Many projects are actively working to utilize blockchain technology to disrupt almost every industry sector imaginable nowadays. Insurance. Transportation. Venture Capital. Logistics. Storage. You name it. But there’s a project I heard about a few weeks ago that just might be the craziest, wildest, and most ambitious idea yet, and it’s something I’ve started to grow quite fond of. And it’s not a joke either; far from it. And they already have a large community to boot. As I’ve been reading more and more about this crazy idea, it’s something I’ve personally become quite passionate about for humanitarian reasons, so wanted to talk a little bit about it. The name of the project is BitNation.
BitNation
Their name is a pretty accurate portrayal of what they’re trying to achieve, a virtual nation without any physical borders, or a Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation (DBVN) as they call it. Indeed it’s a pretty radical idea. We normally understand a nation to have a defined physical territory which a government that rules on behalf of (or against) people who live there.
Why BitNation?
Why on earth is this necessary (pun intended)? There’s a boatload of reasons that BitNation is trying to address but in my opinion the most significant is contract enforcement & dispute resolution. That doesn’t sound that grandeur of a goal when you first read it, but it would be incredibly profound should they be able to solve it. These days, more and more people are working online, where there are no physical borders. They don’t work for a company. They are contracted by a company and for all intents and purposes are self-employed. The company couldn’t care less what country the person is located on, or if they’re on the moon for that matter. In our increasingly globalized world, more and more things transcend arbitrary national borders.
In fact, 1 billion people are due to be solely online workers by 2025, and these people need a governance system in place because existing national governments don’t provide legal mechanisms for them to enforce agreements with those in other nations in most cases, or if they do, they would incur incredibly high and cost-prohibitive legal costs in order to do so. Legal protections should be an essential right that all individuals ought to have. And BitNation helps to achieve that.
BitNation’s idea is to create a pseudo-legal jurisdiction which people can voluntarily join, and through blockchain technology, contracts can be binding and enforced within this jurisdiction.
Other Purposes
The goals of BitNation go beyond contract enforcement and dispute resolution – a very basic legal remedy all people should have across borders frankly, but which doesn’t currently exist.
While I would consider the contract enforcement to benefit those in third world countries even more than most, the other things BitNation is attempting to do can definitely be categorized as being in the humanitarian realm. Which is perhaps not surprising given that the founder, Susanne Tempelhof has a long history of working with humanitarian organizations and charities, having personally witnessed the Rwandan genocide in 1994 among other atrocities.
Refugee emergency identities, birth certificates, and marriage contracts are also offered as part of BitNations platform. These are also all contracts to some degree, and things they may not always be able to get from their local governments despite the dire need for them.
There are surprising number of people in the world without any actual legal identity. And that includes those in first world countries as well. Life can be a living hell without a birth certificate, at Qia Gunster knows http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/life-without-a-birth-certificate-b-c-resident-caught-in-impossible-limbo-as-a-lost-canadian . He’s unable to get a birth certificate because while he was born in Tucson Arizona, his mother didn’t register his birth. After all this time since his birth, Arizona has good reason to deny him a birth certificate since they cannot conclude he was undoubtly born there. But he cannot get ID anywhere else without a birth certificate.
If you’re passionate about this project like I am, consider joining the community, becoming a citizen, and helping build a better world.
Awesome article. Resteemed!
Cool