Courage Garikai

Courage Garikai › Publications

DCAI working paper 3

Order Without Custody

Governance-first design for merchant commerce rails in low-infrastructure economies

Small merchants already sell at scale — through chat threads, pages and a phone number painted on a wall — but they sell without a record. This paper argues that the binding constraint at that tier is not payment capability but reconciliation, and that reconcilability is an architectural property rather than a feature. Five mechanisms are formalised against artefacts a reader can inspect: the No-Custody Rail, Admission-Gated Discovery, Reserve-Ladder Scheduling, Surface-Disjoint Multi-Tenancy and the Constrained Persuasion Doctrine. The empirical section is forensic: five classes of governance failure, each stated as a signature, a detector and a design response.

Candid about its limits: no paying customers in the measurement window, no control condition, no inference beyond the case.

Contents

  1. 1 The problem with the obvious answer
  2. 2 The thesis
  3. 3 Contributions
  4. 4 Reading map
  5. 1 Entrepreneurship without capital: effectuation, bricolage, and their limit
  6. 2 Mobile money, informal commerce, and the record gap
  7. 3 Platform economics and the custody question
  8. 4 Observability, and the log as witness
  9. 5 Agentic systems: capability versus custody
  10. 6 Design science and the single case
  11. 1 Positionality
  12. 2 Evidence base
  13. 3 Measurement definitions
  14. 4 The disciplines that constrain the paper's claims
  15. 1 What Tapstall is, in one paragraph
  16. 2 The substrate, and why it is part of the argument
  17. 3 The verification surface
  18. 4 The commercial frame
  19. 5 The document that carries the thesis
  20. 1 The No-Custody Rail (NCR)
  21. 2 Admission-Gated Discovery (AGD)
  22. 3 Reserve-Ladder Scheduling (RLS)
  23. 4 Surface-Disjoint Multi-Tenancy (SDM)
  24. 5 Constrained Persuasion Doctrine (CPD)
  25. 6 Why these five belong to one theory
  26. 1 The verification surface across the release chain
  27. 2 Discovery throughput, before and after the source expansion
  28. 3 Budget behaviour
  29. 4 The statement's arithmetic
  30. 5 What was refused
  31. 6 Cost
  32. 1 G1 — Provenance collapse
  33. 2 G2 — Budget cannibalisation
  34. 3 G3 — Representation drift
  35. 4 G4 — Surface collision
  36. 5 G5 — Custody leakage (and its documentation analogue)
  37. 6 What the taxonomy is for
  38. 1 The custody arbitrage
  39. 2 Reconciliation as the product, and the statement as an object
  40. 3 Attention as the real quota