Crypto-Anarcho-Social-Libertarianism: A Salad^H^H^H^H^H Technocrat's solution.

Bitcoin is a decentralised mechanism for the authentication of public records.

Its use to record "cash" transactions and to verify the ownership of tokens (the BitCoins themselves) is almost certainly just the start of something bigger (much bigger).

My initial thoughts for taking BitCoin to the next level (from early 2011), were along the following lines:

To use the BitCoin protocol to create a sort of distributed stock market, where the instruments being traded were the keys to "virtual companies" in the form of forum participation & voting rights, where the outcome of the votes has some role in controlling various intangible assets (probably in the form of collectively-controlled BitCoin wallets themselves), used to pay for the development and operational costs of various products & services. I.e. true "digital native" businesses with no permanent human employees, owners or executives, just transient part-owners with voting & forum-participation rights.

Now, I want to think bigger - instead of creating something to replace corporations, I want to create something to replace states. (Cue diabolical evil laughter: BWAHAHAHA! &c... &c... )

I.e. to create a system that contains entities that are linked by persistent (but conditional) flows of tokens -- the BitCoin equivalent of taxation, but where those flows could be voted upon in a flexible manner.

I.e. individuals can have a wallet, but part of the logic for that system is that wallets "leak" over time, and that the lost funds either get distributed randomly, or individuals can vote on how the funds will be dispersed, or perhaps the funds are dispersed in a manner controlled by a combinatorial optimization algorithm, optimizing for feedback given by individual wallet-holders: I.e. people periodically provide feedback saying how happy and/or sad they are, and the (distributed, natch) combinatorial optimization routine adjusts the weights on how the funds are distributed to maximise (some non-linear aggregating function of) the happiness of each participant.

Anyway, loads of ideas to explore in there.. and the implementation should be quite fun too! (Although perhaps not as much fun as making up stupid titles for these blog posts).