Can a Contribution Pool Pay for Help? A Conserving Pass-Through Rule over a Once-Only Help Graph

Can a contribution pool pay for help? The answer for this rule is negative: at the recommended setting, with attested value fixed, a recipient never gains by co-signing a record, so the rule is a consent-gated default division of a producer’s attested value, not a measure of what help produced. The rule divides an exogenous pool over a help graph whose edges are seconds of synchronous help, each counted once per credential under the companion paper’s once-only budget. Shares are normalized against a public own-effort allowance and all help received, with a ratio cap; at the recommended setting, while the cap is slack, a helper’s share of a producer’s attested value is the hours it gave divided by the producer’s allowance plus all hours the producer received. The payout basis is a conserving pass-through: each person keeps the residual share of their own attested value and passes on exactly the credit their helpers earned. We prove well-posedness, conservation and a coalition bound: a coalition takes at most its own attested value plus the credit it holds through outsiders’ records, so a closed ring takes exactly its attested value, while rings with honest helpers can still dilute them. When help raises value, a producer with no other helpers and a slack cap gains in payout basis only if an hour of help adds more than its value per allowance hour. Four attacks lie outside the rule: dilution, veto or sale of helpers’ shares by the producer’s signature; routing of helpers’ records to an accomplice; deferring an outcome to a later window; and fabricated value. Splitting a pure helper is neutral; splitting a producer needs a second credential. We give a worked example, an attack catalog, and the requirements the rule does not meet by itself: value attested under criteria fixed in advance, an equal baseline that no score reduces, a legal operator, and privacy against the funder.