Topic: Perfect government by protocol - page 2. (Read 4029 times)

@opticbit
A wiki is a nice idea. I don't know how to set one up though.

A mailing list should also be possible.

Still at the moment I favor my smartcard idea as that will also teach me basic BTC skills I will need for this/fund any operation.

@Traktion
You don't have to join us or anyone else, we are just talking about software.

As for companies being oh so nice, you forget how oil companies poison the environment and decimate local tribes. You also forget their private security officers.

Aren't you essentially advocating cooperatives? Specifically, organisations where everyone owns a share and votes on the direction of the organisation as a whole?

While you may want to create some fancy software system to manage such a thing, it is by no means needed. There are many examples of successful cooperatives, who operate in similar ways, with voluntary membership.

IMO, there are times when cooperatives are good and useful and times when they are not ideal. The best way to find out when each should be used, is to let individuals choose via the market place.

Yes, the free market and individuals making individual choices is ideal. But most libertarians understand the concept of trying to organize individualists is like herding cats. Collectivists are able to form groups and combine efforts, but they tend to fail as the planning is centralized and  stifles individuality.

What I look at is taking all of those individuals who all have the same goal but do not have the power to combine their efforts toward the same goal.

When it comes to a group of people spending their money in a combined effort, this should be easily done voluntarily. Like the example of a group of people putting their money together to buy a park. Something that would otherwise be reserved for someone with a lot of money.

Ideally, there would be a group of people with a similar goal that would pledge a certain amount of money. Many ideas would be put forth toward achieving that goal. Members of the group would vote with their money toward the achievement of that goal. If not enough money is voted toward the goal then it fails and other proposals are put forth. If only 80% of the group votes with their money toward the goal but 80% is sufficient, then it goes forward. A new group is formed of those 80% stakeholders and the other 20% has the choice of contributing and having further say or moving on. The proposals put forth could include the organizational rules such as this software would provide, a leader to oversee the spending, a voting method for how to deal with future decisions, dues if necessary and whatever else may be desired. The key being that everyone agrees to how things are set up and nobody is forced to do anything. All while providing a way to combine efforts.

There are many ways to form groups in society and if they are voluntary, then that's fine.

Maybe cooperatives/mutuals (where members are owners and can vote etc) are better for some things (health, roads, schools perhaps), while directed organisation are better for others. It isn't really important which are used, but rather that they are voluntary.

I've got a book waiting to be read by Elinor Ostrom. She won a Nobel price for her work about the tragedy of the commons and how it can (and is in many cases) be solved without central governance: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-victory-of-the-commons

You don't have to go far back in history to reach a time when many commons had to be shared and the state had little involvement in the process. It is only in the modern era that communications have lead to top down organisation even being remotely feasible - the option simply wasn't there for millennia and people found systems to deal with commons just fine.

Thanks for being the sane voice on this thread.

'The state' is just an organisation like any other, except that it gets to use violence with impunity. It's strange that people seem unable to see this and want to treat it like some sort of special flower - an organisation which is somehow unlike any other and should therefore get to coerce people as it sees fit.

All people need to accept, is that they own themselves and the results of their actions (both good and bad). Everything else from theft, through fraud to murder, all fan out from these basic assertions.

It doesn't matter how a 'special' organisation is run, whether it is via software or humans, allowing it to steal and murder with impunity, will lead to tyranny. No organisation or individual should be able to coerce with impunity, no matter how special some think they are - including the organisation called 'the state'.

I like this,  Its something i've wanted to see for a long time
many think it will never work, many think the same about bitcoin, but here we are, and most people still don't know what it is, but say they will look it up.  The same way I say I'll look it up, but then forget what it was, and don't bother trying to contact that person about it.  Over the years as people see the benefit and start using it, or a better replacement.

I have been saying for a long time that a good start would be a wiki, get people who are legal minded to write a document on how things should be run. I set one up on my host, It got damaged by spam bots, and i havent re-installed since changing hosts.  I was the only one writing in it, I'm not a very good writer so a great idea doesn't look as good as it should.  I expected my family to contribute some, and then the OccupyWallSt people to be interested, a small group of them were interested, but didn't do anything.

Write in the spirit of the law in plain english, and have the letter be the fine print in legalese .  Part of the problem with the current system is going by the letter there are too many loopholes because if every contingency was written down a simple rule will turn into a book.  Along with the intended loopholes.

Many people don't agree on what rules to live under.  We can decide to live under a set of rules, and be ok with someone else living under a different set of rules - like Creative Commons and choseing how open your software is.

There are many other features i'd like to see, cant think of them all, right now, and don't want to make this a longer read. There are many people out there that have come up with a better way of doing things, but it hasn't been implemented, Many because of red tape, we need to be supporting these new ways more.  I envision this like bitcoin, a small group of people working on it, and getting to the point where people can look it over, like it and agree to it,  then start spreading it, to the point where the old system fades away,  No violent revolution needed, And the new system will thrive.

Thats just fine, C# is much like Java anyways.

How about you Vitalik, wanna join?

I think it will be a big project, might take a year. That's why I wanted to make the smartcard and earn some money with a job also and then do the OrgProtocol.

EDIT: Perhaps also specify the hours you will have. I think I will likely have a day (8 hours) a week.

Companies go bust when they mess up or get a bad leader, your community will not have that option as going "bust" could mean very nasty things.

Keep in mind that shareholders also vote, so given that corps still go bust at times, trying to find better voting methods seems a decent idea to me.

My own ideas are more systematic; I have tried to minimize voting to a fail safe while focusing on promoting only the best to leadership - precisely because voting seems to fail too often for my taste.

That is however not important when discussing a "P2P OrgProtocol". Anyone got a better name?

Do what big corporations with thousands of share holders do to make any decisions..

Let's take government out of the equation here.

You and your 500 closest neighbors formed a voluntary association which legally, according to strict free market principles, bought up some nearby undeveloped land for the purpose of maintaining a park there. Everyone contributes a bit, everyone's happy. Three years later, there are some decisions which need to be made about which direction your commonly owned park will go in. There are debates as to whether the park should have a playground or if the money is better spent planting more trees, where the paths should go, whether a field should be cleared to allow people to play sports in it, etc. The challenge is to create a voting system which creates the optimal outcome in all of these cases while minimizing bureaucratic inefficiency.

What should we do?

This has already been found many many decades ago and it's called by strictly consumers regulated markets (i.e. free markets) where voting is carried out 24/7/265.25.

The only problem is there's this small gang of psychopathic people who benefit immensely by using violence to interfere with it. Remove them and all of our problems with governments will be solved.

I can code, not very well versed in the nuances of C# but started out with C/C++ with some .NET and now mainly work in Java.

My focus has been mainly around finding the "perfect" voting system. For me the perfect voting system means that only those people who want something, pay for it and get it.  This gets a bit tricky with things like defense or something that gets paid for and benefits those who do not pay for it, but with moving money around it can be done. At the very least, a voting system that everyone agrees on upfront would be good as well.

I was thinking community or my family, but yeah right with you.
My ideas where the same on that front, then it finally hit me that the clients don't need to hold, only distribute funds as per the social contract.

I would be very interested in working with you, even if you can't code, however I think we will need to be 3 minimum.

I am planning to program a BTC smartcard if possible as my next project to raise some funds, but a lot of the work overlaps.

If more show interest in working on this I might temporarily drop one project in favor of another.
I think Hazek and I silently agreed to disagree.

You guys sound like I made clone/fake accounts...

I like the compass, I'm a "leftwing libertarian". Not sure that's possible, I call myself a positivist-technocrat which is likely a progressive in the US.

Can we please not degrade every thread on innovative social organization into people yelling at each other about violence and coercion? I understand the moral concerns, but I would really like to see interesting discussions on how we can implement a society that can overcome issues such as tragedy of the commons and public goods problems without creating a centralized hierarchy of power. There are lots of political systems that can exist even within a constraint of non-coercion; both a communist no-private-property system and an ultra-neoliberal regime of privatizing every last square centimeter of nature and human creation are technically compatible with the concept - this insight is what ideas like the Political Compass are ultimately all about.

I personally find the idea of running elements of basic infrastructure on cryptographic protocols quite ingenious; it removes both private power and government power and leaves us with a simple set of rules that anybody can play by to participate in the network.

I was actually coming on here to get some coding advice to get started on something very similar.

My plan, however, was to start small. Instead of looking at how a government would work, look to something like a club.

Members pay dues, they vote on things and money flows to one thing or another. This is all done voluntarily and no force is used.

If such a thing can be done at the small level, it can eventually be ramped up to a small local "government". Imagine a community that already has some government services but would like to better manage their resources. The community can take donations and start improving their community through the use of this organizational software. They may raise enough money to hire a private fire company that serves the members of their club/community. Same with detectives, police, schooling, etc. It does not necessarily need to replace the current government but it may reach the point where enough people in the community are covered by the voluntary government that they vote in the majority to end the services that they are already receiving.

I like your implementation of using a blockchain to hold the treasury. My idea was to have everyone hold their dues/fees in a single wallet and vote by moving their funding to the treasury, if the vote does not pass, the funds are returned. Each organization would be able to determine the voting structure and the dues and what happens if dues are not paid.

Would love to see your write up, my approach was going to require a centralized location for holding the funds which would require a lot of trust.

Apparently the same parts as you since you did not contend that a military company would be needed.

Any military = violence. Imagining that you will never ever need to stand against bad guys is childish and has not EVER happened in the history of the WORLD.

Even chimps fight wars, its nature. Just try to minimize it, don't kid yourself you can ignore it.

First of all I know about the gold confiscation and the imprisonment of us japs. I also know the allies bombed civilians on purpose to slow nazi production under the guise of "de-housing".

All that shit is still better than Hitler who to their defense they were fighting.

I don't get why you are attacking my person and my knowledge, pretending you are so much more knowledgeable. Most of the "great wisdoms" you have cared to share are pretty darn well known to anyone who ever watched 10 min. of a BBC documentary.

Just because I don't mention something in my argument doesn't mean I don't know it or didn't account for it. And as for what I know I know freedom because I will accept nothing else - its a state of mind and a willingness to kick back once the iron bootheel comes down.

As for freedom vs. economy I believe the two are linked:
1. You will not have a good economy if you are oppressing your people to extreme degree. Even China had to open up.
2. More resources = more mouths fed. Dying "free" on the street isn't so great either.

Sure its not perfect, but its something.

Up until now minorities were also getting more and more rights in America, but now a reverse trend is starting to appear with excessive and increasing police brutality against blacks.

If the US was truly deeply corrupt all the way back in the 40ies or before as you claim then minority rights and the economy would not have been improving in many ways until maybe the 80/90ies.

Imperfection/non-utopia does NOT equal fascist dictator state.


Anyway unless you have something about the actual practicalities of my idea I don't want to argue with you anymore - I get that you are not interested.

What part of using violence to enforce rules is not a solution do you not understand?


I don't give a fk about the economy. I was speaking in terms of FREEDOM. (Do you even know what true FREEDOM is or feels like?) In terms of freedom pre WW2 was getting shittier and shittier by the minute, not to mention once the war started. First UNDER THREAT OF VIOLENCE ALL AMERICANS GOT ROBBED OF THEIR REAL MONEY - GOLD. Then once the war started, if you remember, some 110k japanese Americans got their rights terminated OVER NIGHT just because of where their parents were born and hauled into concentration camps. And these are just the two most important examples. Not to mention all the shit they did pretending they're trying to solve the great depression.

Of course it didn't happen to you and you have no clue about history so all you can see is a few statistical numbers like GDP or what stuff was made available to be bought in stores. How severely ignorant of you.

Before I sign up with them, they'd have to convince me they wouldn't. I'm sorry but I can't even begin to imagine in what ways they might do that because obviously I'm not as smart as the market is, but rest assured they'd have to provide some pretty big fking guarantees they aren't going to turn on me.

But rest assured it is possible, just like it's possible to have a web of trust market place between pseudononymous people on the internet using bitcoins.

Yes what great secret knowledge you hold there.

If thats your bone then use the algorithm I thought up to write a protocol for a government with hundreds of leaders making small decisions and where they are up for re-election every damn hour.

Its possible.

Well this just shows me how little you really know if you thought everything was still gravy back then.
[/quote]
I didn't say "gravy". You are making strawman arguments.

But the country was not collapsing in on itself like it is now. China will likely be the biggest economy over the US in few years and in real terms probably is now.

Every US politician is competing to sell out their country.

Whatever you thought of 70ies and back you have to admit things were not as bad as THAT.

Fuck the curse of knowledge is so damn frustrating.. Look, here's where your problem is. You assume, wrongly, that some form of government, which means a small group of people making rules and enforcing those rules through violence, is or can be a solution at all the problems a government is suppose to solve and I'm telling you it's not and it can't be. Because no matter how well intentioned this group is picked in the begging or how well their PR statements is written there is absolutely nothing to prevent this group from going corrupt and abuse their power. Nothing. Not a constitution, not a contract, not even a peer to peer protocol. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As long as you have centralized power the auctions will always follow and the power will get bought and abused.

The use of violence to force people to pay for a service they don't want is not a solution, violence can't ever be a solution. No matter how you change the administering of this violence, it doesn't change this fact. The only valid solution is a voluntary one. Opening the market up and letting businesses compete for providing the services we'd like from a government on a voluntary basis.


Well this just shows me how little you really know if you thought everything was still gravy back then.

I think you are confusing "THE American constitution" with "A future software protocol constitution".

There is no why, of course people try to exert their influence always! My solution makes the "how" much more difficult.

Given that you JUST made fun of the idea of 4 pieces of paper holding leaders responsible I find it weird you give no thought to software based alternatives.

Of course telling people on forums to "wake up" will surely stop the corrupt leadership, your solution is so brilliant.


As for when the US got corrupted I would say that since they helped defeat Hitler in the 40ies and went to the moon in 69/70ies things were holding up rather well until at least then.