All around the globe, there’s a heated discussion taking place about borders and immigration. Nationalism, citizenship, and refugees dominate news headlines regardless of where you live. The intensity surrounding these topics has led many to ponder what it would take to live in a world without borders. BitNation has done more than simply dream of a borderless world — this cryptocurrency-powered platform has created one.
What Is BitNation?
In short, BitNation is a platform that allows you to conduct government-sanctioned transactions and agreements without having to deal with the government. Gone are the bureaucratic rules and excessive red tape that plague every process from getting married to securing a new ID card. Now, these functions are managed in a peer-to-peer community, with none of the headaches of dealing with an official government office.
Officially, BitNation is the world’s first Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation (DBVN).
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, CEO Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof describes the platform as “a Decentralized Organization (DO), offering Governance 2.0 services: borderless, decentralized, and voluntary blockchain-based governance applications through a user-friendly and cost-efficient platform.”
It’s managed through the Pangea Jurisdiction app. BitNation users can create their own virtual nations, complete with their own constitutions, economic models, and rules of diplomacy. Then, other users can decide to join a particular nation and sign the constitution. However, their signature isn’t binding — they can leave at any time.
Once they’ve joined a virtual nation, they can make agreements, sign contracts, and settle disputes with other citizens of the same nation. As they complete contracts in good standing or successfully settle disputes, they’re awarded reputation points. These points are tracked solely using blockchain technology. Based on their reputation scores, users are awarded the Pangea Arbitration Token (PAT). PAT is an ERC20-compatiable in-app token designed for use within any official Pangea nation.
The blockchain-controlled PAT distribution system ensures that users can’t buy a good reputation or use their popularity to influence contracts and agreements. This is essentially a bias-free government entity.
What Services Can You Execute Through BitNation?
In December 2015, Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky attended the world’s first digital wedding through BitNation. “The whole world was invited, and it went almost without a hitch,” he wrote. That wedding was the result of BitNation’s partnership with the Estonian government, which allowed public notary services for e-residents of Estonia. That wedding was only recorded via blockchain — not with the local government office. Also, in late 2016, VICE’s Sarah Souli profiled Dirk von Heinrichshorst, who registered his German countryside castle as an embassy through BitNation. Since then, Heinrichshorst has used his estate to shelter refugees and host Bitcoin weddings, and he accepts cryptocurrency as payment via BitNation.
Effectively, BitNation is a platform where users can register for insurance, diplomacy, security, and identification, and they can handle disputes in a timely and safe manner — all without a third party.
BitNation is a still new platform, and thus, the team is still working through the legality of its documents across various territories. However, virtual citizenship is quickly gaining favor. The Atlantic’s James Bridle writes that BitNation proposes “a peer-to-peer voluntary governance system to replace the arbitrariness of birth as the decider of one’s citizenship.” With time, virtual citizenship could become much easier to attain and maintain.
The BitNation Team
BitNation was founded in 2014 and currently boasts 15,000 citizens across 500 registered nations. There are also 50,000 open source community members. More than 5,000 contracts have notarized since the platform’s inception, and a whopping 200,000 lines of code have been written to form and run the network of virtual nations.
Founder & CEO
Tarkowski Tempelhof serves as founder and CEO. She told Bitcoin Magazine she created BitNation to align with her worldview. “To me, nations and their arbitrary borders always seemed pointless and I’ve been thinking about different types of voluntary and competitive governance systems for the last decade or so,” she said. Prior to launching BitNation, she authored The Googlement- The DIY Guide To Starting Your Own Nation (And Changing The World), and she was founder and CEO of the Shabakat Corporation, a grassroots organization based in Libya.
She’s backed by an experienced team of engineers and developers who are experts in iOS, Android, JavaScript, and AI. Some of BitNation’s key advisors include Rick Falkvinge, a political evangelist of Sweden’s Pirate Party, and Vinay Gupta, the founder of London-based Hexayurt Guy Capital Partners.
Conclusion
As cryptocurrency continues to gain momentum and popularity, many companies have looked far beyond the currency’s purchasing power to make a real difference in the world. BitNation looks to make the biggest impact yet by granting complete sovereignty to its users and offering a new era of governance that could change the way the world is run.
TO FIND MORE ABOUT BitNation, VISIT bitnation.co