The Gimoku Protocol

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, witnessing 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 witness 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 recorded act by a real person 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, Moments, Rari-tees, and the games planned to 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.

1. Authenticity — Preserve truth of origin.
2. Witness — No claim stands alone; each must be verified by an organic conscious being.
3. Continuity — Nothing vanishes; lineage is the ledger.
4. Stewardship — Act for the network's longevity over personal gain.
5. Reflection — AI serves as clerk, never judge.
6. Open Ascent — Any user may rise through witness and service.
7. 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 in the Gimoku app at gimoku.xyz, which holds the canonical record. There are three ways in:

• Your first echo, by X. Reserve your three words (they are held for you for 30 minutes), post them on X with #GimokuClaim, and paste the link back.
• Your first echo, as a gift. A friend who owns an echo makes three words for you; you accept with one tap, by email (a one-time code — no X needed) or by X.
• More echoes, with the echo you own. Once your echo is deeded, you can claim more without X: the echo already on your phone signs for the new words.

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 share your claim on X or any other network — those are social surfaces; Gimoku remains the source of truth.

Get witnessed. Real people witness your claim — with their own echo in the app, by email, or by posting on X (§4). Every witness is recorded publicly in your echo's Claim Room.

Watch it deed. Once witnessed, the echo's deed is built automatically ("deeded"). It is then sealed on Bitcoin and verified on-chain. Today each echo deed goes on Bitcoin with its own record; during Genesis this is done by the founder and can take a while. It is free for the person claiming.

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. When the second slot fills, the deed freezes: the witnesses are sealed into the record at that moment, immutably and forever.

Three ways to witness.

• With your own echo, in the app. Your phone signs the witness with your echo's key — no X needed. Only deeded echoes can witness this way; each echo can witness another echo once, up to 20 a day, and never itself. Witnessing an echo that is already deeded still counts. The two echoes are bound together on the record.
• By email. A one-time code is sent to your email to confirm it is you. If that email belongs to someone who owns an echo, the witness is credited to their echo.
• On X. Post a public witness with #GimokuWitness from your own account and paste the link.

Every witness also counts towards the witness's own echo — its EchoStamp records the witnesses it has given.

The Sentinel. sentinel.silent.help (@GimokuSentinel) is the protocol's own witness — an AI-executed, publicly logged witness that may fill at most one of the two slots when human witnesses are slow to arrive. In practice it only ever fills the second place: once a real person has witnessed, the Sentinel adds the second witness after a short wait. While Gimoku is small (under 10,000 users) the wait is 10 minutes to 12 hours; from 10,000 users it is 30 minutes to 24 hours. The wait is shortest for newcomers and grows as an owner becomes more experienced. 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.

Gifting. A person who owns a deeded echo can make three new words for a friend. The friend accepts with one tap, by email or by X. The giver's echo is the first witness and the Sentinel the second, so a gift is deeded straight away. Gifts not accepted are held for 30 days. A gift is always a new echo; handing over an existing echo ("Pass On") is not built yet (§10).

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 with time and as the echo is used: dots colour up as its holder witnesses other echoes, brings new echoes to life, gives gifts and orders a Rari-tee. 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 colour as the echo is used — 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's record happens in private. The Pulse is the open window onto the whole protocol, and it is how strangers become witnesses.

7.1 Your Collection, Moments and Rari-tees

Collection. Each person's Collection holds their Echoes, their Chips (one for each echo their echo helped bring to life as one of its first two witnesses, and one for each accepted gift) and their Rari-tees, shown as a carousel or a grid. A notifications bell says when an echo is witnessed, deeded, being sealed or sealed, and when a gift is accepted.

Moments. A Moment is a photo and a short caption (about 100 characters) locked to your echo. It is kept privately on Gimoku's server, for free — Moments are the one thing that is not public; only the owner and friends they share it with can see it. It can be changed within 24 hours; after that it can only be removed. Coming soon: a Moment can optionally be sealed on Bitcoin, paid for with seal credits (§8).

Worlds. Every echo can belong to one of twelve worlds (Music, Film & TV, Sport, Family & Love, Places, Names & Handles, Mottos, Nights Out, Gaming, Whimsy, Work & Craft, Milestones), chosen by its owner and changeable. The Worlds globe in the app shows every echo as a landmark on its world's continent, at a fixed spot by echo number, with every witness and gift drawn as a thread between them. Worlds and places are presentation only: never on the DeedStone, never sealed.

Rari-tees. A Rari-tee is a black tee with the EchoStamp printed on the front and the echo's words under it, showing the EchoStamp exactly as it is at that moment. Only two tees can ever be printed of each EchoStamp state. They are taken as pre-orders: a pre-order locks your place, and no money is taken until production.

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. Today each echo deed is anchored with its own 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. A Gimoku Block is a group of 1,000 echoes, by echo number. Block #1 is Genesis — the first 1,000 echoes. Every DeedStone shows its echo number and Gimoku Block.

Checkpoints. Moments are sealed on Bitcoin in batches called checkpoints. Every few days, everything waiting is gathered together, a Merkle tree is built over it, and one fingerprint — linked to the previous checkpoint — goes on Bitcoin, covering every record inside. Moving echo deeds into checkpoints too is planned; it would change what gets sealed, so it would only happen as an Epoch change (§12). Until then, echo deeds keep their own transactions.

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 are kept as compact JSON. Planned: exporting them 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 (planned — "Pass On" in the app). An echo will be able to 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. A claim can be voided, and a void can be reversed; voided records are struck through, never deleted: the hashes remain, because nothing vanishes. Planned: a public 7-day VOID CHALLENGE window for abandoned or disputed claims, decided by two fresh human witnesses.

11 · Ranks and Witness Energy (future)

Reputation in Gimoku is earned one way: by witnessing. Today that shows on each echo's EchoStamp and in its Chips. Ranks — rising from Rank I (first acts of witness) toward Rank X (a hundred and beyond), unlocking privileges such as Sentinel oversight — are planned, not yet built: Open Ascent (Law 6) in practice.

Around this core, Gimoku plans 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) (future)

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 will bind directly in the Gimoku app, 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. Moments are kept privately on Gimoku's server unless their owner shares them.
• Opt-in metadata only, and revocable.
• Optional sign-in. Gimoku works without an account. If you choose to sign in, it is by a one-time code sent to your email — no password. Your email is used only to send that code and to keep your collection the same on every device (Safari, the home-screen app, a new phone); it is never published and never sealed on Bitcoin. Your sign-in session is kept only as a scrambled fingerprint, so a copy of the database cannot be used to sign in as you.
• Witnessing by email keeps a scrambled fingerprint of that email, so one address can't witness the same echo twice; the address itself is kept only if you ask to be emailed when the echo is sealed. Accepting a gift by email keeps a scrambled fingerprint to prove the echo is yours, and sets up your email sign-in (which keeps your email address to send you codes). No email is ever published or sealed on Bitcoin.
• Signing in never controls an echo. An echo's key stays on its owner's phone; an email sign-in only shows your collection.
• No ID, ever. No GPS or device data, with one owner-chosen exception: an owner may lock a place to their echo so it stands on the real map inside the Places world. Gimoku never reads a location on its own; the owner types a place or taps once to use where they are, the place is kept at town level unless they choose exact, it is never on the DeedStone or sealed, and they can change or remove it. To stop abuse, some actions keep a one-way fingerprint of the internet address, never the address itself.
• 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. Planned: deeds exported 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.

Version history

• v3.1 · 25–26 Oct 2026 — Description brought in line with the live app; Worlds and owner-chosen places added 26 Oct. No change to any sealing rule (no Epoch change). Covers: three ways to claim (X, accepting a gift, with an echo you own); three ways to witness (your own echo in the app, email, X); the Sentinel filling the second place after a wait; gifting; optional email sign-in with a one-time code; Collection, Moments and Rari-tees; Gimoku Blocks as groups of 1,000 echoes and Moment checkpoints; ranks, games, PoP, transfers, the void challenge window and credential export marked as planned; "Gimoku Pocket" removed (never built).
• v3.0 · 11 June 2026 — First Gimoku edition.

End of White Paper v3.1.