The invention of the internet marked the first time in history that information could flow frictionlessly. The internet is the democratization of information. The invention of Bitcoin marked the first time in history that currency could flow frictionlessly. Bitcoin is the democratization of currency. The Online Nation will mark the first time in history that power can flow frictionlessly. The Online Nation is the democratization of power.
Me and a few friends are working to develop a model based on the threads here -
http://www.scienceforums.com/topic/27197-the-online-nation/We will use bitcoin (or some altcoin) code to make this system work. Also, yes, it's a government system that's decentralized and ran without a hierarchy of rulers. It's a strong form of Pure Democracy. The voting will be like transactions on the bitcoin network, but with votes so you can't double-vote on a law. The way the government system works is outlined in much more depth in the thread, I'm here to ask about integration and implementation problems, not the political aspects of this system.
I was going to start a kickstarter or indiegogo project to help pay programmers to develop this (me and my friends don't know half as much programming as needed for this) but then I realized there are developers that use this very forum that might be interested in taking a crack at this with us. It'd have just the same (well probably a lot more) potential for great profit as creating any other form of altcoin except this one will have a government attached to it.
I have a few questions, like how difficult would it be to have a single wallet host two different kinds of coinage? I haven't seen many reliable wallets that store multiple kinds of coins. On top of that, how difficult will it be to have these two separate kinds of coin to be hosted on the same blockchain? Is it relatively easy to integrate both into the same block feed? Almost all other cryptocurrencies have a hard cap, but that seems to be a big problem down the road much like commodity based economies run into. The Online Nation will need a cryptocurrency that is elastic, inflating and deflating directly in proportion with the number of citizens (wallet owners) it has. For example, there could be an initial 1 million coin cap, but if someone seeds a wallet (which will be explained later if interest grows) then the cap is increased by 1,000 coins. If someone destroys a wallet (destroying their citizenship) then the cap will go down 800 coins. There needs to be coin-sinks built in to facilitate the destruction of coins that aren't in a citizens' wallet. I know this can be done but I don't know how.
Another potential problem I see is the one Bitcoin is already experiencing. Bitcoin's blockchain is getting enormous. It's a massive file to download from a peer-to-peer network. I know optimizations are coming and people are dealing with this by suggesting different possible fixes, but tacking a law-suggestion and voting system onto this will make the blockchain a much bigger filesize since there will be more "transactions" happening.
The initial cap of 1 million (or whatever amount it ends up being) will probably need to be mostly pre-mined in order to seed the existence of the government when it opens up to citizenship so citizens with registered wallets will have a small percentage of the initial cap given to them upon joining. The after-cap will be shifting according to the number of citizens joined as said earlier. This brings me to my next development question about how easy it would be to develop a registration system into the client to verify that they are a real person with a place of residency. Is this too hard to do without humans physically reviewing the information at some point? We might have to create a government-job where citizens manage this type of information. If human eyes are required to validate that a human is registering and not a bot at any point during the process, then that will become part of the discussion on the other board, but not here. I just need to know if there's a fully-automated system like this already that can't be easily tricked (I spoof residency and personal information all the time).
So let me know if my questions have answers, if any of the suggested problems have fixes, and if anyone reading this is willing to participate in any way. If you want to discuss the political aspects of this system you can post on scienceforums, or private message me here, or I guess we'll start a thread in the political board here but whatevs. =p