A Voluntary Global Decentralized Cooperative P2P Governance System

Blockchain and smart contracts are revolutionizing economics, and they will also revolutionize society, politics, and the structure of government with their ability to form Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). A system running consensus smart contracts on a blockchain network as a DAO would enable immutable decentralized non-representative direct democratic global sociopolitical systems and alternative parallel economies. This is a proposal for a new framework for civil society, a global decentralized cooperative government by the direct consent of the free. It aims to end compulsion in government and cultivate free and dynamic inter-reliance. In a civil society, everyone is free and sovereign. In a civil society, all participation is voluntary. A civil society is structured to encourage and incentivize participation and social responsibility by establishing measures of value distinct from capitalist/materialist goals. So long as power is centralized, there can be no unified world government. No one can rule over the whole world by force. The only path to unification and globalization is decentralization, cooperation, voluntarism, and direct democracy. There is no virtue without free will. No human being should be obliged to another human being unless it is voluntary. In a civil society, you cannot control other people, you cannot force them to do something, and you cannot obligate them without consent. There is only obligation where there is contract. In an ethical system, participation is voluntary and incentivizes participation by means of rewards of honor for service and contribution instead of by means of threat of force. We are free to be governed by whatever principles to which we choose to consent, and we can choose civil society.

Economics is the science of choice and value. Money is a system to quantify certain types of value, primarily the value of goods and services. We have the ability to program economic systems to quantify additional values. Many video games have complex economies of virtual currencies, honor points, awards, guild standing, high scores, or other credentials. What types of honors might incentivize us to participate in the economic and civic systems that will arise and evolve in the next century? Our social, political, and economic systems are like a game, and we can update them and establish any metrics we choose. We can build a sociopolitical system that accounts for our human values in ways that capitalism does not. Capitalism at heart is a value creation game, and this is a good thing. We don’t need to replace capitalism, but capitalism is not a complete value system. We need nuance and complexity in our ability to measure value in order to meet the needs of people and systems. In the past, such efforts have been stymied by the weight of potential bureaucracy involved, but blockchain and smart contract technology remove those obstacles. As humans, we don’t just maximize for profit. We maximize for autonomy, contribution, mastery, purpose, and belonging. If we create a system which embodies those public virtues on which we can agree, and that incentivizes with rewards that are conducive to positive human psychology, then we will be positively motivated to adapt to a new paradigm. Values we can potentially agree upon are freedom, forthrightness, generosity, gratitude, appreciation, compassion, atonement, and merit. All of these incentives can contribute to the function of a voluntary system of government founded as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

Smart contract systems such as Ethereum can do so much more than verify financial transactions. Distributed verification and governance ensure fairness according to consensus derived rules without the need for central authority. A smart contract network can grow in complexity and applicability as the types of contracts running on the network evolve. Capabilities and complex use cases are myriad, and civics is a natural application. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a cooperating group of Sovereign Autonomous Individuals (SAI) who act as nodes on a distributed network, voluntarily consenting to operate by shared rules by running the consensus code on their device. Each device running the code would have an interface to access a vault that corresponds to their identity as a SAI. The interface would offer access to account balances and currency transactions, but also mechanisms for participating in governance, and for generating and executing smart contracts. With blockchain and smart contracts, your money, identity documents, educational certifications, medical records, deeds, all can all be stored on the blockchain. You alone would hold the keys to your vault interface and private information. Each vault would be permanent, non-transferable, individual, immutable, unique, and autonomous. Your vault interface would have controls for various layers of privacy to determine what information would be visible to others, and under what circumstances. In addition to being an interface for your currency, tokens, and governance power, your device would also act as a node, verifying the blockchain as part of a distributed network. Each node would verify and store only a few packets of the total block, so that all of the information on the blockchain is stored fractionally and redundantly throughout the network. No one node has access to any readable amount of data, but as a whole, the chain can cooperatively verify its state by assembling the packets in accordance with the consensus DAO rules and by permission of the relevant SAIs. The network perceives each individual SAI as a unique identity with a set of addresses for the currencies and tokens stored in their vault, and with powers to execute contracts such as participation in governance. Each SAI is a unique and autonomous human verified by biometric ID. The DAO network is composed of all of the cooperating SAI nodes. The various value systems implemented by consensus would function as sharded or side chain DAPP (decentralized application) layers integrated with a core smart contract platform, creating a system of interconnected blockchains that serve the civic and economic needs of the people.

Perhaps the most important DAPP on the consensus network would be a DAO for direct democracy, allowing for truly decentralized governance and the legitimate manifestation of the free will of the people. Examples of distributed governance on the blockchain already exist and are being developed. Scaling and other challenges are being met with innovation. A global, decentralized direct-democratic voting system could be built as a DAO, and representative democracy may no longer be necessary. Everything will happen by intent and with the consent of the governed. As a right of every SAI, and for the identification and prioritization of the needs in the common interest, a direct democratic system would balance value with opportunity cost, utilizing the wisdom of the crowd to set need-based priorities for government. Votes could be made using a single transaction token on the blockchain. Each SAI could generate one vote for every issue in which they are interested. SAIs can weight their votes by priority, so that an individual’s opinion matters more on the issues that are the most important to them, while each person’s total vote weight would be equal. Any citizen could open a petition and gather support for an initiative. Forums for public discourse could be open for a period prior to voting. Wording or coding of new legislation could be edited in a wiki until consensus is reached. Voting results could be verified in real time on the blockchain explorer. Every participating SAI would vote on the needs of the common interest, and everyone would have equal weight in determining the needs of government. This equal-voice direct democracy would serve to prioritize the needs of society, but it cannot implement action except by the voluntary funding of the projects of government by individuals.

Government is for doing the things that benefit everyone, but it has a major ethical flaw in its funding model, and that is the use of compulsory taxation on income and commerce. There is no place for force and compulsion in a civil society. The only just tax is property tax, as land is not produced by humans. Whether it is considered stewardship or ownership, land is ultimately borrowed from the Earth. For this reason, property tax may be a just measure to fund the protection of property rights, certain infrastructure, and environmental protection. The value of the land, its utilizable natural resources, minerals, water, natural beauty, favorable location, and other intrinsic values may be justly taxed. It is, however, unjust to tax buildings or other improvements that are the fruit of human labor. Land ownership comes with rights and responsibilities to the environment and to other beings. Fair property tax encourages sustainable development and stewardship. All other taxation is unethical. Income tax discourages enterprise and breeds resentment. No one likes to be forced to pay for what one doesn’t choose. If we are to live in a civil society, contribution for the public good must be encouraged by incentive, not by threat or compulsion. Environmental protection, safety regulation, infrastructure, and many other projects that are currently funded with compulsory taxation must in a just society be funded by voluntary contributions. Contributors could freely choose which of the democratically-prioritized projects and programs that they personally want to voluntarily fund, with a goal of collectively meeting all of the needs of society. Voluntary funding models like this have been effective in the past, such as the liturgical system of ancient Athens. In the model I propose, contribution would be incentivized by a formal system of recognition and appreciation. Contributions toward any public project would be rewarded with the honor of LAUD, a non-transferable permanent honor token deposited into the SAI vault of the contributor. LAUD acts as a verifiable social credential, symbolizing the shouldering of the financial burdens of society’s need, and the respect, gratitude and esteem that confers. Additional awards of symbolic honor could be bestowed on the largest contributors in a given year, or for cumulative LAUD over a lifetime. Instead of idolizing the richest people, we might reward the highly-LAUDed with our esteem, championing generosity over the accumulation of wealth alone. For those capitalist winners who have earned more than enough traditional wealth to meet their needs, the free and voluntary choice of how the fruit of one’s labor is distributed will inspire generosity that would be impossible under compulsory taxation and central authoritative government. In the case of insufficient contribution, or the needs of society going unmet, there can seem to be little recourse in a voluntary funding model. For unfunded projects, it may be that alternate solutions need be sought, but there is no ethical defense for the use of force or compulsion to collect taxes, even from the greedy. The greedy, lacking honor, will tire of their greed. Cooperation and contribution must be a legitimate adaptive advantage for success in order for the new paradigm to succeed. A system that justly rewards those that uphold the values of society will produce winners that uphold those values. Rewards such as the status conferred by LAUD must be sufficient incentive for contribution in order for ethical governance to be effective.

As a first project of decentralized global government, we might consider Universal Basic Income (UBI). We are mastering the allocation and distribution of resources, and efficiency is increasing in every sector as new technology is embraced. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, automation, and other technological innovations mean more people could find their careers obsolete and their lives in uncertainty and transition in the coming years. Many might find themselves without resource or opportunity even as technological wonders abound. It is in everyone’s interest that there is a safety net and opportunity for all. Some say aid fosters dependency, but in truth we are all inter-dependent. The means of production is money, and UBI means that every single person has the means of production, or something to start with each month at least. If someone is capable of being productive, then it is best that the means should be available to them. In this way, UBI will increase per capita GDP, GDH, and public safety. Having some means of production means having the opportunity to innovate and turn one’s creativity into sustainable income, providing value for society. Sufficient UBI enables lifting of certain restrictions on capitalist labor markets such as the minimum wage. People could work for whatever wage or other tangible or intangible value that they choose. We can become so advanced with our technologies and so efficient with our resources that each may choose our own work as we will, as a joyful service. Every person that wants to do something great with their life, to contribute something unique and meaningful, need never go to waste. We can create opportunities for people that lead to a better world for everyone. The amount of UBI per capita would not be set by mandate, but would be an automatic equal distribution of all contributions to the UBI fund, and might therefore vary somewhat over time. UBI, by definition universal, would be distributed equally and automatically to every SAI vault, even billionaires. If you don’t need the UBI, you can pay it forward as a contribution to other common interest projects of your choice and receive LAUD. Earning enough to not need the UBI and return the funds to the common interest could merit a monthly or annual achievement token in addition to LAUD. Establishing an environment of trust, incentive and opportunity will unlock the human potential we need to move forward to a golden age.

For the millions of severely traumatized people in the world who need help now, compassionate and effective relief measures may be organized and undertaken. An important social project that might bring healing to global society is the voluntary funding of relief and reparations for victims of recent and historical traumas. For descendants of slavery, or survivors of persecution, genocide, or injustice, funding networks may be created for relief and reparations. Voluntary donors may feel compassion for sufferers of misfortune and victims of malice, or they might desire a reconciliation of conscience. For an indefinite amount of time, anyone could contribute to a fund to be equitably distributed to all of those affected by a crime, atrocity, or injustice. Beneficiaries of these funds may remain in the pool indefinitely, they may pay the funds forward as they choose, or they may withdraw from the pool of the affected at any time as a symbolic step toward resolution and forgiveness. Perhaps enough money could never be raised to erase an atrocity, but it is important for healing and reconciliation to have a formal recourse for compassion, reparation, atonement, and forgiveness.

A major obstacle of unanimous global adoption is racism and prejudice. If genealogy and genetics have taught us anything, it is that we are of a common heritage. Humanity is complex and beautiful beyond the capacity to be manifested by any one individual, family, or ethnic group. We need everybody. We can create opportunity, celebrate our shared humanity and interdependence, and appreciate our unique contributions. In embracing a compassionate, voluntary, borderless, and inclusive socio-political paradigm, we all thrive. In a voluntary civil society where there is unanimous embrace of basic universal values, there is no cause to fear or resent the unfamiliar. We can appreciate our diversity in peace. Another belief that undermines social cohesion and breeds class-based resentment is the belief in overpopulation as a dire problem requiring drastic action. This view encourages public policy that causes untold suffering and waste and can even lead to genocide and eugenics. Overpopulation is of least concern. Birth rates decline naturally with increased prosperity and opportunity. Environmental concerns will be averted with ingenuity, technological innovation, and lifestyle and cultural shifts. We are going to Mars. We will mine the asteroid belt. We will colonize the galaxy. We need everyone and all of our ingenuity. To those who worry about the effect of our increasingly affluent world citizenry on the environment, go find a specific problem, focus on it, and find a solution. Your team’s innovation may only solve 0.1% of the problems humanity faces as far as pollution and environmental degradation, but if there are 10,000 teams out there each trying to solve 0.1% of our problems, even if 90% fail, we will succeed in meeting the challenges of our age. If we focus on encouraging and incentivizing innovation and creating opportunities for the disenfranchised to contribute to that innovation, we will solve these problems. In a civil society, we needn’t fear our fellow humans. We need everyone.

Life is punishing enough as it is without us punishing each other. Punishment is abhorrent to a civil society. We need to stop destroying people with incarceration, and instead focus on nurturing health, education, and opportunity. Criminal activity is motivated by lack of opportunity, a failure to find a place in the world, resentment for the injustice of existence, or traumatic emotional or psychological damage. As vice arises from fear, ignorance and insecurity, we can address the sickness at its cause and make way for healing and reformation. Even those who are so corrupted by fear and resentment that they would intentionally inflict suffering on others, all deserve compassion and mercy. Perhaps more importantly, we deserve to act compassionately, so that we ourselves may avoid corruption. Learning requires mistakes and failures, but we are capable of great things. Criminal justice systems must become therapeutic instead of punitive. If we focus on appreciation, healing, reducing unnecessary suffering, and providing clear opportunity to fulfill one’s potential and lead a meaningful life, crime will greatly diminish or disappear. We cannot know another’s suffering. In assessing the choices of others, we may learn, but to punish or resent others is pointless and wrong. We can reform ourselves as we find fault, but for others, we can only cultivate environments conducive to positive reformation. If society is to broadly discourage degenerate behavior, it is important that opportunities are always available to make a better life. There is no place for a punitive incentive structure in an ethical and voluntary political system. The role of police in a just and civil society is to protect and serve everyone, including the guilty. Only the dangerous should ever be restrained. Most of what we consider criminals in today’s penal system could better serve society with rehabilitation or counseling. A system that requires voluntary participation must operate on a system of incentives and opportunity. No one is worthless.

We talk a lot about unpaid care work that goes under-recognized and under-acknowledged in our society. Clearly there are kinds of social value for which a means of recognition and quantification is still needed. Every day, regular people do things to help others that they don’t have to do. They go the extra mile with no expectation of materially profiting. These acts deserve our recognition and we deserve to be proud of them. One needn’t be smart (or profitable) to be noble, and one needn’t be smart (or profitable) to take responsibility. Every person is valuable, though sadly much of that value has gone unrecognized because the only yardstick we have had heretofore is capitalism. We can choose to create an economy of care and gratitude that would exist alongside and in balance with the capitalist economy. We can design a currency for the quantification of value for any work that is voluntary, unpaid, or unpayable by capitalist means. We can design a system of value exchange that is cooperative, not competitive, and accrues its own type of status and recognition. We can have a parallel economy in gratitude. The mechanism for this would be a smart contract, executable by any SAI, that generates a single transaction token called a “thank you” (THX). To complete the transaction, the intended receiver of THX generates a “you’re welcome” (YWC) token. The tokens are generated as a pair, exchanged, and stored permanently on the blockchain and in the SAI vaults of the transactors. Though optionally anonymous, the SAIs participating in the transaction are ineffably linked, forming a massive web of interconnected gratitude. This economy recognizes the reality in life that we rely on each other all the time, and that value cannot be represented by money alone. Someone can be grateful even if they have no money. Sometimes money is inappropriate for the context, and sometimes we have no money. Gratitude can be a form of money of which everyone has an unlimited supply. It is important that we have a way to express value that is available to everyone regardless of circumstance. Willingness to help others without material gain is honorable. It is important that volunteer work gets recognized and appreciated. The THX/YWC is an economy of unlimited abundance based on cooperation and inter-reliance. Having an unlimited supply and being non-transferable once transacted means that THX/YWC can have no monetary value, but it is a valid account of value. It empowers the powerless, recognizes virtue, and encourages social cohesion.

Other intangible values that might be implemented as non-transferable tokens in the SAI vault are educational and professional credentials. In the decentralized university of the future, you might get a custom EDU token specific to one semester course taught online by an independent but accredited authority. You might collect EDU tokens as you take courses at your own pace. The earning of certain EDU tokens in high-need fields might be additionally incentivized. Accreditation of professors can be established by vote of confidence of peers, and quantified by its own single transaction token. The token systems verify authority of credibility within specializations, so that expertise and ability can be optimally applied to the public good. In a future of decentralized direct democracy by billions of people, access to education and information will be critical. EDU tokens or other merit and achievement type token honors may help incentivize the growth and development of individual human potential for the betterment of mankind.

So what does it cost to build a decentralized voluntary cooperative government? The first act of the DAO will necessarily be to create itself. This will likely require a massive cooperative effort, including a symposium of specialists, a public forum to formalize design, resources to develop component technologies, and massive cooperation and integration of various technologies still in their adolescence. Many of the technological elements already exist as proof-of-concept, but there is much code infrastructure yet to be built, and that code must be proven with testing. All code must be open source. For full implementation, and to bring the maximum benefit to the poorest and most disenfranchised people, we also need universal device ownership, global satellite wifi, reliable renewable energy, and failsafe biometric identification systems. As the platform develops, UBI and debt forgiveness would be natural first acts of the decentralized government as they mostly only require funding, and not so much complex logistics to execute. As the platform evolves, public health, infrastructure, and education will likely gain prominence and effectiveness on the platform. We have this opportunity to make the world a better place with technology, but implementation of this system would require a leap of faith both from and in humanity. If successful, general prosperity will flourish and we will live in a golden age of artistic and technical accomplishment as well as freedom and prosperity. This revolution is creative.

These systems I have proposed, or any parts of them or variation, have no need for official adoption by any government. The blockchain smart network can grow and develop gradually and incrementally alongside existing governments until the systems and technology of a decentralized consensus model are proven resilient in shouldering the responsibilities of government. This system, or any variation of it, can be established at any time and at any scale. Once the core elements clear testing, it can function indefinitely as a decentralized nonprofit organization operating parallel to existing governments as the DAO evolves and grows in capability and effectiveness. It may take many years for traditional nation-states and governments to transform or be replaced by voluntary cooperative decentralized government. Cultural centers would persist and retain their character. Traditional art-forms would flourish as global decentralized cooperation brings about a golden age of art, science, and achievement more generally. Our competitive, aggressive, and tribalistic tendencies could be focused into fitness, sports, games, and even capitalism. Games are by nature cooperative as well as competitive. Despite our differences we need to cooperate or we all lose. Decentralization equals resilience. Decentralization enables cooperation across political boundaries. Decentralization enables peaceful voluntary globalism. The automobile was born into a world optimized for horses, and a new political economy will be born into a world optimized for central control and monumental bureaucratic inefficiency. Direct democracy will make wasteful government programs obsolete. Public projects will be funded individually and held to public account transparently and immutably on blockchains. As the transition gradually progresses, there will be a period of settling accounts with the old systems in order to minimize upheaval, preserve what is valuable, and mitigate losses. There must be a roadmap for peaceful and graceful transition so that unnecessary suffering is minimized or eliminated. We need to respect the old guard, thank them for their service and provide opportunities to continue to serve in appropriate capacities. We must offer amnesty to incentivize voluntary participation, and to found this “honor system” on nonviolence and non-compulsion. A gradual, incremental transfer of responsibility for common interest projects to the new voluntarist political system will relieve the budgetary burdens of nations. Society will reorder gradually as individuals voluntarily adopt a new paradigm.

This prototype for a decentralized sociopolitical system is open for discourse, but there is no doubt that what I have outlined in this paper is possible with blockchain, smart contracts and other emerging technologies. We have these capabilities. We live in an accelerating technological future. The more people that are thinking about where we’re headed and where we want to be headed, the better for all of us in the future we co-create. We can design an ethical socio-economic system into which one wouldn’t mind being born blindly. Let us build into our systems, nurture in ourselves, and honor in others, those virtues that bring happiness, peace, and progress to all. Legitimate government is manifest of the will of the people. Reconciliation of Individualism and Collectivism seems to be what We the People would want if we knew it were possible. It is possible. We can build a system that meets the needs of society by offering clear opportunities for attainment and status while maintaining autonomy, dignity, and free will. We can nurture healthy psychology and steward a healthy environment for growth, Individually and collectively. With freedom, cooperation, safety, fairness, dignity, belonging, the opportunity to live a meaningful life, and the opportunity to give back and accrue honor, we can cultivate massive abundance and stable wellbeing on a global scale. We have the technology.