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RE: Will the Blockchain Replace Government?

in #blockchain7 years ago (edited)

I don't think Blockchain can replace government but help it be more transparent and clear.

Sadly, the "old boys" are an artifact of electoral democracy from times before we had telegraph. Back then it made sense to elect somebody in to office for 4 years since it was impossible to get a productive discussion or any kind of consensus over large distances. Today we have opinions swing within minutes.

Global governance might be very impractical, narrow majority wins have consequences over a larger set of people and create a feeling of tyranny by majority.
I would say that Switzerland's referendum system is the closest we can imagine easily being implemented on a blockchain. If I'm not wrong, they get 3-6 referendum questions every 3 months and they can be canton specific or federal.
The first hurdle is to get started, like implementing a blockchain cadastre, that initial information entry is the hardest but all changes afterwords will be a breeze.

Politicians would still be there for the legislation execution of what the general public decides on. If we take their right to initiate legislations and vote on them, they become very useful.
I might write a larger post to expand on how I might see that possible.

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I like such a model where citizens are in actually getting a regular number of referendum questions put in front of them. Obviously democracy of the masses is a sloppy affair. Here in NZ we have a Multi Member Proportional system. So essentially there are 70 electorate seats, and 50 seats allocated by party vote. Something similar could work for global goverance to make it more inclusive of different parties and vioces whether we keep the politicians or not . Global federalism backed up by the blockchain?

Referendums are a very good way to get publics opinion if done correctly.

Correctly here can mean a lot of different things but I'd mention two reasons that I think are important.

  1. Properly revised referendum questions - They should have more depth to them with a more granular form of questions. Having few and hard ambiguous questions can do more harm because it still allows politicians to translate that differently in to policies.
  • example Brexit; Better construction would have probably been "Do you want to leave but be part of EFTA like Switzerland, Iceland and Norway?", "Should we allow for student exchange programs with other EU members?", "Should we protect UK citizens living as expats in Europe?"...
  1. Transparent/unbiased education of the general public - Probably the hardest and most important reason for a successful referendum is educating the mass on whats being decided. We should be presented only with facts in a system possibly very similar to Steem. Charismatic leaders should have no place here and all sides should be presented by neutral speakers.
  • example; "350 mil a week" tour bus anyone?

One of the problems with any representative democracy is that its prone to the agenda of specific interest groups... even more if they are elected for a relatively long period of time.
We assume they will perform their duties with moral/principles with which we elected them.
One more problem is also compromises people are willing to take. Politicians might take compromises that are not supported by majority of their constituency and they start feeling betrayed, even though they are getting the result they voted for.

Global governance implemented on a blockchain sounds like the way to go but depends largely on the execution. We can decide on stuff like basic human rights on that level but nuances should trickle down to smaller constituency.

That is so true, no one solution can really effective for the whole globe, implementation would need to take place a local level.

Wording has always been important, and will stay important. People will never be removed from the process perhaps, just less important in the future.

Exactly! We can all decide that fresh water is a human right but what would be an acceptable dress code should be down to the culture of that region/city/neighborhood.

You got it, never removed but with limited/balanced power spread between politicians and general public.

Ok! Now let's just get everyone else on board :)

I was actually thinking about this for some time now and I think we already might have a solution that was waiting for something like blockchain.
This discussion is making me think that the best actually might be to write a story about it and at least try to kick off some debate on steem :)