Ethereum and Bitcoin now have a combined total value of over 12 billion USD, which is not a lot from a linear point of view where 30 steps take you to thirty, but in an exponential world, if you take 30 steps, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, by step 30 you’re at a billion. That is the rate of growth of these new decentralized crypto-states. As our legal and financial machinery becomes an information technology, they also come to evolve based on the law of accelerating returns, and our linear perception no longer applies to them.

Cypto-currency makes taxation impossible, there will be no record of income for anyone, and it will be impossible to tax by hunting people and companies down, and this is the main selling point of crypto-states, as it inevitably starves statism to the point where it ceases to exist. Basically, globally available cryptography gives individuals the same advantage the Enigma machine gave the German army against the allies, and this strategic advantage is now available to everyone.

The idea of universal basic income is often center around state-funded basic income, but, even for those who do like the idea of basic income at gun-point, that system is not going to be able to sustain itself, since cryptography dis-intermediates the very ability to exert centralized control. Again, an Enigma machine in the hand of every individual on the planet provides a strategic advantage, and centralized government will not be able to compete against that.

Now, if we cannot force one another to share wealth, which besides not being possible in a future world is also inhuman and revolting, could we come up with a different way to do it ?

I’ve been working on designing new types of incentives that could enable universal basic income even in a world where taxation has become impossible. The idea behind the system, that I call Resilience, is to reward people and companies for choosing to consume from entities that donate to the system. When they do so, they will inherit what I call a Taxeme, that will extract the same amount of wealth when someone else consumes from them. The system is based on paying it forward, and rewards people for spreading a behavior of donating part of their income.

Those who pay forward a Taxeme will get rewards from future people and companies whose transactions and business grow outwards from where the Taxeme originated, forming a perpetual wealth redistribution cycle that is driven not by violence, but by something similar to the golden rule.

One metaphor to describe the Resilience system is to call it darwinian basic income. The rules of the system, how Taxemes are inherited and selected by the consumer, and how future donations feed back into past donators, are designed to self-organize into a behavior of wealth sharing that emerges naturally from how the system is designed. The system taps into self-interest, short-term gratification etc, and the rest of what makes us human, and weaves a highly complex network upon which people can get rewards from the future, basically.

There is a time-dimension to is, that is very different from how we usually think about the everyday state of affairs, but as it is encoded into the system itself, people don’t need to think about it, they just join the network, spread Taxemes that extract lots of wealth, and then enjoy their basic income to its full extent, providing social resilience as we humans are emotional beings, and our ability to feel empathy and to communicate our worries work best when our limbic systems are relaxed, providing space to negotiate business deals so that we perhaps could co-exist peacefully, and transcend the very idea of, and need for, politics.

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