Constitution key points and open questions

[luis]

My very initial proposal for the Nation3 Constitution can be found here.

You can comment by just selecting text, and then the Hypothesis sidebar will pop up.

There’s an overview of the Constitution here.

In this forum post, I’d like to outline the main points of the draft and some things that set this Constitution apart from others. That being said, I’ve taken good input from existing ones like Iceland’s, Singapore’s… I’d welcome comments and feedback from the community! Keep in mind it’s still an early version, and legal professionals need to conduct a thorough review.

Citizens as ultimate governors

Citizens (through the DAO) are the ultimate governors of Nation3.
While the Constitution imposes checks and balances, there’s no denial that they can eventually be undone by the citizens themselves, with enough time and support. But the system encodes friction to slow down their erosion.

Adherence to declarations of rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights are embedded within the Constitution. The freedoms described by those cannot be removed from the Constitution.

Dry code > wet code

Smart contracts are legally binding. In a matter that is both regulated by smart contracts and legal contracts, the results of smart contracts are binding, unless explicitly stated otherwise by the parties in an agreement.

Citizenship by possession of NFT

Citizens are deemed so if they possess a passport NFT. The DAO can regulate the requirements for obtaining a passport NFT via smart contracts, those requirements haven’t been formally included in the Constitution.

Financial limited liability

All parties entering in agreements within the Nation3 jurisdiction can only lose two things:

• Any collateral staked in those agreements.
• Their citizenship, in case of criminal offences.

This brings the concept of financial limited liability, previously only available to corporations, to every person within the jurisdiction. Thus entering agreements becomes more desirable, as results are more predictable.

North Star metric alignment

Laws and other governance proposals must describe how they help increase the North Star metrics chosen by the DAO. This ensures maximum alignment between citizens.

No unfair taxation

Unfair taxation is prohibited by the Constitution.

No retroactive laws

Legislation with retroactive effect is prohibited by the Constitution.

Opt-out of laws before they become in effect

If a citizen doesn’t want to be bound by a new law, they have some grace time to renounce their citizenship.

Guardian Guild is the only official guild

The Guardian Guild needs to exist because depending on the whole DAO to keep an informed eye on all deliverables and funding proposals is impractical and lacks ownership.

Possible issues and open questions

• Right now any natural person can become a citizen. This is, of course, unenforceable right now, since passport holders can be anonymous. Will this be an issue down the road, once we have land?
• Right now each Citizen’s voting power are their veNATION holdings. This is important to ensure skin in the game, but also because we don’t have any method of using 1-person 1-vote that is Sybil-resistant and privacy-preserving.
• Right now Citizens are incentivized to interact in agreements with a different Ethereum account, so they cannot lose citizenship while doing so. We should introduce benefits for Citizens to interact with the account that holds their passport, like lowering collateral requirements if the Citizen has built a good reputation over time.
• The Emergency State can be triggered by the Guardian Guild and the Supreme Court Judges Multisig, only if both agree and there’s a force majeure event. This gives power for veNATION holders to pass smart contract-related governance proposals without following the governance process, in order to mitigate events like hacks. This seems needed to make sure we can quickly react to attacks.

[rencai201]

@luis

• Right now each Citizen’s voting power are their veNATION holdings. This is important to ensure skin in the game, but also because we don’t have any method of using 1-person 1-vote that is Sybil-resistant and privacy-preserving.
• Right now Citizens are incentivized to interact in agreements with a different Ethereum account, so they cannot lose citizenship while doing so. We should introduce benefits for Citizens to interact with the account that holds their passport, like lowering collateral requirements if the Citizen has built a good reputation over time.

• I think the Nationcred System which the research guild is developing can help us to deal with these two questions. We have successfully used the Sourcecred to caculate the performance of our citizen for half-year. These credits which the citizen collected can be a good way to distingush whether the account is Sybil or profit-sniper. When we finish our Nationcred System, a more complete and all-around system, we will have a lot of possibilities to use it. Distribution the porfits from the serive fee, UBI system, different credits have different collateral requirements, etc. How to improve, design and develope this system that it can reflect the Citizen’s real reputation, which is the core mission we need consider.

[AbuUsama]

First of all, thank you for all the hard work not only in producing this draft document but also the linked mark down spec. This was herculean effort!

some things are sound a bit ambiguous to me like 4.3.d

1. No Citizen shall physically or verbally threat, harass, physically assault or perform a digital attack against another Citizen.

what constitute a digital attack? and how does the meaning of such ambiguous words evolve over time? i assume its with case law?

Another two points raised in the discord

First I noticed that there are no provisions dealing with minors rights as citizens such as, how old must one be to become a citizen, can one permanently lose ones citizenship as a minor and do minors have the same level of responsibility as people of majority age? Of course it might be intentional to omit such a clause, so as to not discriminate against minors as per 4.2. b/c.

and

Another question is in regards to self defense. Should there be some acknowledgment of the right of territories or individuals to defend themselves? While one advantage to a decentralized network state is that we won’t be tied to a geographic location like trad states, there could come a time where the entirety of our state comes under attack, an acknowledgment of our right to defend our nation could be useful. On individuals, it might be prudent to discuss codifying a citizens right to defend themselves and others, as necessary, through physical means.

The second point is especially important imo. there is reference to mobilisation but no reference to the state reserving the right to defend its self or citizens having the right to self defence. maybe this is intentionally left out of the constitution its self but definatly worth a conversation.

WRT the open questions

@luis

• Right now any natural person can become a citizen. This is, of course, unenforceable right now, since passport holders can be anonymous. Will this be an issue down the road, once we have land?
• Right now each Citizen’s voting power are their veNATION holdings. This is important to ensure skin in the game, but also because we don’t have any method of using 1-person 1-vote that is Sybil-resistant and privacy-preserving.

eventually, we are going to have to adopt some protocol to ensure citizens are unique individuals, ideally one that preserves the right to remain pseudonymous. But it should be enough that the constitution says citizens should be unique and as and when we find methods to be fully sybil resistant we move to a 1p1v system

[aahna]

Should we include something about the separation between money and State? (If a Nation3 citizen sells a product/service to another Nation3 citizen, for example.)

I heard that some (most?) tradstates force their citizens to only use this thing called “legal tender.” That’s madness for someone using Ethereum, but at the same time this concept is a huge difference between a tradstate and a network state, so maybe worth pointing out in the Constitution.

[guance.eth]

@luis

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights are embedded within the Constitution. The freedoms described by those cannot be removed from the Constitution.

Which Rights have higher priority or are they equal?

@luis

Legislation with retroactive effect is prohibited by the Constitution.

I suggest also have a sunset date for each law to review and renew them.

Is ETH the official ledger for Nation3? Do we consider other ledgers like APT?

[luis]

@AbuUsama

what constitute a digital attack? and how does the meaning of such ambiguous words evolve over time? i assume its with case law?

Thanks, changed that to digital assault (such as hacking of personal devices or private data stealing), but it will be indeed left for case law to further specify.

Re/ self defense: makes sense to include that provision.

Re/ minors… this is tricky because we don’t have a way to enforce it. The only way to check age would be to use trad passports and do some sort of KYC.

@aahna

Should we include something about the separation between money and State? (If a Nation3 citizen sells a product/service to another Nation3 citizen, for example.)

Good one, done! https://linked.md/v?u=https://linked.md/api/github/nation3/law/main/Constitution.linked.md#prohibition-of-monopoly-over-currency

@guance.eth

Which Rights have higher priority or are they equal?

Equal.

@guance.eth

I suggest also have a sunset date for each law to review and renew them.

Do you mean for every law, or for the Constitution? I like the idea of citizens re-ratifying the Constitution every generation (~20 years) to have the buy-in from the youth, but renewing all laws might be too much bureaucracy/friction. Let me know your thoughts.

@guance.eth

Is ETH the official ledger for Nation3? Do we consider other ledgers like APT?

So far yes, Ethereum. That’s where the Nation3 DAO lives. However that might change if the Jurisdiction expands to other chains.

[aadopii]

Thanks for all the work you have done Luis, it’s really amazing.

I am interested in going deeper with the taxation topic. For example, what is the exact meaning of “unfair” in this context?

@luis

No unfair taxation

Unfair taxation is prohibited by the Constitution.

On our website we describe Nation3 as a “zero-tax society”, stating (in my opinion) that all taxes are unfair and that’s why we don’t like them. With this statement, we are leaving the door open for futures interpretatation of what unfair exactly means, and potentially, not reaching the goal of being a “zero-tax society”.

By the way, I am not against all kinds of taxes. I actually think that taxation should be a tool of last resort.

Let me know your thoughts and thak you again.

[luis]

Thanks for the kind words!

The specific definition is here https://linked.md/v?u=https://linked.md/api/github/nation3/law/main/Constitution.linked.md#prohibition-of-unfair-taxation

I agree that zero-tax is useful now, but that it’s a last resort tool that we might need to use. That’s why in the Constitution, only taxes on worldwide income are prohibited.

[aadopii]

Thanks Luis!

Totally agree on the worlwide income taxes prohibition.

Best.

[luis]

Another one (from @teresacd11):

Will the Constitution be suspended in case of an emergency state? If we read the articles, some of them won’t be able to be applied in case the Emergency State is activated. So I would say yes.

Read about the Emergency State here.

In most countries, this is the case. However, it’s quite scary. In any case, the current iteration of the Constitution limits it to 1 week, and only 1 time per year. Is this okay? It’s probably a necessary evil, but must be used with caution and really limited.