# Using Cryptocurrency to Strong-Arm Prudent Policy Decisions By [Shriram](https://paragraph.com/@shriram) · 2022-04-03 --- > **Summary**: I believe that policymakers can leverage the benefits of transparency and neutrality offered by cryptocurrencies to better align economic incentives for prudent policy decisions. Incentives ---------- At their core, I think incentives represent a way to weaponize a personal psychology to get someone to act in a specific way. Most basically, this creates two corollaries: (i) The less someone originally wants to do something, the more powerful the psychological weapon has to be, and (ii) People who notice the presence of manipulation could put a tax on the act of manipulating to retain autonomy and prevent future meddling. In my opinion, these two ideas together can kickstart an interesting toolkit in terms of national policy ideas. Meta-Persons ------------ As a dramatic oversimplification, I tend to think of nations as one iteration of a meta-person. In other words, using internal power hierarchies to weight the relative expressiveness of an idea, the thoughts of a nation are an amalgamation of the thoughts of its people. The same applies to corporations and workers unions and religious groups. Since I can apply my two rules on incentives to a nation’s people, I can use that power weighting to apply those same rules to the nation itself. I can also come up with a third idea that specifically applies to meta-persons due to the interactive nature of its people: (iii) Internal bond strength creates a necessary force multiplier which must be overcome to execute an incentive. Role of Transparency -------------------- In my opinion, the biggest effect of transparency would be on point (ii): More transparency means less uncertainty on “why” an incentive exists means lower manipulation taxes. The secondary effect is a more robust ability to evaluate personal benefit. While that might not directly affect point (i), it allows one to more easily filter for proposed incentives which pass the necessary hurdle rate. Thus, bad incentives are less likely to be proposed because the resources required to propose that incentive are almost certainly not worth being immediately filtered out. Role of Neutrality ------------------ In my mind an entity is more neutral the less it is itself subject to whims of some concentrated group of selfish actors (though I am not entirely satisfied with this definition). A purely neutral entity is almost impossible, since ambitious people often find ways to concentrate power on their own behalf in entities of importance. However, the presence of direct, complete, and transparent internal structural guidelines which favor representativeness can neutralize the parent entity in the eyes of others. Once an issuing entity is broadly perceived as neutral, its proposed incentives will likely bypass much of the force multiplier from point (iii), since ideological fighting will concentrate on the idea itself rather than both the idea and source. How to Use this Framework to Force Prudent Policy ------------------------------------------------- I believe that increasing the levers of transparency and neutrality at a national level can fast-track robust incentive systems. However, altering either of these factors without infringing on national sovereignty is a tricky endeavor. In my opinion one of the easiest ways to do so is to empower grassroots adoption of systems which cannot exist without these principles. Essentially, encourage the people to raise the bar for what is acceptable so that it must include high levels of both transparency and neutrality. I am writing this very article on a platform built on the infrastructure of cryptocurrency and decentralized file storage. So it might be obvious my biased bet is that this same technology will be the one which empowers such change. That mainly hinges on the fact that extremely high-quality user-friendly enterprise-grade financial and corporate governance infrastructure will soon enter the hands of anyone who owns a computer, smart phone, or tablet while circumventing national information controls over those protocols. However, even if that specific bet is incorrect, my hope is that new technology is broadly leading us in that direction. --- *Originally published on [Shriram](https://paragraph.com/@shriram/using-cryptocurrency-to-strong-arm-prudent-policy-decisions)*