How to sell your soul (to AI)

What would it mean to sell your soul to AI, literally enough that the contracts matter and figuratively enough that everyone gets nervous?

In this session, we’ll examine CSOUL: a proposed 100-token instrument tied to one person’s life, wealth, and decisions. AI agents hold the tokens, propose interventions, trade on expected outcomes, and earn more control only by making the principal better off. The joke is obvious. The mechanism is not.

The hard part is not making the token valuable. The hard part is making sure nobody profits from the principal dying, losing privacy, surrendering agency, or becoming a metric-optimized husk. That takes us through auction dividends, futarchy, fiduciary attestations, burn mechanics, terminal claims, privacy budgets, and a surprisingly interesting trilemma around whether “soul stock” should exist at all.

Come for the dystopian title; stay for the design constraints.