What if humanity voted by burning sats \ stacker news ~Politics_And

pull down to refresh

822 sats \ 23 comments \ @snufon 27 May Politics_And_Law

Send to burn address A: you vote A. Burn address B: you vote B. The burn address with the most money wins and is used as a trustworthy signal of what humanity chooses.

First, what do we think of the general idea? The first obvious criticism is that rich people can influence it more, but it's already the case in our democracy where influencing the masses to vote against their interests is very cheap for the ultrarich and frequent. At least here, everyone plays by the same rule without any cheating and the money is burned forever (no snowballing like proof of stake).

The second criticism would be "what if people in China vote for a French law?". Yeah they could, but I don't see the issue with that. People in France have skin in the game so more incentive to use their money to change a law affecting them. In addition, if Bitcoin is about breaking barriers, should this not include state borders?

Then, how could this be implemented? A naive L1 implementation would suffer from high fees. Ideally, you'd want the advantages of Lightning: instant, low-fee payments. I feel like this would be doable but there might be issues, how would you create a LN channel to a burn address?

A basic client implementation would have you set a maximum amount of money you're ready to burn for this votation, let's say 10k sats in favor of A. What would happen is that your money would be sent to the burn address only when A is losing (to not waste money). In addition, it would be sent slowly, little by little, until your side is winning. This would avoid everyone sending massive amounts of money at the last minute and overpaying. An L2 solution would again be required for something like this

I'm sure other people thought of this already but I was not able to find anything (maybe I googled the wrong keywords?)

view all related items

123 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 27 May

I think it makes more sense to just have the funds go towards offsetting taxes, rather than burning them. If, by some miracle, they more than offset taxes and deficits, issue a rebate to every address that had zapped.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @snufon OP 28 May

True, that would be the more "state-centric" option and totally valid as well

33 sats \ 3 replies \ @senf 27 May

My biggest worry would be voting and having whoever would enact change just ignoring the results.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @snufon OP 28 May

That's already the case now though right? At least here the fact that you're ignoring the results would be even more obvious

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @senf 28 May

Yeah, but then I'd be out money for nothing. I don't want to pay for something (that I don't pay for now) where I have to trust anyone about the outcome.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @snufon OP 29 May

Then you would not vote and that seems fine

33 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullcount 27 May

Democracy is tyranny of the majority and the majority are... retarded

If voting costs money, then that democracy will just vote to give themselves money even faster than they currently do.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @snufon OP 28 May

The fact that the majority is retarded is literally why I thought of this in the first place. The clueless masses are easily manipulated and that's the cause of many of our problems: winning the vote democratically is just a contest of who will convince the clueless people lying in the middle of the bell curve. If it suddenly costs money to vote, it will drastically reduce the weight of people who vote without having a clue.

Your second sentence implies that a costly vote would incentivize worst decisions than a free vote, why would that be the case? I think it's literally the opposite

Btw I assume that you're not Greg Maxwell (nullc)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 28 May

People tolerate government because they like the idea that there's an "adult in the room" with due authority to tell them how to act. Its the same reason people like to theorize conspiracies. It helps maintain the illusion that there's order and planners with a purpose in this otherwise chaotic universe without meaning. Voting is an illusion of power "given" to people. Power is never given away. Power can only "step down" leaving a vacuum for another power to take over. Authority, however, is given. Voting is a humiliation ritual of giving authority over your own life to some politician or democratic outcome.

People tend to riot and protest if they can't vote (or be attacked by foreign powers trying to "spread democracy"). Voting is a pacifier, there is no substance beyond that. The powerful aren't giving away their power to a vote. They rule regardless of what government system is used to keep their people docile.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @snufon OP 29 May

Debatable + doesn't address the previous points

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @jakoyoh629 27 May

I understand the technical side of trying to implement that, and it's kinda neat to think about, but I honestly think burning sats is a rookie error. Still, that's the cool thing about Bitcoin – everyone's free to do their own thing!

55 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 27 May

Burning onchain, sending sats to an unspendable output, doesn't have an obvious analog in lightning so you'd need some kind of other L2.

To keep it simple, I'd recommend not worrying about wasting money for now and focus on how you design an L2 without requiring trust and one which mostly functions to aggregate burn txs.

There's likely prior art somewhere, but I'm also unfamiliar with it.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 27 May

I see you have discovered the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism for social choice.

In mechanism design, the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism is a generic truthful mechanism for achieving a socially optimal solution whenever monetary transfers are available. It generalizes the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction into a general-purpose mechanism for social choice, which can be used to select any outcome from a set of possible outcomes.[1]: 216–233 However, the VCG mechanism also has several problems which keep it from fully solving the public goods problem, including its vulnerability to collusion and the issue of participants failing to pay their bids.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @398ja 29 May

I believe what you are describing is what is known as quadratic voting.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @snufon OP 29 May

I did not know the term, interesting! The similarity lies in being able to vote in "variable amounts" , the difference is that it costs you actual money and not credits specifically created for that purpose, making it more costly to the voter

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @398ja 29 May

Yes. The advantage of using voting tokens is that it creates a level playing field, assuming everyone receives the same number of tokens.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @snufon OP 30 May

As written elsewhere I don't think that's an advantage :^)

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @398ja 30 May

I think the system you describe could be better than what we have now, but it unfairly favours wealthy countries. I find the mix of borderless money with country's elections questionable.

In the end, you may not have your country for too long...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @snufon OP 30 May

As brought up by someone else, the money could also be sent to that country's government instead of being burned. You would have even less incentive to vote on laws of other countries.

Also, I think that the huge disparity in the different countries' power/wealth are unfortunately very hard to fix by anything... This reminds me of Bitcoin criticism that goes something like "rich people can just buy a lot of btc and stay rich": yeah it's unfortunate but there's not much we can do about it, it's an issue deeper than Bitcoin/the voting system... Still a stepup IMO

reply on another page

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 27 May

My rights aren’t up for debate, let alone a vote

~ Michael Malice

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 27 May

No, burning Sats is heresy. Sats are a gift you hold until the next generation. There are better ways.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @guerratotal 27 May

🔥 Burning money as speech. Imagine telling your grandkids about that one.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @wolfsbane 27 May

That would be really weird even though it makes sense