Capitalization Bus Theory was not written in a single pass. It has gradually developed into a working theory through sustained reading, business practice, case analysis, repeated discussion, and multiple rounds of adversarial review. Beginning with value investing and discounted present value, it has continuously absorbed ideas from the Austrian School, institutional economics, transaction-cost theory, entrepreneurship theory, evolutionary economics, and work on risk and antifragility, while attempting to translate these dispersed bodies of knowledge into a unified coordinate system of FCF, r, Boundaries, and Buses.
I am grateful to everyone who contributed questions through discussion, criticism, and real-world cases. Many of the moments that genuinely moved the theory forward came not from “finding an elegant answer,” but from discovering a counterexample that an existing formulation could not accommodate, a gap in a conceptual boundary, or a point at which the theory had to allow itself to be falsified. The Bus Generation Interface added in V3.54 was shaped in exactly this way, gradually moving from a sketch to a formal set of provisions through repeated examination.
Multiple large-language-model tools were used in writing, structuring, constructing counterarguments, comparing versions, and editing language. At different stages, these tools served as aids for thought experiments, conceptual translation, red-team review, and text editing. Artificial intelligence is treated here as a research tool and dialogue partner, not as the bearer of theoretical responsibility. All choices among core concepts, final judgments, version decisions, and any resulting errors remain the responsibility of the author.
Special thanks go to the criticism that repeatedly forced this theory to maintain the discipline of “patch gaps without expanding.” A theory that cannot allow erroneous concepts to die will eventually be dragged down by the illusion of its own explanatory power, just like a project without a Hard Budget Constraint. May CBT retain this capacity for self-correction: allowing new futures to enter, and allowing judgments that no longer hold to exit.