The epoch
A dividend is declared as an epoch on the distributor contract. Each epoch records the amount distributed, the census of citizens at declaration, and the resulting per-citizen share — an equal division, the same for the newest citizen as for the first. The record is on-chain: what an epoch contains is not a press release, it is a contract read.
Claiming
Nothing is pushed to you, because the Republic cannot push — it does not hold your wallet. Each citizen claims their own share by signing a claim transaction with their own wallet against their passport. An unclaimed share does not expire into the treasury's pocket; it remains claimable. Your claim history is public chain data, and each claimed epoch adds 4 points to the dividend signal of your trust score, up to its cap.
Where dividends come from
Epochs are funded from the sovereign treasury — the Republic's own holdings and their yield, never from citizen deposits (there are none). The chain from source to citizen is fully auditable: treasury reserves are public reads, epoch declarations are public events, and claims are public transactions. If the arithmetic ever failed to add up, any citizen could prove it in an afternoon. That auditability, not any promise, is the guarantee.