The Crowd-Weight Index.
Most competitive systems reward scale. Veto inverts it: the harder the room is to convince, the more a single convinced mind is worth. A chamber of four is hyper-dense — every vote carries the weight of everything that could have been said. A chamber of a million is a broadcast, and a broadcast pays in volume, not density.
The formula.
Four terms. No hidden coefficients, no editorial weighting, no discretionary adjustment after the fact.
Distinct anonymous votes cast in the match.
√(n / 100) — the sublinear dilution of a crowd.
round(100 / c(n)), capped at 1,000 and floored at 1.
- 01Fix a reference chamber of 100 voters. One vote in that room is worth 100 points — the baseline unit of argument.
- 02Define the crowd factor as the square root of the chamber's size relative to the reference: c(n) = √(n / 100).
- 03Divide the baseline by the crowd factor: v(n) = 100 / c(n) = 100 · √(100 / n). The value decays as the room grows.
- 04Award each side its own pool multiplied by v(n), then settle the decision: higher pool wins outright, equal pools dissolve the room.
A linear decay would collapse too fast — a crowded match would pay almost nothing and the form would reward empty rooms. A flat curve would erase the advantage of a hard room entirely. The square root halves the crowd's leverage: to halve the value of a vote you need to quadruple the audience. It is steep enough to make a small room matter and gentle enough to keep a large one playable.
Density falls with crowd size, but the total points available still rises. Total = n · v(n) = 100 · √(100n). A large chamber cannot make any single vote expensive, but it still distributes more points in absolute terms.
THE POINT OF THE DESIGN: A DENSE MINORITY ARGUMENT OUTSCORES A SHALLOW MAJORITY SWEEP
A resolved chamber, worked out in full.
Forty-one anonymous voters in the room. Side A pulled twenty-seven. Side B pulled fourteen. Nothing else is entered into the machine.
A chamber of forty-one is smaller than the reference hundred, so the crowd factor drops below one. Fewer minds, more weight per mind.
Every single vote in this room is worth 156 points. A hundredth voter would have been worth 154. The price moves with every arrival.
Side A wins outright and keeps all 4,212 points it earned. Side B is not wiped out: it holds 2,184 points for the minority reasoning it defended.
The audience ladder.
Five chamber classes. There is nothing between them — the class is a function of raw size, computed continuously and displayed for the room.
The five laws of resolution.
THE WINNER TAKES EVERY VOTE THEY EARNED
Direct points. No multiplier on top of the pool, no cascade from the loser's votes. The winning argument is paid exactly what the chamber actually handed it.
THE RUNNER IS NEVER WIPED OUT
The losing side keeps points equal to the smaller pool it pulled. A minority argument that survived cross-examination still holds value — it just holds less of it.
DENSITY DECAYS WITH THE CROWD
Every new mind in the room lowers the value of every existing vote. The chamber is priced continuously, not pooled at the end.
EXACT TIES DISSOLVE THE ROOM
A mathematically perfect split pays both sides their split points and ends the match. There is no overtime, no sudden vote, no adjudicator. The room simply dissolves.
IDENTITY IS NEVER AN INPUT
Nothing in this formula reads a name. It reads a chamber size and two anonymous pools. There is no field in which popularity could be entered.
Interrogate the machine yourself.
Move the chamber. Move the split. Nothing is hidden — the same function that pays out is the same function on this screen.
A narrow chamber of close readers. Votes stay expensive.