Which Way Value Moves

A Research Program on the Gift as Economic Primitive, and the Register of Everything That Could Show It Wrong This document states a research program and the conditions under which it should be abandoned. The program's hard core is a single claim about direction: that value can be organized to move only forward — from giver to receiver to the next receiver — and that a system built on that constraint circulates better than one that permits return to the source. Four chapters name the ways the core can break: whether receiving creates the capacity to give, whether the constraint survives a change of currency, whether it survives past the family, and whether it survives the giver. Each chapter is attached to pre-registered predictions, published here as a register of sixty-six items with their falsifiers, their instruments, and their status. The program is published at a deliberate moment: almost nothing in it has been run. Two desk censuses have returned results, both null or partial-null. There have been no field tests. The first is gated on a product launch in August 2027. A register published after the data arrives cannot be distinguished from a register assembled to fit it; this one is published while the outcome is unknown, which is the only condition under which it constitutes evidence of anything. --- Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/which-way-value-moves. Its SHA-256 is 89dfd48398c1c23ec6613ae953a3b326a469f8a14e76258fcdabc46fea156d5b, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.