pokkecon.

A gift-economy router in the spirit of Bruce Sterling's "Maneki Neko" (1998).

People post small offers and needs. A matcher pairs them nearby, the app pokes each side with one tiny assignment, both sides attest the act happened, and standing accrues. No money, no central ledger of favors owed between two people.

The core loop

1. Observe. Your phone publishes a coarse signal: an Offer or a Need, a category, a geo cell, a time window.
2. Match. The matcher pairs complementary signals in the same cell and window.
3. Poke. Each side gets one small, declinable assignment. A decline costs nothing.
4. Act. The stranger does the thing.
5. Attest. Both parties sign a receipt. One-sided claims do not count.
6. Standing. Attested acts raise a local standing score, weighted by the attester's own standing, decaying with age, capped per pair per week. Standing steers who is poked first. It is never shown as a leaderboard and never spent.

Design rules

• No pairwise debt. Giver and receiver are rarely the same two people, so nobody is "owed".
• Coarse location only: a cell, not coordinates. Signals expire fast.
• Pokes are rate limited per person per day. Declining is free and invisible to the other side.
• Standing decays. Old favors do not buy permanent privilege.
• The router sees signals, not identities. Handles are rotating pseudonyms.
• Funding is not favors: a Cashu ecash funding edge (bounties, public goods) is in design only; no favor ever carries money.
• Fail closed: no valid signature, no scope, no match.

Status

Open-source scaffold written in Rust. The CLI, matching, receipts, standing, and a Nostr transport layer (ephemeral kind-20001 signals, gift-wrapped pokes and receipts, per-day transport keys) are built and tested against a local relay. Push delivery to phones and any relay deployment are stubbed on purpose; nothing is broadcast today.