These could become the basis for city apps. Obviously, use city coins to pay locals. Less obviously, use them to recruit talent, invest in companies, and generally bet on a city’s growth.
A bit like municipal equity, instead of municipal debt.
Blockchains offer the possibility of building genuinely public digital infrastructure.
Just like you can write valuable open source code for a city, you can now create a valuable open state database for a city, a digital commons to read from & write to.
Early days, of course…
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Municipal bonds have existed forever. But they are traded in inaccessible venues and don't use modern tech.
The concept of municipal equity, or a natively digital cognate thereof, is new.
What if city residents, working together, could build value & share upside?
The advantage for every city to legalize citycoins is simple: they are a new source of funds for a city.
Figure out the split. The city government gets X% of the coins. Then allow N private operators to build competing city coins with different features. And let market decide.
As outlined in this series of articles, every country that's not the USA or PRC will shift to national stacks & neutral protocols over the 2020s.
National stacks for domestic trade & communications.
Neutral protocols for international access to the same. balajis.com/tag/india/
BTC is akin to digital gold, and cannot be frozen or seized by any state. It is this property that makes BTC so precious for safeguarding national security.
A network that cannot be shut down by any state can be relied upon in time of conflict. balajis.com/why-india-shou…
Crypto makes security tangible. When an account is hacked, the funds are withdrawn right away.
Not all hacks have pecuniary motivations. National security hacks are in a different class.
Still, the capture-the-flag aspect of crypto — where an attacker has a strong incentive to instantly use the private keys, lest funds are moved — is a sharp contrast to silent compromise.
You know who isn't good at security? Government IT developers.
You know who needs to constantly think about security? Crypto developers.
The predator/prey aspect of crypto security is creating a generation of engineers who know how to harden systems. digitalguardian.com/blog/top-10-bi…
Here's one of the books I referenced, which should be handed out at Miami airport.
Now that I think about it, if @depalman can get a Kindle edition, we might even do a mass purchase. An electronic bookdrop: first 1000 copies free if you write a review? amazon.com/Man-Who-Invent…
You can read it online for free if you sign up at the Internet Archive, though there may be some kind of rate limiting in terms of the number of simultaneous users. archive.org/details/manwho…
What we need: a censorship-resistant inflation feed.
The on-chain, crypto oracle version of MIT's Billion Prices Project. No editorialization, just an undeletable history of prices.
Build it pseudonymously. Build it with an eye to a ban. Build it now so it's ready then.
All you need to look at is recent history in other countries, or the CDC on masks, or the censorship of the lab leak theory, to know that the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats.
So, the decentralized network will have to do so.
If inflation censorship occurs the on-chain inflation feed would be the crypto flippening in several respects.
1) decentralized cryptographic truth would be more trusted than centralized emanations of press & state 2) an on-chain app would be one of the world's most popular apps
It is also a technical innovation, just not on the dimension people think.
Public blockchains are massively multiclient databases. They support fewer transactions-per-second than a traditional database, in return for millions of simultaneous root users.
Public blockchains are massively multiclient databases, where every user is a root user. They're useful for storing shared state between users, particularly when that shared state represents valuable data that users want to export without fail, like money. balajis.com/yes-you-may-ne…
But I also think this a key point to articulate: rather than a few people with root access to PayPal's centralized database, anyone with the right public/private key pair can move funds on a public blockchain.