Steven Carroll
Origins — product invention and the limits of IP protection
Carroll's interest in dispute resolution is not theoretical. It is biographical.
He began working with electronics at age 10 and founded Intimidation Ltd at 21, under the mentorship of electronics engineer Bill Kelsey. The company designed and manufactured professional DJ mixers, most notably the Apex — a compact battle-style mixer that introduced kill switches to the market: the ability to independently drop individual frequency ranges from a live mix, alongside VCA crossfader technology that eliminated the popping artefacts that plagued competing products. These innovations are now standard features across the DJ hardware industry.
In January 1998, Carroll filed a patent for an encoded vinyl disc to control digital music — a foundational claim on the technology now known as the Digital Vinyl System (DVS): the system used by professional DJs globally to control digital audio through analogue turntables. The claim is disputed. What is not disputed is what the experience produced: a first-hand encounter with the procedural failure of IP protection systems to resolve priority disputes quickly, fairly, or in proportion to what was at stake. A patent filed in 1998, shopped as IP, eventually abandoned — not because the claim was weak, but because the system for resolving it was not fit for the speed of the market it was meant to serve.
That experience is the foundation from which KYC.co's design logic follows directly.
Intimidation Ltd — product archive (1993–2001)
Four mixer designs produced under the Intimidation Ltd label between the early 1990s and 2001. Each introduced features now standard across professional DJ hardware: kill switches, VCA crossfader circuitry, battle-format ergonomics. The Blue became the most widely distributed; the Apex the most technically refined.
In January 1998, Carroll filed a patent application for a system using encoded vinyl to control digital audio. The technology — now known as DVS — is the standard method by which professional DJs control digital music through analogue turntables worldwide. The claim is contested; Carroll has documented the evidence in full, including contemporaneous correspondence and the original patent application materials.
Network analysis — bipartite graphs and small-world manipulation
Carroll's second body of applied research came through LinkAudit.co, where he applied formal network analysis methods to the problem of coordinated manipulation in digital ecosystems. Using bipartite graph modelling — representing the two-node-type structure of pages and domains — he mapped how small-world network dynamics enable manipulation to concentrate at structurally weak nodes while remaining invisible to single-layer analysis. The work was framed around Google's Penguin 4 algorithm and the detection of coordinated manipulation within interconnected authority networks.
The underlying methodology extends beyond search. In any complex network where authority flows through connections, manipulation concentrates at structurally weak nodes — and detection requires modelling the bipartite relationship between node types, not just the connections between like nodes.
The same structural logic applies to expert witness appointment networks, where authority flows through party-appointment relationships — and to the compliance networks that CBDC architecture is now formalising at scale.
LinkAudit — the tool
Academic work — network proximity and expert impartiality
Carroll's published research applies the methodology developed at LinkAudit.co to a structural defect in expert witness procedure across European civil proceedings. The paper, Network Proximity and Expert Impartiality, documents how the current procedural architecture creates systematic impartiality risks that go undetected by existing recusal mechanisms. Published 2026 — available on SSRN (#6905898).
The argument is methodological: academic co-authorship and supervisory relationships can be mapped as a network, and proximity within that network — measured using an Erdős-number framework — provides a rigorous, quantitative basis for assessing whether an expert witness is genuinely independent. Applied to the Azevedo-Henriques case study, the analysis places the expert witness at Erdős distance 1 from the commissioning party: a level of proximity held by fewer than 500 people globally, automatically within the statutory appearance standard for recusal — and one that went unchallenged under existing procedure.
Read the paper summary
Expert witnesses in civil proceedings are legally required to be independent. The current recusal mechanism relies on self-declaration and adversarial challenge — a slow, qualitative process with no quantitative standard for assessing network proximity between an expert and the parties they serve.
This paper applies network proximity analysis — using Erdős-number methodology on academic co-authorship and supervisory graphs — to demonstrate that the existing procedural standard is structurally inadequate. In the case study examined, the Azevedo-Henriques relationship places the expert witness at Erdős distance 1 from the commissioning party: a level of proximity held by approximately 500 people globally, indistinguishable from direct collaboration, and automatically within the statutory appearance standard for recusal.
The paper documents how this proximity went unchallenged under existing procedure, traces the genealogy of the recusal standard through European civil procedure doctrine, and proposes a formal network proximity threshold — grounded in scale-free network statistics — as a required component of expert appointment procedure across European civil proceedings.
The methodology draws on bipartite graph analysis, small-world network theory, and comparative civil procedure research across European jurisdictions. Carroll welcomes correspondence from academics, comparative procedure scholars, and judicial education bodies.
Download full paper (PDF) ↗KYC.co — the infrastructure gap
The academic paper exists in deliberate conversation with two applied projects Carroll is currently developing. The first is KYC.co — a contract-backed alternative dispute resolution platform designed to address a gap that neither traditional courts nor the emerging CBDC architecture has been built to fill.
Central Bank Digital Currency infrastructure, as currently specified by the Bank for International Settlements and implemented downstream by national monetary authorities, has been engineered to close the compliance distance between issuing institutions and their endpoints. The architecture enables granular compliance enforcement, direct tax collection mechanisms, and behavioural incentive structures embedded at the transaction layer. What it has not built — by design — is any mechanism for dispute resolution at that same layer.
As the velocity and volume of digital transactions grows under CBDC infrastructure, endpoint disputes will grow exponentially. The traditional court system, already at capacity within a procedural framework largely unchanged since the nineteenth century, has no structural ability to absorb that load. KYC.co is designed for this gap: contract creation with expert adduction at the contract layer, resolution through structured ADR, backed by CBLT — its own token — as an alternative to CBDC settlement rails that lack dispute infrastructure.
Moral.Money — the cultural layer
The second project is Moral.Money — a gamified procedural reasoning engine that makes the abstract problems of expert neutrality, burden of proof, and institutional capture legible to a mass audience. Where KYC.co provides infrastructure, Moral.Money provides cultural context: a platform using game mechanics, AI-driven argumentation, and historical narrative to explore how systems of judgment and adjudication have been designed, captured, and reformed across centuries of monetary and legal history.
It is simultaneously an educational instrument and a proof-of-concept for AI-assisted deliberation — an experiment in what it means to scale procedural fairness beyond the institutional constraints of the courtroom.
The single argument
These three projects — the academic paper, the ADR infrastructure, and the gamified reasoning engine — are not parallel endeavours. They are the same argument expressed at three different registers of abstraction.
The expert witness paper diagnoses a design flaw that has persisted because the institutional incentives sustaining it are stronger than the academic consensus against it. KYC.co builds the alternative infrastructure that makes those incentives redundant. Moral.Money builds the cultural vocabulary that makes the problem visible to people who will never read a law review — but who will, eventually, live inside its consequences.