In this article, I further elaborate on an idea for a free market educational platform and currency possibilities in a voluntary society. As always, feedback & criticisms are welcome.
One thing that should be without question at this point in time, a voluntary society and free market will provide high quality education at very low cost. Don't believe me? Just take a look around youtube, there are thousands of people recording and explaining why they do things certain ways in DIY type videos. There are countless lectures from conferences and universities that dive into just about any topic one would like to study. Things like Khan Academy provide a platform for the basics of education in math / science / english / history as well as more advanced topics. As of 2016, the only excuse one has to not become educated in any topic they so desire is one's own perseverance and industriousness. The opportunity is there, the individual must become responsible for his/her own education.
The type of education platform I would propose is not something that would replace the base level of learning (reading, writing, arithmetic, history, etc.), but it could be thought of as the new vocational education. Real world skills from people doing actual work being used as educational material. These types of articles, videos, interviews, etc. that are already very common could be organized in a way that turns them into the actual curriculum of this new vocational program. The homework & study material would be learning the grammar (who, what, when, where) of an actual real life economic skills. The tests would be creating ones own operating business as an individual, or as a larger group.
To reward the content creators (hosts, guests, video / audio technicians, etc.), I would think an easily accessed donation feature could be used. A setting where the student could set up a fixed amount that they donated to whatever video they found worthwhile that could be distributed between everyone that contributed to making the content. I.E. a person would set their donation to $0.50/video equivalent in the currency of their choice. A feature like this coupled with the organization of material into more formal teaching curricula would help give the educators further resources (incentive) to produce more content and the flow of funds on a voluntary / donation basis would help reward quality of content. The big hurdle here is gathering enough content creators together and having them agree on an acceptable currency so that momentum can be increased and the project given enough vitality to grow naturally.
On the subject of currency, I will first admit I don't have the technical knowledge to say with certainty that this idea will work the way I am intending. From my limited perspective, I will try and explain my reasoning while acknowledging that this area will possibly look completely different by the time this whole platform starts getting built.
I propose using a multi-tiered two phase monetary system. The two phases being the real / physical phase and the platform specific replication while the multiple tiers would be physical commodoties / metals / etc. that the currency growth is constrained by. To explain this in a way that makes sense to anyone outside of my own head, let's use the following example;
It's my own opinion that a currency system of 1/3 BTC, 1/3 gold, & 1/3 silver would provide all the flexibility and stability necessary at the higher levels of the social structure. A universal means to create local / regional currencies that are more appropriate for circulation & use to those populations would need to be a primary feature of this whole system though so some way of converting between regional & national / global currency would be needed.
I currently think the cloning of the BTC as well as physical gold/silver into digital tokens would be a good way to achieve the overall goal of establishing a voluntary society and also a free market on local and global levels. To do this, take the total weight of all currently existing gold & silver and and create the digital equivalent and create a clone of BTC which is specific to this social structure. By creating the digital equivalent of existing precious metals, it does several very important things. First, it decentralizes the existing wealth that these assests currently represent. The fact that physical precious metals are mostly held by non-voluntary institutions at the moment means that a purely physical monetary system using these metals would not be feasible. By creating the digital clone of a physical commodity and allowing the price of the digital version to freely float vs. the physical metal (and any other form of currency available) a stable price would fairly quickly be reached.
In the previous post on this topic, I suggested distributing these digital versions of existing money to individuals as they joined the network in a fairly unique way. By distributing a set amount of currency to each person as they join the network, it allows for newcomers to have necessary resources to participate and function in the newly formed economy from the very beginning. To use my previous example, each person would get the equivalent of $33,333 in BTC/gold tokens/silver tokens the moment they joined the network. This acts as an instant transfer of power (money) from the existing control structures (reserve banks & governments) to the individual wishing to function in a voluntary society. It also gives those who have had the foresight to begin accumulating physical coins or bitcoins the opportunity to transfer their existing wealth to the new economy in a seamless fashion. Additionally, this idea would provide a multi-tiered monetary system that maximized the individual strengths of BTC/GOLD/SILVER while minimizing the weaknesses each of those individual monetary options has.
The BTC branch provides for an optimal savings vehicle since the total quantity will be capped at 21,000,000 coins as the end of the distribution cycle. While the gold and silver digital equivalents would grow on a yearly or monthly basis depending on the quantity of actual metals mined from the earth. This would mean that after the entire supply of existing gold & silver equivalents were distributed to network participants, the addition of people into the network would need to be limited to correlate with the amount new metal brought from the earth over any given period of time. By the time this occurs, I would think that a robust economy would be available that would provide the needed economic opportunity for newcomers. This would create a very big advantage to joining the network early which I view as a good thing. Those individuals that have the courage and foresight to create & participate in a new voluntary economy deserve the rewards that would come with the early phase of currency distribution.
The second major function of the currency solution I proposed is the set amount of funds that would go to a 'public' account. This serves two major purposes. The first is to give incentive to people who would like to build businesses that benefit a broader portion of the population. These businesses would be meant to replace the existing .gov bureaucracy that is inefficient and unaccountable at present. These new 'public' businesses would be funded only after publicly providing their business model and funding requirements which would be the best way of avoiding theft and corruption that I can think of at this time. After they are funded, they live or die by their own merit and could get not additional public money unless privately donated.
By having a system where each individual to join the system adds to a publicly held account without force or coercion would allow for large scale projects to begin very early on in the life of this new economy. The opportunity for large scale economic activity is very important to the success of the economy as a whole. It gives incentive to begin fixing the economical and social problems created by the existing control structure while also providing opportunity for those who do not wish to start their own business the chance to have meaningful work in which they could earn money.
Thanks for ready and I look forward to hearing ways you think this model could be improved! Have a great day wherever you are and whenever you happen to read this :)