Bitcoin for an Efficient Open-Source Government?Eric Blair While its true that bitcoin transactions are anonymous because senders and receivers are represented by long strings of numbers (wallet addresses) instead of personal data, its public ledger logs every transaction to provide ultimate transparency. Dont confuse anonymity with privacy: anonymity means we know what youre doing but we dont know who you are, while privacy means we know who you are but we dont know what youre doing. The U.S. government seems to be increasingly outlawing both anonymity and privacy for citizens while it simultaneously becomes more secretive. This path is truly the antithesis of a free society. Yet, this lack of transparency for government and privacy for average citizens can be reversed if the government embraced bitcoin technology. For example, imagine paying at the gas pump and the funds are immediately dispersed to the proper accounts; to the gas stations wallet, $.20 per gallon to the federal government roads wallet, and about $.30 per gallon to your states road wallet (exact fuel taxes here). Not only is this far more efficient than current systems, but lets follow this through a bit more. Now imagine that the governments wallets are public where anyone can view income and expenditures in real time. Talk about transparency! Yes, I know, it sounds Utopian, idealistic, and makes too much sense to believe government would ever adopt this. A system that relies on waste, cronyism, corruption and control would obviously oppose this level of transparency no matter what the public benefits are. Another possible application for this technology as it pertains to governing is voting. Projects like BitGov are seeking ways to use a decentralized consensus network for elections and referendums. Theoretically, all voters would get a votecoin that they transfer to their preferred politicians name on election day. The algorithms security and public ledger would make voter fraud a thing of the past. On an even bigger level, if a government adopted a cryptocurrency as its national currency, it could provide complete transparency for governments, and itd be impossible to finance wars, private industry bailouts, or a massive surveillance and police state without the consent of the governed because the supply of money is fixed. In short, it would eliminate bribery. Stefan Molyneux explains in the video below, that the war on terror costs more than all of the worlds gold put together. Without the Feds ability to print endless sums of money, the war machine would die because there is very little market demand for war. What do you think, are we ready for an open-source government? Recently by Eric Blair: 