Saturday, July 16, 2016

The European Onion - A New Start.

I'm proposing that the UK start a new global movement which for want of a better name I am calling the European Onion (the EO, not entirely unconnected with the excellent american satyrical magazine of similar name). This is quite a serious proposal

Starting with (say) England, Estonia and Greece (for example) we would create a new set of technology based systems of governance.

1. Digital citizenship - based on the estonian system, you can choose levels of citizenship, and pay towards them appropriately - for example, non resident can have some rights, but to get healthcare, you need to be resident and pay tax (or have unemployment insurance, which you may have a right to depending on past history) - this might permit scotland to "stay" in the EU and be part of the UK, whilst England and Wales would be part of some new systems (the bootstrap citizenships of the EO).

2. Currency - a new digital currency, perhaps based on something like rscoin (etherium variant), with various incentive systems, and ability to be used both anonymously, and as an identified part of a distributed ledger, and with the capability to carry tax towards something (e.g. local, or regional, or towards some group affiliation - e.g. a legacy nation or federation, or a new clave).

3. Free movement of people, goods and services will be determined both by the block chain, and by some peering or customer/provider relationships (see "Border Gateway Protocol" bgp) - geographic regions have various local properties (land, resources, schools, hospitals, work, entertainment etc), and can support given populations - movement of people is obviously often beneficial, but on varying timescales - new infrastructure has to be included in the cost, so if an area supports ingress of people, the source of those people has to contribute to the cost of new infrastructure - of course, if the source had contributed (e.g. education) then that has to be factored in to the ingress cost in a fair/balanced way. Peering regions (or legacy nations, e,g, countries staying in the old EU) would have simple free movement, whereas in the new system (the EO) we would have checks and balances.

4. Virtualized Jurisdiction allows complex, nested and intersecting rules to be applied to any relationship between individuals and groups. Legacy jurisdictions (e.g. constitutional systems in legacy nations) can be factored in, but new arrangements can be made - for example, this would be a way to allow Northern Ireland and the Republic to keep an open border and the free movement of people with free residential rights in england (and maybe scotland and wales - depends on them) and voting rights. It would be just like contract law is today, when, for example, companies setting up business relationships (e.g.) between Hong Kong and London might choose to agree that any disagreement is settled under law in New York. Except that we can make up new jurisdictions based in new groupings and new mixes. This could include virtual extradition, border control, tax and criminal law. And rules about surveillance and sousveillance by different groups..

5. Information flow control can be applied using rules similar to Wikipedia, to allow transparent evolution of news and educational material, but to prevent monopoly ownership of sources of verifiable facts and methods.

6. Intellectual property is just another part of the previous rules.

7. The systems will be evolvable - for example, at the least, we could expect new rules to emerge in the currency, jurisdiction and flow control arenas - the DAO stands still for no clave.