Hack: Ethereum vs. the NRA

Posted on February 23, 2018. Filed under: Uncategorized |

So I’ve been obsessed with this idea of distributed lobbying on the blockchain. Basically, I think it’s bullshit that the top 50 companies in the US have an efficient way to put capital against influencing legislation and judicial outcomes, but we as a self organized and distributed population of individuals don’t have an equal ability. We can protest (now more effectively than ever as a result of communication tools like Facebook and encrypted messaging apps that let us self organize), we can vote, we can speak (now louder than ever as a result of communication tools like Twitter that help us self organize our voice), but money talks…and we as a group don’t have an efficient tool for self organizing our capital to push against the organizing forces in our country. I’ve seen more money pooled in the crypto space around theoretical projects than the entire pharmaceutical industry, oil and gas industry, etc…spend through lobbying in a year. It’s doable to exert force against legislation if we can create a trust model that allows us to self organize our capital. Here’s an experiment I’ve decided to run in this vein:

put whatever amount of eth you want to use to fight the NRA into this address 0x33Bd9F7419296a4400F81057b59EA054474C3CCC (anybody can audit the amount of funds and changes in account balance via https://etherscan.io/address/0x33bd9f7419296a4400f81057b59ea054474c3ccc).

It’s not a donation. It’s not an investment. It’s not a pledge. It’s something inbetween the three. It’s a decision to financially join a collective that is alligned around impact and economics.

As the administrator of this collective, i promise to deploy the capital to further the fight against the NRA. I don’t know yet all of the most efficient channels but likely candidates include: independent lobbyists, lobbying firms, direct campaign contributions, surrounding awareness campaigns, and whatever other channels help to translate capital into political and legislative influence.

I promise to report to you how and when i allocate the money.

I will use a private telegram group as the primary channel for reporting and being accountable to you and also for hosting a dialogue and planning forum amongst our community of contributors. This is how we will organize collective thought and action, but ultimately it will be my job to listen to the community and act in our shared interest when deploying capital.

i promise to send you back your % of the remaining capital at any time if you are unhappy with the way i’m deploying it. If you put in $100 worth of eth and decide 6 months later that i’m doing a bad job advancing our cause, if in that time the pool has spent 20% of the capital raised, you can walk way with your remaining $80. If you are happy with our work, keep your money in and help to grow the collective by recruiting like-minded others and their capital

I wish i could make a bonding curve for this pool such that the order that you send eth in will determine the % of the total pool you can take out in a way that financially rewards early participation and support of a growing movement, but I can’t administratively handle that just socially hacking on an eth wallet. As a hack to this, i am going to take 5% of all eth sent in and put it into a bonus pool, and on a discretionary basis dole it out to the earliest and most meaningful supporters of the project as defined by the amount and date they put in, their actions in growing the capital base, their ideas and actions in the private telegram channel, etc. I will report all bonus transactions with links to such transactions in the public telegram group. Basically if you are responsible for increasing the impact of this pool in combatting the NRA, you have some claim to the bonus pool and I’ll do my best to recognize contributions fairly and administer it accordingly.

To participate, send eth to this address and then immediately email jordan.cooper@gmail.com with the public address you sent it from (and if you are sending from Coinbase, also the amount of your contribution b/c public addy gets obscured in the transaction). your email must be timestamped ahead of the block that your transaction shows up on so as to prevent false claims. I will reply with confirmation and a link to join the telegram group. If you don’t want to claim your contribution with your identity, that’s cool but you’ll forgo your ability to redeem your contribution or earn any of the bonus pool. Basically, in the absence of being able to codify this rule set at the smart contract level, i’m using communication tools like email and telegram to handle redemption requests and other messages btwn you the contributor and me the administrator.

you shouldn’t have to take counterparty risk in this agreement, but this is a hack

you shouldn’t have to trust me to do the right thing, but this is a hack. for this experiment you can use my online reputation, my decade of writing on this blog with a deep focus on ethics, and whatever social cred I’ve earned in the technology community and calibrate the risk of me being a fraud as an input into your decision to contribute.

you shouldn’t have to trust my discretion and bonus pool mechanic but this is a hack. the size and vintage of your economic support should dictate your claim to an outsized portion of the pool upon exit, independent of my judgement. If discretion or judgement is needed to quantify non-economic contributions to our collective goal (i.e. referrals, awareness, etc), we should have governance to make those allocations together, or at least you should have recourse to remove me if I’m not fair…but this is a hack.

but there’s no generalized platform or smart contracts available to help me administer this experiment without trust and hacks. I want that platform. it’s why i’m doing this experiment. I care about fighting the NRA. you care about electric vehicle tax credits, someone else cares about animal rights legislation…every cause, whether socially, economically, or some combination therein motivated, deserves the ability to harness self organized capital as a tool to advance it’s political agenda. the 50 biggest companies in the US do this all the time via lobbying to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year…democracy talks when electing officials, but unfortunately money talks when it comes down to votes. if we are to achieve collective economic force in a truly distributed and self organized way, the trust model between contributors of capital (aka a constituency) and the administrator(s) of that capital needs to evolve. We need to redefine concepts of decision making, accountability, recourse, and even economic gain associated with such efforts, and the blockchain is a perfect place to do that.

So consider this a campaign to fight the NRA w our collective ETH

Consider this a commitment on my part to put time and energy into efficiently deploying our collective capital

Consider this an experiment, or proof of concept, or proof of need for a more generalized framework for self organizing our capital as a tool of force (with a true and honest recognition that you cannot decouple the concepts of profit/wealth and capital regardless of it existing in a social or political context)

Consider this a call to design and build the generalized and trustless version of this experiment that will enable anyone, regardless of their reputation or social reach, to harness the capital of a widely distributed community or constituency and both ask for and earn the right to point it at the political institutions both government and surrounding, that shape legislation, judicial decisions, and as a result the way our society operates and is organized. I’l happily invest in you to work on this problem and help you design it and build it: jordan.cooper@gmail.com

I’ll start by putting in $5000 worth of eth. To be very transparent: Although philosophically I believe it’s a stronger design if I am eligible for the bonus pool that I will be administering, I commit to not pay myself from the bonus pool for hygiene and simplicity in this experiment. I say it’s a stronger design because part of the point of redefining how we self-organize capital via the blockchain is to explore new points of optimization btwn things like impact and wealth creation to create “organizations” or “collectives” that look different than the way we organize work and capital today. In doing so, if we find the right ones, we have the potential to draw in more work, better people, more capital, thereby leveling the playing field when competing against the existing organizing forces of private enterprise and government institutions that currently shape our society and day to day. So yea, if my contribution is the biggest and the first and this effort grows in size and scope and impact and capital raised, I should stand to profit along the way…by design. In practice, again, I won’t allocate any of the bonus pool to myself, but I don’t expect that people using the generalized form of this experiment (i.e. organizers/administrators) would or should recuse themselves from the economic upside of a successful campaign or movement.

DISCLAIMERS:
1) I think I have a sense for the amount of effort that will go into running this experiment, processing transactions and administering our capital in a way that is impactful, but if it turns out to be a massive effort i reserve the right to send you your ETH back at my discretion, or whatever portion of it the collective hasn’t spent.
2) I have a pretty in depth understanding of the security and custodial mechanics of crypto and will adhere to best possible practices…but I reserve the right to apologize with no further recourse if something bad happens…