Decentralised Autonomous Governance

The role of any democratically elected government is to ensure the health and prosperity for the people they govern and the land those people inhabit. They do this in two ways:

• First, by passing laws and regulations protecting its people and their environment;
• Second, by taxing the population and redistributing those taxes.

This latter way we call public spending and aside from ‘moralistic’ issues (religious and so forth), deciding “who gets what” is for the most part what governance and politics is all about.

This centralised method of distribution causes many problems, the main one being corruption for example: politicians promoting a grand infrastructure project with a ‘real’ cost of $100m that actually ends up costing $200m.

Furthermore, centralised planning is woefully inadequate at taking into account localised issues. Often times, local governments are forced to contort themselves to fit fixed budgets inadequate for their needs. As a result, local governments must implement austerity measures such as cutbacks of public services as they struggle to ‘balance their books’. This centralised method of distribution creates most of the internal conflicts within legislatures and leads to nearly all the conflicts outside them. Decentralised Autonomous Governance proposes a solution to this problem.

Decentralised Autonomous Governance

Pre-requisite: First, we must imagine that transactions in society are routed through a publicly owned distributed ledger (this could be blockchain or a DAG — it matters not).

All transactions would incur a ‘universal transaction tax’ applied equally onto every transaction. This tax will be automatically collected by a smart contract with the proceeds being used to fund a Universal Basic Income directly distributed to any member residing inside that society. Each citizen will receive the income streamed directly to their digital wallet. This will remove all governmental intermediary corruption (ie politicians siphoning off money, wasteful spending etc).

How will the tax rate be determined?

The tax rate will be automatically determined by ‘price oracles’ connected to the ‘Internet of things’ (IOT). In other words, a smart contract will automatically adjust the size of the UBI each person receives according to price data sent to it from price oracles connected to data-points around society (such as the local price of rent, food, education etc). As the cost of living goes up and down at the local level, this will in turn be reflected in an overall adjustment to the universal transaction tax rate.

What about privacy?

Individuals transaction information & history will be hidden from public view with the use of privacy enabling technologies. The only information required for the smart contract is the total amount of transactions on the network.

BENEFITS

• The entire system is self regulating. Runaway inflation is prevented through the variability of the transaction tax.
• Automatic taxation will increase tax receipts reducing the overall tax rate of society.
• As everyone pays this tax, the never-ending issue of “who pays for it?” ceases to be relevant.
• Market stability will increase due to a decrease in short term unproductive financial speculation.