Blockchain Project Bitnation Marches Pangea Beta Forward
One of the earliest blockchain projects, Bitnation, wants to aggregate all of the values of government into a distributed software platform, from identity and contracts to resolution services. Bitnation seeks to promote the idea that government can be a service, “geographically unbound, decentralized and voluntary.”
Bitnation founder Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof aims high when it comes to the project at hand: retooling the nation-state.
“People tend to take the nation-state model for granted, like it’s something that’s always been there and always will be there,” Tempelhof said, speaking to CCN.com. “That’s inaccurate. It’s only a 400 year old oligopoly, and it has had horrible consequences. It’s time to change the paradigm now, and we want to show people how easy it is to opt out of the system through creating your own nation.” The Bitnation team sees a digital horizon beyond Democracy.
“Democracy is a ‘one-size-fits-all-model’ that might be suitable in extremely homogenous environments, but it’s sub-optimal in most circumstances,” she explained. “Holacracy allows for much greater individual freedom, people simply form their own groups as they wish, and then it’s up to others to contribute to their group, or not.” Holacracy is not new concept, representing a system in which power is distributed.
“We’re trying to make it more efficient, more liquid, through using the blockchain,” Tempelhof said. “We deserve better than the Nation State Oligopoly: we deserve to be free citizens of the world.”
The distributed government, Bitnation, is open-source, and the team encourages people to contribute to the code. The Bitnation regime currently wishes to deploy on the Ethereum network.
“The more variations we have, and test, the faster we’ll be able to define the right models for the right purpose, and evolve them,” she said.
Tempelhof says Ethereum’s technology is optimized for the type of services Bitnation looks to offer. Just because the technology is on Ethereum now, doesn’t mean it will be there forever.
“We’re loyal to our citizen experience, not to any particular blockchain, and ultimately, we aim to be blockchain agnostic,” Tempelhof notes, which has a Slack Channel viewable here.
“We’re very excited about our Pangea Beta platform,” Tempelhof said. “It will be quite different from the alpha, with a more narrow focus on creating a ‘blockchain jurisdiction’, and a different much more mobile phone centric UI approach.”
Images from Bitnation.
