Tl;dr:
I’m exploring what a real experiment could look like for a voluntary society where legitimacy comes from ongoing consent—not enforcement. I’m calling it Candora. All transactions are revocable. Each participant sets their own rules. Trust is built through design and behavior, not authority. I’m sharing early to gather critique, stress-test the philosophy, and co-create the vision before we discuss how to build it.
The Whole Enchilada:
I was reading the What Logos Needs thread and found myself resonating with a lot of the uncertainty there. I wanted to spin off a focused conversation: what would a real experiment look like for a society built entirely on voluntary, revocable interaction?
I’ve been calling the concept Candora. It’s not a network state—it’s closer to a trust network, more like what the Sons of Liberty or early Freemasons were to the constitutional democratic(ish) nation states that would come later. Their structures were: voluntary, informal, and governed by shared rules. I’m not tied to the specifics of this idea—I’m sharing to test the philosophy and invite disagreement to create a vision together of what the right social experiment to build might be before we start mapping out what it takes to execute on it.
Here’s the rough sketch:
- Joining requires staking and currency only flows among staked participants.
- All transactions are revocable by any party, anytime, including retroactively. This might trigger cascades—that’s intentional. Legitimacy comes from ongoing consent and no regrets deals are easier than other ones.
- No enforcement. No courts, votes, admins, police, etc. No force or coercion. Not to say participants can’t organize or delegate, but they can always revoke.
- Every wallet has its own rule set. These define when you’d interact or revoke to prevent revocations, and they can be shared, forked, or composed with others. Automation and usability are key here—this has to be usable by non-technical people.
- Incompatible things don’t appear. If something doesn’t meet your rules, it’s invisible by default—but you can inspect what was filtered out and why.
- Reputation is your revoke record and transaction history. Over time, individual or groups of people may offer services to evaluate trust, suggest rules, or guide members—these become the “institutions” of the society.
This thread isn’t about implementation. Before we build anything, I want your feedback on:
- The core principles of the society
- The structure, potential problems to running an experiment, or to long term success, and any ideas you have to make it better
- What would make the first experiment meaningful—and what would make it fail?
- What constraints, edge cases, or obvious problems are missing from this sketch?
Appreciate any input, friction, or perspective. A follow-up thread will dig into coordination and roadmap when we’ve had enough input to create a solid foundation for that.
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And just because I’m a lover of pictures, threw these together (not VQA ready, hah)
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I like the experiment, one thing I am not clear on though is the revocability - can you give me an example how that could look like?
It feels like “all transactions are revocable by anyone, anytime and retroactively” would cause weird situations - probably stemming from my misunderstanding of revocable transacion in the concept
Interesting.
Not sure I’ve understood whether the experiment is focusing on building (1) app that can what you describe; (2) forming initial community like you describe?
Yup let’s say you sold me a token and then I sold Bill that same token. You reverse the transaction with me on the chain, that reverses both, leaving you with the token and Bill and I with our money. Thats obviously the simplest example. What if it was food that I ate? What if what I gave was time or expertise or risk? I have some thoughts on these externalities but one thing I would underscore here is that revokes don’t need to be perfect, the whole point is for people to need to consider not just entering in to a deal with consent but that consent to be ongoing. If you are a small business owner providing a service to a powerful person in our society this is actually the way things work today. If someone disputed the charge and has more lawyers than you, there’s nothing you can do. I think another important point is that the society that would emerge from these conditions wouldn’t look like any today. Plopping this in to existing societies would work about as well as calling for a vote in the King Henry VII’s Star Chamber.
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Thanks for the great input, just jumping in to say I changed that weird max replies setting haha.
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100% the society. We could do it on paper with this group since we are all builders with positive intent. The chain and app would be important to growing something like it, but for now our goal would be to refine before building too much.
Maybe my philosphical and economic understanding of the world are not enough to comprehend this:D but it sounds like a relationship/contract I would never wanted to enter because even if I follow all the agreed rules, the other party (or any party transitevely? even scarier) can arbitratily revoke and rollback the “transactions”.
I cannot imagine anyone would agree to anything without some assurance (even if just a promise or trust) that the counterparty will not withdraw without a very clear reason of braking the agreements.
I feel like I might be mising something or maybe I am just not open minded anough:D I’ll wait for others to comment and see whether that will shed more light into this:)
But in reality, the consumer today has no assurances. These agreements you sign often protect whoever in the relationship has the most power and money. I thought about this recently when I traded in a phone. That company could have easily taken the phone and given me nothing in return. In fact that’s nearly what happened, save that I had the resources and experience to increase the perceived cost of doing the wrong thing. These agreements, the courts, payment systems themselves are or are very closely tied to a state apparatus which is how exploitation and crony capitalism emerge. They’re only protection if you have money for the legal fees. Otherwise the real protection is in fact coming from voluntary (if upset) association. If I went and bought an orange from someone at the market on chain in this society, they and I would only need to worry about a revoke (which affects the record of both parties) if the orange was misrepresented to me during the transaction. You could also think of it as giving card information gives the seller the ability to charge the buyer, but the buyer the ability to charge the seller for up to the amount they were charged albeit the record of ownership of the item also reverts. Just like buyers today have to be careful which sellers they give their info to, in this society, sellers would need the same caution. This isn’t about removing guarantees it’s about removing the illusion of a guarantee the state system wants us to believe is necessary for a functioning economy. And it’s about creating a protection against the biggest problem capitalist societies have today: the engines for creating value are equally viable for extracting it (see when companies get big but are no longer innovative, you get cheaper materials, trickier sales tactics, and so on, because the easiest way to satisfy investors becomes to extract value from the people who made your business successful). If I can only obtain value by ongoing consent, the economic value of a lie is zero (negative, even) and that’s a good thing. Another thing I’d reiterate is this wouldn’t fit well within a system, it would have to be its own society, and it’s also why I’m proposing the experiment. I would be willing to provide goods and services (in theory, not peddling a product here haha) under these terms, at my own risk. And as the buyer it’s no risk to you either because you’d have the ability to revoke. I don’t expect this experiment to turn in to an economy where people buy and sell houses day one, just like the first person saying “hey why don’t we pool our money so the king doesn’t have a monopoly on gold” people arent just going to be like “sounds great have my farm” hah. Nor should they and nor would I. But having a chain that works like this (infinite settlement) we could very inexpensively surface whether it might work and what other aspects are necessary in the design of the system. That’s a key element here, trust by design rather than by enforcement or authority by appointment, all requiring a nation-state apparatus.
Also I just wanted to thank everyone for joining in and participating in the conversation, more than anything I appreciate the opportunity to have these conversations and get your perspectives and just help make the world a better place, however that happens.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for fixing the system or building a parallel polis/society to allow you have these kinds of relationships instead of being forced into broken ones:-)
I am curious how much research you have done into what Gnosis is building with Circles (https://aboutcircles.com/) obviously they are not talking about revokability of the contracts/TXs, but I am curious if upfront trust build between the parties is better/more viable option than uprfont distrust and higher risk of this revokable approach.
My thoughtprocess here is probably more from the perspective of the seller of some item (maybe it is a bias, but I feel like as a buyer I have low risk, especially with low value items), but the seller often has to put funds up front to actually develop the product/service then has to provide the unique service/item to the buyer, only to realize the buyer decided to revoke (and then we also get to the whole problem of perishable goods) the TX and hence now I have a used good/services, hence decreased value and no money for it.
Clearly, my thinking is very limited in this context - to keep the thought experiment simple - as we can say you have N minutes to revoke for full refund, but then the price you get back goes down 0.001 % every minute (i.e. in 90 days you get back 0 when revoking the TX, could be tweaked based on TX/contract between seller and buyer, so for some goods, maybe it is 90 days, for some 9, for some 900?)
Anyway, I am also excited about these discussions 
To give an example of where I think the Candoran approach might work better: a person decides to solve climate change through innovation and let’s say this garners wide support from a group who believes in influencing behavior through persuasion and incentives and applying innovation to seemingly intractable problems. This person becomes the richest person in the world. Let’s say this person decides to spend all of the money earned from that business on destroying the environment (obviously some parallels to a real scenario but I’ve changed it so it’s more directly applicable here). What does a society do? You could do nothing (ends poorly) or have enforcement (which I would argue also ends badly because it either creates a state or a proto-state that will become a state). In the Candoran case, this person can see which money is subject to self laws that prevent their capital from being spent on whatever activity this is (say, drilling for oil) and I can see how large thr pool of capital is that doesnt have that issue. The revoke needn’t happen but if it does, consumers revoke and provide a check to the power of anyone who accrues massive wealth if they use it to extract rather than provide value.
Per your point on used and perishable goods, I agree, item depreciation needs to influence the return value and without any central authorities how is that determined. One way is looking at the chain of transactions, what is profit can be determined and revokes could only affect profit not base cost. Another for the item itself would be the system is designed to automatically depreciate the item based on some logic (but i would worry about arbitrage here).
I’ll check out circles and give it a try, looks interesting, thanks! I think this could solve how to create currency trust without banks, but I’m not clear on how it would prevent a scenario like the one I gave.
People would probably have rules like I’ll only sell or delegate decisions or control to people with clean revoke records with some threshhold (likely services that provide vetting) like a credit score, basically. But in a world where exploitation lowers the perpetrator’s credit, as well, not just the victim’s. For those who want WAY more detail, I’ve actually drafted a doc that lays out all of the rules of the society in varying detail (since one assumes a blockchain, the other is implementation agnostic).
And all of these thoughts are great, I specifically am looking for folks to poke holes so whatever the first experiment is, it’s accomolishing the right thing. Like maybe regardless of solution I’m wrong that it’s better to remove exploitation from capitalism or maybe some state is necessary because no matter what people need to sometimes be forced to do “the right thing” if the foundational assumptions are wrong the design of the society doesn’t matter. And I’ll admit if every person is treated as a country and this is international law, the global situation right now does leave a lot to be desired haha.
It occurs to me it may be a good idea to cover the most important part of this which is the “moral reasoning”.
- I believe in a society of free individuals based on consent.
- If I lied to someone in order to sell them something, and they discover this, even years after the fact, if it’s true that I only consider a transaction valid with consent, then I consider that transaction illegitimate. I will cover the what ifs here in a moment so let’s say we agree it’s not legitimate and that’s clear.
- There is actually no enforcement here unless the transaction does NOT reverse. Not reversing is legitimizing an illegitimate transaction, giving power and therefore rise by design, to coercion. A system for people who believe that consent is the basis for legitimacy in my view must provide reversibility. This also removes the need for mediation which generally produces some mechanism for consolidating power that can be used against a party without their consent.
So I said I’d come back to 2 because there are naturally some questions.
- What if the person acted in bad faith? I think I could write a book on just this but the short version is this: according to whom? If I consider my actions in good faith and you consider them in bad faith, who do you consider correct? In my view we must assume that each person’s assessment of their own faith is the most just. To this section I would also add that I believe that people act in bad faith to protect themselves in many cases as a result of societies where others are able to act in bad faith and impose conditions upon them without their consent. We’ve created an arms race of abuse and coercion.
- What if both parties acted in good faith but there was a misunderstanding? Related as you’ll see is what if the revoke significantly harms the the party who didn’t wish to revoke? These two scenarios have the same two answers which are a) I advocate for trying a system that allows reversing transactions and enshrines ongoing consent as a necessary part of legitimacy. I do not advocate for a system that compels anyone to make use of this feature. Parties not wishing to harm one another can find another way to settle. If either party is so obstinate this is impossible this is only proof of the transactions illegitimacy which brings me to b) I expect this to look very different than our world today. It’s like a person in an abusive relationship their whole life trying to imagine a good relationship. “If I sleep with the door unlocked, couldn’t she come in and beat me up in my sleep” “well yes but I would try and catch that tendency before moving in together”. I won’t add too much detail on this as I believe this sub point is what ive talked about the most in this thread.
Tl;dr here is I’m not sure whether or how well it will work, but I believe it can, and it’s the best instantiation of a society grounded in consent I’ve come up with, but I would LOVE to hear other ideas or indications of interest in building whatever the best idea is. I’m certainly committed to helping with whatever idea is best but I’ll need help.
Very interesting experiment, just had a chance to read it through. Will put down some thoughts asap, for now I wanted to share this with you as it might serve to illustrate some points, in case you are unfamiliar with it it’s a really cool (and relevant) little thought experiment: The Evolution of Trust
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The reversibility concept sounds very interesting. I like the fact that it forces a person to not only behave or communicate in a certain way once to get the funds and get away with it, but instead it forces one to continue acting the way they promised they would, if they don’t want transactions to be reverted.
I’m not sure how it works with physical goods, deliveries and all but it does sound like it could be useful in some situations.
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My thinking with these (totally tentative as i have the least certainty with anything physical but how much of our lives are online hah) is that when an object first has an nft generated for ownership, it is assumed that anything over that is profit. Reverting reverts the owned nft (ownership record) and profits back. The physical item is still possessed by the revoker but it belongs to the revokee per the record. In the case of an NFTless (perishable) good, only the profits are reverted and the buyer is left as the owner. And yes this means that if you ran a business it is possible for people to just take what you offer for free (assuming you allow the transaction). This also means that you can get infinitely rich or be delegated infinite decision rights. But everyone you interact with has to want you to be infinitely rich and have thise decision rights. If they decide, even later in hindsight, that they wouldn’t have given it to you, they take it back. No courts, no police, no violence, it’s just like the physics of the system and nothing can change it. Ideally for instance a weapons manufacturer would make weapons that you can only use if you’re the owner so if your ownership is revoked it stops working. Some might even make ones that require a good revoke record. It’s like everything is debt and a revoke is a non payment and your revoke record is your credit score. Like in real life, everything about who you associate with and how can affect your record and the level of trust people commensurately give you. In our society where interactions and transactions aren’t voluntary it tends towards abuse but not so here.
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This link is incredible and a perfect demonstration of what I mean by trust by design with this idea
