BITNATION The Pangea Jurisdiction: The Internet of Sovereignty

The Internet of Sovereignty

Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, Eliott Teissonniere, James Fennell Tempelhof and Dana Edwards Bitnation, Planet Earth, April 2017

Abstrack

The Pangea software is a Decentralized Opt-In Jurisdiction where Citizens can conduct peerto-peer arbitration and create Nations. Pangea uses the Panthalassa mesh, which is built using Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) protocols. This enables Pangea to be highly resilient and secure, conferring resistance to emergent threats such as high- performance quantum cryptography. Pangea is blockchain agnostic but uses the Ethereum blockchain for the time being. In the future, other chains such as Bitcoin, EOS and Tezos can be integrated with Pangea. The Pangea Arbitration Token (PAT) is an ERC20 compatible in-app token for the Pangea Jurisdiction. The PAT token rewards good reputation and is issued on Pangea when Citizens accumulate non-tradable reputation tokens through creating a contract, successfully completing a contract or resolving a dispute attached to a contract. PAT is an algorithmic reputation token, an arbitration currency based on performance rather than purchasing power, popularity or attention. The distribution mechanism for PAT tokens on Pangea is an autonomous agent, Lucy, which will initially launch on Ethereum as a smart contract. This mechanism is blockchain agnostic and can be ported to any viable smart contract platform. An oracle created by Bitnation will help to facilitate this (semi-) autonomous distribution mechanism in a decentralized and secure fashion.

Introduction

BITNATION Organization: A Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation (DBVN)

“Every citizen is sovereign and has the right to self-determination and is at liberty to choose any form of expression or way to be human or posthuman and with whom to associate and cooperate.” Bitnation Constitution, Article 6 Bitnation’s vision is a global free market for governance services. A post-Nation State world of Voluntary Nations, City States and Autonomous Communities which compete for Citizens by providing a range of opt-in governance services. In our world sovereignty shifts decisively from the State to the Citizen, and humanity reclaims freedom of choice when accessing governance services. This vision sharply contrasts with the current world order, where Citizens are forced to compete with one another to receive their desired governance outcomes — a process that often leads to violence and conflict. In Bitnation’s world, you can become a Citizen of any Nation through a smartphone application. Competition for Citizens drives down costs and improves the quality of services. In a Bitnation future there is little incentive for violence because every one of us is a potential customer. Bitnation is the proof-of-concept Decentralized Borderless Voluntary Nation (DBVN). We are an open source movement, and anyone can build their own DBVN on Bitnation Genesis

Already over 200 new Nations have been registered. We have over 100 Embassies, and Consulates, over 10,000 Citizens on all five continents, and a dynamic community of 2,000+ contributors. We offer a range of services in-house or in partnership with other providers:

The Bitnation blockchain Public Notary is being used for a wide range of purposes — marriages, wills, birth certificates, company registration, land titles, freelance agreements, loan agreements, etc;
The Bitnation Refugee Emergency Response (BRER) provides a blockchain ID for stateless people. BRER’s software won the Grand Prix and Award for Best Idea at the UNESCO NETEXPLO 2017;
Partnerships with third party governance service providers such as Exosphere Education Program, SpaceChain’s open source space hardware and software program, resilience.me basic income protocol, and Dragonfly’s physical security service;
Bitnation organized the world’s first Blockchain Marriage and World Citizenship ID, Blockchain Land Title, Birth Certificate and Refugee Emergency ID during 2014 and 2015.
In 2016 Bitnation, recorded the world’s first DBVN Constitution on the Ethereum blockchain and has since set up a resource center for other aspiring DBVN creators.
The Pangea Jurisdiction which has been in development since 2015, and is currently on version 0.3, is built on IPFS, SSB and Ethereum. Two previous iterations have been released in the past, the first one using the Horizon chain, and the second one based on the SSB “gossip” protocol.

The core function of any nation is to protect its citizens and their assets through an enforceable jurisdiction (the practical authority to administer justice within a defined area of responsibility). Security and justice ensure that our assets, including our bodies, are safe from violence and dispossession. Increasingly security and justice are merging as more of our assets become digital.

Pangea Technology

A phase change is coming. Virtual communities are in their ascendancy, displacing conventional notions of nationhood. Geographic proximity is no longer as important as it once was.

Pangea is a decentralized jurisdiction for the peer-to-peer creation of voluntary nations and making and arbitrating solemn agreements. The Pangea frontend is built as an intuitive mobile chat application, while the backend is a mesh network which can be configured to communicate with any blockchain to create and execute smart contracts. On Pangea users, arbitrators and smart contracts can build reputation and are rewarded for fulfilling contracts and resolving disputes with Pangea Arbitration Tokens (PAT).

The very first iteration of Pangea was built on the Horizon blockchain in 2015. Horizon is a fork of NXT that allows for greater on-chain storage. After building and releasing the first version, market analysis suggested that in the future peer-to-peer contracts are most likely to achieve mass adoption through chat applications. We also understood that a blockchain-based communications protocol would be too slow and expensive to use to be practicable. At that point our design focus switched to a mobile-first chat platform based on a decentralized communication protocol which could be configured to interact with blockchains.

was built in 2016 using code from the open source mesh network communications protocol SSB. The ingenious SSB design allows the user to carry around their own data, rather than trusting it to centralized servers — as is currently the case with WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger, for example. SSB both provides remarkable resilience and allows users to operate without access to an internet connection — through mesh networks, sneakernets and gossip protocols. Imagine the possibilities for places with limited or no access to a working internet connection. Yet while 0.2 enabled us to demonstrate our chatbased concept, it was clear that we needed greater storage functionality to build Pangea.

The third iteration of Pangea has been developed in 2017 on Bitnation’s own mesh network, Panthalassa. While 0.3 borrows from the philosophy of SSB’s gossip protocol, it is much easier to use, no longer requiring users to create full nodes and download message chains. 0.3 also has increased data storage and manipulation capacity as it isimplemented on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) distributed web protocol and incorporates an Ethereum geth_node to enable smart contracts created on Pangea to be written to a blockchain. Quantum resistant encryption is being added to future-proof user security. The new Pangea 0.3 frontend is a mobile first chat application with embedded Ethereum smart contract functionalities (and the ability to switch between other blockchains).

Under the Hood

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonwealth, our governance will emerge.

All agreements and contracts begin with a conversation between Citizens and smartphone chat applications such as WeChat, and WhatsApp are increasingly becoming the go-to tool for conducting business everywhere, but especially in emerging markets. For those reasons, we are convinced that our jurisdiction needs a chat interface. This is implemented through Pangea’s core communications protocol backend and mobile first frontend18 .

Panthalassa is the mesh-network backend software developed by Bitnation. Citizens can use the Pangea application to chat with each other, share files, write and sign smart contracts, acquire reputation, trade, create new nations and organizations and interact with nations and governance service providers. Pangea is inspired and builds on the Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) philosophy and draws on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) distributed web. Compared to SSB, our backend has increased decentralization and adds Pangea specific features such as smart contract functionalities and a quantum-safe encryption algorithm.

Unlike blockchains, Panthalassa is designed for many different yet synchronized implementations. The goal is to provide users with a secure communications mesh network from which smart contracts can be written to the Ethereum blockchain via an integral geth_node 1920, a light external node which removes the requirement for users to run a full node and sync the whole message chain, further improving usability. Panthalassa is constructed as a delay tolerant network (DTN)21 to allow users to have full functionality even if their internet connection is intermittent.

As emerging quantum computers will make RSA and elliptic curve encryption irrelevant, the DTN is designed as a quantum-safe protocol, enabling Citizens to send ephemeral messages22 and providing them with forward secrecy. 23 To build Panthalassa we have developed new code and reused some work from other open source projects

Pangea Arbitration Token (PAT): Master Token Mechanism

PAT master tokens are tradable in-app tokens distributed through an Ethereum smart contract. They do not confer voting rights to holders. 34% of PAT master tokens are released on Pangea as rewards for Citizens who build up POA reputation. This portion will be used as a tradable token to reward the accumulation of individual and group reputation. Nevertheless, master token holdings are not indicative of reputation themselves and reputation cannot be traded on the platform. This portion of PAT master tokens also collects revenues generated by Pangea through small transaction fees on arbitration charges and contract timestamping on blockchains. Among other tokens, PAT can be used to pay for governance services on Pangea.

A seperate 34% of PAT master tokens will be sold to external stakeholders through a two stage Token Sale Event (TSE) to generate resources for the construction of Pangea and to empower a broad stakeholder community which drives user adoption. The remaining 32% of PAT master tokens are reserved to reward Bitnation founders, contributors, advisors and current Bitnation Citizens and early Pangea adopters for developing, improving and maintaining the system (18% pre-allocated 33 and 14% reserved as options and bounties for future contributors).

Organization and PAT Distribution

PAT holders do not have voting rights, in order to avoid the tyranny of the majority problem39 . Instead, Bitnation is governed by the principles of liquid holacracy. This encourages participants to form holons and execute their own ideas without requiring the consent of any other parties (such as other Citizens, Bitnation Core Contributors, or other entities).

DBVNs can be formed directly on Pangea and will stand or fall based upon their ability to attract Citizens or members 40 . Since Pangea is open source software, a group of individuals who disagree with the fundamental functions or direction of Bitnation, Pangea or PAT have the ability to fork the code and create a version which suits them better. The original Bitnation DBVN contract was developed in 2016 by Alex Van de Sande together with Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, based on an existing MIST wallet DAO contract.

It was launched on the blockchain together with the Bitnation Constitution in early 2016. The contract was later on upgraded by Johan Nygren who added a patch against the recursive call vulnerability which led to The DAO hack in 2016. The contract has been redesigned, drawing upon code from the Aragon Project to make DBVNs upgradeable, which enables fixing potential vulnerabilities and extending functionalities via modules (executed with nearly full privileges in the DBVN) or applications (interacting with the DBVN, but with limited privileges). We believe that such functionalities will lead to a market of third-parties’ applications

The “proposal” module of a DBVN allows its members to add proposals such as:

New constitutional amendments
Spending PAT and Ether

TSE Token Release

The token sale is split into three phases and a total of 14.28 billion PAT (34%) will be sold across the three phases of the sale.

Sale phases:

Phase 1: Presale — completed in December 2017.

Phase 2: Public auction — 1 month auction of up to 7.3% of PAT supply.

Phase 3: Slow release — the remaining unsold tokens will be sold via exchanges over the following 24 months so that a total of 14.28 billion (34%) have been sold by April 2020.

The total amount of PAT in circulation 24 months after the public sale finishes (25 April 2020) will be 14.28B (34% of 42 Billion) in addition to the PAT allocated to the core team and issued for bug bounties.

The public sale begins March 25th, 2018 4pm CET and finishes when either the hard-cap is reached ($27.3M of Ether has been bid), or on April 25th 16h00 CET. The sale is hard-capped at $27.3M USD and the token price is set by the market. This is achieved using a reverse auction with a variable price for the token. One of the effects of this model is that we do not know how many tokens will be sold during the auction. The higher the market-set price of PAT, the fewer tokens will be issued in order to reach the hard-cap.