Why is human civilization suffering from issues such as poverty, inequality, corruption, exploitation, over consumption, environmental problems, biased and censored media, inadequate education, immigration, discrimination, oppression, and tyranny?
Because of the lack of real democracy at all local, national and international levels. The “democracy” is not used here to refer what we know as independence of the judiciary, or having a government that executes law made by a legislator. I do not believe in this model either. As good as this model works in theory, in practice, it breeds a variety of inefficiencies, injustices, and corruptions.
The term “democracy” in this article refers to the ability of the people to participate directly (or to be a cross-sectional delegate) in legislation and implementation. Thus I propose a bottom-up process, in which the power-less and possess-less people participate in a gradual movement to establish a new social order, a new power distribution model, and a new wealth distribution mechanism.
The core belief of the proposal is “the people are the system”, in a matter of quantity and quality. Therefore we (the people) need to find each other, cultivate our common world and apply our wills in the real world to impose radical systemic changes.
Indeed it is not a new attitude or ingeniously solution and throughout history, humankind has gone this way many times and failed many times. Sometimes it failed because of oppressive governments, and sometimes it failed because leaders became the new oppressive government. While the motives of movement and the threats have remained the same as the previous ones yet, why should it end up in different result this time?
Fortunately this time we have innovative technologies and tools to carry out and support the movement till success and human prosperity. The internet, cryptography, blockchain, and decentralized governing mechanisms are our tools. A well-designed game theory on top of these tools will encourage people to engage in problem-solving at all local, national and international levels simultaneously, while being rewarded (directly or indirectly) because of their participation. The game rules also prevent participants from becoming the new tyrant ruling class, while the decentralization protects the whole system against external adversaries.
The strategy
While it is very hard and impractical to teach history, philosophy, and economy to everyone and explain how and why we ended up in this catastrophic human civilization, in order to convince them to revision their value system and reform their assumptions and misconceptions, It will be far easier to hack existing and familiar concepts and materials, and enrich the concept with new features.
So by launching a persuasive game theory can trigger an evolution in the concept definition and concept functionality.
One of these familiar concepts and materials is the money. While money itself, is not the matter, it seems that everyone believes that money is the cause and meter of almost everything in the world.
“The New Paradigm” uses the concept of money to embody its thesis in a
tangible manner. It uses the money as an index of excellence of the money owners. This is a new interpretation of the famous “money is power” motto, which is “the money quality is power”.
Indeed “The New Paradigm” introduces not one money but many community-based monies. An interactive model, in which every group of people can plan to create their custom money and plan how to divide it.
The outcome will be a free market of different communities with varying rules and “value system”s. There will be a variety of communities with different monies or money-less communities(IOUs or even gift economies) that are competing for more population in order to increase the value and popularity of their currency and their values as indicators of the excellence of their community.
The new paradigm is about a “true” free market of beliefs and believers, since entering a community or leaving it -unlike the current communities, ideologies, political regimes, or countries and territories- has no cost.
Deeper in “The New Paradigm”
The core elements of “The New Paradigm” are the software and the people. In other words, everyone can download and install the software on their personal computer or mobile and start a community with their friends or like-minded people.
There is no central control.
Thus, no one can prevent people from establish, join, branch, or leave a community or force them too.
Having this software, we can expect to make millions of different communities and currencies, but in practice, only a handful of them will be able to amass a significant population. These communities will compete to convince other people about the value of their currency and the ethics of their value system, the excellence of their social order, the fairness of their rules, the perfection of their governing model, etc…
Since we already established a real and transparent free-market of thoughts, there is no barrier for people to leave a community in favor of joining a better one, and there is no barrier for communities to adapt successful strategies of successful communities.
This progress and inter-community improvement is explained in another post, titled “Redefining exchange rates to excellence index in democracy term”
Till here, we assumed that we had created a real free market of ideas without outside interference, but creating a truly free market of thought remains a matter of doubt if we cannot guarantee the security and privacy of free and uncensored debating.
These are merely the software responsibilities and are explained in detail in “What is wrong with current social networks and messengers app”.
To address these concerns, the software is designed to be as secure and
libre as possible.
Another requirement for a real democracy is the possibility of running a “free and democratic election”. In this regard, we must answer the following questions.
- Who can set the election subject?
- Who can vote in the election?
- How to hold an election (instant democracy, liquid democracy, Quadratic voting, etc…)?
- How votes are counted?
- What is the quorum of acceptance of a person or law?
Again it is the software’s responsibility to prepare all these options for the community and communities will decide how to configure elections as they please.
The software is designed to be as flexible as possible.
As we expect, the elections will lead community to the passage of laws. Because of Cyber nature of this communities, these passed laws will be expressed in form of codes and smart contracts.
This law treats everyone automatically and equally. The combination of a free market of thoughts plus democratic polling and “code is law” will cause the “rules without ruling class” and “governance without government” in these communities.
This consequence eliminates the necessity of legislators, judges, and an executives. This concept can be applied to all communities which are powered by the software regardless of where the community members living, who they are, and what race or nationality they have.
This mechanism embodies truly egalitarian communities all around the glob. Some communities can be formed to talk about a local area governance, whereas other community is about a national problem and the other one is about global warming.
An individual can be member of one or two or three simultaneously.
Not only online, but also offline
So far we have explained how to set up online communities that are democratically created and managed. Now the question would be; how can these online societies affect the real world and improve the living conditions of their members?
In other words how an online society can impact real-life situation?
In addition to what is mentioned in this great article “Netizens: An Anthology” I want to return back to money as a tangible and favorable concept for everyone.
The basic assumption is that the members of a community will begin to use the community’s money in their day-to-day business dealings -and not only for speculation.
Obviously the community money in early days worth nothing, and remains worthless for a while. It is the power point of this money. There will be no IPO, no ICO, no IEO at all.
Instead, it is the community’s mission to empower its money through making something useful for world, either an idea or a physical product. It is the reputation of a society that values its money.
Some societies (like the “imagine” society) may plan to attribute a kind of intrinsic value to their money, and some other follow alternative plans. In the earlier stages, people will try to spend community money in small amounts, for online/offline tipping, gift, temporary jobs, gardening, dog walking, fiver-like projects etc…, and later they will use that money in more serious jobs and larger amounts.
Obviously, the initial market range for communities will be too thin and the community member hardly will find goods or services in exchange the money of community, therefore the early population would promote the community and encourage people to join to the community in order to widen the market range and add more purchasable product or services (in terms of variety and volume) by community money.
The communities grow and increase their reputation, expand their common world, embrace new members and over time the communities increase their money turnover gradually until they meet all their day-to-day
needs directly with their money, without the need to exchange the money for governmental money and vice versa.
If a member of the community can not meet his needs from within his community can get it from members of another community. Obviously s/he needs to exchange the her/his community money to money of the another community.
The software supports most important financial activities such as transactions, remittance, loan and lending (with possibility of both fractional-reserve and not fractional-reserve), pull and push business models, and a subset of smart contracts all in a decentralized model without need to a third party and without need to trust anyone.
Just having customized money under your control, and the possibility of providing capital and running mutual systems (e.g. mutual savings banking, mutual credit) greatly improves the economic situation of a community member. Needless to say, this independent money in some cases is far better than cheap, inflationary governmental fiat money.
A community of capable, minded and relatively richer people that have the possibility of free debate and democratic decision making and funding, will lead influential social movements to force real changes in the real world. This will be the outcome of “The New Paradigm” in the long run.
The software features and technical details
“The New Paradigm” is realized by a software called “Comen” stands for Community maker engine. The Comen gathered and implementedsome necessary and useful features from some different real worlds projects. These features (products) mostly are implemented in ineffective, neutral in matter of utility, biased policies, useless, hard to use or incomplete manner that led no one (or few people) to use those products. As a result seems to have virtually no such products. Here is a list of some current features of Comen.
– a flexible permission-less and uncensorable decentralized domain name system, by which users can register an arbitrary combination of characters and numbers (e.g. Nakamoto, 2Bfree, or 胡) in the blockchain and have absolute control on it.
The domain name owner can use the registered name to publish a unstoppable decentralized website, forum, wiki, podcast or video channel. This registered usernames can be used either to encrypted messaging or
user-friendly money transfer between wallets too.
– the iPGP is a user-friendly implementation of PGP (GPG) as an important encryption tools in citizens privacy protection fight. The Comen implementation solve issues of classic PGP such as key exchange, public
key servers attack, authenticity and cumbersome “web of trust”. Comen
uses iPGP as a default encryption, in application layer,on top of all of its communications. Either between nodes, messaging, or money transferring between wallets.
– the free format blockchain technology which not only supports classic money transactions, but also customized documents such as run a polling, the ballots, weblog posts, wiki pages, media files, etc. because of this flexible data recording potential in Comen, third parties can easily make products as plugins on top of Comen blockchain to implement value added services. Services like supply chain, decentralized identification, dececentralized market, etc…
Since Comen implemented a DAG data structure to record the shared ledger information, it is better to call it block-graph. Comen default consensus algorithm is PoS which I prefer interpret it to Proof of Solidarity (to system) or Proof of Support (the system). The communities can activate PoW consensus or any hybrid consensus of PoS and PoW with different hash algorithms(e.g. ASIC resistance)
– a “Peer to peer payment system” (AKA cryptocurrencies). Whereas the Bitcoin is the first proof of the “money without state” concept, Comen tried to realize the “governance without government”concept as well as addressing Bitcoin’s payment system shortcomings such as limited bandwidth, smart contracts, etc…
In addition Comen implemented an upgrade on software development. As we know, in decentralized systems, “the protocol” is everything and as long as the nodes respect the protocol, it does not matter who is the node runner or what her/his intentions are. If a node breaks the rules, the rest of the network will boycott it. So everyone can join to network and participate, but one of the biggest shortcoming in current Bitcoin implementation is monopolized “protocol” development which cause misinforms and slow down its freedom mission. An small set of developers and their company are controlling Bitcoin protocol, means no decentralization any more. As an example of this misbehave, not surprising that they prefer downgrading the protocol to even smaller block size and less TPS in order to promote their alternative commercial solution in cost of more centralization and less liberty. The Comen and its primitive supporter community (the “imagine” community) have a proper network architecture and mechanisms in order to guarantee the highly democratic protocol and software development.
Because of DAG data structure, the Comen doesn’t face the Transaction Per
Second (TPS) limitation.And because of default supporting of M of N signature schema, and input time lock and output time lock, Comen
supports flexible, various handy payment models. Indeed transaction format in Comen is customize-able. That is, while classic traceable Bitcoin-like transactions are default transaction format, users can use different transaction types (like zk-snark, Monero-like, MW, IoT-friendly, etc or novel transaction formats like TTT or in-jar transactions) depends on their needs all simultaneously in one Block-graph. The developers can implement even
new transaction formats to meet new needs.
– ability of establish standalone, un-censorable, unstoppable and un-spyable online/offline communities (AKA social networks). Needless to say how much we need this software where the gov-corps can mute even a resident or gaslight or paralyze the information flow in certain areas or countries.
In terms of the technical details of the project, perhaps the most controversial part in blockchain concept is the prevention and neutralization of double-spend attacks, specially in a DAG data structure.
The Comen uses a customized CAP theorem and PoS consensus algorithm to address this issue. The main obstacle in order to fight with double-spending is the “speed”. While the rest of the cryptocurrencies exaggerated the emphasis on transaction speed (because of their pure speculative nature), the Comen increased the “maturity” time for each transaction to 12 hours. That is, the transactions immediately are recorded in block-graph, and the coins’ ownership are transferred to recipient, but the recipient can not spend the coins before 12 hours have passed.
So going back to CAP theorem which claim in a “partitioned” distributed system you can not have both Availability and Consistency features together and you can have only one of them. So Comen chose “Availability in spending maturated” coins, and “Consistency in spending not maturated” coins.
Because of this timing we can apply Besantin consensus on a overcrowded
network (even million nodes of validator/participator). Each node immediately records received blocks, and marks the block used coins as used coins. If later the node receives some blocks which are trying to double-spend the coins, the node records all these suspicious blocks in DAG as well.
Meanwhile node generates a report about transaction reception order and sign it and propagate its idea about the right order of transactions, based on its perspective.
The entire network can propagate their report about the order of received
double-spend transactions. The network have 12 hours to this reporting activity. After 12 hours all network will have same set of different reports from different nodes.
So they can evaluate reports, score them based on reporter’s share, and summarize it in order to decide about the real order of transactions. The outcome will be one of these decisions.
A: one of transactions is first transaction (based on majority votes), and it is valid transaction and acceptable, the other transaction(s) will be rejected.
B: Both transactions are rejected and the engaged inputs will be ceased
in favor of network treasury(or be burn).
The actual implementation is a bit more complicated and interested readers can study the consensus process in software source code.
In short, every transactions are recorded in DAG immediately. So the coins are spend definitely and spender can not reverse the transactions at all. In recipient side, s/he can spend coins after 12 hours. If spender tries to cheat the coins, the coins could be ceased in favor of network treasury.
The critic that merely technical people may make is “the 12-hour delay in permitting to spend money is too much”.
The answer is yes. 12 hours is too much, but in what point of view and which concept? The Comen is not designed for speculation, and it is far beyond an only money transfer rail, so it do not care about speed that much.
In a world in which people do not get paid even after of months of hard working, 12 hours delay won’t hurt anyone. In addition this 12 hours maturate time will help network functionality in countries with slow and limited internet connection and covers propagation delay.
Unlike the gov-corp hypocrisy projects, Comen is intended to prepare services for real no-banked people in poor countries.
Meanwhile system must be resilience for any kind of sabotages like slowing down internet connection. Again, for most general financial activities, 12 hour is pretty good time frame.
Additionally some features like speed, and huge data process/transfer ability forces project to be used by who can afford these services, means more centralization, which is not the goal of The New Paradigm”.
The New Paradigm is not only a technological fix.
It is a whole different level in human history. There is trade off between a humanistic pure decentralized free system, and a biased high performance commercial system.
The New Paradigm stands for more decentralization and more freedom.
Some other technical notes about Comen could be data congestion problem, spamming, vector attack, Sybil attack, DoS/DDoS attacks, etc… that are fixed by Comen architecture and for the sake of brevity I do not go to detail in this article.
The Comen software and its proper technology is enough good to start.
It is a minimum viable product (MVP) which doesn’t claim a perfect product at all, but the ideology behind it and its developing roadmap and mechanisms, leads it to be a global high quality product, which “everyone” can install and use it by two or three clicks. The Comen users take
human society steps closer to prosperity.
“imagine” all the people sharing all the world
John Lennon
Here, to delve deeper into the “The New Paradigm” potentials and practical details, I intend to explain an early community that is powered by the software as a tangible and real world example. This community is called “imagine”, inspired by the famous song of the same name from Beatles.
The first and most important mission of “imagine” is to implement, develop and gift this software to the world. The “imagine” motto is “fair effort, fair gain, win-win-win”, where the winners are the world, the “imagine” community, and the participator, respectively.
I have created and enacted some rules according to my plan for improving this community. Are my rules capitalistic or socialistic or under certain doctrines, regimes, or schools of thought? While the answer does not really
matter, my answer is yes and no simultaneously. Indeed, I do not want to fit “myself”, “The New Paradigm” and the “imagine” community in any “ism” at all. I made the system which “I” think will work for my philanthropist visions, while other people can establish different communities and different strategies as they believe.
I set proper rules to achieve the proposal’s goals and ship the software, as free as possible, as open as possible, as flexible as possible, as robust as possible, and as un-stoppable as possible. Hopefully, successive communities use the released software and ancestors’ experiences happily.
Are the laws I have passed for the “imagine” community the best, fairest, and most complete laws? Certainly not, and I have no such claim either. The first rule of imagine is: “every single decision must be made based on the vote of the community members.”, thus over time “imagine” rules will be changed dramatically. This is good for both the community and the software.
Let’s return, to money and figure out how money flows in the “imagine” community. In “imagine” I created scarce money. That is, the software is configured to create a fixed amount of coins every day. So the issuance of money is regulated, predictable, and there is no way to increase it overnight.
Then I set the rules for dividing these coins between community members. The mechanism of distribution of coins in imagine is simple and straightforward. Whole coins will be divided between participators (aka shareholders or community members) in proportion to their shares. Who works more obtains more shares, who works less obtains fewer shares, but it is not merely a meritocracy, since it has some complementary mechanisms to moderate it that you can find more about it here:
“Can we imagine an alternative monetary model to recover our current economic fails” and “There is no place for feats, beauty and heroic deeds in the modern world”
In this way of dividing money, the following questions come to mind.
- What kind of participation, people can do in imagine community?
- Who and how do we measure and evaluate their participation quantity
and quality?
Indeed there is no limit for activities or even no-activities (e.g. UBI).
That means if the current community members -for any reason and by any mechanism- are convinced that person Y deserves Z amount of shares, then person Y will be a shareholder of the system, and because of that shares, s/he will be get paid a portion of daily X minted coins, unconditionally.
Also, person Y will have voting right in proportion to her/his Z shares of system total shares.
In imagine people are encouraged to talk about what is “good job“ for world and do that “good job” and record it in a global transparent, un-censorable, un-stoppable and un-corruptible ledger and being rewarded by doing these. It is a practical altruism. It is what we all were seeking for, from being human in first place and it is goal the the all philanthropist ideologies till now. The “imagine” community is formed based on these values.
In imagine the community members are all proposers and evaluators simultaneously. They evaluate and accept (or reject) the other user’s proposal. Every single proposal is put to a vote, and “all” community can/will up-vote or refute the proposal.
People can send proposals for participating in “imagine” activities and become the member of a community. In this stage, the activities are mainly developing software, testing, designing and translating. But the community always welcomes all new ideas, even if one believes that feeding an elephant in Africa has a positive effect on improving the overall condition of human society.
The way “imagine” creates and distributes money prevents the “Cantillon effect”, and runs a rational cash flow – Don’t spend it all at once or HODL it forever. (neither inflationary nor hyper-deflationary)
The money and power distribution in “imagine” is a fair, efficient, and democratic manner at local, national, and global levels.
Regarding the fact that this money and the community around it, are created by the first person who installed the software on her/his computer and invited others to join her/his network, the community members and
their horizons are strongly tied to intentions, tendencies, and beliefs of its founder(s) and early members.
So the benevolent originator will run the software and will invite like-minded honest people and -probably- will establish and develop a Utopian society, while wicked people will establish a corrupt community.
The evil people already have their tools and most probably do not need
our newborn software, but some of them will try to obtain the majority of shares of our honest community in order to exploit it or destroy it, since they would probably be more motivated for doing so.
So how can we prevent them from that? Here, the concept of “power of fragility” comes to the picture. The software that manages community issues is open-source and free. It is designed to be fully decentralized, flexible, and user-friendly.
Everyone without technical skills can install the software, configure the community settings, monetary mechanisms, and governing rules in a couple of hours. Users can launch their own new territory, new money,
and new rules. There is no monopoly, control, or privileges.
The software also supports immigration. That is, if some members of a community are not happy with the community, they can fork it and establish a new community.
They can selectively port the history, coins, rules, and configurations of the old community to a new one.
They can re-configure a new community hoping the new community grows
without malicious members. Good actors boycott bad actors (or vice versa) by running polling with minimum cost. Both old and new communities will have their money. Probably both will lose a portion of their money’s value, and that is ok too.
If the dispute wasn’t grave, probably they will find some solution to avoid splitting and losing the population and the value of their wealth, since they had cultivated their common world by spending time, strive and faith. Here the “cancel culture” costs far more than tolerance, debate, and constructive communication.
The splitting impacts directly on every member of the community by reducing their money power and their community reputation. It is the conscience of the “power of fragility”. Nothing happens overnight, neither germinating a community nor the destruction of a civilization.
Throughout history, civilizations have always moved on the edge of the balance between keeping citizens happy or disintegrating, and this story will continue for our communities as well.
By the way, in the “imagine” governing model, there is potential for doubt. For example it seems unlikely and also impractical that everyone to evaluate every proposal and every work collectively, and participate in every polling.
Thus we need another mechanism to encourage people to participate in a proposal evaluation. The rule is “every new proposal by default is approved”. If no one votes, the proposal will be approved after the poll time frame automatically.
Since the issuing coins amount is fixed, new shareholders mean less dividend to current members. Thus community has enough incentive to participate in polling and will investigate wisely on every single proposal. It is an instant democracy. Is it technically possible?
In old classical human interaction, this kind of decision-making was too costly and nearly impossible, but with the internet and blockchain technology, it is possible, even for the entire world population. Things could be handled more effectively by liquid-democracy or even quadratic voting.
All are applicable in the proposed software/community.
By this design at this point there is a possibility that there is a perverse incentive for current shareholders to undervalue the work of other people (even up to zero). Let’s imagine the community consists of only myself as an initiative shareholder.
I have whole shares and I’ll get all the new money. If I do not find somebody who accept my money in exchange for their goods or services, the money is worth nothing.
It’s clear that because of our human nature, we prefer to keep more coins
for ourselves. If it is not possible, we will divide coins between as few as possible people, and if this is not possible either, we will divide it between our clan.
But none of these three approaches will help the community in sustainable growth. Particularly the value of the money of the community is directly affected by the quality of the community in every aspect. For a community-based money, no one will accept the money that owned by a bunch of greedy hoarders.
Thus the network has to be expanded and embrace new members to raise the money usability, applicability and popularity in order to advance its market range. Although bigger community means fewer daily coins for each, but also means more usability and applicability for the coins.
Hence community has to be grown and every decision is made by polling. The community needs to add more honest people and not corrupted ones. Otherwise, the community dies in the early stage and their money will never be a valuable asset. The community grows because of its improvement and vice versa.
Money is just a group hallucination but that doesn’t mean it is an easy thing to create (if you do not use the violence or military force).
The community around that money can be established and grow or just die very quickly. It is a trade-off, and the outcome depends on how community members mature and how much they care about the community.
What about bad actors?
Even bad actors have to follow rules and do something good for the system to obtain system shares. Their contribution empowers the system as well. There is a catastrophic case in which the majority of the system are bad actors and they accept corrupted proposals to gain more and more power. The “power of fragility” is the solution.
The “imagine” community is a prove of “The New Paradigm” theory in practice. While the software and the “imagine” community are the product, they are also the means of production.
According to the mechanism of distribution of wealth, power, and software services (such as financial sovereignty facilities, privacy care messenger and social network, democratic voting system, decentralized domain name service(DNS) and decentralized website, wiki, weblog, video channel service, in whole a better internet), we can claim that “imagine” and software are also an “allocation” at the same time. In summary, in “imagine” the community decides what to produce, how to produce, for whom to produce, and why to produce.
The “imagine” community is not just producing free software.
The “imagine” reeds a culture of “decentralized production” (aka “peer production”) and ParEcon, that using decentralized and open money, which will be the basis for the production of other decentralized products such as open hardware, open technology, open medical, etc… in “The New Paradigm”.
All-told, regardless of “isms” and the labels, “The New Paradigm” proposes a system of technologies and people that make a real transparent free market of thoughts (a realization of Agora and “Vita Activa” in 21 century) where people freely can support or reject any idea with minimum cost.
They support a community by joining to it or simply accepting the money of that community (in exchange of their goods or services) or vice versa, condemn it by leaving the community or simply not accepting or devaluing the money of a particular community.
It is the easiest and most practical way to demonstrate democracy in all local, national and global levels. The free choice of free people determines the communities progress direction. Their choice elevates society or turns it into an abandoned territory. No need to argue, quarrel, or fight. No need for war.
These communities are not merely online groups since they affect people’s real lives in different ways. As a practical example, we described a realized community called “imagine, which was created by the software in order to maintain the software.
The “imagine” represents one of the thousands of potential ways to generate and distribute money and power, which can be created by this software.
In order to join to network you need a normal computer (either laptop or desktop) and some computer skills. We Will remove this technical dependency soon, so we will need just eager users to download software and install it and connect to internet. Then you can use software to
transfer money or use forums, wiki pages and participate in the project development.
The “imagine” community looks for the active participation of software developers, hacktivists, activists, artists, and researchers to flourish
it.
EMAIL: evergreener@riseup.net
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