I think unions are a mixed bag.🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉 🦉

Some unions are great and do a good job of leveling the playing field between workers and their employers. Others are corrupt and prevent reforms that the system needs.

So this post is not about praising unions across the board or shilling unions or spreading union propaganda. I have a healthy skepticism of unions, coupled with a measured optimism that they can be forces for good.

The reason I’m thinking about them today 🤓 is that I was imagining a factory running on bitcoin that isn’t “owned” by anyone in particular.

And I realized that that is sort of what unions are trying to do = take over a capitalist business, run it via a committee system, and hold the means of production in common.

The problem is the “in common” part. That part never really works out, does it?

But in the factory I’m imagining, the “in common” part could be replaced by a system of multi-sig wallets and smart contracts on Bitcoin. Maybe every worker owns a key. Maybe most of the administration of the business is performed by bitcoin smart contracts. Why not?

So the only “union”-like part of this would just be the group of more involved workers, aka, the devs and foreman and various workers who are involved in decision-making processes for running the factory.

🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

I’m imagining a system where the components are: the factory itself and all of the assets relating to it; the bitcoin treasury; the workers; the more connected and involved workers that manage the system and are not temporary.

Ideally, the connected workers main job would be to make sure the factory is producing goods and maintain the factory in good working order so that it provides value to the customers and workers alike.

What would be the incentive for managing the factory well?

Two ideas: 💡💡

a) programmatic compensation per management task completed, and

b) the threat of dissolution of treasury funds by the workers.

For a), the idea is simple. A factory will have certain tasks that are management tasks. For instance, one task would be to choose a vendor for raw material for the factory. This task can be governed by a smart contract, and administered by workers, either any worker or some specific worker with knowledge or skill, as decided by the smart contract.

When the task is complete, ie., when a vendor is chosen, the smart contract pays out some sort of bonus. Anyone who has the skills and ability to choose a vendor can fulfill the contract.

For b), let’s first imagine that every worker has a key to the multisig wallet with the treasury funds in it. I mentioned this above, and it may be a terrible idea or impractical for some reason. But let’s go with the idea that every worker gets a key to the treasury, say a 200 of 300 multisig (assuming ownership can be distributed via multisig in this way), just for the sake of this thought experiment.

🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽🌽

The upshot for this kind of setup would be that, if the workers don’t like working at the factory or don’t value the goods they are producing, they can just liquidate the treasury and shut down the factory. The only things they would need to acquire would be 200 keys from 200 workers to do it.

This would obviously be bad for business, but if there is demand in the free market for a widget the factory produced, then someone will produce it eventually. So even if one factory gets liquidated by workers, another factory would pop up to replace it. At least that’s the theory, more or less, right?

Now, going back to the council or workers performing management tasks, what would be their incentive? These workers would naturally be the workers in the factory who want the profit from the production of widgets. They want to keep the factory going because they want to earn money. So how do they prevent a faction of 200 workers from liquidating the treasury?

They make the factory nice to work in and make sure the factory workers share the profits to keep the workers happy.

BUT WAIT, ISN’T THAT THE WHOLE POINT OF A UNION? TO IMPROVE WORKING CONDITIONS AND DISTRIBUTE PROFITS FAIRLY?

Yes. Bitcoin just helps to align the incentives properly so that this happens naturally.

By decentralizing ownership of the capital/assets/means of production via multisig, and (in a sense) monetizing the worker’s experience of interacting with the system, the free market is allowed to influence the working conditions and worker compensation policies of the factory while also protecting the factory’s production power.

Is this communism? No, because the free market is influencing the development of the factories internally and externally and decides which succeed and which fail.

Is this capitalism? Yes. However, because no one would own the factory, ownership would be decentralized, diluted, and distributed, and it would be a new form of capitalism. When sufficiently decentralized, the lines between public and private blur and dissolve.

What do you think?

How right am I

and how wrong…