De Lege Ferenda: Koine

LiechtensteinMalbun03.07.18.jpg

Koine - ''feminine singular of Greek 'koinos' - "common, ordinary" [1], "common, public, shared, general, ordinary" from PIE kom- "beside, near, by, with" [2] - as opposed to ... ''idios "one's own" cf.[3] :)

Koine [pronunciation like 'coin-ee'] is the nickname, which only few persons have heard up to now, of a project of mine going as far back as to the ancient 2015.

I find it to be a description of inevitable reality. Kinda prophecy. So loud and clear.

I throw it here message-in-a-bottle style, addressed to 'who ever catches it'', but I bet it will be my favorite Liechtensteinians [4]-[6], before any other.

Lets do it! Together!!! [7][8]

In my previous and first essay of the De Lege Ferenda series [6] I expressed my admiration of the general approach:

<< On 28 August 2018, the Ministry for General Government Affairs and Finance of Liechtenstein published the consultation report on the new Blockchain Act (Act on Transaction Systems based on Trustworthy Technologies (VT) (Blockchain Act; VT Act; VTG)).

The government has decided to regulate not only the current Blockchain-applications (in particular cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs)), but also to establish a legal basis for the entire scope of application of the token economy according to a long-term approach, which should also meet the needs of future generations. >> [5]

Such a strategical deep future perspective perhaps could be only compared with the success of the US Securities Act of 1933 [9] projecting into the $20t [10] US capital market of today. The 'envy of the world'. [11]

For many reasons [12]-[22], lots of which I'm yet to write down, I find that the blockchain [23]-[25] is orders of magnitude stronger enabler of unrestricted capital flow and wealth aggregation. Fiat is as much scalable is scope and resolution as its human hierarchy architecture is. Quite bottlenecked.

Thus, the fruitful direction is rather to implement the blockchain in law [26] than to enforce law over blockchain.

The draft Blockchain Act of Liechtenstein is a step into this direction. It provides some important definitions, for first time on national, not constituent level [27] and for first time with an Act so high in the normative hierarchy [28][29] :

<<Trusted technologies (Art. 3 VE-VTG): Trusted technologies (VT) are technologies that guarantee the integrity of tokens.>>

which reflects the technically achieved reality of the self-enforced ledger content commonality and uniformity, the fact of 'trust from within' what relates to blockchains, and:

<<Definitions (Art. 5 VE-VTG): The law contains a number of definitions, including the term "token". A token is described as an information on a VT system that embodies justifiable claims or membership rights against a person, rights to goods or other absolute or relative rights.>>

in short: legal treatment of claims tokenization,

which also perfectly alignes with the EU/EEA Digital Single Market rules and agenda [30].

This is unprecedented generalization without any shadow of doubt, BUT ... just imagine:

- What if a law gives general definition of a 'currency'?

This is the core idea idea behind my Koine - to treat cryptocurrencies as any other currency.

To break the barrier between fiat and crypto. To harness the colossal potential energy between them.

Up to now currency is more or less 'defined' by exemplification. It is indeed taxonomy, ennumeration, but not definition per se. The national laws nail down a 'legal tender' [31] and by analogy accept that the other sovereigns' [32] legal tenders are 'forex' [33].

The apparent differences between the major fiat currencies like CHF, USD, EUR and, say, the Zimbabwean or Transnistrian national currencies are left out of any positive legal definition, in the same way as we yet have no strict legal criteria to distinguish strong from weak cryptocurrencies [34].

Yet, it is apparent too that, say, USD and BTC have more in common between eachother than USD with other fiat currencies or BTC with other cryptocurrencies. Most of the sovereign fiat currencies are weaker than many blockchain ones.

- What if we IN GENERAL manage to define a currency in terms of security of transaction?

Or other measurable specifications. Like the classical monetary functions of MESVUA [35] and/or other quantitatively assessible features? Regardless of whether it is sovereign-made or chain-made.

It would be like what Gibor Basri have proposed in astronomy for classification of celestial bodies [36]-[38] regadless of where and how they orbit and what stage of their life they are into.

A simple set of criteria to define and rule them all?

What if we enact these definitions into an enforceable law?

What if we have in hand the community power of being key part of extensive network of jurisdictions [39] to spread it out as a global standard?

This will have multiple positive effects. It will boost crypto and fiat finance AND the economy in general. Hard to ennumerate in the brevity of the essay form. A thick volume won't be enough - the intersection is everywhere, amplification effect upon everything. Will mark only two of all here.:

I. BANKING in BITCOIN

Unfortunatelly, the meme which rules yet the sentiment of the masses is that the 'good new crypto' is against the 'evil old banking'. Fortunatelly, nothing working could be made on such a utter lack-of-sense basis.

My firm conviction is that crypto is the best thing which happened to the banks and financial industry for centuries.

IF crypto can move dollars [40], [41] over the blockchain - THEN what prevents the fiat infra [42] to move cryptographic tokens?
Visualize: VISA and SWIFT transfering BTC.
See.: banks openning and running accounts denominated directly in crypto.

We've already being there: from at least 7 thousand years with moving noble metals [43] with written records into fractional reserve [44] fiduciary [45] banking, until 1971 [46] AND even we are just here with it again now in crypto with the dominance of the centralized fractional reserve banking cryptocurrency exchanges. Yeah, all of them.

Why should we have separate 'hybrid' institutions of cryptocurency exchanges if we have the splendid multimillenia ones - the Banks - to do that job with unprecedented skill, experience and expertise?

At the end of the day fiat is double-entry bookkepping [47] and blockchain is tripple-entry bookkeeping [24]. Both are standardized into strict rule sets. Which makes them (and any other rigorously stated forms of transaction ledgers, or accountancy) easily convertible one into another.

If the only possible universal language [48] is ... translation, then the only possible universal currency is ... conversion.

Banking on crypto means that banks could bank on stablecoins, too. Closing the circle. Self-referenial recurrence opens the gates of the circulus virtuosus [49] paradise.

II. AUTOMATED TAXATION

If universal meta-currency achieved by conversion then it won't matter what currency one pays its taxes into, as far as transfer of exact value guaranteed, the same way as transfer of precise meaning guaranteed by a meta-language [50].

In his splendid essay ''How Can Bitcoin Prevent Money Laundering'' of January 2, 2018 [51], Ohad Asor [52] outlined some thoughts of his, so apparenty efficient and simple that very few notice and even fewer understand it.

<<I suggest the following regulation to cryptocurrencies. A business that would like to accept them as a means of payment, will have to declare to the tax authorities a list of addresses (public keys), and they’ll be obligated to accept payments to those addresses only. In other words, all their income is visible to the tax authorities without any need to report anything.

Enforcement of this is no less good than traditional enforcement. The only way to catch a business not paying tax is to come as a customer and not get an invoice. Same here: come as a customer, and ask to deposit coins into a different address than the business previously declares. So the enforcement abilities of tax payment don’t go worse than the current situation.

This can not only replace invoicing but also replace accounting. The tax authorities can then track not only the income but also the expenses namely deals done between other businesses, and automatically calculate the net profit. Obviously this is also a much more transparent, easy, and fair way to perform legitimate businesses and prove their legitimacy, simply by doing all transactions in the addresses privately submitted to the tax authorities.>>

The fiat institutions like banks, tax offices etc. natural job is to verify the entitled ones. The entitled ones over records (positive/asset or negative/liability) onto the common centralized log book what any fiat system is.

The bank and tax secrecy could be maintained by cryptographic methods [53], but still because anything physical requires enforcing the role of authorities or authorized institutions is uncircumventable in the business of identity verification. Yeah, what we call KYC [54], KYCC [55], AML [56], ATF [57], CRS [58] and all these scary abbreviations - to confirm and deliver compliance services to and before whom it may concern.

The 'problems' associated with blockchain enabled automated instant taxation are of the kind of: too transparent public spending, too cheap tax system operation, too redundant tax people workforce ... lower taxes, inherent prevention of money laundering, etc. to name a few.

NOTE again that it is all NOT about giving a fiat [59] status of cryprocurrencies by fiat [60] means, but about common legal definition of all currency in general.

Resources.:

[1] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/koine

[2] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/coeno-

[3] - https://www.etymonline.com/word/idio-

[4] - https://www.llv.li/files/srk/vnb-blockchain-gesetz.pdf

[5] - https://www.pwc.ch/en/insights/regulation/liechtenstein-publishes-draft-of-the-new-blockchain-act.html

[6] - https://steemit.com/tauchain/@karov/de-lege-ferenda-intro

[7] - http://www.behest.io/

[8] - https://steemit.com/blockchain/@karov/behest-for-tauchain

[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Act_of_1933

[10] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(numbers)#1012

[11] - https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speech-clayton-2018-05-02