Getting Rid of Governments

Blockchains to the Rescue

Every so often I poke my nose into world politics as it affects the things we can and cant do. More and more it seems to me that the sooner we get politicians out of the way and hand over government to a subscriber-owned and led blockchain the better. It will be back to the days of the old Greek city states and real democracy.

Of course, that may not happen. The real problem will not be the technology but the politicians, who will no doubt refuse to stand down. I trial the idea in my latest book: Governments are Obsolete.

Here is a very quick and reduced explanation of why I think this is desirable:

The first reason can be summed up in a simple request: Just look around you. The world is one almighty fuck-up, no matter how you look at things. And why is that? The curse of politicians who are either incompetent, venal, or downright stupid. And they are a menace, constantly causing trouble. It’s time they were consigned to the trash.

AIs can think quicker and more effectively than politicians, and we need to get rid of as many middlemen as possible. Distributed networks do that very well.

And then there is that little matter of the money.

Alastair Macleod from goldmoney.com has always maintained that digital currencies may not be the big disaster we are expecting because our elected morons will be too keen to keep their own dirty dealings secret, and it looks as if the US House of Representatives is right now attempting to hobble the issue of digital dollars.

But there is another way in which a digital dollar, sterling or euro will have limited clout.

Just look at the way blockchains are developing and taking over. Each blockchain operates using a tokenised currency. I am currently looking at what is for me a new chain, Injective. It has issued its own native coin INJ, which is used to pay for transactions on the platform, for governance, and to secure the network through Injective’s PoS consensus mechanism.

For those who dont know the acronyms, PoS stands for Proof of Stake. In other words governance of the chain is distributed among those who hold tokens, and therefore secure the operation of the chain. How the chain works is decided by those who secure the chain by holding the native tokens, and that can be anybody who chooses to buy those tokens.

This process is happening all across the blockchain world, and soon we will have so many different currencies being used on different chains that government issued money will be used in just another part of the financial landscape, and will be sidelined. If you depend on the government you will probably be largely confined to the government money system, but otherwise your money could be coming from anywhere, and be used anywhere. That also means that governments will not have a monopoly on the money circulating in the marketplace, and so there will be less that governments can do to destroy the currency that people use.

Just take one example: Facebook (I’ll keep using that name because it is still more well known than its update) has made two attempts to introduce its own currency. There have been snags, but I suspect it will be third time lucky. That company has a worldwide user-base of several billion people. What’s wrong with the company insisting that its users use FB currency for any transactions on the network?

And how long before we get a gold-denominated token that is used to swap between different tokens?

The future is looking interesting.

If anybody wants to read the whole section on blockchain versions of government taken from my book, just let me know by subscribing to this post.