Pay the toll or work the road.

The road

England, the eighteenth century. The roads between the towns were kept by turnpike trusts: a gate across the road, a keeper's house, a toll book. Six days a year every parish owed work on the roads, and a man could come out with a shovel or pay to be excused. The word commute came from there.

trnpike carries the gate onto Robinhood Chain. On the wall of the tollhouse hang the bills of ten thousand wanted men. Whoever holds a bill holds a man, and the man works the road for his bearer. Everything that comes through the gate is shared, every shift, among the men who worked it.

The bills, and the two roads to one

Ten thousand bills, numbered 0000 to 9999, each printed by the contract from its number alone: nothing stored, nothing uploaded, no two the same. There is no presale and no allocation; the author takes bill 0000 and nothing else.

Work. Bring a hash under the mark and the next bill is yours, free but for the gas. The mark starts at about four million hashes, a few seconds for a phone, and doubles every 384 bills: by the last bills it is a job for a farm. The seed moves with every bill, so nothing can be found in advance.

Coin. Or buy the next bills at the price of the road: 0.0001 ETH for the first, up 2.33 percent every hundred bills, ten times over the whole run, one to twenty a hand. Nine tenths of the money go to the treasury of the road, one tenth goes to the road itself: it waits at the gate and is laid into the pool when the shift closes.

In the first hour after the opening no hand takes more than three bills, by work or by coin: the phones get their window before the farms.

The shift and the wage

A shift is a day by UTC, numbered from the epoch. Once a shift, a bearer shows the gate one hash under the shift's mark (about four million hashes, a phone finds it in seconds) and every bill in his hand goes out on the road for that shift. More hashes buy nothing; more bills do. A bill works once a shift, whoever holds it.

When the shift closes (the first work of the next day settles it, or anyone may) the gate counts what came through it since the last settlement: the toll of the pool, in ETH and in TOLL, and the royalty of every bill sold on the market, in USDG or ETH. Eighty of every hundred go to the bills that worked, evenly; twenty to the keeper's house. The shift also strikes TOLL: a million in the first shift, evenly to the bills that worked, halving every hundred shifts. A shift nobody worked strikes nothing and books nothing; the money waits for the next.

The wage is pulled: COLLECT on the front page takes it, ETH, USDG and TOLL, for every settled shift your men worked. Nothing is promised; the tolls are counted.

The man taken

Once a shift, one working man is taken: drawn among the bills on the road, one ticket a bill. The draw takes two hands. The first transaction of the new shift closes the old one, books the wages, strikes the TOLL, paves the road and notes its block. Any later transaction from a later block draws the man, from the hash of the block noted and the seed of the shift: the hand that closed the shift could not know that hash, and nobody can hold the draw back, because anyone may make it. When a man waits to be drawn the front page says so and offers the hand: DRAW THE MAN TAKEN. The reward printed on his bill, 1K to 99K TOLL, is struck to his bearer. The bill stays in play. His face on the wall gets the wax: TAKEN, and PAID OUT over his reward.

The gate and the pool

The pool. ETH against TOLL (the coin is TRNPIKE TOLL) on Uniswap v4, with the keeper as its hook. The keeper founds the pool the moment it is born, at the opening price, and lays a stock of TOLL below that price, so the pool stands from the first day and nobody else can open one under the gate; the window of the tollhouse is lit while it stands. On the first day the pool holds only TOLL: the first buyer takes from the stock. A tenth of every bill bought is laid into the pool after each shift, with TOLL struck to match, as liquidity the keeper holds forever: no hand can take it out, and what it earns comes through the gate to the men. Every swap is a passage through the gate, and every passage pays the toll, one in a hundred: half to the liquidity of the pool, half through the gate to the men who worked the shift. There is no free passage, and a hash buys none. Work the road is the other thing: the daily work of the men, one hash a shift for the bills in hand, paid for from what came through the gate. PAY THE TOLL on the front page is the swap, TOLL bought for ETH or sold for ETH, through the wagon of this site: the ETH rides along with the call and the change comes back, TOLL needs one approval; the wagon names your price, allows one percent of slack on it and gives up after ten minutes.

How the page finds your men

The bills are not enumerable on the chain, so the page reads the Transfer logs of the bills to and from your address, from the block of the deploy on, and keeps the list in this browser by chain and address, reading only the new blocks after that. When the count disagrees with the chain, or the logs are out of reach, it asks every printed bill who owns it and keeps that answer instead. Before the men go out, each bill is asked which shift it last worked, so the ones already out today stay home.

Contracts

Not yet on the chain. The addresses will be printed here, and in the book.

No owner, no pause, no upgrade. The keeper creates the coin and the bills and founds the pool in one deploy; the bills carry a five percent royalty (ERC 2981, enforced by ERC 721 C) that goes through the gate to the men. To work the road from the front page you need a wallet in the browser and a little ETH on the chain for the gas. One button does it all: mint a bill, put your men to work, collect the wage.

Nothing is promised. The tolls are counted.