$Zuckbucks$ and Political CryptoTokens

We are learning more and more about how Facebook’s ($FB) Mark Zuckerberg not only suppressed freedom of speech on his platform but he used his money to back hard left-wing candidates in the last election.  What we don’t have is any tracking mechanism on the money.  People have complained about money in politics for years.  We have had campaign finance reform which failed.  The left used to whine about the Koch brothers long before the right whined about George Soros.

I am all for any US citizen or US-based entity putting as much money as they want into a political race as long as it’s transparent. You earned the money, you get to decide what to do with it. There are diminishing returns to dollars spent.  The laws of economics even work in political races. Foreign money isn’t welcome in determining the make-up of our government and that needs to be tracked too.  In the early 1990s, Bill Clinton famously mined China for money far before the fake Russian outrage of 2016.

The problem is how to trace and track it all.

Fortunately, there is a new technological way.  Create a political token and have a corresponding blockchain.  All money that is spent on political ads, material, travel, cocktail parties, political lobbying, and the like would have to be paid for with a token. Each token would be like a stablecoin, equivalent to the value of one US Dollar.  US Dollars would be converted to Political tokens.  Once that happened, the spending would be traceable on a blockchain.  As soon as the token were converted back to US Dollars, everyone would know it.  Corporate entities could hold Political tokens as assets on their balance sheets if they wanted, but then we’d all know how they were allocating their resources to politics.

Everything out in the open.  Everything transparent.

Of course, then competing campaigns could see where their opponent’s money was coming from and how they were spending it.  It would heighten competition and change strategy in campaigns.  That’s a good thing because you’d have data to back up accusations on funding.  No more unfounded news reports of this and that when it comes to campaigns and lobbying.

Political tokens would be a boon to political and economic researchers.  They’d have solid data they could look at, track, and run regressions on.  We’d have greater insight into who is trying to move political markets, what the actual economic dollar value cost was, and maybe gain insights into real versus false trends better.

For this to work, it would take some crypto techies to formulate it.  But, it would take Congress to mandate it.  What are the chances that Congress really wants to see dark money come out into the open?  What are the chances corporate America and wealthy individuals want true accountability for the money they donate and spend on politics and lobbying?

The post $Zuckbucks$ and Political CryptoTokens first appeared on Points and Figures.