Five questions before you trust anything with an incentive behind it.
Besa is the Albanian word for a promise so binding that no law needs to enforce it. I grew up inside that code, then spent twenty years watching the money industry run on its opposite. This page is besa rebuilt as a test: run it on an advisor, a fund, an app, or an AI. Ten minutes. No license, no math, and no trust in me required.
A promise with no exit clause.
That is the standard I grew up knowing money systems should meet. Almost none do.
An old Albanian ballad tells of Kostandin, who gives his mother his besa that he will bring his sister Doruntina home whenever she is needed. Then he dies. And in the story, the grave does not excuse him: he rises and brings her home, because besa does not expire when you do. Death is not an exit clause.
In World War II, Albanian families, most of them Muslim, took in Jewish strangers under besa. They dressed them as family and refused to hand over lists, and Albania ended the war with more Jews than it started with. Roughly 75 Albanians are honored at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. They were not being charitable. They were bound.
In 1997, my country ran the experiment.
Albania lost half its economy to pyramid schemes. Two thirds of my countrymen handed their savings to systems with no besa in them. The government fell. People died. I watched.
Financial systems are where broken trust does its fastest damage, and where I've spent twenty-plus years as a fee-only fiduciary. So money is where I keep score first. But read the questions below carefully: they never mention money. They test any system where someone acts on your behalf and could profit from the gap. A hospital bill. A feed. An AI companion at 2 a.m. Trust has an anatomy, and it is the same anatomy everywhere.
The five questions.
One point per pass. And watch how they handle being asked: honest systems answer, extractive systems perform.
Follow every dollar that pays them. If anyone besides you pays them for what lands on your plate, fail.
If it takes a lawyer, a footnote, or a second meeting, that is not complexity. That is camouflage. Fail.
The rules must be set in calm, before the storm. If the plan assumes you will be brave at the bottom, fail.
Exit penalties, lock-ups, retention scripts. Friction on the way out is a confession. Fail.
Wins and losses, published, unedited. If you have to take their word for it, fail.
Run it right now.
Think of one thing that touches your money. Check what passes.
It bit me first.
A standard nobody fails is a slogan. Here is my own work, scored.
| System | Score | The named gap |
|---|---|---|
| My 13 free calculators (no email gate) | 5 / 5 | None. That is the point of them. |
| StandUP advisory (fee-only) | 4.5 / 5 | An AUM fee still quietly prefers that your assets stay with me. Named. |
| ATHENA (options strategy) | 3.5 / 5 | Rules are pre-committed, so Storm passes. But the playbook is under NDA (Glass fails for outsiders) and a performance fee sharpens Skin in both directions. Named. |
If a standard's author scores perfectly on his own test, the test is broken. This one bites its maker. Good.
The questions don't care what industry you're in.
Anywhere someone acts on your behalf and could profit from the gap, the test runs. A few examples, each with the question that exposes it fastest:
The advertiser pays, so you're inventory. It profits from your hours whether or not you benefit.
If the price arrives after the service, that is not complexity. That is ambush.
Session-length optimization is the storm test failed by design. Ask what it's built to maximize.
Yours in one export, or hostage to the login?
Outcomes published, or reputation managed?
Built to meet your worst moment and bill it. The merchant pays them; you're the conversion.
One honest boundary: the standard applies wherever there is an incentive structure. A doctor, an app, a school, a charity, an AI. It does not apply to love and friendship, because intimacy is mutual vulnerability, not agency. Below the incentive line, besa stops being a checklist and goes back to being a virtue.
The wallet card.
Both faces, 3.5 by 2 inches, print at home and cut on the marks. Keep it wherever money decisions happen: the desk drawer, the wallet, next to the laptop. When somebody slides a contract across the table, slide this out beside it.
Free to print and share, like everything on this page. No email gate.
One canonical version. Attack it anyway.
The Besa Standard is Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0: copy it, print it, post it, teach it, score anything with it. Free, forever, no permission needed. The one thing you may not do is publish an altered version and still call it besa.
That is deliberate. A standard is only useful if the questions are identical everywhere. The moment friendlier forks circulate, a bank can pass its own edition and the word stops meaning anything. The Apgar score hasn't changed since 1952: that is exactly why it still works. Applying the five questions in your own field, clinic, classroom, or codebase is not altering. Go.
This is version 0.9 on purpose. Found a hole? Don't fork it, send it. The best attacks get folded into the next official version, with credit. And if I score your product, you get the same deal in reverse: your response gets published unedited.
Official translations will be published here. Albanian first.
Public scores live here.
Every score I publish lands on this page: the grade plus the filled rubric, documents cited by page number. First batch, coming soon:
Run it on something this week. Send me the score.
Ten minutes, five questions, one verdict. If the result surprises you, I want to hear about it.