Huge amounts of money are being poured into attempting to resolve institutionalized flaws within government service delivery.
As recently as November 2017, the government of the UK committed £20 mln (approximately $27 mln in the US). Just as fintech has emerged as one of the fastest growing modern industrial sectors, it appears that ‘GovTech’ may join it in prosperity soon.
Key services which the UK’s initiative is claimed to potentially tackle, via the country’s official municipal website, are “reducing traffic jams, freeing up teachers’ time and improving the experience of patients visiting their GP.”
There are logistical issues which are not sufficiently tackled by governments the world over. Furthermore, these appear to be issues which can simply be solved through improved processes: as such, their improvement via technology is a logical next step when considering the role of automation in industrial growth.
The problem with nation states
The fact that nation state governments cling to their authority to control these processes despite their inability to provide the best services possible exposes a significant flaw in the existing system. If others can provide a better service then perhaps it’s time that we removed this obsolete middle-man altogether - and the wasted expenses for which the public foots the bill.
In this light: many citizens feel disenfranchised by the ordinance structures which their lives are governed by at present. One reason for this could be representation by a candidate they do not have faith at the national/international political level. Another might be an arguably inherent inefficiency which is enabled and encouraged by existing governance systems, as well as the vested financial interests held by influential third parties.
When you think about the subject of sovereignty the first things that probably come to mind are the restrictive borders of geographic location, and ruling political leadership of national authorities. Even in so-called democratic administrations, these authorities are most often run by a political party which has received no more than 55 percent of the popular vote (or even less for coalition governments).
Regimes, benign or not, have proven to be obtrusive to social, technological and economic progress in many ways - just like the barrier between government and technology itself.
A decentralized marketplace for government services
‘Bitnation’ hails itself as a Blockchain-based solution to the drawbacks or absence of services provided by traditional governments or “service providers” as they have been called by the Bitnation’s Founder and Chief Executive Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof when speaking to Max Keiser of RT.
Bitnation seeks to pioneer decentralized, smart-contract based governance and help to overcome political, economic and geographic barriers posed by borders and overreaching regulations. Superseding the structures traditionally provided by these nation-states; this new Ethereum-based platform is set to provide superior services which are “better, cheaper, and fairer in a distributed and voluntary way.”
As such, people can join various competing “service providers” without having to conform to location or generalized tax without their explicit consent. The dual nature of their tokenized economy (non-tradable reputation tokens and tradeable ‘PAT’ or ‘Pangea Arbitration Tokens’) is set to discourage corruption actively.
A Blockchain based neighborhood watch style service is set to be one of the first services rolled out and will act as one of the early real-life use cases for the platform.