A local economy should not wait for another star.

Start with the distance

A community on a ship or another world needs to trade while Earth is unreachable. Waiting for a distant vote on every purchase would make ordinary commerce depend on the journey time of a message. Rldcoin’s paper starts with a different arrangement: give each balance one authoritative home and settle its payments there.

One currency, many local homes

runlai (RLD) is the sole native currency. A home, called a domain, maintains its accepted local validators and available balances. Owners authorize payments; local consensus orders them. Separate communities can circulate distinct funds during disconnection as long as their own quorums and resources remain available.

Moving between homes requires surrendering the old spending right before a new one is installed. Copying a ledger, carrying a private key or relaying a message cannot create a second balance. Import relocates the same RLD under one common monetary identity.

Prepare before the long journey

A destination first supplies funded receiving capacity for one source and agreed acceptance terms. The payer can choose actual inputs later. Local preparation locks the exact amount in a separate controller, which makes one decision: cancel or release. Other local payments can continue while its historical execution proof is built.

After release, a complete payment package travels through real contacts. The destination verifies it and imports or permanently rejects once. A recipient can spend imported RLD locally without sending a receipt back to the source. Unknown destinations and depleted receiving capacity still need setup.

A finite supply and explicit operating costs

The proposed lifetime cap is 21 million RLD, with zero spendable genesis and no founder, investor, treasury or validator allocation. Public work issues the fixed budget. Existing RLD pays payment, work-author, relay and archival services. Continued operation needs funded capacity and renewal; no finite reserve promises eternal service.

A construction with stated assumptions

Local validators, execution proofs, signing custody and available data each have a separate role. The paper makes those dependencies explicit. A shared currency does not mean every community accepts every other authority, and a valid proof cannot expose an unseen conflicting quorum certificate.