Australia: The Land Where Bitcoin Gets Political

Australia: The Land Where Bitcoin Gets Political

Bitcoin gets a lot of press in major markets like China and the United States, but one of the most fervent Bitcoin markets in the world is Australia. At the start of 2015, it was estimated that Australia manages 7% of the global Bitcoin market, a very impressive amount of control for a nation of fewer than 25 Million people. To put this into perspective, the amount of Bitcoin owned and controlled in Australia would give every Australian citizen $15 USD in Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is a very big deal in Australia, and now, one set of young politicians are ready to start building their plan of governance around the digital technology.

The Flux Party

Max Kaye and Natan Spataro are developing the new political group to help streamline the implementation of the will of the people. Current Australian politics have led to gridlock and even a national poll to help resolve issues. This inspired Kaye and Spatar o to come up with a plan using the Power of the people and Bitcoin together.

The Flux Party, which has already received over 1,000 members for this fall’s election, would have six senators voting transparently for legislation after it is put to an online vote, so in theory, each Senator would have a 16.67% voting power. Each voting member would get some Bitcoin to use for future votes, which they can use, trade, or allocate to a group that they support in a proxy.

One small problem that hasn’t been flushed out apparently is what happens when more than 50% vote for a measure. If the vote comes back that 57% want something, would four senators vote for it, or only three? Will the vote have to move in almost 17% thresholds to gain another vote? This could cause real-world problems in the logistics of real-world governance.

"This ancient system we've got of representative democracy, which at the time liberated us from monarchies and was awesome, now we're at a point where it's become this monster," Spataro said to Reuters in an interview. “We're in a society now that's got the Internet and when democracy in its current form was conceived, you had to sail on a ship from England to get here. This model wasn't designed for this world. "

Not everyone is impressed with this idea of using a less human and more computerized system of governance. Dr. Adrian Lee of the University of Technology in Sydney says he hasn’t seen anyone use Bitcoin’s blockchain technology this way, but voters are still human, and would have to still be trusted to vote as instructed.

"They're just the modern version of something that's always been around: utopian political system designers," states Peter Chen, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sydney. "They're obviously guys who are really focused on the tech thing and that has always been the problem with the e- democracy people. They're often really tech-driven and they need political scientists at the brainstorming floor to say 'Well, I don't know if that'd work’."

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Original post : http://www.bitcoingeek.me/australia-land-bitcoin-gets-political/

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