The promise
Most numbers you read about the economy ask for your trust. A price index, an exchange rate, a “fair value” — you take the institution’s word for it, because you can’t recompute it yourself.
openunit is built the other way around. It’s a small, open reference implementation of a unit of account: a measuring stick for value. The entire design goal is that you don’t have to trust me. You clone the repo, run two commands, and get the exact same number I published — down to the last digit — along with the exact same SHA-256 hashes. Change a single byte of the inputs and the hash changes and verification fails.
Don’t trust me. Verify me.
That sentence is the whole project in five words. This post is about how the reproducibility actually works, and why a measuring stick should be built this way.
What it is (and what it isn’t)
openunit is a fixed-basket index — think of the IMF’s SDR, but with the basket weights chosen by population instead of by reserve-currency politics. At a low-frequency “vintage” it pins a fixed quantity of each currency, derived from how many people each economy has. The unit’s value is then read off market (or PPP) exchange rates.
It is not money. It issues no token, holds no reserves, settles no payments, and predicts no returns. It only measures. The value is quoted in a numeraire (US dollars) purely as a readable denomination; the unit itself is defined by the basket.
Why population?
Expressing value in a single national currency bakes in the politics of whoever issues it. openunit counts people equally instead — one person, one vote.
I want to be upfront: that is a value choice, not a neutral fact. Population-weighting favors populous economies; GDP-weighting favors large ones; PPP-weighting favors welfare comparisons. openunit doesn’t pretend its choice is objective. It fixes the choice, writes it down, and makes it contestable — the method is auditable, so the politics of the weighting can be argued in the open instead of hidden inside an opaque index. (There’s a whole section of the spec, “On fairness,” that says exactly this.)
The engineering is what makes that honesty enforceable. If the method weren’t reproducible, “it’s a transparent choice” would be an empty claim.
How the reproducibility works
The engine is a single standard-library Python module — no third-party dependencies, on purpose. Five rules make the output bit-for-bit identical on any machine, any OS, and every Python from 3.8 up (3.8–3.12 in CI):
-
Exact arithmetic. Every number is parsed from a string into
decimal.Decimalat precision 50, roundingROUND_HALF_EVEN, inside an isolated context. No floats, ever. Float math gives platform-dependent rounding — exactly what you can’t have if hashes must match. -
No wall clock. The engine never imports or calls
datetime/time. The result depends only on the inputs, never on when it runs. -
Canonical JSON for hashing.
json.dumps(obj, sort_keys=True, separators=(",", ":"), ensure_ascii=False), encoded UTF-8. Sorted keys, no insignificant whitespace, the same bytes everywhere. -
SHA-256, twice.
input_digest= hash of the canonical spec.artifact_hash= hash of the canonical artifact minus the hash field itself. - Strings in, strings out. Every quantity in the published artifact is an exact decimal string, so there’s nothing to re-round on the way back in.
The interesting part is how this is enforced, not just promised. A determinism guard (standalone and in CI across 3.8–3.12) checks four invariants:
- same input → same output, including a full JSON round-trip;
-
no wall-clock read — verified two ways: a source scan and monkey-patching
time.*to throw at runtime, so any hidden clock call would crash the build; - tamper detection — flip one field and verification fails;
- the pinned realized weights equal the population shares at precision 60.
That second one is my favorite: the test literally poisons time.time and friends, then builds an artifact. If the engine touched the clock, it would blow up. It doesn’t.
The artifacts
Two real, pinned vintages ship in the repo. Each is a spec.json (the hashed input), an artifact.json (the built, self-verifying result), and a SOURCES.md with full provenance.
v0.1 — real market data. One person, one vote, on UN World Population Prospects 2024 and ECB euro reference rates (baseline 2026-01-09, valuation 2026-05-15):
1 openunit = 0.985631 USD
artifact_hash: sha256:1e615cf7…9a3a
Population-pinned weights: India 39.08%, China 37.39%, United States 9.24%, euro area 9.20%, Japan 3.24%, United Kingdom 1.85%.
v0.2 — PPP-aware. Same weights, but the value leg reads purchasing-power-parity rates from the World Bank (PA.NUS.PPP, ICP 2024), so the unit is read in international dollars:
1 openunit = 2.848010 international dollars
artifact_hash: sha256:566c95c1…b97a
Reading the unit at PPP shifts realized weight toward lower-price economies: India moves from a 39.08% headcount share to a 64.48% realized weight, while the US falls from 9.24% to 3.24%.
A small honesty note from building v0.2: the World Bank publishes no single “Euro area” PPP figure — I checked both the CSV and the API, and the cell is empty. So the euro-area factor is a population-weighted blend of the 20 member states’ real World Bank values, using the same UN populations as the headcount basket. It came out to 0.642950 — lower than a GDP-weighted blend would give, because low-price members carry real per-person weight. That’s documented as a contestable choice, not smuggled in.
Verify it yourself
This is the part that matters. Clone it and check my numbers:
git clone https://github.com/Hiroshi-Ichiyanagi/openunit
cd openunit
python3 test_determinism_guard.py # 4/4 determinism checks
python3 make_vintages.py --verify # vintages reproduce, byte-for-byte
You should see:
4/4 PASS
PASS v0.1-2026-05-15 reproduces hash=sha256:1e615cf7…9a3a
PASS v0.2-ppp-2026-05-15 reproduces hash=sha256:566c95c1…b97a
2/2 vintages reproduce
If your machine produces those exact hashes, you’ve independently confirmed the published values. If it doesn’t, something is wrong — and you’ll know. Nothing to install; it’s standard library only. There’s also a CLI (openunit build / verify / show) so you can verify someone else’s published artifact from just their spec.json and artifact.json. And for the strongest check, verify_independent.py is a second implementation written from the spec alone — it shares no code with the engine, yet recomputes the same hash. When two independent implementations agree, the number no longer rests on trusting my code.
Tamper-evidence
A measuring stick should also be hard to silently revise. openunit has an optional, offline, keyless hash-chain anchor: it commits an artifact_hash into an append-only record, so a publisher can show an artifact existed by some point and hasn’t been quietly changed. A local chain proves integrity and order, not time — so the record carries an external_proof slot (outside the commitment) for a public timestamp, and attaching one never changes any hash.
Both shipped vintages already carry one. Each artifact.json has an OpenTimestamps proof committed to the Bitcoin blockchain — BitcoinBlockHeaderAttestations at block heights 953507 / 953528 / 953536. So you don’t have to take 2026-05-15 on faith either: ots verify data/v0.1-2026-05-15/artifact.json.ots checks the artifact against the Bitcoin chain itself.
Where it’s going
v0.1 and v0.2 are real and pinned; the determinism guard is green across Python 3.8–3.12; an engine-independent verifier and Bitcoin-anchored timestamps already ship. Next: more real vintages as the dates roll forward, tightening the input domain (rejecting negative populations — currently disclosed and pinned by test, slated for v0.3), and writing the artifact format up as a standalone spec. It’s early — an alpha — and the point is precisely that you can check every claim above rather than take my word for it.
If you think population-weighting is the wrong value choice, good — that’s a real argument, and the method is fixed and auditable so we can actually have it. If you find a way to make the build non-deterministic, that’s a bug I want to know about.
Repo: https://github.com/Hiroshi-Ichiyanagi/openunit (Apache-2.0).
Don’t trust me. Verify me.
