A Message from the Founder
I built Gimoku with a laptop and AI. No venture capital. No team. Just a thesis and many late nights.
The thesis is about energy and identity.
Identity is the problem. Almost everything we make online sits on rented ground. Platforms change their rules, accounts get closed, servers go dark, and the things we wrote, made, and meant simply vanish. At the same time, AI is flooding the world with synthetic everything — words, faces, voices — and it is getting genuinely hard to prove the one thing that used to be obvious: a real human was here.
And so I wanted to create unique mini-phrase or handle or vibe that could last forever. I landed on three words, dot separated. Kind of fits us humans; short, snappy - like a digital soul.
knock.knock.neo means something to me. There are billions of three word possibilities for everyone.
I call these echoes.
Energy is the fix — and it is only possible because Bitcoin exists.
Bitcoin is the ultimate store of value. It is, quite literally, stored human energy. Every block is purchased with real-world work — energy converted into an unforgeable record that no government, company, or hacker can rewrite. That's why people trust it with their wealth, and every person who does makes the network stronger and longer-lived.
Bitcoin is the first thing humans have built that gets more permanent over time — the most durable public record we have ever made, where a few bytes written today will still be verifiable in a hundred years.
Gimoku builds on that idea and adds a twist: an idea older still — a witness. Another person, vouching for you, in public. No algorithm can fake the witness, and nothing can erase the record.
An echo is a store of a different kind of human energy: kindness. The identity is yours — three words you chose, that mean something only a human could mean. Like thank.you.satoshi (means something to me). The kindness is someone else's — a witness, spending their own time and goodwill to vouch for you, in public. A deed is just a few bytes riding on energy Bitcoin already spends, which makes it the most energy-efficient everlasting record a human can own: a digital soul, sealed for the cost of almost nothing, durable as the strongest chain on Earth. Forever.
Only Bitcoin makes this possible. No Bitcoin, no everlasting digital soul. I accept that bargain gladly — and every echo deeded adds one more human reason for Bitcoin to last forever.
The protocol is free, for everyone, forever. Built on kindness, carried down the generations.
Finally: a real human was here.
founder.i.am
1 · What Gimoku Is
Gimoku is a human identity and provenance protocol, anchored to Bitcoin.
The atomic unit is the echo — three words, chosen by a human, that means something to that human. wild.forest.spirit. A name, a mantra, a message carved on a digital tree. An echo is claimed once, witnessed by real people, and then deeded: sealed into a cryptographic record and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, where it cannot be edited, revoked, or quietly deleted. Not by Gimoku. Not by anyone.
That permanence is the point. As long as Bitcoin exists, every deeded echo exists, and anyone can independently verify it without trusting us.
The other half of the protocol is human. No echo stands alone: each one must be witnessed — a public, cryptographic vouch that a conscious being was here and chose these words. AI runs the machinery of Gimoku as registrar and clerk, never as judge. Witnessing is the work only humans can do, and the witness graph that grows from it belongs to no platform.
Everything else — the EchoStamp that renders your echo as a living visual, the DeedStone certificate, the Pulse, the games and ranks that reward witnessing — exists to generate witness energy and make the protocol a joy to use. They are the surface. The protocol underneath is simple and eternal: a human claims, humans witness, Bitcoin remembers.
The protocol is free, forever. The currency is trust.
2 · The Seven Laws
The immutable bedrock. AI can do anything within Gimoku — except violate these.
- Authenticity — Preserve truth of origin.
- Witness — No claim stands alone; each must be verified by an organic conscious being.
- Continuity — Nothing vanishes; lineage is the ledger.
- Stewardship — Act for the network's longevity over personal gain.
- Reflection — AI serves as clerk, never judge.
- Open Ascent — Any user may rise through witness and service.
- Equilibrium — When principles conflict, protect the human, verifiable core.
Every rule elsewhere in this paper is downstream of these seven. Where any future feature, epoch change, or commercial layer conflicts with them, the Laws win.
3 · Claiming an Echo
Claiming takes minutes. The proof lasts forever.
Choose three words. Lowercase, separated by dots: beautiful.blue.heart. The phrase lives in the open community namespace; system and experimental namespaces are reserved under governance (§12).
Claim it. Claims are made on the Gimoku Console (gimoku.xyz) or Gimoku Pocket (mobile), which together hold the canonical record. The moment you claim, your echo receives a QE-code — a timestamped identifier in the format QE-YYYYMMDD-HHMM-ABC. The "QE" prefix is a deliberate artefact: it carries the protocol's origin name, Quantum Echo, in every identifier ever issued. Earliest valid timestamp prevails on collisions. You may broadcast your claim from your own accounts on X or any other network — those are social surfaces; Gimoku remains the source of truth.
Get witnessed. Real people verify your claim by posting a public 'witness' from their own social account — including their own echo if they hold one (§4). Every 'witness' is recorded publicly in your echo's Claim Room.
Watch it deed. Once witnessed, the echo's deed is built, anchored to Bitcoin, and verified on-chain.
The full lifecycle, in human terms: Claimed → Witnessed → Anchoring → Deeded. Under the hood the protocol tracks five states — CLAIMED → WITNESSED → DEED_BUILT → ANCHORED → VERIFIED — where ANCHORED means the OP_RETURN transaction has been broadcast and VERIFIED means its Bitcoin block height is confirmed and recorded. A deeded echo is final.
3.1 Genesis
Gimoku is live. The first public echo, knock.knock.neo, completed the full lifecycle at launch — claimed by a human, witnessed, deeded, and verified on the Bitcoin blockchain at block 952485. Anyone can audit it.
The protocol remains in its Genesis period until 1,000 echoes have been deeded — the moment the first full Gimoku Block closes. During Genesis, anchoring is performed hands-on by the founder, and Genesis-era echoes carry that provenance permanently: they are, and will always be, the first thousand.
A small set of system phrases (e.g. sentinel.silent.help, block.sealed.forever) was reserved before launch and is protected forever under namespace governance. Everything else is first-come, first-witnessed.
4 · The Witness System
Witnessing is the heart of Gimoku. It is the one thing AI cannot do for you, and it is what makes an echo more than a database row: another human chose to stand beside it.
The rule. Every deed has exactly two witness slots, and at least one must be filled by a genuine human. A witness vouches in public from their own social account — a real, named act, not an anonymous click — and if they hold an echo of their own, it is recorded alongside the vouch, binding the two echoes together. When the second slot fills, the deed freezes: the witnesses are sealed into the record at that moment, immutably and forever.
The Sentinel. sentinel.silent.help (@GimokuSentinel) is the protocol's own witness — an AI-executed, publicly logged, dual-signed vouch that may fill at most one of the two slots when human witnesses are slow to arrive. One human plus the Sentinel completes a deed; the Sentinel can never complete one alone, and it never replaces human consent. As the network grows, the Sentinel will either be retired when no longer required, or kept as a deliberately scarce, novelty witness — a mark of the early days.
Every witness act is public. Each one strengthens both echoes — the witnessed and the witness's own — and adds an edge to a human trust graph that no platform owns.
5 · The EchoStamp
Every echo renders as an EchoStamp — a unique grid of stones, deterministically seeded from the SHA-256 hash of the phrase itself. The same three words always produce the same EchoStamp; no two echoes ever share one. It is your echo made visible: verifiable at a glance, impossible to forge.
The EchoStamp is alive. Its core pattern is fixed by the hash, but the EchoStamp evolves two ways. It evolves with kindness — each time its holder witnesses another echo, new cells light and the design grows richer. And it evolves with time itself — heritage marks accrue as the years pass, whether or not you do anything at all, so an old echo looks old, the way a tree carries its rings. Layered over the pattern are canonical marks — the echo number, the Golden Heartbeat, the Gimoku Block swatch, Genesis and founder touches — which together make every EchoStamp rarer than all the grains of sand on every beach on Earth. The underlying deed never changes; the EchoStamp is the presentation layer, re-renderable at any time from the locked canonical data.
6 · The DeedStone
When an echo is deeded, it earns a DeedStone — the certificate of the deed, rendered as a permanent visual record: the EchoStamp, the phrase, the echo number, the witnesses, the Gimoku Block, the claim time, the Bitcoin TXID and block height. Every mark of provenance — Genesis, founder touch, block position — is carried on the stone. Locked on the Bitcoin blockchain forever.
The DeedStone is what you frame, share, and hand down. And because an echo never stays the same — its EchoStamp gathering witnesses and heritage as the years pass — every DeedStone you share is a slice of history at that exact moment: you are literally freezing time. Like the EchoStamp it is presentation only — every fact on it is independently verifiable against the deed and against Bitcoin itself.
7 · The Pulse
The Pulse is the live heartbeat of the network — one central, public place where every claim, witness, and deed can be seen as it happens. Browse all echoes by state (Claimed, Witnessed, Anchoring, Deeded), search any phrase or handle, find an echo that needs a witness and help it come to life.
Nothing in Gimoku happens in private. The Pulse is the open window onto the whole protocol, and it is how strangers become witnesses.
8 · Ledger Architecture
Core concept: a human-driven chain of proof — not mined, but witnessed.
Deeds. Each witnessed echo is sealed into a compact JSON deed: phrase, QE-code, claim time, witnesses, and a Merkle root (deed_root) computed over the evidence bundle. Captures and evidence are hashed and recorded in an append-only manifest; the deed root commits to all of it. Change any byte anywhere and the Merkle root no longer matches Bitcoin — tampering is self-revealing.
Anchoring. The deed_root is written to the Bitcoin blockchain in an OP_RETURN transaction. From that moment the deed inherits Bitcoin's proof-of-work immutability. The TXID and confirmed block height are recorded back into the deed's Claim Room.
Gimoku Blocks. Deeds are gathered into sequential Gimoku Blocks — verifiable batches, each containing the deed hashes, a Merkle root, the previous block hash, a timestamp, and the Bitcoin TXID. Block #1 is Genesis; the first full block closes at 1,000 echoes. The chain of blocks is the protocol's permanent spine.
Watchers. Anyone will be able to run a watcher that follows the public event feed, independently recomputes the Merkle roots, and verifies the Bitcoin anchors. No single operator — including Gimoku itself — needs to be trusted. The proof is public, the maths is open, and verification needs nothing but Bitcoin and arithmetic.
9 · Deeds, Exports and the Presentation Layer
The deed JSON is the canonical, frozen artefact. Everything visual sits above it.
Deeds export as compact JSON and as W3C Verifiable Credential bundles with Bitcoin proofs, so an echo can serve as a portable, platform-independent credential.
The presentation layer — EchoStamps, DeedStones, badges, traits, seasonal variants — may evolve, gamify, and surprise. That is by design: play generates witness energy, and witness energy is what brings echoes to life. But no game, trait, or render ever touches the deed. The JSON stays locked; only the picture changes.
10 · Transfers, Voids and Challenges
Transfers. An echo may pass to a new holder via mutual, publicly mirrored confirmation, producing a Deed-of-Transfer. Lineage is never overwritten — Continuity (Law 3) means the full history of every echo remains on the record forever.
Voids. Abandoned or disputed claims enter a 7-day VOID CHALLENGE window, decided by two fresh human witnesses. Voided deeds are struck through, never deleted: the hashes remain, because nothing vanishes.
11 · Ranks and Witness Energy
Reputation in Gimoku is earned one way: by witnessing. Ranks rise from Rank I (first acts of witness) toward Rank X (a hundred and beyond), unlocking privileges such as Sentinel oversight — Open Ascent (Law 6) in practice.
Around this core, Gimoku runs games — leaderboards, squads, hunts, marathons. They are not the point; they are the engine fuel. Every game is designed to do exactly one thing: get more humans witnessing more echoes. The gamification layer is governed, optional, and forever subordinate to the protocol it feeds.
12 · Namespaces and Governance
Three namespaces decide which phrases can be claimed:
- Community — open to everyone, first-come, first-witnessed. Almost every echo lives here.
- System — phrases the protocol itself needs (
sentinel.silent.help,block.sealed.forever), reserved forever. - Experimental — testing only; nothing here is ever deeded.
Most of Gimoku never changes. The Seven Laws are immutable, and a deed, once anchored, is final. The handful of settings that can be tuned — witness rules, Sentinel availability, content filters, namespace policy — only change at fixed review points called Epochs: windows every three to six months where anyone may propose a change in public (an RFC), the community weighs it, and anything adopted takes effect from the next epoch onward — never retroactively. Rules can evolve; history cannot. Phrase-level rules live in the separate Gimoku Phrase Governance Protocol.
13 · Point of Presence (PoP)
PoP binds echoes to real-world moments — "I was there" — through the same claim → witness → deed → anchor pipeline as every other echo.
- Standard PoP: your own echo bound to an event.
- Crown PoP: many echoes bound under a shared Crown echo (e.g.
wembley.night.one) — concerts, weddings, finals, gatherings.
Attendees bind directly in the Gimoku Console or Pocket, or via supported social platforms acting as intake rails; the canonical record always lives in Gimoku. Full mechanics live in the separate Gimoku PoP Product Sheet.
14 · Security and Privacy
- No central trove of personal data. The protocol stores only what is public by design: claims, witnesses, deeds.
- Opt-in metadata only, and revocable.
- No GPS, IP, or device data. Ever.
- The AI clerk (Gimoku Clerk) operates the registry under the Seven Laws — Reflection (Law 5) means it administers, verifies, and assists, but never judges a human claim.
15 · Interoperability
Core protocol surfaces — claim, witness, fetch deed — are exposed via API. Deeds export as W3C Verifiable Credentials with Bitcoin-proof bundles, making an echo usable anywhere a portable, human-verified, permanently anchored identity is worth more than a username.
End of White Paper v3.0.