51.1 World-wide coexistence

This is a radical form of VoTa in which there is no State Territory. Citizens of the VoTa State may live anywhere they choose. All such Citizens receive UBI: eligibility depends only on citizenship of the VoTa State, not on residence.

Enormous numbers of unemployed and poor people across the world can be expected to want to become Citizens. Early adopters who participate in commerce are therefore more likely to have altruistic motives: their participation provides a way to give charity to large numbers of people throughout the world. Whether this can occur depends on overcoming significant barriers to seeding the system and allowing it to gain momentum. Initially, adoption may depend less on immediate economic advantage than on the uniqueness of the idea and the willingness of people to try it.

There is a fundamental obstacle: to be a Citizen is to be required to supply only businesses that operate in accordance with VoTa. It is therefore unlikely that well-established employers or their employees would suddenly switch to VoTa. Doing so might also cause them to breach local tax laws. Adoption would necessarily be much more organic. It might begin, for example, with small communities of otherwise unemployed people creating new businesses for the first time. They might be attracted by VoTa's implementation of sound money and live in places where the local government permits them to participate.

The early adopters might start small, but each early adopter makes VoTa more useful and gives more people a reason to join. If most of the producers in a village adopt it, joining VoTa may become the rational choice for people nearby. This process could begin with unemployed people: citizenship gives them UBI that they can spend on useful Products, so becoming Citizens may be in their rational self-interest. Their spending supplies the initial demand from which commerce can begin.

At first, this commerce might consist of simple, casual work such as doing someone's housework, caring for a garden, or looking after children. Because VoTa has no minimum wage, there is no legal barrier preventing people who were previously unemployed from discovering that they can perform simple jobs, earn VoTa currency, and spend it in a growing market.

During an inception period, the money supply would be created through UBI rather than funded by a UBI tax. This would help people feel that they were not being punished for adopting VoTa early. On the contrary, early adopters would receive more UBI over time simply because they participated from the beginning. Latecomers would miss out on all the UBI distributed before they joined.

From an early stage, tax choice would provide a mechanism through which communities could provision public services. VoTa's infrastructure could work particularly well in parts of the world where the existing State is inadequate, perhaps because of war, insurrection, or other causes. VoTa could fill an institutional vacuum wherever one exists.

The worldwide scope of VoTa would greatly increase the chance that it could take off organically, because some parts of the world would provide conditions in which this is possible. Essential infrastructure, including Central Bank nodes, would need to be available both as open-source software and as a small number of provisioned nodes distributed around the world to seed the network. VoTa presupposes the availability of its computerised systems, including those for identity verification, voting, the Central Bank, and payments.

Initially, smartphones might provide the basis for Central Bank monetary exchanges between parties. This would make VoTa independent of existing banking and electronic-payment systems. It would again depend on open-source software capable of running on people's phones, tablets, and laptops and of communicating between nodes over the Internet using TCP connections.

VoTa would seek to avoid conflict with existing governments, because peaceful coexistence would allow it to grow more quickly. The general rule would be that Citizens adhere to the VoTa Constitution except to the extent that it conflicts with the law of the place in which they act. Local law would prevail where compliance with both systems is impossible, while the VoTa Constitution would continue to govern everything else. This simple rule would allow practice to tend progressively towards the VoTa Constitution in places where VoTa becomes widely adopted, without requiring confrontation during its growth.