News

Catallax and Enabling Peaceful Financial Violence Against the State

The events of the last couple have been fascinating to watch. I spend a lot of time thinking about how a Catallax based society would approach some of these same issues.  Specifically #DefundThePolice is fundamentally built into the underlying Catallax System. 

Catallax isolates State Accounts in the system in a way that financial violence can be used against the state by the people in a couple of ways.  First of all, State Accounts cannot have any kind of privacy in how funds are used.  The inflows and outflows are public record by default.

In a Catallax based system each government domain has a State Account. They collect taxes via the systematic decay of currency in accounts that elect that domain.  These Domain Accounts can create Agency Accounts for the various agency accounts that their collected taxes fund. The police department would be one of these agency accounts.  Citizens that pay taxes into the Domain Level account get a Democratic Veto right to all agency accounts.  The democratic veto is described as follows in my book Immortality:

VTO. Democratic Veto

... How can the (CTZ), using selective citizenship (SCZ) and the public ledger (PLG) keep the state's power in check?

Power corrupts and the citizen must have tools to regulate out of control power without the use of force.

When a citizen pays taxes they should get a vote in that 'state'. We will do this via the democratic veto.

This veto is a 3 phase vote. Citizens can vote 'abstain', 'deny', 'override' on a state account.

This gives power to small minorities to stop the payment from state accounts until their concerns are addressed or their negative vote is overridden by other citizens.

We also don't want small issues gumming up the general working of the state. As a result we should provide for agency accounts that can be selectively vetoed when particular issues arise in the running of those agencies.

Therefore:

Establish the democratic veto for state accounts and selective veto for agency accounts.

This system allows small groups to have their voice heard and amplified.  Larger groups must be proactive in overriding the veto and while this proactivity certainly hasn’t kept people from being oppressed in the past, it at least puts the burden of action on those that would seek to not meet the needs of the minority.

In a practical application, communities across the US could use the Democratic Veto to freeze the accounts of police departments across the nation and keep those accounts frozen until the departments make the demanded changes.

Catallax could soften the economic impact of pandemic

The Catallax project has been on ice for a while as we wait for the technology to catch up to the vision.  ETH 2.0 and DFINITY currently are pushing forward with scalability advancements and ZK tech will have some interesting things to say about how to deal with the ‘privacy problem.’  As frustrating as it is to wait on these technologies to mature, it is even harder watching the current spread of Covid-19 and the associated recession knowing that a world with Catallax would have significantly more economic tools to help weather the storm.  I’ll rip through a few of them, but if you want to know more you can check out http://catallax.info or read my book on the subject here https://amzn.to/39894up.

Cash Decays

In a Catallax based economy cash decays overtime backward through the blockchain.  This means that if you hold cash, it eventually is returned to the people that paid it to you.  Now this happens slowly and it is very likely that you will have spent the cash before that happens.  In scenarios like this economic trumpdown the governing system can print a lot of cash and ramp up the decay rate so that it is available to get the economy ginning again, but also decays back out of the economy quickly so that inflation is avoided.

Cash Decays to you

The backflow of cash in a Catallax economy flows to the people who have spent money in proportion to how that money is used to build more value in the economy. As you spend more money over time you build up an earned basic income.  The amount of your basic income payment depends on how you’ve spent your money. If you’ve spent it with sustainable and profitable businesses your income will be higher than if you spend it with companies that fail to build sustainability.  Math dictates that this basic income will likely not come close to compensating for your entire income, but it is enough to help people make it through times like these with reduced employment.

Grassroots agencies

A portion of decay goes to support government agencies that are selected by the participants in a Catallax economy.  In times like this groups can coordinate to fund new agencies with their tax dollars and cash starts flowing to those agences immediately.

Holding Government Accountable

In a Catallax economy, the people have the ability to shut off the account access of government agencies in order to pressure those agencies to act.  Government inaction can lead to swift organization by those that participate in the system and pay taxes to those government agencies.

Conclusion

It is never fun to have to think about how to react to these things while in the midst of the emergency.  Previously I dreamed up Harveycoin (http://catallax.info/news/2017/9/8/devlog-10-harveycoin-decentralized-disaster-relief) when it was the only thing I could do when I was evacuated from my home after the hurricane that hit Houston.  Hopefully these ideas will inspire others that are currently social distancing and who have the time and ability to code these things in the new and scalable tech that is emerging.  Please reach out if you’d like to talk more about these things or if you’d like to try to come up with some solutions.

My new book is out and it is called: Immortality

In 2014 Lawrence Lessig asked the Mayday PAC to help him fix ‘money in politics.’  At one point during the crowdfunded campaign, when it looked like it would not meet its goal, I asked myself the following question:

‘If we can’t fix money in politics, can we fix money?’

The exploration of this question led to my formulation of the democratic hypercapitalism framework, this site, and a speculative manuscript that I called ‘Art and Democratic Hypercapitalism.’  The initial feedback that I received led to a couple of issues:

  1. Someone suggested that what I was really talking about was catallaxy and not capitalism so the name changed from hypercapitalism to hypercatallaxy.

  2. People kept asking why I wanted to do something like this.  What was the deep why that the what of hypercatallaxy answered.  This led me to go back to the drawing board and answer this question.

The result of the second question put the entire venture into dormancy while I pursued some other business opportunities and spent my spare time trying to answer the question of ‘Why?’

I finally have my answer and it is available today in my book Immortality.  The subtitle of the book is ‘An Economics and Moral Framework Toward Immortality.’  It is a study of the intersection of the moral quandary that our postmodern world finds itself in and the vast potential of the results of current scientific inquiry.

It turns out that the answer to why we need to change the kind of money we use is because it is good and right to do so.  By doing so now, we can speed the oncoming reality of much longer lives.  It may be too late for us to participate in this reality, but it may not be too late for our grandchildren.  I try to pitch a vision of the future that is highly anti-fragile to the volatility that we face as a human race and propose a moral framework, a form of money, and a political structure to support this vision.  The book mixes and extrapolates a number of ideas from Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence), Christopher Alexander(A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order), Nassim Taleb (Anti-Fragile and Fooled by Randomness), and Eliezer Yudkowsky(Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and Rationality: AI to Zombies).  

The book can be purchased in physical form on Amazon here.

On kindle here(free for Kindle Unlimited Users).

And on the web here.

You can comment and ask questions on github here.

And you can view the source and history of the book on github here.

If you find something interesting and would like to help further the research please consider supporting my Patreon here.

My hope is to build out a set of smart contracts that implement the ideas in the book, publish a set of ongoing blog posts, and a podcast series where I explore these ideas with others in the community.

I take pull requests, so if you have some suggestions or corrections, please fork and submit pull requests.