No Intrinsic Value: Blockchain Without Coin or Speculation
Crown Letter: Tom Simon
CFO — Liana Banyan Corporation (Offered)
February 9, 2026
Mr. Simon,
I watched your segment on the Reed Morin Show where you said crypto isn’t a currency — it’s garbage because it isn’t tied to anything real. I’m paraphrasing, but the point landed. I’ve been saying the same thing for nine years while building a cooperative platform, and I’ve never heard an expert with your credentials state it that plainly. You described most crypto as unbacked gambling chips; I’ve spent nine years trying to design the opposite.
I’m writing because I agree with you — and because I built something that uses blockchain technology while deliberately avoiding everything that makes crypto dangerous. I’d like you to put it through a crucible, if you are willing.
What I Built
Liana Banyan Corporation is a cooperative commerce platform — sixteen charitable initiatives funded by three commercial websites, where every creator keeps 83.3% of revenue and the platform margin is permanently locked at Cost + 20%. The operating agreement makes extraction structurally impossible. I’ve been developing cooperative economics for 47 years and building this specific platform for nine.
We use blockchain strictly as an immutable ledger — for intellectual property provenance, transaction audit trails, and internal valuation markers. Not on a public mainnet. Not tradeable. Not redeemable for cash. Never used to raise money. We call it “Test-Net By Design”: our provenance layer lives permanently on a test network, not as a staging step before mainnet, but as a deliberate architectural choice to prevent speculation from ever being possible. Our internal currencies (Credits, Marks, and Joules) are closed-loop service units — they work like arcade tokens: you can earn them, spend them inside the system, but you cannot sell them, transfer them, or cash them out. Period.
The value of our blockchain medallions, in my view, is precisely that they have no intrinsic value. They only signify — immutably — the actual dynamic value of the intellectual property they represent. The medallion isn’t the asset. The innovation is the asset. The medallion is the notarized receipt that proves the innovation exists, when it was documented, and who contributed to it. That receipt can’t be traded because it shouldn’t be traded. It’s evidence, not currency. And we treat it as “garbage in, garbage forever” if we’re not careful — which is why the CFO seat owns controls over what gets notarized in the first place.
I’ve attached a technical paper — “Blockchain Without Coin or Speculation” — that lays out exactly how we use the technology and, more importantly, what we deliberately do not do with it. I wrote it specifically for someone with your forensic accounting background to evaluate. I’m not asking you to validate it. I’m asking you to find the holes.
The Research You Can Verify
Before building any of this, we ran 130 prior art queries across 12 innovation categories using Perplexity AI’s patent search, reviewing 330+ existing patents against our portfolio of 1,200+ documented innovations. Eight innovations survived with no prior art found — we call them the Crown Jewels. The full research — every query, every result, every search log, every dual-AI valuation assessment — is published at Cephas.LianaBanyan.org in the “Under the Hood” section until peer-reviewed. Nothing is behind an NDA or a paywall. I am inviting you to verify every claim against the source material.
This is standard procedure for what we call the Press Junket: a standing invitation for domain-verified professionals to evaluate our work publicly. The feedback tool at Cephas.LianaBanyan.org is exclusively for credentialed reviewers — we have a slot reserved specifically for you that accepts submission from your @simoninvestigations.com or @alumni.clemson.edu domain email. No contact is made between us before or during your review — this preserves the empirical value of an independent expert assessment. You publish what you find, in your own words, with no editorial input from us. What happens after is entirely up to you. We welcome professional evaluation precisely because we want to do it right. An uncoached critique from a 26-year FBI forensic accountant is worth more to our members than anything we could write about ourselves.
As a standard professional courtesy, every credentialed reviewer who signs in through the Press Junket receives the equivalent of what our $5,000 Sponsors receive — full platform access at the Sponsor tier, regardless of what they find. This isn’t compensation for your opinion. It’s a standing offer to every domain-verified professional who lends their credentials to the process, so you can evaluate the system from the inside, not just the documentation.
Why You
Twenty-six years investigating white collar crime for the FBI. CPA. Forensic accountant. Licensed PI. You’ve spent your career inside Ponzi schemes, investment fraud, and corporate embezzlement — you know exactly what financial structures look like when they’re designed to cheat people, and you know what they look like when they’re designed to protect people.
I need someone who can tell the difference, and who won’t be polite about it.
I’m offering you a Crown. In our structure, a Crown is a permanent leadership seat — in this case, the CFO seat for Liana Banyan Corporation. The CFO oversees financial integrity, regulatory compliance, and the audit architecture that protects every member’s interests. If a cooperative’s finances can’t withstand forensic scrutiny, it doesn’t deserve to exist. I want someone in the CFO seat who spent a career making sure that scrutiny happens.
The Ask
One Crown, One Offer. No one else is getting this letter for CFO. This role is fractional — three to five hours a month: strategic oversight, quarterly financial review, your name lending credibility to the audit architecture. You keep running Simon Investigations. I keep building.
If you’d prefer not to sit in the seat yourself but know someone who should — that is almost equally valuable to my purpose. A Crown holder can appoint and mentor the person they place into the role. You would be the French Fleet for your appointed CFO — the veteran commander whose presence keeps everyone honest. That mentorship is what being the Crown means. You don’t have to run the finances day-to-day. You just have to make sure the person who does has your standards.
If none of the above fits, I have two simpler asks. First: review the attached technical paper with the eyes of someone who’s testified in federal financial fraud cases. Tell me what’s wrong with it. Even an hour of that feedback would be worth more to me than a year of friendly advice. Second: if you know someone who might be right for this role — a forensic-minded CFO or fractional finance executive who cares about protecting ordinary people from financial exploitation — I’d welcome an introduction.
Who I Am
I’m a 52-year-old Army veteran — Infantry (11B) and Aviation (15A), FAA Commercial Rotary Wing IFR-rated helicopter pilot. Father of eight. Twenty-one years in IT development. The patent portfolio behind this platform includes 1,200+ documented innovations — 99% utility patents, not design — protected by 210 formal claims across 7 applications. Eight definite with 9 more out of the first 130 so far have survived a deep dive against the U.S. patent office with no prior art found.
I’ve also written to Michael Seibel about the CEO seat, MacKenzie Scott about Board Chair, Sal Khan about our education initiative, and José Andrés about food security. The ecosystem is forming. It needs a CFO who can keep everyone honest.
I’ve built a personalized walkthrough of the platform at LianaBanyan.com/RedCarpet — enter your @simoninvestigations.com email and it will recognize you. No scheduling, no pitch deck, no salesman. Just the architecture, laid bare.
Help each other help ourselves.
Jonathan Jones
Founder & General Manager, Liana Banyan Corporation 406-578-1232 | Founder@LianaBanyan.com
P.S. Attached: “Blockchain Without Coin or Speculation.” If nothing else comes of this letter, I hope you’ll read the paper. And if you want to publish your assessment — positive, negative, or anywhere in between — your verified domain email unlocks the review slot we reserved for you. No contact with me required. If even one thing is wrong, I need to know before members trust it with their livelihoods.
Enclosures:
- “Blockchain Without Coin or Speculation” — Technical Overview for Expert Review
- Full research archive: Cephas.LianaBanyan.org/under-the-hood/patent-prior-art-research/
- Platform walkthrough: LianaBanyan.com/RedCarpet (personalized for @simoninvestigations.com)
- Economics deep dive: Cephas.LianaBanyan.org/under-the-hood/