i·coord (v.) — to commit to a shared action, conditionally: to bind yourself to move if, and only if, enough others move with you. The internet learned to talk, then to pay. This is what comes next.
Communication — the packet.
ARPANET taught machines to address one another. Any node could reach any other. It became free speech at planetary scale — and almost no capacity to act on what was said.
Transaction — the coin.
Bitcoin taught machines to move value without a trusted middle. Money became native to the network. But a payment is still a lonely act: one party, one direction, one moment.
Coordination — the intendo.
iCoord teaches machines — and the people behind them — to commit together. A promise that begins in the first person and only executes as a we. The internet learns to act on agreement.
The internet gave us near-total free speech — and almost no capacity to govern itself. You can freely transact, but you still lean on outside institutions to enforce it. What's missing is an association layer.
You don't "submit a cryptographically signed conditional commitment to a threshold-triggered atomic execution mechanism." You icoord. The word had to exist before the thing could feel simple — the way to email or to google made whole machines disappear into a single verb.
Every icoord is a sentence that begins in the first person — I will — and only ever executes as a we. It carries its own condition inside it: if enough of you are here, count me in; if not, I was never exposed.
36 hunters. Everyone would rather take the stag together than a hare alone — but no one wants to be the only one who shows. Set the threshold you'd need to feel safe, then commit. Watch whether the pack forms.
The market itself — where hunts are posted and packs assemble. The mechanism, end to end.
Yonatan Sompolinsky's research — Project Staghunt, Azazel, and the six-pager the whole idea rests on.
The settlement layer — proof-of-work at internet speed, the only base that satisfies every axiom at once.
Building the coordination layer? Researching the mechanism? Want the language to spread? Cast an intendo of your own — tell us what you'd move on, and who you'd need beside you.