Rewrite line 1 to say that every credit is an IOU

[NetworkTheoryAppliedResearchInstitute]

Sixth of the six review points. A reader asked whether line 1 was saying "there are no IOUs here." It says the reverse — every credit in the system is an IOU, created when two members trade — but it never said so, and it never said what is actually banned.

Before / after

Before. Money is created at the moment of exchange — one balance down, one up, always summing to zero.

After. Every credit is an IOU, created at the moment two members trade — one balance down, one up, always summing to zero. That is the only way money comes into being: nothing is minted, nothing is issued from outside, and nothing accrues as interest.

The old wording described the mechanism without ever naming the thing, so "created at the moment of exchange" read as a restriction on when money appears rather than a statement that a credit simply is a promise between two people. Leading with Every credit is an IOU fixes that, and the second sentence carries the prohibition that was only ever implied.

The three closed routes are not new policy — jfa-structure-article.md:17 already states them for endogenous mutual credit (Moore, 1988; Greco, 2009).

One thing I left out, on purpose

The structure article's sentence reads "no reserves, no external issuer, and no interest." I dropped no reserves, because line 10 requires a deployment to begin in escrow — collateralized, no negative balances. Writing "no reserves" flatly into line 1 would contradict line 10 for every deployment in its opening stage.

That is worth a decision beyond this PR, since the structure article currently states it unconditionally while the document requires the opposite at the escrow stage. Either the article should scope it to the mutual-credit end state, or this belongs in OPEN-QUESTIONS.md. Not taking either action here.

Division of labour with line 2

Line 1 is now strictly about how money comes into existence; line 2 stays about how it is acquired and redeemed (earned, never bought, never redeemable for fiat). The two no longer overlap.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[NetworkTheoryAppliedResearchInstitute]

Translations: after adoption. Required by CONTRIBUTING ## Translations and missing from my original description — flagging it late rather than not at all.

The English is authoritative and still under review. These seven amendments touch overlapping parts of the introduction, principles, layer bodies and references, so translating each separately would mean seven passes over seven languages against text that may still change in review. Recommend one translation pass covering every adopted amendment once this review closes.