Strategy

Taking those titular objectivesScroll to the next section apart, if you've read our short film project, you already know how we intend to inspire. The attention drawn from there, via multiple distribution platforms, will be directed to our YouTube channel, The Finergy Matrix, by which we then seek simply to inform; these two projects comprising the Educational, critical-objective portion of our strategy.

The following touches upon some of the distinguishing attributes of this approach, what we hope to achieve with it and, finally, two additional projects (with another in the works) that aim to accelerate this much needed goal into reality (the Actualization objective), inasmuch as is presently possible. What excites us the most is how it finally, truly is.

A Shot Across the Bow

When dealing with difficult and complicated subjects, the impetus of being inspired to learn goes hand-in-hand with learning itself - it simply must. Disenfranchisement begets apathy, and the very concept of self-determination we all inherently know we're supposed to have, naturally turns to detachment and cognitive dissonance when attempts at reconciling this with reality yields only disappointment instead. The ever-increasing rise in various forms of escapism, social media bubbles, narcissistic tendencies, and depression - all stand as solemnly stark indicators of this detachment. Self-determination and a feeling that one can make a positive difference in life, and for one's community, are essential, but the problems of this world are so enormous, and the rules so insidiously rigged, it's understandable how people come to embrace the (intentionally or not) nihilistic view that nothing one does will even matter.

Highlighting this reality, placing it in sharp contrast with a life lived more 'in tune' with nature, coupled with breathtaking scenery, music to die for, and a simple yet inspiring motif, will (we feel) strike a strong chord with many. The attention thereby drawn will be directed to The Finergy Matrix, for which the film will also serve as an opening trailer.

If you haven't yet availed yourself of it, please have a read of our short film script here (production budget estimation, here). We recommend reading it first before skimming it again with the music. There's a breakdown, in seconds, within the script to indicate the placement of the music as it aligns with the scenes portrayed. We do hope you enjoy it!

The Finergy Matrix

Imagine Nikola Tesla, that great scientific genius of the late 19th to early 20th century, were alive today and just as widely celebrated as before. Now recall how his remarkable ascendancy was undone. Do you know the tale? It has been repeating, quietly, ever since.

The Finergy Matrix is our YouTube channel, and its name is its thesis: finance and energy form a single matrix of control, and neither can be understood - or unwound - without the other. Episode by episode, we follow these modern-day Teslas and untangle the monetary and legal webs that continue to ensnare their inventions from wide-spread availability on the marketplace.

The channel carries forward the work we first conceived as a feature-length documentary. After Depeche Mode granted us the use of their stupendous instrumental for our short film (via their then-manager, J.D. Fanger), we obtained written endorsements from Greenpeace (US & UK), Friends of the Earth, and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, and prepared to do what environmental charities do: raise awareness, then petition the government for relief. Our research ended that plan. "Petitioning the government", at least with respect to certain alternative energy technologies, isn't exactly the best thing one can do for one's health, and the trail of why leads somewhere few expect.

A documentary must say everything at once; a channel never has to stop. One thread at a time — an inventor's story, a law almost no one has heard of, or a market almost no one ever questions - each episode connects the dots between them, without ever losing sight of the inventors this organization was created to support.

"It is well that people do not understand our banking and monetary system because if they did, I am afraid there would be a revolution tomorrow." ~ Henry Ford

Our audience is there; they are you, they are us, they are everyone. Most importantly, they are ready. For them, rest assured, we will connect the dots.

Bootstrapping our second critical objective, that of Actualization, SVRN is a decentralized stake pool operation for the Cardano™ decentralized network. Decentralization, be it in the realm of finance or energy (or indeed, even governance), is the primary and most crucially effective means by which any monopoly may be dissolved, or at least weakened.

Opening up the global energy industry so as to allow competition from certain revolutionary, alternative energy technologies, necessitates the weakening of any superior monopoly powers acting in their own interests as its protectorate. As observed, with astonishing candor, by none other than former Director of the Bank of England, Sir Josiah Stamp, we have identified the current, privately owned, completely independent and unaccountable, central banking industry, as the largest and most powerful of these groups.

Without question, Cardano™ is quite simply, and already, the single greatest technological achievement in decentralization the world has ever seen. We are definitely grateful to be a part of that, and by communicating its significance, to extend and maximize its proliferation.

It really is an exciting time to be alive! Join us, and with your help, we can now truly change the world!

Challenge question:

Most public services are sub-contracted at 3-5x cost. How is community self-governance best achieved via delivery on a utility platform?

Why is it important?:

Community mindedness today risks veering from its original meaning. Self-governance is, by definition, a bottom-up, not top-down, approach.

What does success look like?:

Elected authorities from amenable jurisdictions become local heroes for greatly reduced taxes. Private companies are paid more and on time.

Key metrics to measure:

* Please note: this challenge is open to proposers from all continents and nations.

Proposers are welcome to explore and weigh the merits of transaction metadata, smart contracts, tokens, smart markets, and/or any combination thereof in the determination of how best to align services with specific zones & localities (such as street cleaners and/or garbage collectors, for example), contracted for a given term.

Collaboration will prove a key factor here. A project of this scope will require talent and expertise across a wide array of skillsets and disciplines. Prospective proposers are encouraged to engage (across the project's Discord channel or elsewhere) in order to build a team that can arguably, if successful, help change the tide of history (more on that below)!

Of greatest initial importance will be the opt-in, by at least one local government authority and a service provider, to accommodate a Proof Of Concept within a pilot jurisdiction. The boon from a successful POC, for any politician (as a now-lauded and pioneering visionary), will yield them a near certain re-election and serve as a model for blockchain efficiency, with subsequent demands for its expansion and implementation elsewhere.

Key metrics:

The proposed solution must demonstrate a substantial savings to be had by the taxpayer, as compared to the amount local governments set aside for the contracted service from a given tax (like property taxes). Each local government participant is expected to act as an honest broker in these arrangements, redacting 100% of the respective service(s) being off-loaded; the key word being "expected". This comparison should be made between the projected operating costs of the proposed solution, once deployed, versus the status quo. Initial development costs will no doubt skew this comparison in the beginning, so it's important to keep in mind the savings from an ongoing perspective, especially when instantiated across multiple jurisdictions.

Initially, service providers themselves should expect remuneration to not only be significantly greater than when contracted by their local authorities, but also to be paid far sooner than is typically the case for any government contractor.

As time progresses, new businesses wishing to compete within the service provider's space should also be accommodated for proposals to the local community from within the deployed solution, so that citizens may collectively choose for themselves which provider the service will be granted, and for how long (with a likely quorum being required for the contracting of a given area or district); much like a digital "Town Hall" for each local community, for citizens to decide on local matters.

As with any advancement in automation and technology, government jobs can also be expected to be made redundant/nonessential. While this isn't necessarily the kind of key metric they themselves might look forward to, private markets have born the brunt of such consequences of innovation to a disproportionately larger degree, and for far too long. If there's any sector in need of economizing and reducing waste, for sure it's within the government. What's good for the goose is surely good for the gander!

Last but not least, while politicians themselves may regret the latter, they can most assuredly expect a much happier electorate as a result, redounding to a re-election. It really depends if they are for big government, or small.

Challenge brief:

It is indeed a challenge to any community to redefine the very concept of itself in the apparent absence of applicable, historical precedent. Without a relatable narrative, even the most imaginative minds can be forgiven for falling back on legacy concepts and inherited structures, all while seeking to break the mold and redefine it. And according to what model?

What does it even look like, to live in a truly decentralized, self-governing community, when all we've ever known is an essentially top-down, command-and-control infrastructure?

Sure, there's 32 flavors to choose from at Baskin-Robbins, but one's choices narrow significantly from there, the more important they become. A truly trustless technology carries the promise of liberating humanity, however, and so this implies the unraveling of existing modalities of governance, far more so than the creation of new ones.

If the goal is the strengthening of self-governance, and the shaping of legislation and commercial standards accordingly, I posit the best approach to be a practical one, in keeping with the true bottom-up nature of decentralization. As for historical precedent, who would've guessed the answer to that age old question, "But without government, who will build the roads?", can be found in a piece of near-forgotten history from over 180 years ago?

Alexis de Tocqueville was an aristocrat and political scientist from the Courts of Versailles, France, who eventually became Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he is universally acknowledged as the father of sociology and social anthropology throughout most all of western academia. As with many others in Europe at the time, de Tocqueville was mesmerized with this strange new nation called America across the sea.

In 1831 he finally visited and chronicled his travels within his famous, 'Democracy in America', published in 1835; the second volume published another 5 years thereafter. In it, de Tocqueville described the astonishment with which he found a near total absence of government in nearly every township he paid visit to, save for the local post office. This was unfathomable to him, for in his native France there were government offices everywhere, with breadlines feeding the poor and destitute, stretching for blocks... By contrast, in America, what little he could find of the poor and needy were all dutifully cared for by an abundance of charitable organizations; the people keeping 100% of their earnings while looking after their own communities themselves. The discrepancy in literacy rates also astounded him, with barely 10% who could read in his native France, compared with the over 90% literacy rate he found in the States.

People maintain that charities could never sustain the needs of the poor today, but if you try to feed the homeless in most cities you will be arrested!

A better way of phrasing the aforementioned question of "Who will build the roads?" isn't by hearkening to any notion of zero government, so much as highlighting its replacement with self-government instead. Roads and public services were of course funded directly by community-minded citizens in the old Town Hall meetings of New Hampshire, for example, without any of the trustless automation that can now be leveraged. Centralized, top-down administration of these services have become so intertwined with our very concepts of how communities must operate, it's not surprising it was a source of bewilderment to Monsieur de Tocqueville just as it is now for us today, and so many years later…

What's perhaps more surprising is why you've probably never even heard of de Tocqueville until now. Given these historically remarkable findings from early American society, and his being recognized as creating the science of anthropology itself. Yet even if one studied the subject now, it would probably surprise one even more to discover his complete absence from the books currently in print…

As former Secretary of Education under Reagan, Gary Bauer, openly declared: for every $1 collected in tax for the purpose of education, only $0.25 ever goes to the actual schools to pay for the teacher's salaries and books. A full 75% of it simply lines the walls of the ever expanding bureaucracy there in D.C., like some malignant tumor! I was so stunned by this announcement when I finally heard it (many years later), I personally contacted his offices to confirm it, and he told me now it wasn't even $0.20 out of every dollar…

I then researched the average expenditure in taxes per pupil in D.C. for that year, and it was over $26,000 per head - more than a year's tuition at Montessori! But private schools are just as dependent upon government licenses to teach as those that are declared public, and the books, now bereft of any hint as to how communities can indeed thrive much better under the liberty of self-governance, reflect the purposeful neglect a top-down mode of governance imposes for its own sake just the same. But as far as public services are concerned, I know education is still perhaps a bit too delicate a subject for most to accept the decentralization of. Best keep it to street cleaning and such for starters!

The concept of a decentralized, self-governing community is so foreign, most people assume there's no historical context by which it may be easily conceptualized. The fact de Tocqueville is acknowledged as the father of socio-anthropology, and yet had his own observations removed from all the books on the subject, says something as to why… but what he recorded is proof this has been achieved before, and was so powerfully successful compared to the top-down models of governance, its example had to be censored.

"A Republic, if you can keep it." ~ Benjamin Franklin

Cardano very much represents an opportunity for, not just a return to sound money, but a return to a truly decentralized community of self-governance, such as the Republic to which Franklin referred.

Also Ben: "When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the Republic."

This is unfortunately beginning to happen now, and it's easy to understand why. When the ability to earn oneself a living is removed, of course people will vote themselves money ad infinitum, but this must be acknowledged as an extremely urgent and dangerous situation! Especially when the concept of decentralization, while generally positive, still resides somewhere in the "nice to have" category of perspective; much like the other benefits of blockchain, such as immutability, security, inclusiveness, etc. People are still looking at decentralization and thinking, yes that'd be "nice to have"…

Well let's take a look at what we do have at the moment:

- Central Credit Monopoly
- Media Mind Control
- Destruction of Private Industry

Essentially, Planks 5, 6, & 7…

Decentralization is not a "nice to have", it is a must.

As mentioned in the metrics section, this challenge is for proposers from all nations, and a truly decentralized, self-governing society is the goal. America is where we may find the greatest, socio-anthropologically confirmed, recorded example of decentralization's outstanding success. By contrast, another example of what's being hailed as a "self-governing" success, are the new, private company governed townships being offered in Nevada, where technocratic Lord-Barons pose to make a dubious return (see https://reason.com/2021/02/08/tech-companies-could-form-their-own-governments-under-a-new-nevada-proposal/).

Power always seeks to maintain its perch, and expand it where ever it may. The technology available to us now will be wrestled over to this end, and this may be our last chance to show the world how much better a truly self-governing society can and would be, should that power be finally pushed to the edges.

Thank you for your consideration and your time!

Challenge budget in USD:

$300,000

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

... Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education ... the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint ... It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold ... they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volume 2

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