Capitalism is often blamed for profiteering at the cost of our well-being. Some corporations pollute and create unhealthy products like cigarettes, junk food, social media and addictive drugs. They don’t install seat belts until the government forces them to do so. They bribe researchers, lobby the government and harass anyone who seeks to undermine their revenue.

I actually agree with Bernie Sanders here: Those are real, egregious issues that must be dealt with. Not to forget the military-industrial complex. But the problem is not capitalism: it’s the lack thereof, in one critical sector. The natural enemy of public harm is insurance, and we have socialised it. We call it the government.

Besides being a law monopolist, the government is in many regards an insurance company. At least in Europe, it is commonly justified as a necessary protector from unemployment, illness, disability, crime and externalities like pollution or land use.

Government indeed has the resources to protect us from harm, but not the incentives: they get to take our money by force, whether they do a good job helping us or not. Don’t pay, go to the cage. Resist and we’ll shoot you if necessary. Protection racket may be a more fitting term.

But at least we get to vote! We get to beg and plead for our rights and occasionally change the talking heads in elections, but that doesn’t make too much of a difference. For the lack of a better expression: same shit, different asshole. The incentives are broken.

In contrast, free market insurers have both the resources and the incentives to protect us. Given fair enforcement of contracts, they lose money when we suffer harm. We only pay them if we so choose, which keeps the relationship mutually beneficial. Incentives make all the difference, not pleas and petitions.

Free market insurers use no stick, but carrot: they would give you discounts and otherwise encourage you to stop smoking, eat healthy and make other good choices in life. You could still eat Twinkies and smoke while riding a motorcycle without a helmet, but the risk premium would be on you, not on the taxpayer.

In their own financial interest they’d do it all. They’d install a fire alarm into your house. They’d come up with cost-effective ways to prevent crime in your area. They’d fund unbiased research into product safety and healthy ways of life. They’d put a price tag on pollution that causes harm to our health or property, whether it’s CO2 or noise pollution from the party upstairs. Maybe they’d file a class action lawsuit against the depressing modernist architecture that pollutes our landscape.

Unfortunately, there is no true free market insurance around. Insurance is a super-regulated business. Insurers are some of the biggest corporations that lobby the government just like the others. They push laws that limit their competition and make us pay more. Together with the lobbying by big pharma and labor unions, they have made US insurance and healthcare the most expensive in the world.

And of course, people with pre-existing conditions are uninsurable: no one insures a house that is already on fire. Those people do need our help. Family and charity are traditional, voluntary forms of social support that are more feasible when the taxman hasn’t already taken half of our income. (In Finland that’s the average Pertti’s total tax rate, including VAT and costs of employment.)

Unlike government handouts, voluntary aid is resistant to abuse: you don’t stay in your mom’s basement for longer than you can listen to her nagging about it.

Maybe voluntary aid will suffice to take care of the poor and the needy. Or maybe we are so greedy and selfish that we need to hire someone to collect our money at gunpoint, and ask them to not exceed their powers. But that’s another debate. The point stands: free market insurance would be better than its socialist or crony capitalist versions.

I’m a firm believer in the theory of evolution. Good (i.e. efficient) organizations eventually drive out the bad. That’s why socialism has historically lost to capitalism. I’d just like to see peace, prosperity and reduction of human suffering during our lifetime. For that purpose, we must build socially scalable alternatives to government-tit-sucking insurance.

Many countries have already moved to a healthcare system that is based on at least semi-free-market insurance. Netherlands is a fairly successful example. But if you don’t want to die of old age (or lack of healthcare) while placing your hope in politicians, you need to go for alternatives that don’t depend on the government monopoly on law and justice.

Augur is one of the few such systems out there. It’s a blockchain-based prediction market, which can also function as insurance. For example:

Imagine a Chilean farmer whose livelihood depends on rainfall. He could protect his family from drought by creating a market forecasting rainfall, and betting on a low amount. If it ends up raining, great. But if it doesn’t, he still ‘makes it rain’ on Augur where he earns a payout from his hedge. Traditionally it would cost millions of dollars to start a market like this. With Augur it could be a few bucks. — Ben Davidow

A pre-designated reporter will report on the outcome of the prediction on the Ethereum blockchain. You can appeal to the “supreme court”: a jury that consists of all Augur crypto token holders around the world, who then vote on the resolution. There are incentives in place to ensure truthful reporting, appealing and voting.

Or you could have mutual insurance pools where participants trust each other and process claims together. For governance, you could use multi-signature Bitcoin wallets: for example, 3 out of 5 participants would be required to approve a claim and move the funds. Pools could be formed by individuals as well as retail insurers. Pools could buy reinsurance from reputable super-pools that the end user can always appeal their claims to.

Economy of scale is needed to get the most out of any insurance system. You need enough capital to hire (or incentivise) people who find, quantify and mitigate even the smallest of risks. That capital eagerly awaits opportunities in the crypto world if you just present a good value proposal: say, yearly interest for your bitcoins at a reasonable risk.

Or it could be something else, like Etherisc.

Free market insurance can help us predict and prepare for the future, and even persuade it. Whether you worry about the ills of capitalism or the government’s inability to help us, there’s a solution waiting out there: free market insurance.

Originally published in Sirius Business.

Ad-funded online media have been under scrutiny lately. Arguably, the business model incentivises media to compete for our screen time using questionable means such as addiction engineering, clickbaiting and outrage provocation. As a result, we become more depressed, anxious, isolated, polarised and dumbed down while wasting our time.

“Fundamentally, the moral structure of advertisement is messed up and that’s the root of the problem.” — Tesla CEO

How to fix the problem? Recognising it is the first step. The famous Netflix documentary Social Dilemma did a great job raising awareness of these issues, as do Center for Humane Technology, EFF and Mozilla Foundation.

If the concern becomes widespread, we may see government regulation of online media similar to the regulation of cigarettes, gambling, pollution and other causes of public harm. However, the global and quickly evolving playground of the internet may be much more difficult to regulate. It may be a game of whack-a-mole.

Ultimately, it’s all about the incentives. If you want to solve the problems of ad-funded media, you must turn the revenue model upside down. Instead of maximising screen time, you want to incentivise content that makes the user feel appreciative afterwards.

In my opinion, the best solution is ad-blockers that enable automatic contributions to content creators on a flat-fee monthly subscription.

Brave Browser already has these features. You can pay a monthly subscription that is automatically divided among the creators of the content you view. You can bypass the paywall on sites that support it.

You can retract your contribution after reading an article or watching a video, which disincentivises clickbaiting and incentivises content that the audience actually appreciates. Since it’s a flat-fee monthly subscription, you’re not incentivised to retract contributions for no reason.

But retracting a contribution in Brave should be made easier, so that you’re not auto-contributing to clickbaiters out of convenience.

Although Brave’s contribution model is fundamentally right, I can’t recommend it without major reservations, as it’s tied to 3rd party crypto wallet providers. In order to receive contributions, they require photos of your official identification documents. Also, I’d rather use bitcoin or just fiat money instead of Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT).

My free money-making tip to Apple and other device manufacturers: block ads from mobile apps and enable contributions instead. You have the payment rails, development resources and everything that’s needed. As a byproduct, you get more refined screen time metrics, which helps your customers reflect on their device use.

People who don’t have a credit card can get contribution credits as a part of their mobile subscription, in-built to their phone, or through other prepayment. Friends and family could contribute to each other, since they don’t lose basically anything by doing so. Or if you want, you can still choose to sell your attention to select advertisers for a few cents, which you can then distribute to the best content creators.

Now the app developers and content creators are incentivised for user appreciation, not for screen time maximisation.

Now you also have an open source software funding model much more viable than before. This helps create decentralised alternatives for social media and the contribution systems themselves. That may be necessary to prevent the centralisation of power to companies like Apple or Brave that can be pressured to deplatform people who have devoted political, commercial or personal enemies.

Distribution channels become decoupled from content. You could watch movies and listen to music from a bittorrent app that has all the content in the world, while still automatically contributing for the content that you appreciate. You could read your news and blog posts using an RSS feed reader while still contributing.

I believe the contribution model could be a lot more sustainable and ethical basis for the online economy than advertising. In the future, AI will filter out the ads anyway.

The best way to advertise online will be to create ads or products so good that people want to follow and share them. Or influencer marketing, where at least the influencer, with their brand at stake, sets the standard for ad quality and ethics.

As the old saying goes: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Hopefully, by reversing this business model we can shape a future where technology brings us not depression, distraction and division, but joy, well-being and harmony.

If you agree, please spread the word!

How To Fix Everything That’s Wrong With the Internet

Originally published on Hacker Noon.

What do Google, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Uber and a phone book have in common? They are indexes — searchable lists of stuff. Google is a list of keywords mapped to the websites they appear in. Facebook is a list of profiles, posts, private messages, events and other types of information. Youtube has users, videos and comments. Amazon: merchants and items. Uber: drivers, customers and ride requests.

Oh, and the phone book. Young readers might not know that it was a 20th century business model where you print out a database of names matched with phone numbers and drop the heavy object into people’s mailboxes.

Most online unicorns are essentially just indexes with a nice user interface and occasionally some sort of customer support. They are commonly called “platforms”.

Strong network effects are the boon or bane of indexing, depending on whom you ask. Winner takes it all: users must join the most popular index in order to find others and be found, i.e. to get the most search results and appear in as many searches as possible.

This is good for the winning company’s shareholders. “Competition is for losers”, as Peter Thiel wrote in his book “From Zero to One”. Also, it’s convenient and computationally efficient when you need to search only one index which contains everything and runs in a highly optimized data center.

The downside is that these companies become central points of tremendous power — in other words, single points of failure. Many of them have become necessities that our daily lives and livelihoods depend upon, yet they are not accountable to their own users. They are private companies that can quite freely favor or discriminate against whomever they like. What is your recourse when Facebook decides to suspend your account for 1 month at a critical time?

There have been calls to regulate online platforms as public utilities akin to banks or electricity companies. Good regulation could help, but bad regulation could make things worse. Many things can go wrong when trying to solve problems by government force. Government too is a monopoly — one that you can’t even unsubscribe from when things go wrong. And how did it work out with bank regulation? It’s always safer if we can develop new technology that solves these problems without the use of force (and more ethical, one could argue).

What Satoshi Nakamoto wrote about banks applies to online platforms as well:

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.”

As we have already seen, such central points will inevitably be abused from the inside or outside for commercial, political or outright criminal gain, while the rest of us pay the price.

Historically, printing presses, telegraph offices and railway stations have been some of the first central points seized by communist revolutionaries. Modern day authoritarians hijack search engines and social media corporations. They can be used to direct or suppress public debate and are globally used to influence politics.

Some political activists demand “deplatforming” of people they disagree with — too often successfully. Big tech companies themselves admittedly have a bias against conservatives, which they have arguably acted upon, banning them more often than left-wing users.

In 2018 Germany started enforcing a law that obliges social media companies to censor “obviously illegal” user content within 24 hours or face penalties up to 50 million euros. Human Rights Watch criticized the law on the grounds that it “can lead to unaccountable and overbroad censorship” and “sets a dangerous precedent for other governments”. At least Russia, Singapore, and the Philippines have cited the law as a positive example of legislation for removing “illegal” content online. France enacted a similar law in 2019.

A topic of their own are authoritarian countries such as China, Iran, Turkey and North Korea which severely restrict the access to social media or even to the whole internet. People in those countries resort to VPNs, file sharing by usb sticks or occasionally bluetooth mesh networks.

For many people, Snowden’s revelations about NSA mass surveillance programs have been the wake-up call to privacy issues. It’s reasonable to ask if we want to share our digital lives with the big tech and subsequently the government.

Another concern about centralization is infrastructure security. What if someone at Google just messes up? What if WhatsApp servers are unreachable in an emergency? That concern can be shared regardless of your particular political bias.

How do we make it right? Decentralize indexing. Take out the middleman. It gets a bit more technical here.

Bitcoin is a proven decentralized alternative to central banks and money transmitters. We no longer have the situation where Alice wants to send money to Bob via middleman Carl, but Dave prevents it by pressuring Carl. Alice (or Alexei) doesn’t need anyone’s permission to send her own bitcoins to Bob. Now we just need to make bitcoin more convenient for everyday use and hodl.

Bitcoin and other decentralized ledgers are all about state management: how to achieve a consensus on the ledger’s balances without asking a central authority. Bitcoin presented a novel solution to the problem: blockchain — or more specifically, proof of work. Every full bitcoin node replicates a chain of transaction blocks, and the valid version of the chain stamped by the most computing power (proof of work) is considered the consensus.

However, decentralized indexes face a different set of technical challenges and tradeoffs. For example, blockchain is not the right tool for social media: you don’t need or want slow and expensive perfect synchronization with everyone in the world. Eventual consistency is sufficient and can be achieved with conflict-free replicated data types: systems that don’t even need an internet access — just occasional contact with peers. Examples of such systems are Gun, Automerge and OrbitDB.

When network failures inevitably happen, you need to choose between availability and consistency of state. In case of a trustless ledger, it may be better to sacrifice availability and stop transactions in order to prevent double-spending. Social networks and many other applications might do fine without strong consistency, i.e. everyone always having the same dataset. The content you post offline can be synchronized later. Even bank ATMs choose A over C, since the benefits outweigh the risks (as explained in this excellent article on CAP).

Another challenge is how to make sure that the data you receive from peers is relevant or valid. You don’t want spam in your social media feed. You want search results to actually contain the searched words. When the index is not run by a single trusted entity, you can use a web of trust to filter out users and peers that produce spam or other unwanted content — all without giving power to central moderators.

Bittorrent solves this somewhat similarly, exchanging file parts with peers on tit-for-tat basis, rewarding peers for co-operation. You can see your download start slowly and then speed up as other downloading peers see that you are giving back.

Sharing of static files in a peer-to-peer network is old and proven technology. However, maintaining and querying decentralized indexes — big dynamic datasets — is easier said than done. Centralized torrent indexes are the single point of failure that governments, defending billion-dollar corporate interests, have heavy-handedly cracked down upon — most famously The Pirate Bay and more recently KickassTorrents.

Torrent Paradise takes torrent indexing in a more decentralized direction. While the index is still centrally maintained, it is distributed via IPFS which makes finding its maintainer or preventing its distribution more difficult. The index maintainer could even hide behind Tor to prevent detection by traffic analysis.

OpenBazaar is a fairly popular IPFS-based project that lets merchants index their own products. YaCy, founded in 2006, is a fully decentralized web search application. Both are based on distributed hash tables, the same technology that bittorrent uses for peer finding.

Manyverse is an interesting offline-first mobile application that can synchronize over bluetooth, wifi or remote servers. It is based on the Scuttlebutt feed synchronization system, which already has hundreds of active users.

I have been working on Iris, a social networking application that stores everything on its users’ devices and connects to peers directly. Interface-wise it’s not too different from some existing social media — you can post text, photos, videos, audio or other types of files into your feed.

You can have end-to-end encrypted private chats and get mobile or desktop notifications. Users give each other trust ratings to form a web of trust — a concept that has been used in public key infrastructure since the 90s. Trust ratings are functionally not too different from adding a friend or following someone.

Iris web of trust works both on the software level and the user level. On the software level it is used to manage peer connections and prioritize storage space: friends connect to each other and replicate each other’s content. On the user level it aims to serve as a socially scalable version of the system of trust that naturally exists in tribes and villages, reducing the need for a centralized justice system and facilitating the gift economy.

Web of trust helps filter out spam and other unwanted content without entrusting the power to a central moderator. Instead of a single moderator, you have multiple “moderators” whom you can choose and whose collective decisions you can override. It makes trolling, fake news and other propaganda campaigns more difficult, since your messages are only shown to people whose WoT you are in.

Based on attestations (“identity verifications”) from your WoT, Iris maps natural names to public keys and other identifiers, providing a decentralized alternative to digital identity providers such as domain names, email addresses, phone numbers, social media handles or CA certificates. Similarly to Petnames or Namecoin, it fulfills all three properties of Zooko’s triangle outlined in Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful: Choose Two.

Unlike Namecoin addresses or other global names, Iris names are not globally unique: there can be multiple people named John Smith. When searching for a name, you get a dropdown list of results ordered by their WoT distance, along with avatars and other human-meaningful attributes that are attested by your WoT. Iris doesn’t have a globally shared state. Instead, what you see depends on what your WoT says.

It could be even used to maintain a shared conception of borders, countries and properties. Instead of Google playing the geopolitical moderator, the borders and names you see on a map would depend on what your WoT has attested to. Good for local sovereignty advocates. Use together with uncensorable public polls.

Ideally, Iris users would have device-based private keys that share access to the same private data. Losing one key doesn’t matter, and the other keys can be used to invalidate the lost one. If you lose all your keys, you can just ask your WoT to attest a new key to your identity. After enough verifications, other users can fetch the private chats with your old key and re-encrypt them to the new key. Your non-shared private data would be lost though. That could be avoided with yet another key recovery option: Shamir’s Secret Sharing, which allows e.g. 3 out of 5 recovery shards stored by friends to restore your private key.

Iris outsources storage and networking to Gun, the aforementioned CRDT system. With storage adapters it provides offline-first eventually consistent data synchronization between all kinds of storages, such as RAM, file system, local area network peers (multicast), websocket servers or remote WebRTC peers. With a bluetooth adapter you could use it in an ad hoc mesh network where peers don’t even need to be connected all the time — very censorship-resistant.

Iris users maintain their own indexes of Message and Contact objects. These are synchronized and queried over Gun. When you search for messages or contacts, other indexes in your web of trust are also queried. That is web of trust based decentralized indexing.

This works using Gun’s simple API:

# open our own index (read & write permissions)
user = gun.user()
user.auth(keypair)
user.get(‘messages’).get(indexKey).put(message)
user.get(‘messages’, params).map(msg => doSomething(msg))
user.get(‘contacts’)…

# open someone else’s index (read-only)
user = gun.user(publicKey)
user.get(‘messages’, params).map(…)

The same paradigm could be used to store and retrieve other kinds of objects and build all kinds of decentralized alternatives to platforms like Google, Amazon, Uber etc.

Sharding, replication factor, algorithms for efficient querying of peers and other optimizations are yet to be explored. Perhaps a distributed hash table between trusted peers could be used. The optimal division of labor between local devices and servers (super-peers) needs further research: you want it to work offline or in a mesh network (to some extent), but also to be able to utilize the power of data centers.

Servers and efficient data centers have their place even in a system where the data model, storage and networking support decentralization. You could still have companies that maintain large indexes: they would just be interoperable with other actors in the network. The question is how to find the right balance between them.

In order to truly compete with centralized platforms, decentralized applications must provide user experience as good as or even better than what we are used to. Iris and the other presented solutions are not quite there yet. Bittorrent does a great job with download speeds, but has no integrated content indexing and search like we’re used to on Netflix, Steam or Spotify. The others typically have performance or scalability issues. On the other hand, we can already boast offline-first capabilities and ease of signup unlike Facebook and the others. Not to mention the sheer ecstatic feeling of self-sovereignty.

Iris logo: rainbow colored eye in a speech bubble.

If you’re enthusiastic about something that nobody else seems to get, odds are that you are chasing a rainbow (and Iris happens to be the Greek goddess of the rainbow). But sometimes you are right. In 2009 I emailed Satoshi Nakamoto and offered to help however I could with Bitcoin. After that it would take years before Bitcoin’s success eventually convinced people to start taking it seriously.

I have been similarly enthusiastic about the ideas behind Iris for years, but lacked the marketing skills to promote them. I believe that code speaks louder than words though: bitcoin wouldn’t have gotten off the ground with only the whitepaper and no reference implementation to prove it. Iris software is getting there, but progress is slow when you’re working on a complex system by yourself, using experimental building blocks that have changed many times along the way.

If you liked the analysis or the proposed solution, please share this article or check out Iris on GitHub for more contribution options. If you have a better idea on how to decentralize indexing or otherwise make us less dependent on corporate online platforms, please let us know. The world needs it!

Why should we expect any better results from a government monopoly on law? And we can see the results: injustice, corruption, bad customer experience, costly legal proceedings that take years, social problems and horrors like the war on drugs or the prison-industrial complex, which would not happen without taxpayers’ money. We are so used to lousy legal systems that we take them for granted and just try to avoid getting caught in the wheels.

“Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?”
― David D. Friedman

Unlike top-down dictated statutory law, laws should be discovered in free human interaction in the same way as prices are — the aggregate of individual preferences, the meeting point of supply and demand, common sense of justice balanced by the actual costs and benefits of enacting it. This is akin to common law or customary law which is readily found in tribal societies and in some countries supplementary to statutory law (although monopolistically enforced in developed countries).

Characteristic of customary legal systems such as the early Irish law, the ancient Germanic law or the still practiced Somali Xeer is the prevalence of compensation over punishment. That tends to happen when lawmaking is not detached from the real world, i.e. is subject to real costs and benefits instead of popularity in parliamentary elections. Laws that do more harm than good would go out of business.

Few would pay 50,000€ a year out of their own pocket to keep an offender in prison, when he could be made to follow a compensation plan instead. If you commit a crime, your tribe would likely compensate the victim and collect the debt from you, as going to war with another tribe over it wouldn’t be worth it. If you refuse to pay, your tribe might disown you. You would become an outlaw and might need to go into hiding, essentially isolating yourself at your own cost.

Victimless crimes would generally not exist. War on drugs would not happen without a law monopoly — physically attacking others because of their personal choices would be a fatal mistake without taxpayers’ money and the overwhelming force of a law monopoly to back it up.

How would a modern society without a law monopolist look like in practice? The opposite of monopolistic law is polycentric law: multiple providers of legal protection and other “government” services within the same area. They could be a mixture of tribes, mutual insurance pools, for-profit companies or social networks organized in some way we cannot even imagine yet — whatever works best and suits individual preferences. Essentially, they would be groups of people that come together, pay some kind of insurance money or have a commitment to participate in their operations, and have processes for handling internal and external disputes and protect their members.

If you were unhappy with your “government”, you could change it at will, just as outrageously as you can change your mobile carrier without having to sell your house, leave your social circles and move to another country. Customers’ ability to leave forces businesses to do better or be replaced. Most unfortunately, our monopoly governments do not enjoy the same reality checks — that is why their services are such a timeless topic of complaint.

Law and protection providers would have the natural incentive to focus on proactive crime prevention rather than just dealing with the damage. They would likely want to help you with security planning and offer discounts for doing it. Customer experience would be massively better than what we have now — providers would actually have to care about keeping their customers.

What if there’s a dispute between providers? Well, governments these days disagree all the time and international justice is a mess. Still, they don’t go to war over small things — even if they could do so with taxpayers’ money.

In case of non-monopolistic providers that people are free to leave without moving to another country, there is even less incentive to go to war or leave “international” disputes unresolved. Members will go elsewhere if the price gets too high or the service too bad. Providers must co-operate and follow the common law, or else they will face external pressure and increased costs.

How do we get there? Through technological advancements that make old-style governments obsolete. We will have decentralized and voluntary alternatives that outcompete stagnant government services. When we have better alternatives for education, healthcare, social security, money, reputation systems, dispute resolution, personal registry, ownership registry and personal safety, governments lose their justification and legitimacy.

When the framework of governments and banks is not needed to run companies, organize work and property or move money, taxation without consent becomes increasingly difficult and government monopolies become even less justified.

Government services, like everything else in life, are just better when there is consent and choice. No monopoly, thanks!

Julkaistu alun perin Sirius Bisnes -blogissa 15.2.2015

Raha olisi Pekka Routalemmen mielestä hyvin jännä juttu. Tietokannassa olevia numeroita, jotka määräävät miten ihmiskunnan resurssit jakautuvat. Ihmiset ymmärtävät keskimäärin aika vähän rahasta siihen nähden, että raha tai sen puute määrää miten he voivat käyttää elämänsä päivät.

Abstraktin olemuksensa vuoksi rahakysymykset eivät valitettavasti herätä yhtä paljon tunteita ja mielenkiintoa kuin vaikkapa homoliitot tai söpöjen eläinten oikeudet, vaikka ne ovat jokapäiväisen elämän kannalta paljon merkityksellisempiä.

Voit elää kituuttaa tehden rankkaa työtä sairaanhoitajana Suomessa ja hyvällä tuurilla saada asuntolainan maksettua ennen eläkeikää. Tai voit pelata turhanpäiväistä rahapeliä ja elää kuin Dan Bilzerian. Tai voit saada miljoonaperinnön ja elää mukavasti koroilla, tekemättä koskaan päivääkään töitä. Rahalla voi saada nautintoa ja onnea, ja rahan puute voi aiheuttaa kipua, kurjuutta ja lyhyttä elinikää.

Raha ei loppujen lopuksi olekaan pelkkää abstraktia numerohöttöä, vaan se ihan käytännössä mittaa sinunkin elämäsi tunteja ja niiden laatua. Siksi sellaista asiaa kuin “verotus” ei voi sivuuttaa olankohautuksella, minkä joku saattoikin jo huomata kirjoituksieni teemoista. Jutta ja Jyrki määräävät elämäsi rajallisista tunneista pääasiassa verotuksen avulla.

Jos Jutta ottaa sinulta ensin 30% tuloverona ja sitten Jyrki 20% alv:nä kaikesta mitä ostat, menetyksesi on valitettavan todellinen. Joudut tekemään noin kaksinkertaisen määrän töitä saman elintason eteen — 20 ylimääräistä viikkotuntia hikisessä toimistokuutiossa tai pakkasessa rakennustyömaalla. Tarkemman arvion voit laskea veroaste.fi-palvelussa.

Vaihtoehtoisesti joudut tinkimään kaikenlaisesta mikä elämässäsi on arvokasta, kuten harrastukset, hyvä ruoka, laadukas terveydenhuolto tai ystävien ja perheen kanssa vietetty aika.

Osan maksamistasi veroista ym. maksuista saat ehkä takaisin julkisina palveluina tai eläkkeenä, mutta et voi irtisanoutua, vaikka katsoisit että niiden arvo ei ole 50% elämäsi työtunneista.

Verotus on tehokas tapa hallita ihmisiä. Se on eräänlaista vapaan karjan orjuutta, jossa alamainen saa itse valita mitä työtä tekee ja kuinka paljon. On helppoa ottaa duunarin rahoista puolet pois ennen kuin ne ovat edes hänen pankkitilillään. Paljon vaikeampaa ja kalliimpaa on rangaistuksella uhaten pakottaa hänet työntekoon tai käydä hänen kotonaan takavarikoimassa aineellista omaisuutta. Lopputuloksen kannalta kyse on kuitenkin samasta asiasta.

Oma lukunsa on rahajärjestelmä. Koska raha määrää mihin ihmiskunnan resurssit käytetään, on setelipainon vartijalla huomattavan paljon valtaa. Rahajärjestelmää ymmärtämätön ei voi oikein sanoa ymmärtävänsä paljoakaan yhteiskunnan toiminnasta. On hienoa, että uudenlainen rahajärjestelmä Bitcoin on herätellyt ihmisiä miettimään tärkeitä kysymyksiä: mitä raha on, mistä se tulee ja miten se toimii?

Lyhyesti: Raha on yleinen vaihdon väline ja arvon mitta. Euroja ja dollareita syntyy (tyhjästä) kun 1) keskuspankki ostaa valtioiden tai talletuspankkien velkakirjoja tai muita arvopapereita, tai 2) kun asiakas lainaa rahaa talletuspankilta. Rahaa poistuu kierrosta kun pankkilainoja maksetaan takaisin, tai kun keskuspankki myy omistamiaan velkakirjoja tai muita arvopapereita. Rahan luontia ja poistumista säätelemällä keskuspankkien on tarkoitus ylläpitää hintavakautta.

Keskuspankit käyttävät valtaa ohjauskoron avulla. Ohjauskorko on keskuspankin tarjoaman lainarahan hinta, jonka säätäminen vaikuttaa siihen, minkä verran uusia lainoja otetaan ja minkä verran siis uutta rahaa syntyy.

Keskuspankit voivat myös halutessaan taikoa uutta rahaa ja ostaa sillä markkinoilta arvopapereita, mistä käytetään nimitystä “määrällinen elvytys”. Joskus keskuspankit taikovat rahaa suoraan valtion tilille, mitä kutsutaan setelirahoitukseksi.

Uuden rahan luonti hyödyttää niitä joiden käsiin raha ensimmäisenä päätyy ja haittaa muita rahan omistajia, kun sen arvo vähitellen laskee.

Vaikka bitcoinitkin luodaan tyhjästä, järjestelmässä ei ole vallankäyttäjää, joka voisi mielivaltaisesti luoda uutta rahaa. Uusia bitcoineja ei synny sillä että joku ottaa lainaa bitcoin-pankista. Bitcoinien säilytystä ja siirtoa ei ole keskitetty pankeille eikä tilejä tarvitse yhdistää luonnolliseen henkilöön, minkä vuoksi rahavirtojen verotus ja muu sääntely ylhäältä käsin on vaikeaa. Bitcoinin käyttöä arvon mittana on tähän mennessä haitannut sen suuri volatiliteetti, eli kysynnän ja tarjonnan vaihtelut.

Raha on diippiä shittiä. Se ei kuitenkaan ole ainoa elämän mahdollisuuksia ja liikkumavaraa määrittävä asia, vaan siihen vaikuttavat myös maine ja luottamus. Olemalla hyvä tyyppi voit kokea ilmaiseksi asioita joista joutuisit muuten maksamaan, tai asioita joita ei edes rahalla saa. Ystävyyttä ja rakkautta ei voi ostaa, joskin rahalla saa paremmat edellytykset niiden hankkimiseen.

Mistä johtuu ihmisen päätyminen joko sallivaa maahanmuuttopolitiikkaa kannattavien, tyypillisesti vasemmistolaisten “suvakkien” tai sellaista politiikkaa vastustavien oikeistolaisten “rajakkien” leiriin?

Sosiaalipsykologi Jonathan Haidt esittää kirjassaan The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), että jako poliittisiin leireihin johtuu eroista ihmisten sisäsyntyisissä moraalisissa perustunteissa. (Moralfoundations.org, Wikipedia: Moral foundations theory)

Haidtin mukaan moraaliset reaktiot syntyvät intuitiolla, ja vasta sen jälkeen alkaa älyllinen prosessi, jolla keksitään perustelut omalle tuntemukselle.

Haidt jaottelee moraaliset perustunteet kuuteen osa-alueeseen:

• huolenpito
• reiluus (yhteisten sääntöjen noudattaminen)
• uskollisuus omalle joukolle
• auktoriteettien kunnioitus
• pyhyys/puhtaus (esim. “avioliitto on miehen ja naisen välinen asia” tai “sisarukset eivät saa harrastaa keskenään seksiä”)
• vapaus.

Haidtin mukaan oikeistolaiset pitävät usein vasemmistolaisia “hyväuskoisina hölmöinä”, mutta pohjimmiltaan hyvinä ihmisiä. Vasemmistolaisen silmissä puolestaan oikeistolaisuus näyttäytyy suoranaisena pahuutena, itsekkyytenä ja piittaamattomuutena. Tämä johtuu Haidtin mukaan siitä, että oikeistolaiset kokevat moraalisia perustunteita tasaisemmin kaikilta osa-alueilta ja siten kykenevät ymmärtämään niitä. Vasemmistolaisten tuntemukset taas painottuvat huolenpitoon.

Vasemmistolaisten ja oikeistolaisten lisäksi on tunnistettavissa vielä kolmas ryhmä: libertaarit. Libertaareille tärkein arvo yhteiskunnallisissa asioissa on vapaus —jokainen tehköön elämällään ja omaisuudellaan mitä haluaa, kunhan ei loukkaa toisten vastaavaa vapautta.

Mitä tällä tiedolla sitten voidaan tehdä? Ainakin vaikuttaisi siltä, että erilaisia tunnereaktioita kokevien ryhmien on hyvin vaikea saavuttaa yhteisymmärrystä keskustelun kautta. Sovintoon ei päästä myöskään vastapuolta marginalisoimalla ja panettelemalla — se vain kärjistää tilannetta ja saa ihmiset kerääntymään entistä tiukemmin oman jenginsä lipun ympärille. Kuinka välttää väkivallan eskaloituminen seuraavan pakolais- tai talouskriisin koittaessa?

Poliittisissa keskusteluissa erimielisyydet kärjistyvät, koska politiikka on pohjimmiltaan sotaa. Äänestetään siitä, kenen arvojen mukaisesti kaikki pakotetaan toimimaan. Politiikassa on kyse siitä, kuka saa valtasormuksen — kenen yhteiskunnallisen vision rakennuspalikaksi sinut pakotetaan. Viime kädessä aseistetut miehet pitävät huolta siitä, että kansalaiset noudattavat valtaan äänestettyjen poliitikkojen keksimiä lakeja.

Jokaisen rauhaa haluavan ihmisen pitäisi toimia kuten libertaarit: lakata pakottamasta omia arvovalintojaan muille. Arvovalintojen pakottamista on mm. maahanmuuton kustannuksien tai kehitysavun maksattaminen veronmaksajilla, Yle-vero, huumeiden kieltolaki, samaa sukupuolta olevien avioliittojen kieltäminen ja lukemattomat muut poliittiset päätökset.

Voit edelleen olla vasemmistolainen tai oikeistolainen, kunhan jätät eri mieltä olevat rauhaan. Vasta sen jälkeen kannattaa keskittyä polttopullojen heittelijöiden tai katutappelijoiden kauhisteluun — hekin vain toteuttavat omaa visiotaan toisten kustannuksella.

Ei ehkä ole poliittisesti realistista odottaa rauhanomaista ratkaisua, jossa ihmiset luopuisivat valtasormuksen tavoittelusta ja antaisivat jokaisen tehdä arvovalintansa itse. Todennäköisemmin kriisejä tulee lisää, “suvakkien” ja “rajakkien” vastakkainasettelu voimistuu ja väkivalta eskaloituu — toivottavasti ei sisällissodaksi asti. Tavallisen rauhanomaisen ihmisen kannattanee vältellä vaarallisia paikkoja ja toivoa, että kriisin ja romahduksen seurauksena syntyy ennemmin uusi Viro kuin uusi Irak.

Dunbar’s number supposes the maximum size of a social network that we can hold and maintain in our heads. The usual estimate is 150. In tribes or villages 150 is about the number of people you need to know to enter a system of trust. In today’s secular urban environment, where most of the people you come across are strangers, establishing trust is more difficult and there is less incentive to be the good guy. Fortunately, we can overcome the limitations of the human mind by information technology.

Uber and Airbnb have shown how reputation and feedback systems can help people to trust strangers. People tend to treat strangers with greater respect when they get a star rating that includes a complementary comment.

Imagine if we could extend this trust to all human interaction. You could thumbs-up the friendly bus-driver or the stranger who helped you find the way. Perhaps even the otherwise under-incentivised cop or public servant would also appreciate some recognition?

Who wants to be a bad guy if anyone you meet already knows it? Your reputation goes ahead of you. Against government monopolies of law enforcement and justice, reputation could easily be a stronger, faster, less corrupt and more cost-efficient force for good. It just needs to be done right.

What would a universal reputation system look like? Probably something better than what the creators of Peeple had in mind before giving in to the shitstorm that their “Yelp for People” conjured — although they did get some things right.

We need something better than centrally managed sites or apps that are prone to censorship and do not allow users to easily export and relocate their data. It is essential that a review is not completely removed from the system because someone didn’t like it and pressured the admin. A central point like GitHub is acceptable if the system itself is open-sourced, mathematically verified and decentralised like the Git version control system.

We need something that gives a truthful picture of what the people you’ve interacted with think about you. We do not need the anonymous online trolls, or the restaurant owners who write themselves Yelp reviews on fake accounts. Next to your feedback it should display the reputation and identity verifications of the person who gave the review — and automatically hide the feedback from accounts that have low trust from your extended social network. The same database can be used to filter out social media comments written by fake profiles for propaganda or commercial purposes.

Someone’s reputation is not best represented by a static score that is displayed to everyone. What you see should depend on how your personal web of trust regards them.

We want mechanics that encourage dispute resolution, apology and compensation instead of endless conflict. Getting rid of a public trail of unresolved disputes should be an incentive in itself, but applications that make third party dispute mediation easier (and profitable) could also be worth experimenting with.

We want reputation to follow the user, even if their email or social media account changes, gets hacked or if they forget their password. The system should bring together the reputation from different sources. On the other hand, feedback needs to be contextually distinguishable — 5 stars on eBay doesn’t mean that you’re a great Airbnb guest, or a good guy in general.

We want to make sure that getting hit by a Twitter lynch mob (case Justine Sacco) doesn’t ruin your life — or at least the system shouldn’t make the current situation any worse. We want a reputation system better than Google search, which doesn’t give an accurate picture of anyone and can be manipulated to one direction or another with search engine optimization.

I have been developing an application called Identifi [2019 EDIT: renamed to Iris] which aims to address these points, besides being a decentralised address book. You can use it to keep your contact details up-to-date, have them verified by peers or a trusted authority and to bring together your trust score from different applications. It stores its data in a distributed fashion on all the computers that run the open source Identi.fi application. It has its bugs and is still very much in-development, but it should point in the right direction with its web-of-trust based content filtering.

Changing the world by yourself is difficult, even if you’re Satoshi Nakamoto. If you think these ideas could make the world a better place, please consider contributing to the Identi.fi codebase [2019 EDIT: Iris] or sharing this post. Let’s shift the decimal points of Dunbar’s number and build a global village society where people can trust each other again.