3 ms·

It's an interesting idea, but I see some major problems. 1) It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity. There's quite a lot of in

by Ronkdar 15y ago

It's an interesting idea, but I see some major problems. 1) It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity. There's quite a lot of inertia/sentiment preventing this sort of situation. If you can't insure that each person only gets one voice, then the system breaks. 2) What happens when the Goon Swarm arrives? No, I'm serious. It's hard to troll the government as it stands today. The internet sees a lot of groups out there whose only goals are to inconvenience others. This system could actually give Anonymous etc. real world power.

1880 15y ago
> It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity Actually, it's quite possible nowadays in many countries, with the introduction of smart ID cards.
- Ronkdar 15y ago
  That is... relatively scary. I feel that one of the essential features of the internet is its anonymity. Take that away and it loses some of its value.
  - jerf 15y ago
    This isn't the Internet. It may run over the Internet, but it isn't the Internet. It's a government. A more delicate balance of accountability and anonymity is called for. I'd also observe that nobody is really claiming that we must run out and immediately implement this to replace the US Federal government. Start a house-level government, or a frat-level government, or I suppose more relevantly for this crowd, use it for your open source project's governance. Work your way up, learning from the experience. Anonymity and coercion and a lot of other problems that absolutely must be solved for this to work at large scales need not necessarily be solved at smaller ones. Scale up the security later when we need to, and when we understand the space better. In the future we need better cryptography and P2P and etc etc etc, but let's learn about the space now. (There's something about the word "government" that just makes engineer's engineering sense go flying out the window and turns them right back into Waterfall designers. It's OK to iterate!)
alissa 15y ago
Alex Howard suggested this link to me about how one country is using Bank Accounts for authentication. what do you think of THAT idea?? http://egovau.blogspot.com/2011/06/turning-open-government-petitions-into.html http://egovau.blogspot.com/2011/06/turning-open-government-p...

by Ronkdar 15y ago

1880 15y ago

> It's currently impossible to tie a person down to a single online entity Actually, it's quite possible nowadays in many countries, with the introduction of smart ID cards.

Ronkdar 15y ago
That is... relatively scary. I feel that one of the essential features of the internet is its anonymity. Take that away and it loses some of its value.
- jerf 15y ago
  This isn't the Internet. It may run over the Internet, but it isn't the Internet. It's a government. A more delicate balance of accountability and anonymity is called for. I'd also observe that nobody is really claiming that we must run out and immediately implement this to replace the US Federal government. Start a house-level government, or a frat-level government, or I suppose more relevantly for this crowd, use it for your open source project's governance. Work your way up, learning from the experience. Anonymity and coercion and a lot of other problems that absolutely must be solved for this to work at large scales need not necessarily be solved at smaller ones. Scale up the security later when we need to, and when we understand the space better. In the future we need better cryptography and P2P and etc etc etc, but let's learn about the space now. (There's something about the word "government" that just makes engineer's engineering sense go flying out the window and turns them right back into Waterfall designers. It's OK to iterate!)

alissa 15y ago

Alex Howard suggested this link to me about how one country is using Bank Accounts for authentication. what do you think of THAT idea?? http://egovau.blogspot.com/2011/06/turning-open-government-petitions-into.html http://egovau.blogspot.com/2011/06/turning-open-government-p...