I thought this up last week, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the first. It's a combination of a few popular ideas. The financial crisis got people think

I thought this up last week, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the first. It's a combination of a few popular ideas. The financial crisis got people thinking critically about what money is, especially the people who hopped on the Ron Paul boat back in the 2008 election season. (I hope you'll hear me out even if you consider those folks to be crazy people.) That's when I first understood that money is debt. Bitcoin gave us blockchains: the ability to create ledgers that we can agree on without authority. You send transactions to move amounts in the ledger. Ethereum allows us to create arbitrary transaction types that modify the state that transaction type controls. The Clojure and React communities got me thinking more about different ways to think about state. State is the result of transactions, and if you keep either the transactions or the previous states around, you can control time in your program, among other things. Apache Kafka, Samza, and related projects introduced me to the concept of a database as a transaction log. One potentially useful application that my coworker pointed out is that we could write events to a Kafka database, then change what they mean later. State is a function of a list of transactions and a transaction processing function. You can change your transaction processing function at any time. Anyone who has the transactions can build their own view of the world with a function they define, so everyone can have their own calculation of merit, for instance. I've thought for some time that while governments are useful, it'd be better if we could find ways to achieve the same ends without giving anyone power over us. I've been exploring ways to use blockchains to give society the power to self-organize and provide the things we currently need governments to provide for us. Merit capitalism is a combination of those ideas, and probably more parts of the idea soup in my brain.