behaviors built by a defense, offering an alibi with a hypothetical nine zero’s of statistical certainty.

People can say anything. At a certain scale, the DTI limits what they could have plausibly done. In fact, it eliminates most things. A person who has never been on the clockchain and does not show up in the DTI will still have to reconcile with all the things adjacent to their actions.

For example, someone cannot claim that they were at a restaurant when no clockchain entries exist from that restaurant in the past ten years at that time of day. No record is needed to know what time they are open, past a certain amount of data.

Voter fraud would be nearly impossible through clockchain-style ledgers that include multiple identity checks. In cases like some from the distant future intergalactic economy, you are the sum of who you are validated to be. How could any institutional verification out-perform that statistical model of certainty of identity? (2)

Time is emergent on top of a framework of priors. That network is both discernible and can be inferred, to a large extent.

Current AI research accounts for time in linear models; not a singular model. But surely the particles that make up the screen on which you read this were doing something when the dinosaurs roamed this world.

A synchronized universal time exists, we have just not started using it.

To a machine, our carbon atoms are temporarily human.

What sets of human assumptions will be wholly replaced when multiple AIs are analyzing time-synchronized petabytes of data? “Economics” will seem like a cute joke, early Homo sapiens pontificating on their behaviors with rudimentary data. The butterfly effect should be able to be put to the test, at scale, with substantial-enough AI.

In Assembly Theory - as loosely referenced for this essay having nothing to do with it (surely poorly), the intellectual equivalent of a baboon trying to open a coconut - consciousness emerges at a threshold of priors, a level of trailing aggregate complexity or interconnectedness.

The clockchain and DTI - in theory - enable tracking of individual atoms or molecules, on their journey across time. Then, perhaps, their centrality score would be the measure of potential for consciousness?

Or perhaps that’s all wrong and the clockchain + DTI prove it? We’ll see.

tApps are novel things only possible because of the clockchain + DTI.

Validators are integrated with the application in its roots.

Integrations are third parties that play nice, and have mutually-beneficial goals. As discussed, DAO’s are a natural fit, and are inspiration to the clockchain design. New protocols are of most interest to me as partners, so to speak:

While apps may change over time, a few of interest today are:

Proof of Attendance Protocol PoAP. This allows event organizers to prove attendance. It’s already permitting into “honorary” ones that organizers give to community members who miss events, and so on.

Superlocal and CityCoins enable different levels of stacks where people can earn tokens, NFT’s, and similar digital assets by being places.

Of course, Ethereum is a natural tie-in to use clockchain records as timestamps, to use XPAYZ time conversions across planets, and to settle time scales on bets, for example. Bitcoin is, in its own way, as pointed out by many before me, time. The minting and proven work cycles are time scales unto themselves. Perhaps XPAYZ time converts to chain height at timestamp or some novel conversion like that to serve as a dually-immutable hyper-graph of authenticity of some moment.

Users cannot permission ownership of their clockchain entries with other users, other than as activities that can be forked to be repeated — templates to reuse, basically. But users will want to share in some cases, just as cultural artifacts. In this case, they should be able to mint their time as an NFT. Perhaps it’s a grandfather giving his grandson his time climbing Everest; or a mother giving a daughter her first startup venture round closing as a memory that inspires her daughter in her new job managing a billion dollar fund; or something more sentimental, like a last moment together of long-lost grandparents. Or a famous athlete receiving a gold medal for 3 minutes.

It’s a creative ocean of options with that kind of feature, and early efforts should focus on where these things create joy, more than value, in my opinion.

From the Way, one emerged.

From one, two emerged.

From two, three.

From three, all things emerge.

—Tao Te Ching, verse 42

The leadership structure of the tDAO needs to be based on a deep commitment to and deep incentive for the integrity of the DTI. Rather than being the equivalent of Bitcoin maximalists, the keepers of this timeline will emerge into those responsible for the structural integrity of software, human coordination, and new structures of thought, philosophy, and science. This should not be governed by an elected board, but by a consortium of differing interests. Similar to checks and balances, the clockchain and DTI need systems to maximize the benefit of integrity and scale to all stakeholders.

These mechanisms should be formed by consensus within the TAO. One such mechanism may be that the centrality scores are integrated into all functions. This could enable, as an example, paying higher validator rates to validators whose users refer the most validations. This in turn motivates validators to design, tailor, and market their services to those users most likely to grow quickly in scale. Age-out mechanisms of rewards ensure ongoing opportunity and lack of access to perpetual market dominance tactics, which could erode the integrity of the system over time.

Perhaps a scenario emerges where many factors add bias to rewards. Integrity of clockchain filings; integrity over time; link-backs like eigenvector reference scoring used in search; redistribution of share efficacy; participation in other community points-type systems; or even efficacy of governance proposals or some other measurable but subjective contribution.

The best thing is probably a Proof of Work for the system; and Community as another domain. Perhaps these are the two houses of commons in voting. One ruthlessly mathematical; the other chaotically human.

The way of the tDAO should be gentle, yet immeasurably strong. Time crystalized down to a true abstraction, perfect in the way that each moment can be a full and complete story — yet able to grow and permeate and emerge complexity upon complexity to reveal yet another focused lens by which we can understand the reality in which we operate this system.

The first 100 supporters of clockchain protocol and DTI will receive Time Guardian NFT’s. I made this art, bending time. It shows dozens of portraits of people, with one collective human experience emerging across time. C’est la vie.

This NFT signifies you as a keeper of the timeline. As such, you will receive access to unique and important discussions and events.

It’s critical protect Intellectual Property in order to honor the TAO, in this case.

In the open budget, a percentage of engineering and legal resources go to this work. The tDAO owns all.

Time is scarce. Time is limited. Time is brutal. Time is now. We don’t know what time is. We make up time. There is nothing in the laws of physics that requires a sexagesimal system (60-based), nor is there anything in physics, nor biology, nor chemistry that dictates that we can’t contrive some entirely new model of time, using perhaps 12-based systems of hours, where minutes are about 5 of our current minutes.

All of these are strange truths to consider when you think about your life, your work, your time with family, or your bank account. But all is time, and time is all. Most of us care more about time than anything; and when people lose their ability to cherish their time, we recognize it as a mental health problem, not a logical conclusion.

We must further accept that we don’t have infinite choices. We have very limited choices. Most options we can conceive of are impossible. We cannot think of being in Paris, and be in Paris. We cannot think of being in the year known now as 1850, then be there. But we also cannot invent a water-to-wine machine simply because we can conceive of it. We cannot be in New York at noon and Dehli an hour later. We cannot write twenty books in a year. The limits themselves are finite, but a massively long list.

None of this is counter-intuitive. It’s counter cultural.

We, the people, own time.

Our infrastructure must be fully consistent with that absolute truth.

Housing and time emerged together. As the context of our daily lives became more and more safe from daily threats and distracting insufficiencies, we had the freedom to deeply synchronize and coordinate our time and labors with other humans.

But we have a full philosophical barbell arch here, where we can return to responding to our context. This extraordinary liberty will be the soil from which our higher forms emerge.

Owning the means of production may not be as important as it was once regaled to be; owning time itself can be what sets us free.

In a future world, where suffering and strife are solved due to rapid mimicry of essential behaviors in high resolution, enabled by the clockchain + DTI, how we spend our time is how we spend - and cultivate - our love.

In the end, the love expressed when you align your intentions and your impact, is the love you take.

//////

Thank you.

Sean

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(1) Is the universe immortal? Let’s figure out! But until then, we’ll go with ‘not for storage costs’.

(2) A highly-sophisticated highly-coordinated PoHT attack where the conscious being does not agree with their chained identity — would be a great sci-fi script. It should also be theoretically impossible because fraud can only span so many nodes deep in the DTI past the scale of roughly 10B entries. That admittedly arbitrary point represents a threshold at which so many real things exist that a whole artificial history would have to be contrived, and so long as each clockchain entry records its own time of recording.

These updates are made after the first draft circulated editors, colleagues, friends, and family. Thank you all for your help and feedback. Thank you to my family for your love and support.

Nothing stated herein should stop the user from posting encrypted data; although it would probably break DTI label look up and taxonomy functions, in at least some of the cases. The ideal encryption system would have multiple zones: user management, clockchain meta management, encrypted clockchain graphs, and encrypted variables within graphs. There should be another set of encryption tools, which include the ability to decrypt-on-time-trigger and perhaps smart decryption contracts, the former being of more prescience and portent -- and inter-referential to the clockchain.

A critical point of feedback is that there are many reasons to include a mutability function - whether ticker or trigger - that ages entries out of the clockchain. It’s not clear how that would work, or how archived versions could possibly be handled. But, it’s a good subject for debate. Perhaps there is some asymptotic curve value over time like ADPRS; there is a trigger; there is user command; or some other function that stops including an entry. I’m skeptical, but optimistic.

Among the good reasons to have optional mutability: people may do things they regret and want to hide; fraudulent entries have to be stopped somehow; no clear mechanism exists to stop group-level deception, creating a statistically-likely yet entirely false entry; and the storage costs of all entries, over time, becomes very large. Perhaps the mindset of optional mutability is wrong altogether, and all entries should de factor age out, but can be set to perpetuity. Perhaps these entries have higher or residual mining fees?

My brilliant friend and past collaborator Alex offered up the brainstorm that clockchain miners monitor our position in space to record time. By analyzing data from a variety of prospective sources - satellite data, eclipses, orbital data, local basic telescope data, and dozens more - the miners could develop a consensus on where in space they are. This would exactly position us in time, as well. Appending POPS to clockchain entries would show exactly where in the universe the entrant was when the entry was entered, which would show exactly when. This is a superior time format to what is described in my essay, and in the official first version of this essay, I will replace my ideas with this one. Combined with nuclear time, it is a system the whole universe should be able to agree upon.

Another brilliant friend, Rakshak, pointed out that “term limits” on the governance of the clockchain are important. To be clear: I’m working to build the clockchain in a decentralized way that does not put me in a long-term exclusive position of power, but rather ages me out of the power structure entirely, becoming a self-sustaining emergent phenomena with rewards to all contribute to its success, not just a founding handful.

It’s not clear how to do that, but it should be recursive, in my opinion. Perhaps it is a count of the number of graphs posted to the clockchain. I can be on the tDAO with voting power for the first billion? Then the second billion I start quadratic scaling down in power, but never reaching zero on my returns. Whatever the mechanism should be, the design should enable incentives that last perpetually (i.e. revenue share that goes asymptotically towards zero but never reaches it), but also prevent governance power from suffering nepotism, unbreakable dominance, x% attacks, and other crippling problems faced by the battleground of failed crypto initiatives.

As a clarification, I can’t imagine that people benefit put “brushing my teeth” on the clockchain, with maybe some very outlier cases like research at a dental college. It’s not a calendar or behavioral quantification tool, any more than bitcoin is a mortgage broker.