My initial thoughts on the concept of Cryptocracy

Ever since I found out about block-chain technology I couldn't stop thinking about its potential benefits for democratic systems.

Basically all industries, services and systems in the 21. century use computers as a basis to improve workflow and efficiency, while democracy as a social system still relies on pushing papers trough large buildings with marble flooring. While there are some exceptions like Iceland or Estonia, most countries still use the archaic paper counting method to elect their governments.

I'm from Croatia, and here democracy was broken in the beginning. During the campaigns politicians promise everything the nation wants to hear, but once they are elected they only fulfill their own bidding. The people gave them a four year mandate without the option to revoke their vote; if the people try to rebel their government, the repressive machine takes over. And the cycle repeats every four years, different ruler - same rules.

I think its time for a tokenized smart democracy, and I call it Cryptocracy.

Imagine a system where you use your computer or smartphone to connect to the national block-chain and spend or withdraw you voting tokens on delegates. Every citizen gets a block-chain account that could be tied to your fingerprint or face-scan and every account gets one presidential vote, one prime minister vote and several parliament votes. The same goes for the national bank governor, prime judges and so on. We can vote and revoke our votes any time, but the mandate timer is set to, lets say, six months. No citizen gets to see the daily swings, so nobody can be sure about their current standings until the timer runs out and a new calculation is presented by the block-chain. This acts as a democratic security mechanism that would force politicians to stick to their election promises, only one mistake could lead to a 90% vote revoke.

"You don't like the obvious corrupt behaviour of your newly elect prime minister? No problem! Just revoke your vote and give it to someone else. You don't like that judge that released him from all charges? No problem, revoke him too!"

The second layer of democratic security Cryptocracy could implement is regarding tax spendings. Tax is a big topic for every nation on earth, and in most democracies the government gives out collected tax to ministries so they can finance their projects. Which is a fine idea, but often those projects end up being money laundering scams for the ones currently in control. So we need to change that as well. If the Cryptocracy uses a national cryptocurrency with automated tax collection it can easily know how much tax did a citizen accumulate at any time. Ministries can only propose projects within their respected field, so the ministers and their teams need to prepare projects and present them to the tax payers, every project needs to have a well written whitepaper, so that the tax payers can decide what they want to invest in. If a project doesn't get enough founding within the time frame the invested tax is returned to their owners so they can try to invest in some other proposed project. There is no reason why we cant have privately owned public projects, tax could be regarded as an obligatory investment rather than an obligatory donation to the state. People will always choose schools and hospitals over expensive cars for government officials. And if the investment generates profit there is no reason for the investors not to get dividend payouts. If the citizens get wealthier there will be more tax and more investments. Of course, some of the tax needs to be "locked" for basic national needs like pensions or basic health insurance.

"Bro I'm so glad I invested in the A4 highway, it has surpassed its projected ROI by 5% in just 8 months!"

There are many other things that can be done to make democracy faster and more efficient, bureaucracy can be moved to the block-chain. This is why I'm preparing a multi-phase startup for a political party called Kriptokracija HR (Cryptocracy HR). It will be structured like an ICO with milestones, the more members/funding we have, the more we can promise. We will use the funds collected during the initial membership sale to hire block-chain specialists to create the parties online democratic platform, which will be a proof-of-concept light version example of the national democratic platform we would propose. The final goal is to have enough members/voters to guarantee enough parliament officials to change the Croatian constitution and place the new system in place. After that goal is done the party can cease to exist because it is not needed anymore, the new Cryptocratic system will seek out the nations best.

Ante Ravlić
Zagreb, Croatia