Ideas | Charlie Lidbury

This is joint writing/thinking with Sam Andersson.

Contents

Introduction

Government as an Information Processor

The claim: government is nothing more than an information processing machine. Our current government looks something like:

• Its input: the national vote.
• Its output: a set of money transfers (aka: what each individual owns legally)
  • Or if you want to get philosophical about money, it’s really a co-ordinator which tells people what they can/can’t do

For instance, due to the national vote, this information processing machine has determined that people should pay income tax. When it receives these wages, it sends them back out again to a variety of other systems like the welfare system, national health service, or military.

You may say, the government also seems to exert force in the physical world. For example, if you choose not to pay your taxes you will eventually get your assets seized to pay for the debt. Isn’t the debt collector a physical manifestation of the government? No, the debt collector is simply a person who has been transferred money conditional on him collecting your debt. If he chose not to collect your debt, someone else would be paid to. All the government is telling everyone that the debt collector owns more in the scenario that he collects your debt; it’s all just information.

<aside> 💡 Money may seem like more than just information because it can’t be duplicated freely like data can, but this is only from our perspective as citizens. The government itself can do whatever it wants with money; it’s just numbers on a screen.

The information output is the banking system telling everyone how much money they have in their bank account, a transaction between two users is the banking system changing how much it says those two people own.

</aside>

Government Could Be Software

Now imagine that the banking system was entirely run on a computer, and so was the voting system. You could articulate the rules the existing government follows (laws) as code, and have it execute automatically.

For instance, your employer sends you money via the banking system and a portion of it is automatically redirected to this central program. This central program then delegates part of this tax to the minister of health, who discretionarily allocates that capital where he sees fit within the national health service. Who the minister of health is, and what restrictions are placed on his spending, is determined by code which was voted in by the last election.

What Would Be Needed

A few (admittedly difficult) things need to be achieved for this to be possible:

1. Assigning a reliable digital identity to everyone. Something like: everyone has a public and a private key, their private key is entirely secret and they never forget it. This would allow them to sign their votes and money transfers etc… This would be incredibly difficult, and if someone could control a mass of private keys at once there would be drastic consequences so it’s important this part works.
2. Coming up with a program which supports the status quo. This system is entirely apolitical, it should work as well for a stable democracy as it does in an authoritarian dictatorship. As such, its introduction shouldn’t make any political changes, which means making a program which when given control of our politics, does exactly what the current government does.
3. Trusting the source code, and its execution. When people look at the information output of the government (what they own), they need to believe it’s the output of the program they voted in.
   1. We already trust a lot of software we can’t see, so this might not be too hard. For instance, we trust that the number shown in our bank account is the amount of money we will be able to withdraw, despite us not being able to see the source code which produces that number.
   2. If there is enough appetite for drastic change, this could be blockchain’s killer application. A chain which allowed arbitrary code execution could run the government program while convincing everyone the right program is being run.