Preface: This post was inspired by 2-digital spaces I call home, The Ethereal Realm & The Bulwark (in its many forms).

A special thanks, to the fellows with whom I share those same digital spaces.

https://youtu.be/gzJ4UEaMLd0?t=2214

https://medium.com/@memetic007/liquid-democracy-9cf7a4cb7f

A primer is available at the above link for the concept of Liquid Democracy which I believe is a prerequisite upon which further expansion can begin below.

This writing is in the form of living document and will see subsequent revisions posted in separate responses and annotated in-line. The original will remain intact fully, outside of grammatical corrections, even if the ideas are deemed banal; alas, one must live and die by the pen in the same way of the sword.

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Introduction

Our journey will require indulging a thought experiment based around a conceptualized idea we will henceforth refer to as, 'entropic effects' which are theorized in Vitalik Buterin's quadratic funding mechanisms.

https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/liberation-through-radical-decentralization-22fc4bedc2ac

There is little difference in the act of funding a corporation, charity, or creed, to the funding of a government. The major difference is the value each entity gives back as payment to its laborers.

If we can hold this statement to be reasonably true, at least in the northern part of the North-South Divide, then there is little difference between quadratic funding and quadratic voting in a distributed system modeled on utilitarian principals.

In a theoretical egalitarian republic the act of a vote by proxy, or the transcription of liberty to an other, must introduce some decay that devalues the votes given-up by the original holder of such liberty, to a proxy voter, based on a logarithmic time-based metric that has yet to be quantitatively defined.

My additions to this school of thought must start with this statement:

The longer a voter holds their vote, the less utilitarian value it provides for the system it services. The faster the utility of voting is transferred to a proxy voter who(m) values liberty over time, the longer period a vote has immunity to this value-decay.

We shall call this entropic-immunity phase, resistance. This concept will be expanded upon in further writings.

All votes in this model are relatively equal,  until the act of revealing their summation, at which point the true value of each vote is measured by a total product of the utility of liberty, which can be defined by the voters intrinsic desire to understand the on-ballot issue intersubjectively as a cost benefit analysis conditional to the value of time to each Individual simultaneously.

Liberty, in this experiment, is the independent cost an Individual is willing to stake towards an action, or the will to learn of an issue that holds value in the worldview of the voter. This cost is realized in the time it takes to educate one-self on the value of the issue, or the product of labor deemed more valuable to the individual during this phase.

The Value of Time

Remember that time is money

Such words were said by Benjamin Franklin in 1748. This utilitarian cost of time can be realized by the Individual voter or credited to an organization who assumes its value, bidirectionally and near-instantly, upon settlement of a contract to pass ownership of the right to vote, or liberty, to that other.

Tax, or a compulsory contribution to state revenue, may be the cost of liberty in the current physical system. However, in a distributed Republic, tax becomes a payment to the voter in the form of a dividend.

This dividend is measured by the utility function of time over value at the opportunity origination to vote, held in relation to the production value of the entire system it affects, and only upon settlement of any contract operating within the standardized voting parameters does the market pay out that difference to all participants based on their accumulation or dissipation of liberty.

Relativistic Democracy

This ownership of a right to vote is natural and equal among all conscious beings under the current definitions of consciousness. The ownership becomes synthetically debased until that utility is associated with the value of all other votes within the system after they have been cast.

https://medium.com/@glenweyl/a-radicalxchange-between-vitalik-buterin-and-glen-weyl-328d8ad088cf

An organization, or group of voter-members, must take upon itself the burden of understanding  any standard measure issued by a democratic system by realizing the utilitarian implications of that vote first Individually and only after that fact, systematically.

This relative position must be staked by the transaction of utility tokens to a proxy who will either:

A) Protract the vote-utility again to yet another Individual or organization, forgoing the risk of realizing the resistance (as defined above) - at no cost to itself. In doing so they must stake assets in the form of payment for labor in any other system they held more valuable than liberty at that time.

Or

B) Realize the remainder of value within the vote based on the current speculation of total resistance by casting it. However, by this act they inherently create a leading indicator to which future voters may speculate on the remaining resistance, and choose to cast their votes accordingly.

These secondary assets are held in custody by consensus and contractually obligated to the originator only so long as the outcome of all votes remain unknown.

These assets are disbursed as payment to the free-market participants of all voting organizations upon the conclusion of a singular vote; even to those who have sold their voting-utility to a proxy, effectively forsaking the liberty to vote for the value of their own production in lieu of.

Further expansion of the mechanics of de-staking during a voting period must be explored, but at its most basic level the value of time spent with collateral backing a specific voter or organization must be called debt, for now.

Debt, in this model, does not function as a restrictive label in any form, which requires even more abstractions from the current socioeconomic model, but I digress.

The spread created by this speculation on a secondary market, which holds the value of the vote to a measurement of the predicted outcome of that vote, should create an index of what may be most simply equated to a Liberty-Utility Index.

This index may be used to determine a dividend value by measuring the consensus of a free market's speculation on the staked utility of each Individual who wishes to produce something other than a vote, backed by the assets that represent that production instead of realizing their own voting utility.

This occurs to all possible votes on a distributed exchange managed by all voters and organizations who value liberty over any other asset continuously, while the real cost of each observable vote to the rest of the constituency remains suspended, or abstracted, until the votes have been counted.

This protracted cost is realized as credit to the proxy voter as a proof of stake in the system without a realized production. This microeconomic function creates a time-as-value utility inherently. There is no abstraction of the entropic-will, or Individual resistance, of the voter before the product of voting itself is realized.

The value of all utility in the system is held relative to the value of the labor of voting, backed by the production of all those who trade their own liberty-utility for utility-production.

The production of a vote therefore has an associated cost, as well as an associated value, depending on the relativistic observation of that value , which remains hidden-yet-speculated-upon until the vote is measured against all other votes.

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Individuals as Organizations and Vice Versa

A member of an organization is a person or process that wants to participate in a digital group operating on a standardized protocol. A member can belong to multiple organizations that all compete for their systematic utilitarian value.

Any organization starts when a single member joins it, and ends when the last member leaves it. At which latter point, an organization becomes an Individual. The production value of the organizational liberty-utility is held equal to the value of all its individuals when expanded infinitely, or contracted into it's smallest scale, which may never be less than one individual.

Which way this utility adds the most production value to the organization is decided through a process of consensus, ratified further by quadratic funding/voting, and limited to the desires of the group.

The functional limitations of this voting system begin when it cannot do anything to change the structure of the organization, or change the end-value of the tasks or products held within it.

This market operation creates a mechanism for organizations to interoperate based on demand of their utility in globalized economies without sacrificing the standards within the production of that utility as defined by that organization.

Voting to simply exercise the option of liberty with no product outcome is worthless in a globalized economy. The speed of consensus must approach the speed of light in a quantum economic system.

The structure of this market should be maximally free, and minimally governed by any centralized authority, or community which supplants natural systematic authority. Robert Nozick's, Anarchy, State, and Utopia references this call most eloquently,

... Yet Nozick also says that the framework might not have any 'central authority'. Still, the framework is akin to the minimal state because it is an institutional structure that enforces peaceful co-existence among voluntarily formed communities.

A good organization should not have any incentive for a member to leave, and inversely none should exist for a member to join as well.

Free interactions between members should be held to existing utilitarian standards agreed on by most members, which limits can be further defined by a majority of the members in any organization.

The members of the organization can then change the conditions of the internal voting system . Proposing these changes to other organizations requires staking a portion of the assets gained by enacting that vote within their own system prior to creating the means of change being introduced.

Each organization should never hold a comparison between the value of the utility of any other member at a negative value. However, the value of speculation and the encompassing risk-reward ratio can be a negative value.

This clause requires much more expansion by myself and others, but for this experiment, we must assume that one cannot be held as indebted to the system for refusing to vote through the process of abstention; in fact an abstention may hold even more potential value in this proposed system by increasing the variability of predicted resistance.

Conclusion

Finally, the notion of any current government which holds itself to the status of a leviathan to be worshiped, where the markets act as a altar for that worship, must be inherently rejected.

Wherein this proposed system an offer exists to return to the roots of the Lockean state of nature, this translation does not come without the cost of chaos, which is most accurately embraced through the lens of J.S. Mill (Liberty, XVIII: 263),

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Therefore, the liberty of each Individual is only a product distribution of the value that is realized after any market assumes control of the end result of that labor .

In this experiment, labor is a liberty-utility function of voting . This production is held against every other product available in any other market which claims to be free within an acceptable range of tolerance; where any Individual or organization distributes a price premium in the form of collateral staked to all laborers who value liberty over production, at least when held upon a utilitarian scale.

Further mechanics, a sort of digital yet distributive version of Robert's Rules of Order, must be examined and proposed to operate as guidance for the earliest forms of these experiments in near-reality.

And yet, based on the foundations expressed above, what happens when the value of the liberty-utility is held in relation to labor that is not equally and totally free? The product of which is offered unto other free-markets with the caveat that the abstraction of its own labor is hidden even still further behind a combined assurance that the product itself is much more valuable than liberty, yet only demanded by others whom consider themselves more free?

I believe the answers to these queries lie somewhere in the concept of custom (Liberty, XVIII: 272),

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement.

Custom will be expanded upon further, as well as some existing economic theorems that may allow for this proposed system to exist outside of my own mind, forced into existence only phenomenologically by others who deem it worthy to ponder the future of a static system that is failing us all now, in real-time.

It may be time to sell tradition itself on the open market, as our perceived liberties have already been offered up to the beast without consent...

Which systems protect the value of liberty? Which tools will allow the most utilitarian slippage from the DISC? All these ideas, and more, will be features of future ponderings.

As for now, thank you for your utility,

~Δ

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P.S. The painting used as the header to this writing is attributed to the great artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder.