Bitnation - blockchain-built nations, as easy to create as blockchain-built currencies [Part 1 of 2]

Note: This post was created to explain what Bitnation is & why it’s awesome in a way that is understandable to everyone. You don’t need to be a blockchain expert for this one.

There’s one thing that has just irked me since the invention of Ethereum.

Before then blockchain was just about money. We were decentralizing money.

But then this thing ETH blew up and suddenly there’s an ICO a day. Like half were scams, and a third were just dumb, but every here and there you’d run into some brilliant concept that promised to completely overhaul yet another aspect of our world with blockchain tech.

And yet still... In this industry founded by libertarians and anarchists, using Vires in Numeris to make obsolete the trusted human institutions of everything we could get our eager little decentralized hands on… with people like Vitalik, Mark Andreessen, & Vinay Gupta calling to blockchain geeks to get our hands dirty fixing the problems of human governance….

All this and NO ONE TAKES A SWING AT THE PROBLEMS OF HUMAN GOVERNANCE?!

I mean come on, eggplants.dx.am lets you anonymously send people eggplants for ETH!

That’s how crazy we’ve gotten about using crypto for everything and then some.

Yet somehow the current geopolitical system has remained nearly remote from it all… chugging along with its old-world methods & tools, satisfying no one with the simple inability of those outdated tools to deal with modern-world issues, providing no one the option to try something else.

Well that’s just unacceptable.

Which is handy because it’s not entirely true.

There is one project, born July 2014, almost exactly a year before the initial release of ETH.

It’s been quietly winning first prize at UNESCO awards.

Its been working with nations like Estonia, India, Liberland, an Apache nation, Venezuela, Catalonia, Myanmar, even Switzerland.

It’s built a remote team, living on boats and in new nations and out of backpacks, working from at least 16 countries at any given time. They can claim multi-million dollar exits, helping launch world-record breaking ICOs, receiving status as a Member of the Order of the British Empire & a UN written commendation for work in the Rwandan genocide, being nominated one of the top 10 entrepreneurs most likely to protect your online privacy by WIRED, holding advanced degrees in everything from international law to engineering PhDs, with years of work in diplomacy and every branch of the military and AI engineering and building intentional communities.

And speaking of intentional communities, one team member was the onsite manager at Liberland in the tumultuous early days, even having 50 of his people wind up in jail after one of their more fiery headbutts against nation-state interference.

Another team member got all 50 back out.

Two of the co-founders were the first people to get married on the blockchain, for Satoshi’s sake!

These guys are crypto-OG.

Anyway, I’ll stop fangirling. My point is that they have the benefit of being the only project on the block willing to take on human governance… first mover advantage. There’s but one place for those who think the same way to gather and do something about it.

And (to finally cut the suspense and say the thing), that place is called Bitnation.

Bitnation - Country in a Box! Just add people.

Ok but no really.

We’re not building a nation here. Actually we are but that’s beside the point. The point of Bitnation is to build a framework that does all the things nations are meant to do. Better & cheaper than they currently do them, in most cases.

And these aren’t just tools to help existing nations streamline their processes.

Just like how anyone can now create a fully functional currency with a few lines of code, we’re building tools that disseminate the ability to create fully functional governance frameworks with nothing more than a few lines of code and a few friends to do it with you.

Yeah I get that this all sounds head in the clouds. So how about some real talk:

Immutable voting, which can be made possible by a Proof of Personhood system we’re working on & are in talks with the government of Kerala District in India about implementing, will allow you to have elections in which literally every single vote can be verified & counted the instant it is cast.

Which doesn’t just mean that things like presidential elections could be had (without the existence of things like an electoral college) with significantly less risk of suffering from tampering or miscounting…. But because this system is so much more efficient and trustless than the modern vote counting methods, you could have true direct democracies where everyone can literally vote on every single issue. Should some drugs be legalized? Abortions? Guns? Gay marriage? Net neutrality?

Whatever your opinion, you could have your vote counted and possibly even use this nation software to find or found your own nation where those who share your views can gather and live their prefered ways of life in peace.

Self enforcing legal contracts, augmented with the ability to assign an arbitrator & hold funds in smart contract escrow, means that legal work contracts, last wills & testaments, pretty much any form of legal agreement you can think up can be executed and often even disputed without the need for any external involvement outside of said arbitrator.

And when you do need a higher level of involvement, you could fall back on that immutable voting system & have a jury of thousands of your peers hear your case and make a decision. Or just default it to the jurisdiction of an existing nation state. Or mud wrestle for it. The point is that this provides you with the options to choose or make any solution you could want instead of being stuck with the few legal options in existence right now.

Which has a huge effect on a whole other segment of humanity, made up of about 2 billion humans: The Informal Economy.

I meant 2 billion, not a typo.

In fact, it’s a low estimate. According to the International Labor Organization, “The informal economy comprises more than half of the global labour force and more than 90% of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) worldwide.”

The first sentence on Wikipedia’s Informal Sector page reads “The informal sector, informal economy, or grey economy is the part of an economy that is neither taxed, nor monitored by any form of government.”

Let that sink in: 2/7 people alive are making at least a portion of their income in a way that is technically illegal.

Not because they’re actively trying to avoid the law… most of them don’t even know they’re breaking it… but just because the existing tools of governance used by every nation in the world just can’t handle huge global P2P economies like this.

In trying they’ve become so complicated, so expensive in time & money, and so ineffective at actually satisfying anyone with the uses they put said taxes towards that even those who make an effort to comply often quit.

Being a digital nomad and a remote worker, especially considering I often get paid in cryptocurrencies & don’t sign contracts even with projects as big as Golem, puts me squarely in that group. Me and most other remote workers, in fact.

Even if we did sign a contract, it’s a formality; We likely don’t have the time or money to take the case to whatever court whose jurisdiction it falls under in the case of a dispute.

The informal economy includes almost everyone on etsy and craigslist and ebay. Almost every freelancer on oDesk. Nearly every street vendor (especially in Asia where I’m writing this). A ton of people on AirBnB & other crowd-sharing apps. Most people who work in cryptocurrency. Most people who get paid in cash… it’s big.

For the first time this brings the ability for these people to have contracts that are actually enforceable, distributing the load across as many nodes as people can think up to be arbiters, lifting this Sisyphean load from the system that’s been failing to carry it for so long.

Which is excellent seeing as more and more of the world’s economy is working globally & using non-fiat currencies, outside of clear nation-state jurisdictions, we’re going to need legal systems that can deal.

This aspect of Bitnation’s work, by the way, is called the Pangea Arbitration System and is currently in the final 24 hours of its ICO at tse.bitnation.co.

We’ve already run freelance agreements, loan agreement, registered multiple companies, and set up a few (as yet unused, phew) wills.

Quantifiable reputation systems, a viable blockchain-based replacement for existing institutions that ensure everything from product/vendor quality, trustworthiness as an arbiter, usefulness as a governance service, attractiveness as a nation, and satisfaction in a law.

Now I can’t go into the three non-tradable reputation tokens and Lucy AI, the AI that distributes them to citizens, smart contracts, nations, and businesses. I’d love to dive deep on it but...

I don’t really understand it yet. I have much to learn before I can write the ELI5-style blog post on that.
It’s not anywhere near finalized yet, we’re still building and testing Lucy AI in private alpha stages. So it’s a bit too early to start talking details on how it works.

I do plan to be writing that post in the future though, and I’ll link to it here and share it on Bitnation’s reddit/twitter/steemit/telegram/etc. when I do.

Digital passports/licenses/certificates. Ever felt kinda befuddled by the fact that, in the modern world, stealing your identity isn’t much harder than stealing your wallet? The damage and repair time that comes with simply losing your driver’s license, passport, or school degree certificate… it’s a lot for something that’s ultimately a piece of plastic.

Why not move it onto the blockchain? Then it can be verified by anyone, without need to see any physical evidence (I’m looking at you and your wheelbarrow of degrees, Craig Wright).

So far we’ve got marriage certificates, birth certificates, refugee IDs, Bitnation ambassador passports, and even constitutions for new nations hosted, signed, and verified on the ethereum blockchain.

Let 1000 Nations Bloom

“Our operating system, as operating systems will, has become buggy, strained, and outdated. Not only are people becoming weary of a system designed to pit people against each other with a crude majoritarian calculus, but new systems are being developed to accommodate phase transition. Indeed some of these systems don’t require the permission of the authorities. They arise from technologically connected people.” - Max Borders (ironically named)

You don’t have to strain to see the future of nations if the ability to create them becomes as easy as the ability to create a good cryptocurrency… we’ll start getting a bunch of people launching a bunch of nations to follow a bunch of ideologies all around the world.

And that’s our dream.

In an ideal world, say 15 years from now, Bitnation will be the software upon which humanity founds a let-1000-nations-bloom movement, giving birth to a new “Market of Governance Systems” in which anyone can choose the government(s) they want, and governments must compete for the best citizens.

The name we’ve given these is DBVNs. Decentralized, Borderless (optional), Voluntary, Nations.

Btw this makes war economically infeasible. Who wants to join a country that’s going to war? As far as these nation’s business is to attract citizens, it’s bad for business. It’ll just empty those nations of everyone except the few for who that war is life’s top priority.

Meanwhile, the explosion of DBVNs.

From seastead & yacht based micronations in international waters; to special economic zones that function independently yet symbiotically with the countries that host them; to the nations of today taking full advantage of blockchain’s potential to create digital passports, self-enforcing legal contracts, the ability to hold public votes and political elections from smartphones while still ensuring that the results can’t be tampered, doctored, sybil-attacked, or even accidentally miscounted… for lower costs and higher security than their current systems.

Hell, if we achieve what we dream of achieving with this, even human colonies on other planets will be run on Bitnation tech.

Another way I love to put it is: Bitnation is to governments what Linux is to operating systems: The core technology on top of which you can build or run pretty much anything you want.

Where the variations built on Linux can be Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, or a cornucopia of other OS’s made by anyone who wants to make one… the variations on DBVNs built on Bitnation tech will be:

true direct democracies (everyone can vote on every issue)
theocracies for every religion you can think of
Native American Nations, like a new home for the Apache Nation that we’re currently working on
borderless nations that instead of land have embassies & buildings & partnerships with other entities all around the world that their citizens can take advantage of
Nomadic nations, travelling in groups of anything from RVs to boats to airplanes and maybe even a steampunk blimp or two
entirely online nations in which everyone can verify who they are and the quantifiable reputations they’ve gained in the nation, with the ability to hold huge sybil-&-bad-actor-resistant votes without ever revealing their real life identity (the whitepaper for that system is here… imagine the organization this could bring to groups like Anonymous)

And that’s just stuff I could think of while writing this.

Again, we’re talking a cornucopia of nations made by anyone who wants to make one… hopefully leading to an explosion in the number of nations that’s not dissimilar to the explosion blockchain has brought to the number of currencies.

I can promise at least one liquid-democratic meritocracy founded by yours truly.

Ok so how are we going to do all this?

Let’s Talk Tech (or Interplanetary Gossip)

The Bitnation Pangea technology, aka ‘the country in a box’, is run on on a gossip mesh network we’ve dubbed the Panthalassa mesh (pre-history nerds, see what we did there? Cus Panthalassa is the ocean that surrounded the continent Pangea and the Panthalassa mesh surrounds all Pangea-based nations… whatever I think it’s clever).

Anyway its built using Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS) protocols, and while starting out on Ethereum, it will be blockchain-agnostic.

Tired of the weird words yet? Buckle up.

Gossip networking is when the network is built up of small individual connections between many many nodes. It’s not every node connecting to every node, which means that you can do things like use a node offline and have any changes synced (into and from the mesh network) when you reconnect to an online node. Anyone can host a node because they only need enough space and computing power to deal with the part of the network they care about.

However, every connection & every P2P private message or peice of data is end-to-end encrypted in a such a way that no one except the ‘verified’ individuals who hold the private keys or have been given access to the data will be able to see it. This encryption method is more secure than sending PGP encrypted emails because even the subject line and sender/receiver are encrypted.

These protocols can be used to make distributed social networks (Patchwork), localized censorship-resistant chat networks (Firechat, which has been used in many protests where the gov censored other mediums of communication)

IPFS is the next evolutionary step in HTTPS.

If you don’t recognize https, its the little thing at the start of https://www.whatever.com. Its what IP addresses are for.

Https is like the directory book for where every website is hosted. And these locations are most often specialized servers in huge server farms. If these server farms were to censor content, decide to take down a site, get caught in a natural disaster… websites could become inaccessible. Essentially barred from being able to access the internet.

IPFS distributes the storage of that data so that, if your friend next to you has the website downloaded, you just download it from them.

Which also happens to make the whole thing wayyyyyyy faster, so you’ll be able to have access to websites and videos and programs that are popular within the nodes you’re connected to much faster than you can get them today.

Right now that might mean a difference of seconds or minutes, but if/when humans become interplanetary then it will be what allows us to communicate and share data across the light-hours.

This man with bouncy hair explains it well.

And… uhm… that’s as far as I understand right now. Why this whole post series is a 2-parter.

If you’re reading this on Apr 25, 2018, today is the final day of the 2nd phase of our PAT crowdsale. You can get in here.

The third & final phase, where we will be drip-selling small amounts of PAT every day, is starting in about a month. If you want the chance to get in on that, and you want to hear news as we build this whole thing, you can stay tuned at:

Written by Eddy Azar (@eddya)