the accounts of the field
The khipu
The Inca ran an empire of ten million people without writing. They kept their accounts on knotted cords: a primary cord, pendants hanging from it, and numbers tied in as knots in base ten, thousands nearest the top and units at the free end. The field’s books are kept the same way here. The figures underneath are for the impatient.
The harvests
One cord per harvested turn, dyed with its sector. The knots are the harvest in whole dollars; the thin subsidiary cord beside each is the proceeds in thousands.
No harvest has been tied in yet.
The sectors
One cord per sector, in ring order; the knots are what it holds now, in whole dollars. The thick cord is the harvest.
The ring is not cut yet.
| # | sector | phase | holds | basis | share | multiplier |
|---|
The multiplier is the issuer’s: a dividend raises it and the Chainlink print with it, so the harvest carries every dividend paid while a sector stood. A green arrow is a dividend already announced and not yet landed.
The field, in one cord each
How to read a cord
Positions run top to bottom from the highest power of ten to the units. A position with no knot is a zero, so 1,005 is one simple knot at the top, two empty positions, and a long knot of five turns at the bottom. The encoding is Leland Locke’s reading of 1912, confirmed on hundreds of surviving cords since.