文章探讨了通过加密货币改革政府运作和税收制度的可能性。作者设想了一个基于加密货币投票的税收系统，公民可以根据自己的意愿投票决定税率，并按比例支付税款。这种模式旨在减少腐败、提高政府效率，并增强公民对政府的控制力。文章还讨论了主权者的角色，以及如何在保障基本权利的同时，赋予其应对紧急情况的权力。作者认为，通过加密货币和去中心化的方式，可以构建一个更灵活、更负责任的政府体系。

💡 **加密货币投票税收系统：** 提议通过加密货币进行税收投票，税收比例与支付的税款成正比，以避免“搭便车”行为。该系统允许公民投票决定税率，并根据共识税率缴纳税款，理论上约50%的税收是自愿的。

💰 **“收入钱包”与“支出钱包”：** 为了追踪现实世界的交易，建议使用“收入钱包”和“支出钱包”来记录收入和支出，政府将对两者之间的差额征税。通过审计来防止欺诈，并可将特定项目（如杂货、医疗保健）标记为免税支出。

🏛️ **政府机构的独立性与问责制：** 设想政府机构（如地方政府、军队）拥有独立的钱包和税率，公民可以针对不同机构进行投票。这种模式下，各机构对其资金负责，并对公众负责，从而减少了对其他问责制度的需求。

👑 **主权者的角色与权力：** 提出主权者在理论上拥有绝对权力，但应遵守基本标准（如权利法案），并通过税收投票获得资金支持。在紧急情况下，主权者可以行使自由裁量权，但需要向纳税人解释其行为。

⚖️ **应对复杂情况的挑战：** 文章承认没有任何规则系统能够完全解决所有情况，并以美国宪法为例，说明即使有反腐败措施，也可能存在其他未被考虑的漏洞。加密货币投票系统旨在提供一种更灵活、更适应变化的管理模式。

Published on May 25, 2025 5:00 PM GMT

A problem with all systems of government is that whenever a person is given power over something, he can do whatever he wants with that power. An example might be that citizens vote to fund a police force, but then the police extract protection money from all the local businesses in excess of what the citizens were intending to pay in taxes when they set up the police force. If you set up a higher government over the police to police the police, then what stops that higher government from doing something similar to what the police were doing?

Voting causes another set of problems, in that votes can be rigged, and voters can be ignorant.

But suppose that tax payers were able to vote for their own tax rates, and voting power was proportionate to taxes paid? And suppose the vote took place via crypto, so that the results of the vote could neither be rigged nor ignored?

In order to avoid freeloaders, each tax payer would not individually pay what he thought he should pay, but all the tax payers collectively would pay whatever the consensus rate was. In this case, theoretically, about 50% of the taxes paid would be voluntary. This is because if more than half the taxes paid were involuntary, then the tax payers would have the power to lower their tax rate.

I think this system would not work until we already had a world where it was normal to pay for things via crypto. Then a government could set up a system for their own country within some preexisting crypto infrastructure (like ADA, or ICP).

Practical details about how it could work:

Crypto cannot fully track everything that happens in the real world. So, I think in order to do this, people would have to do something like declare an "income wallet" and an "expense wallet". Taxes would be extracted from the difference between the income going into the "income wallet" and expenses leaving the "expense wallet." There would have to be occasional audits to punish people for cheating. The government could optionally declare some items as tax deductible, such as items flagged with "groceries", "healthcare", or possibly "rent", so that people could pay for these through tax deductible expense wallets.

Examples:

An employee receives all their salary through a declared "income wallet." To pay for living expenses, they transfer a portion of their salary to their declared "expense wallet", with which they pay for items that are flagged as basic necessities, such as groceries and healthcare. They pay for other things (like entertainment) by some other means, or possibly directly from their income wallet. The government taxes them on the difference between their income wallet and expense wallet according to the tax rate voted upon by tax payers.A business owner, in addition to his basic necessities, can pay for business expenses by his expense wallet. All his business income would come in through his income wallet. Depending on how the legal structure was set up, it might be required to have separate wallets for individuals and for businesses.An investor, before he made an investment, would put the money he intended to deploy in his expense wallet. Then he'd buy his investments through the expense wallet. Whenever he took profits, he'd take them through the income wallet.

Theoretically, ALL forms of taxation could be handled through this one system. I think it would be harder to cheat than one might think, because crypto is a public ledger. For instance, if Steam sold a game which they flagged as entertainment, but the buyer tried to flag it as groceries to have it be tax deductible, then there would be a discontinuity which an automated system could easily pick up on. Both sides of the transaction would have to lie in order for an item to be flagged incorrectly.

This system would work well with largely autonomous government agencies. For instance, the local government, state government, the monarch, and the military could all have separate wallets with their own tax rate. If a citizen, for instance, loved the military, loved his local government, but hated the monarch and the state, he could vote for taxes for the military and his local government, but vote for a tax rate of 0% for the monarch and state. Each branch of government then would be individually accountable to the tax paying public.

If each branch of government is independently accountable to the public for their funding, then it seems to me that no other system of accountability would be necessary. Each branch of government could be largely autonomous. For instance, the police could recruit their own members according to their own preferences without interference from an elected official, and likewise with the military. If they stepped out of line, either they would be punished by higher branches of government, or defunded by the public.

One problem would be that a government agency could choose to pay taxes. They would do this so that they would get voting power to raise taxes, without losing anything in the process, because whatever they pay through taxes would come back to themselves. This behavior would be punished if there were many autonomous branches of government, so that most of whatever a government agency would pay in taxes would go to some other agency.

There could also be a problem that some actors could vote for a billion percent tax rate in order to skew the average. I have thought of two solutions to this problem:

Have a maximum allowable tax rate for any government agency (maybe like 3-5% sounds reasonable to me).Anyone who votes for a tax rate more than 1 standard deviation above the mean would have to personally pay whatever tax rate they voted for, whereas everybody else just pays the average.  Maybe if there were a system that relied on standard deviations, then they should ignore tax rates of 0% when calculating the standard deviation, because there will probably always be some people who vote for 0% no matter what.

It would be cool if the system were set up so that government agencies could be added or removed. One possible way this could work would be that the sovereign declares a new wallet that he'd like to use to fund a new government agency. If more than 50% of the voting power votes for a non-zero tax rate for this new wallet, then it becomes an official new government agency for which people are obligated to pay taxes. Likewise, if at any time, 2/3 of the voting power votes for a tax rate of 0 for any government agency, that agency is abolished and no one has to pay tax to it anymore. In this case, if a citizen thinks that his tax rate is way too high, but he doesn't want the agency to be entirely abolished, it would be rational for him to vote for a 0.00001% tax rate. A tax rate of 0% would mean that the tax payer does not want that government agency to exist at all.

According to Goedel's theorem, there is no logical system which is both consistent and complete.  As this applies to human organizations, I think it means that there can be no system of rules that can adequately address all possible circumstances.  I think this means in practice, some degree of arbitrary power is necessary to be able to respond effectively to novel situations.

So I was thinking it might be best if the sovereign in theory has absolute power, but with a couple caveats. He should by default promise to uphold several basic standards (like what's in the Bill of Rights). Also, if he were part of this crypto voter based voting system, then his funding would depend on popularity among the tax payers.

So, by default, the sovereign should act according to widely known traditions (like the Bill of Rights), but in novel situations, he would have the right to act however he pleased, but he would be incentivized to try to justify his actions to the tax payers, or else his funding would be cut.

 

An example of how no system can adequately protect against all circumstances:  The founding fathers were familiar with religious wars and religious persecution, so they established a separation of religion and state.  But they were not familiar with plutocracy as it exists today.  So, we have a state with property rights, but no checks on wealth being used to subvert the government.  We have a central bank with power to print unlimited money with no oversight from congress and a government with legalized bribery (called lobbying).  This seems like a huge issue to me.  But according to Goedels' theorem, even if the US constitution had some anti-corruption measures in it, there would still be some other way that was unaccounted for which could be used to subvert the government.  I think in theory, whenever constraints are placed on the government to avoid abuse, those constraints can be used as an opening through which one could attack the government.  I think my idea of the sovereign obeying constraints by default, but in theory having unlimited power, but being dependent upon funding by tax payer vote, is an elegant solution to this problem.  Hopefully when some conspiracy arose in order to subvert the government, the sovereign would exercise arbitrary power to put it down, and attempt to publicly justify what he had done.  If the tax payers were wise, then they would reward or punish the sovereign according to his behavior.
 

Another issue with voting: a person cannot give informed consent to an idea which he does not understand.  I think this means that the ideas that will be implemented tend to be understood by only about half of the ruling class.  Suppose there were an idea which required one to be in the 80th percentile of political wisdom to understand, and another idea which would not work as well, but which could be understood by people in the 40th percentile.  Then the idea in the 80th percentile would get 20% of the vote, and the idea in the 40th percentile would get 40% of the vote (everyone in between the 40th and 80th percentiles).  I think an idea is stable at around the 50th percentile.  Any idea significantly more complicated, and too few people understand it to support it.  Any idea significantly dumber, and too many people will realize that the idea is dumb for the idea to get any support.  So, a restricted voting class can result in superior policy if the voting class is wiser than the general public.  I would think if the society were at least partially meritocratic, then that means richer people would on average be more qualified to vote than poorer people, and so this system would have a wiser voting class than in the case of unlimited suffrage.  
 

If I were dictator, I would not immediately implement such a system.  It is complicated, so there may be means of subverting it that would be hard to discern ahead of time.  I would declare my intention to set up such a system a few years in the future, so that smart people could try to find ways of attacking the system.  If it seemed to people in-the-know that a way was found to keep the system secure from subversion, then a public announcement would be made that the system would be implemented on a certain date a few years into the future.  If the system were set up correctly to start with, I think it would be extremely hard to subvert.  

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