A donor who gives more than the minimum in a cycle still earns only one vote for that cycle. The excess does not buy additional votes. Instead, it goes into a matching pool that matches smaller donations from other donors in future cycles. Money in the matching pool is not available to the organization until it is actually matched. A large donation that arrives without the community to match it does not fund the organization — it sits in the pool, waiting. Only when other donors show up and claim matches does that money become spendable. An unmatched pool is potential, not funding. This is a deliberate structural constraint on the organization itself. The most important thing the org can do, at any given moment, is bring in more people and keep current members engaged. Without participation, the money cannot be spent. The org cannot afford to ignore what its users want, because its ability to operate at any scale depends on users continuing to show up. Large donors still matter — they make broader participation possible — but they do not get to bypass the community. The matching design ties what the organization can do to what the community is willing to join in on. That tie is the point.

The platform exists to make collective decision-making consequential. It fails if one person's voice dominates. The concern is not about donors who have lost interest — it is about the opposite. A donor who has been engaged since the organization's founding and has given faithfully in every cycle should not, twenty years in, hold a voice many times larger than a newer donor giving at the same rate today. Sustained commitment is real and worth acknowledging, but it is not a bigger claim on the organization's direction. The mechanism is vote expiration. Each vote expires four years after the donation that earned it. A donor who gives in every cycle is always carrying forward four years of recent votes — no more, no less. Someone who has given for twenty years has the same vote count as someone who has given for four, provided both have participated in every cycle during the trailing window. The natural cap works out to roughly sixteen active votes — reached by a donor who has given in every cycle for four years running. Below that, a donor has however many votes match their recent participation. No one carries more than sixteen.

Votes should be earned by participation that costs something. Without a cost, voting opens the door to sock puppets, brigading, and participants with no real stake in outcomes. The mechanism the platform uses right now is a financial donation. Each donor earns one vote per funding cycle by making a donation of at least the cycle's minimum. A larger donation in the same cycle does not purchase additional votes — the excess contributes to the matching pool, which is argued elsewhere. This keeps the voting roll a roughly even distribution of participants rather than a reflection of who has more money to spend. Other forms of participation could also plausibly earn a vote — an officer of a group who has taken on real responsibility, someone whose sustained work has shaped the platform, other kinds of demonstrated commitment. Each of those should be argued out as its own case. For now, donations are the mechanism. The minimum is ten dollars. Below that, processing fees and administrative overhead consume too much of the donation to leave meaningful funding. The ten-dollar figure will not be permanent — it has to move with inflation and shifts in processing costs over time.

Any research Authored Eternity funds should be published in a way that is freely and permanently accessible to everyone. The results of publicly-directed science belong to the public. The question of patents and products is more complicated, and we should be honest about that. Research often has multiple funders. Partners bring their own resources, their own IP, their own commercial interests. Authored Eternity cannot — and should not try to — override the legitimate interests of parties who have contributed their own resources to a project. What we can require is proportionality. Where Authored Eternity is the primary or sole funder, the expectation is that resulting patents or products are licensed in a way that is free to build upon. Where we are one funder among many, our IP terms should reflect our share. We should not be subsidizing a privately captured monopoly, but we should not pretend we have leverage we do not have. The principle behind both: donor money given in service of humanity should not end up serving private interests. The access requirement ensures the knowledge is free. The proportional IP requirement ensures our specific contribution does not become someone else's wall.

Here is how I think grant voting should work. Each proposal would carry a threshold — a percentage of total donor support required before it passes, scaled to the size of the ask. Votes would be liquid throughout: donors can allocate, move, and reconsider freely. A grant passes when it has accumulated 24 hours above its threshold. If support drops below threshold, the clock pauses and resumes where it left off once support recovers. The threshold holds flat for the first three days, then begins to decay slowly and then faster as time passes. The 24-hour window exists because this community is international. A vote that could close in four hours can close while half the membership is asleep with no real opportunity to participate. Accumulated hours mean a proposal must hold the genuine attention of a global community long enough for anyone who wants to weigh in to actually do so. The threshold decay after day three acknowledges something real: a proposal that has been visible to the full community for days without reaching threshold but also without being actively defeated is not the same as a proposal that nobody has looked at. Persistent minority interest, sustained and unopposed over time, is a signal worth responding to. The decay is slow at first and accelerates — not to make passing easy, but to ensure that genuinely supported proposals are not held hostage indefinitely by a community that has neither endorsed nor rejected them. It also ensures that no proposal lingers in permanent limbo: the decaying threshold guarantees that every proposal either passes, loses its funding to a more supported grant, or reaches a point where the community's silence becomes its own answer. When cycle funds are exhausted, any proposals that can no longer be afforded are removed and every donor's votes are returned in full. Within an active cycle, breadth-first refunds prevent large donors from gaming timing by cycling votes in and out — refunds flow across the widest number of donors before fully restoring any individual's position.

Donors have the power to add restrictions, change bylaws, and alter the foundational structure of the organization — but they do not hire or fire staff, direct day-to-day decisions, or manage operations. That authority belongs to the board and staff. This separation exists for a reason. Donors provide the mission and the guardrails. The organization's people execute within them. Conflating the two would make the org ungovernable — no staff can function effectively when every operational decision is subject to a donor vote. When donors want to change the rules that everyone agreed to when they joined — the foundational structure, the mission, a core restriction — that requires a supermajority of approximately 75% of votes cast. This threshold ensures that changes to the constitution of the organization reflect genuine broad consensus, not a momentary majority on a low-turnout vote. Everything outside that scope is the board's domain.