I am an old school cypherpunk, a dedicated antiauthoritarian, and in general, a huge geek. Professionally, I have, at one time or another, held almost every imaginable technical position within the IT/IS sphere. In 2002, I left my last corporate position to work on what is, to date, the single best thing I have ever done.
To make a (very) long story short, I coded and populated the world's first dark web marketplace: The Farmers' Market. Unlike the many markets which followed, the Farmers' Market was carefully curated. There were no hard drugs, guns or sketchy services offered. Only medicinal substances, including Cannabis and various psychedellics.
In the roughly 10 years of the Farmers' Market's existence, my cohorts and I helped thousands of people around the world obtain the medicines they needed and the recreational substances they wanted. Then, in 2012, the DEA finally caught up with us.
After a long and drawn out plea bargaining process, I was sentenced to 63 months in Federal prison, most of which I served in Fort Dix, New Jersey. While incarcerated, I spent my time teaching other inmates to read, helping them communicate with their families, working out, and giving myself the humanities education I never got in college. I went through an average of 2 books per week on subjects ranging from epistemology to linguistics.
Upon my release, in August 2018, I found myself overwhelmed by the changes that had taken place in the technology landscape. Having always been a generalist, I realized I now needed to specialize, and having discovered Bitcoin shortly before my arrest, I chose blockchain for my specialization.
I now serve as co-host of the Los Angeles chapter of CryptoMondays, and as a consultant on all things crypto-, blockchain-, and startup related.
I live in Santa Monica with My beautiful wife, Sharyn, and my unbelievably awesome dog, Albert Einstein Evron (Albie for short).
All of which goes back to my point: even if we know the benefits received, we can't know in advance how much a vote would go for. It's a missing piece of information from standard democracy that can only be obtained empirically.
Again, I know this will never happen at the level of politics, so this entire discussion is purely academic. What I'm more interested in is how this plays out under closer to ideal conditions (smallish group with similar resources and similar smarts).
These are really interesting mechanisms you're proposing. The first one I think amounts to something along the lines of how Moloch DAO works. Essentially you're paying existing members to join the club. I could definitely make that an option if there's demand (thank you Claude Code!).
As for the DAO splitting, that sounds fascinating, but I don't understand it. Care to elaborate?
Well, it depends on how you do the initial distribution. If you just put up the tokens for sale, then yes, you'd have the problem of one person buying up all the governance tokens. But if you distribute initially to e.g. 100 known individuals (contributors, etc), then you need actual collusion and at some scale that becomes difficult.
Well, I am a minimalist when it comes to government. But regardless of whether or not it's government, there is a variety of situations wherein group decisions have to be made. There are already many mechanisms around for such decisions. I've just suggested another one. As I've mentioned, it's definitely not ideal for all situations. And one of my questions continues to be in what type of organization would this be most effective?
I'm happy to keep having the conversation about vote buying in politics. It's an interesting academic exercise. However, there is no way in hell this ever gets implemented by a national government, so any such conversations are necessarily academic. What's more interesting to me is real world organizations that could adopt such a mechanism.
It seems to me it should always be cheaper to buy a vote than to coerce one, especially if you price in risk. Do you disagree?
Yes! Another interesting dynamic to think about. At what distribution/Gini coefficient does that become improbable or impossible?
Well, the entire class is receiving a much larger benefit than any member of the class, so the class as a whole would sell it's votes for that amount. An individual voter would have to make choices based on the benefits they receive. If I stand to lose $1k by selling my vote, I'm not going to sell it for less than $1k. That said, I'm not guaranteed to lose the whole $1k or in fact any of it, so there is a "probability discount". Maybe the floor isn't the exact amount of benefits but some percentage of it. Looks like I have another question :D.
OK, think of it this way: A poor person gets government benefits. He'd be a fool to part with his vote for less than the amount of the benefits he gets. He has to assume that a rich person is buying his vote in order to pay lower taxes and deprive the poor of their benefits. So it makes sense for the poor to either vote or demand a price for their vote commensurate with the benefits they currently receive.
That said, immediate need may trump rational calculation, as, indeed may a sheer emotional response. So again, no good for things like national elections (probably; though not as bad as it initially sounds). But the question remains: in what type of environment would this work best? I'm thinking resource allocation among peers (e.g. investment groups or corporate bodies) but would love to hear additional takes.
Personally, it's not religion I object to per se. Rather, it's dogma, which is a much larger phenomenon and includes such things as political affiliation, uncritical beliefs in the current state of science, etc. Thing is, there is a huge overlap to the point where religion sometimes appears to be subset of dogma. It isn't really, but it takes a surprising amount of work to find religion outside this Venn diagram.
AFAIK, it's already illegal to fire somebody for their political affiliation. Firing or threatening to fire someone for not selling their vote could likewise result in a hefty fine.