Utopian Financial Infrastructure

Dual Citizenship

The ideas of dual citizenship and multiple citizenships exist in current societies. So, in an era of Utopian societies, one would think that dual citizenships should be possible. They are indeed possible.

When implementing various systems mentioned in Building Utopia and Utopian Financial Infrastructure, for each individual, there will come a time to create an entity record for that individual for the very first time. Usually this happens soon after birth; though it can happen much later. This record creation should be viewed as "registering the fact that a citizen already existed".

The procedure of "registering a citizen" is very different from the procedure of "obtaining a dual citizenship". Thus, in order to obtain citizenship of another society, one needs to already be a citizen of at least one society.

This chapter has two goals. The first goal is to outline the three distinct steps in which a citizen of one society can also become a citizen of another society. The second goal is to outline the mutual rights and responsibilities of such dual citizens and their societies.

An overview of the three distinct steps and their relationship with one another is presented in the section "Overview of Becoming a Dual Citizen". The actual three distinct steps of becoming a dual citizen are discussed in the following three sections: "Request to Create Invitation to Become Citizen", "Inviting to Become Citizen" and "Accepting Dual Citizenship".

Once someone becomes a citizen of another society, they continue to remain a citizen of the previous society or societies. That gives rise to the notions of dual citizenship or multiple citizenships.

The section "Regarding Rights and Responsibilities" discusses the generalities related to high-level categories of rights and responsibilities. Each such high-level category is discussed in a separate section. This discussion, across multiple sections, sheds light on what exactly it means to be a dual citizen.

Overview of Becoming a Dual Citizen

Normally, for someone to become a citizen of another society, that person needs to be invited by someone or some organization from the other society. Thus there is an invitation in which an inviter from an inviting society invites an invitee to become a citizen of the inviting society.

In the above paragraph, we said "normally" to acknowledge that there can exist not-so-normal situations in which a citizen of some society lays a claim to become a citizen of some other society. We won't be discussing these kinds of situations in this version of this book.

Some inviter from the inviting society has to request to their society to invite the invitee to become a citizen of the inviting society. If the invitee also agrees, then the society will officially accept the request to create an invite. This is discussed in the section "Request to Create Invitation to Become Citizen".

In due course of time, the inviting society will consider the request and it may accept the request and create the invitation. Creation of such an invitation based on the request implies approval of the society for the invitee to become a citizen of the inviting society. This is discussed in the section "Inviting to Become Citizen".

The invitee, upon receiving such an invitation, must choose to officially accept or reject the invitation within a specified amount of time. Acceptance implies applying to obtain citizenship. Such an application that is based on an invitation sets into motion the act of creating entity record and associated database for the invitee as a citizen of the inviting society. This is discussed in the section "Accepting Dual Citizenship".

Request to Create Invitation to Become Citizen

What does it mean to be a citizen of some society? It really means that one lives in that society, becomes a member of the society, enjoys the freedoms and rights in that society, and fulfills the responsibilities towards that society. There is nothing more than that.

When someone wants someone else to come and live in a society, that want should be interpreted as that someone wants that someone else to behave no differently than any other citizen in the society; that is actually be a citizen of the society.

Thus a citizen who desires that someone else from some other society should be a citizen of this society, must request the society (that is its administration) to invite the person. In requesting the society to invite someone else, the citizen must specify a reason. These reasons would not be any arbitrary reasons. In fact, these reasons would all be well anticipated and hence well categorized. Thus when we say "reason" we really are referring to a "reason category".

Based on the practices of current times, "inviting a life partner" and "inviting an immediate blood relative" are two commonly occurring reason categories. There are many others.

Here is the outline of the process to make the request to invite someone to be a citizen. There will be an inviter, an invitee, inviting society and the invitee's society.

The inviter has the desire to invite the invitee. So, the inviter would know the invitee. The inviter first discusses the desire to invite with the invitee and we can assume that the invitee agrees with the possibility of such an invitation. Thus the inviter can ask the invitee for an informal permission to create a "request to invite for citizenship" and the invitee will agree.

Here is an outline of the next few steps:

  • The inviter will obtain the invitee's ID as this is the only information required to initiate a request to invite.
  • The inviter will go to a "Request a Citizenship Invite" app hosted by the local financial infrastructure.
  • The inviter will press the "Request a Citizenship Invite" button on this page.
  • This will initiate the identification and authentication of the inviter. The inviter completes the authentication.
  • Next, the inviter enters the ID of the invitee. Note that since an ID contains a society code, the inviting society can contact the invitee's society.
  • Next, the inviter is presented with some minimal identification information about the invitee (like ID, name, date of birth, etc.) and is asked to confirm that information is as per the inviter's expectations. The inviter confirms.
  • Next, the inviter is asked to confirm that the inviter wants to indeed "Request a Citizenship Invite for the Invitee". The inviter confirms.
  • In response to this confirmation, the inviter is sent a reference number (as a certificate) that references this "request for citizenship invitation". The reference number can be used to check on the status of the request. This concludes the interaction of the inviter with the Utopian Financial Infrastructure.

Next, the inviting society contacts the invitee and confirms with the invitee that the invitee is indeed interested in receiving an invitation to be a citizen of the inviting society.

Once the invitee confirms, the invitee is also given the same reference number that references this "request for citizenship invitation". This enables both the inviter and invitee to check on the status of the request to invite.

This concludes the process to initiate a request to invite someone for being a citizen of the inviting society.

Inviting to Become Citizen

For most requests to "create invitation to become citizens", after a request is created, the request gets added to the end of a priority queue. Some categories of such requests can be added at the beginning of the priority queue (like a request to confer honorary citizenship on some person by the society itself).

As long as the request is in the priority queue, a decision about the request has not been taken.

Every society will have some limits (that is quotas) on the number of requests that it will process in a year. The quotas could be different for different invitation categories. Thus in the actual implementation, there will be a priority queue for each category. The amount of time that a request sits in the priority queue depends on the quota and on how many other requests are ahead of this particular request.

If the number of requests is smaller than the annual quota, the requests are picked out of the priority queue in the priority order.

If the number of requests is larger than the annual quota, then every day, the day's quota worth of requests are picked at random and processed. All other requests continue to stay in the queue till they expire after two years, that is 730 days after a request was created.

Note that the priority queue acts only like a true priority queue as long as the number of requests in this queue is less than the annual quota. Once the number of requests exceeds this quota, the queue no longer behaves like a priority queue; it becomes a random lottery. This is the intent because it is the only fair way to select requests when the demand for such requests far outstrips the quotas for such requests.

Eventually at some point in time, a request gets selected for processing. Now a decision has to be made about whether to accept or reject the request.

Every Utopian society will have a criteria for deciding whether to extend an "invitation to become citizen" to citizens of other societies. Most of this criteria would be objective and an algorithm can take the decision. But there will also be human oversight to every decision taken by the algorithm.

In this chapter we are exploring the process of becoming a dual citizen and the nature of dual citizenship. In fact, knowing the nature of dual citizenship would help us in choosing the criteria. So, we will not discuss the criteria in this version of this book.

The request contains both the inviter's ID and the invitee's ID. Since both the inviter and invitee have confirmed the creation of "request for invite", they both have also agreed to share their information for the purpose of processing the request. Societies would have already agreed to share this information with each other.

The request is processed by an algorithm running within the inviter's society's financial infrastructure. The algorithm fetches all the necessary information from the invitee's society; it already has access to the inviter's information. Based on just this information (and it will be extensive information), the algorithm makes a determination to accept or reject the request.

Then the application is processed by multiple but an odd number of officers specializing in this particular kind of application. Note that the minimum number of officers processing each application is three; because one is not enough. Each one of these officers independently evaluates the information and the algorithm’s decision. Their evaluation culminates in either accepting or rejecting the algorithm's decision. The majority decision of these officers is the final decision of this process.

The decision will either be an acceptance of the request or rejection of the request. The outcome is packaged as a certificate and communicated to both the inviter and the invitee.

If the decision results in the acceptance of the request, then it generates an invitation to the invitee. This act of "extending an invitation" is as good as granting citizenship; the only thing that remains is the acceptance of the invitation.

If the majority results in the rejection of the request, both the inviter and invitee would get a status update (as a certificate) about the original request. Either one of them can request a "reevaluation" and there would be a process to do such a reevaluation and that process would again involve independent evaluation from multiple officers specializing in this kind of evaluation. We will leave the details of that process to your imagination.

If the majority decision was acceptance of the request, the invitee would have gotten an invitation (in the form of a certificate) and the invitee can go ahead and accept the invite as described in the next section. The inviter is also informed of this fact.

Accepting Dual Citizenship

When a citizen receives an invitation to become a citizen of some other society, that invitation is just a certificate. The certificate can be opened and the information within it can be accessed. One such piece of information is a link to an "Accept Citizenship Invitation" app hosted by the inviting society. This app provides a button that needs to be clicked to indicate acceptance. This button is specific to the invitation and hence contains the ID of the invitee.

When the invitee clicks this button, it takes the invitee to an app that initiates identification and authentication of the ID associated with the button and its invitation. When that completes successfully, then the app shows all details pertaining to the invitation like the invitee, reason category of the invitation, etc. and asks the citizen to review all the information. Then the app asks for a confirmation for "Accept Citizenship Invitation". This confirmation goes through the normal method for such confirmation. This confirmation is the actual acceptance by the invitee to become a citizen of the inviting society.

This confirmation is also the authorization by the invitee to their current society to share the physical identification information (that is biometrics, etc.) with the inviting society. When this information is shared, the inviting society has the means to identify the individual and hence can proceed with the creation of the entity record signifying a new citizen in their society. This sharing of identification information and creation of the entity record happens immediately.

We could call the creation of an entity record as "granting of citizenship" to the invitee. Once the record is created, the invitee is a citizen of the inviting society.

Societies communicate such "granting of citizenship" events to all known parent societies of the individual. Thus, for a person who is a citizen of more than one society, each such society knows about every other parent society of that person.

Regarding Rights and Responsibilities

Utopian societies implement ideas like wealth redistribution and Utopian Payment Model. Both these imply that a society has responsibilities towards its citizens and it fulfills these responsibilities using money. Similarly, citizens have responsibilities towards their society and a citizen fulfills them by paying taxes.

If an individual could be a citizen of multiple societies, then what would be the nature of the individual's and the societies' responsibilities? Imagine for a moment that there is a person who is a citizen of two societies. Would this person pay wealth-based taxes in both societies? Would this person get wealth redistribution from both societies? If this person is poor and if this person needs to use the Utopian Payment Model to pay for the essentials, then would both societies share the burden? Will this burden be shared equally or unequally? If unequally, then on what criteria? Would such an arrangement give some advantage to such individuals who possess citizenship of multiple societies? Would any such arrangement put all other citizens, who are citizens of only one society, at a disadvantage?

In the normal course of conversation and discussion, when we say "citizen", we are referring to an individual who is a citizen of only one society. Such a citizen has all the rights of being a citizen of a society and has all the responsibilities of being a citizen of the society. On the flip side, the society also has expectations from such a citizen and the society also has responsibilities towards the citizen. We will refer to such a citizen with the term complete citizen. We coined the term complete citizen to distinguish such a citizen from a dual citizen. This is because for an individual with more than one citizenship, the rights and responsibilities between citizen and the citizen's societies will be different from the case of a citizen of a single society. Speaking of terminology, we will use the term parent societies to refer to the societies that an individual is a citizen of.

In Utopian societies, for a person to be a citizen of two or more parent societies, we need to do the following:

  • we need to specify the rights and responsibilities of the person in each of the parent societies.
  • we need to specify the rights and responsibilities of the parent societies in relation to the person.

That is we need to stipulate the expectations about the functioning of the following aspects in relation to the individual and the individual's parent societies:

  • Identification and Authentication.
  • Voting Rights.
  • Taxes.
  • Wealth Redistribution. Both receipts and payments.
  • Payments due to monetary policy.
  • Assistance from the Utopian Payment Model.
  • Regular and Social Employment.
  • Social Credit and Collective Credit.
  • Utopian Mortgage.

The next several sections deal with the specification of these aspects and associated rights and responsibilities.

In the chapter Logins and Transactions we mentioned that the ID of an individual is stored on their devices and they can use that ID to login. For citizens of multiple societies, the society that initializes the device stores on that device all the IDs associated with the citizen. Each one of these IDs is associated with one specific society.

The citizen can choose one of these IDs as the usually used ID. So, in all interactions that chosen ID is assumed. The ID also implies the society and hence the Utopian Financial Infrastructure that can identify and authenticate the individual and get authorizations from the individual.

The citizen can designate some other of their IDs as the usually used ID and from that point onward, that ID will be used. The chosen ID indicates which society's financial infrastructure is the main coordinator of the logins and transactions. Other than this difference, nothing else changes regarding logins and transactions.

We will need to specify the extent to which the person can participate in the decisions of all the societies that the person would be a citizen of. That is we will need to specify the voting rights and power of this person.

The intuitive logic is as follows: If a person is a citizen of a single society, the person has just one vote in any social decision that the person participates in. If the entire earth was one single society, even then this person has a single vote. So, just because earth has multiple societies and some of these societies are willing to confer citizenship on this person does not mean the citizen gets more than one vote.

So, when a citizen of just a single society becomes a citizen of a second society, that event does not change the person's voting power. The person continues to have voting power in the original society and does not get voting power in the second society. At this point in time, it is as though the person is a primary citizen of one society and honorary citizen of the other society.

After the person becomes a citizen of more than one society, the person can change "the society that the person regards as the person's primary society".

We can let such a person change their mind about their primary citizenship. But, we cannot let such a person change their mind about their primary citizenship too frequently. It would seem natural that a change once made needs to stay put for at least a year.

The above choice of "one year" can seem like an arbitrary choice. Could this be a policy parameter? Since there are at least two societies, it cannot be a policy parameter within any of these societies. If it were, then the value of the policy parameter of the primary society controls when the person can change his or her primary citizenship. It does not consider a different value of the policy parameter in the other society, even when the person is a citizen of that society. It is as though one society forces its will on the individual even when the individual is simultaneously a citizen of multiple societies.

We could think about using some sort of calculation (for example minimum, maximum or average) based on the value of such a policy parameter, but that just introduces an additional choice of calculation, which itself could be a policy parameter.

Attempting to make this number a policy parameter complicates the implementation and we derive no obvious goodness other than "because we can". Perhaps, this is a situation in which we should prefer simplicity over complexity. So, for now, the minimum amount of time is chosen to be 1 year.

The one year limit is from the time a previous such choice was made. In case of a person becoming a citizen of a second society, the decision was never previously made and hence immediately after becoming a citizen of a second society, the individual can choose to call the second society as the person's primary society. But thereafter, for every such change of primary citizenship, the person has to wait for one year before changing it again.

Since we are considering a person who is a citizen of more than one society, this person will have accounts (actually the entire account book) in all these societies. Thus this person can have wealth in all these societies.

Every society knows the local current wealth and local typical wealth of this citizen. Every society also knows all other societies that this citizen is a citizen of. Hence they know the citizen's typical wealth in each of these societies in their respective currencies. Each society can convert the value of the typical wealth of this citizen in some other society in the local currency using the currency exchange rate. Thus every society knows the citizens total typical wealth across all societies that the citizen is a citizen of.

We will use the concepts of local typical wealth and total typical wealth.

Being a citizen of a society the person ought to receive his or her share of the wealth redistribution.

For wealth redistribution, if the total typical wealth of such a citizen is less than one unit of gold ETF, then in the primary society, the citizen gets the entirety of his or her share. In other parent societies he gets nothing.

For wealth redistribution, if the total typical wealth of such a citizen is greater than or equal to one unit of gold ETF, then the citizen gets a fraction of his or her share. We will call this fraction as the claim fraction and it is determined as follows:

claim fraction = local typical wealth / total typical wealth

We will use the above described logic for any payments that the citizen would receive from the implementation of the monetary policy.

In general, taxes are charged based on the current wealth - not the typical wealth.

Being a citizen of a society the person ought to pay his or her share towards wealth redistribution. This payment is solely based on the local current wealth.

Being a citizen of a society the person ought to pay his or her share towards wealth-based taxes. This payment is solely based on the local current wealth.

Being a citizen of a society the person ought to pay his or her share towards taxes associated with the implementation of the monetary policy. These are also computed based on the current wealth and are automatically included in the wealth-based taxes. So, in principle and in practice, this payment is solely based on the local current wealth.

For a citizen with multiple parent societies, which parent society is responsible for assisting such a citizen with the Utopian Payment Model?

A citizen of multiple societies can avail assistance from the Utopian Payment Model only from the society that the person is a primary citizen of. Moreover, such a citizen can avail such assistance only within that primary society. If the person is in some other parent society, then the person is treated as a visitor to that society and hence ineligible for assistance from the Utopian Payment Model of that parent society.

The purpose behind the stipulations in the previous paragraph is to ensure that a person who is a citizen of multiple societies does not get more help than the help a citizen of a single society would get. Thus, only one society can be held responsible to assist a person that is also a citizen of multiple societies; and that society should be the society of primary citizenship of that person.

How much assistance from the Utopian Payment Model can a citizen of multiple societies expect from the parent society?

Normally, for the Utopian Payment Model, the amount of assistance is based on the person's typical wealth. In the case of a citizen who is a citizen of multiple societies, the person's total typical wealth is used as the basis for computing the monetary help that the Utopian Payment Model would consider providing. Note that this is not the local typical wealth. This computation only determines the assistance the individual would have gotten if he had all his wealth in a single society.

If the total typical wealth of the individual is less than one unit of gold ETF, then the person receives full assistance as indicated by the previous computation. Reason: the person is so poor, that considering the claim fraction is not warranted.

If the total typical wealth of the individual is greater than or equal to one unit of gold ETF, then the actual help that such a citizen would get from the Utopian Payment Model is scaled down by the citizen's claim fraction within the primary society. Note that the claim fraction was discussed in the "Receiving Wealth Related" section.

Thus, if a citizen holds 100% of his wealth in the primary parent society, then the citizen's claim fraction in that society is 1 and hence he would get 100% of assistance that the Utopian Payment Model would have given.

Thus, if a citizen holds 10% of his wealth in the primary parent society, then the citizen's claim fraction in that society is 0.1 and hence he would get 10% of assistance that the Utopian Payment Model would have given.

Note that social credit is given only when the person has no money in the money account and the specific transaction is eligible for social credit.

There is no impact on getting social credit. If a person was supposed to get social credit, then the person will get the social credit regardless of what other societies the person is a citizen of.

Recovering money given as social credit from citizens of multiple societies is complicated. We will describe it in a future version of this book.

Since collective credit is backed by collateral, collective credit works exactly as it would work for a citizen of a single society. Collective credit from one society is not related to the collective credit of another society.

For a transaction, the person can avail collective credit from the society whose identity the person used to initiate, authenticate and authorize the transaction.

Money and Asset Transfer to Self

For a person who is the citizen of two societies, the person can transfer money to oneself from the money account in one society to their own money account in another society.

Everything we said about money transfer continues to hold true except that we will eliminate the yearly upper limit to such money transfer when the transfer is to oneself from one society to another society.

Note that such unlimited money transfer to self across society boundaries does not significantly alter the assistance that the person is eligible to get as per the Utopian Payment Model. Why? Because the assistance is based on total typical wealth and not local typical wealth.

In the chapter on Money Transfer, we discussed the transfer of physical assets within a society and said that it is allowed.

However we did not answer the question about such transfers across society boundaries. How should we think about a transfer of physical assets to oneself across society boundaries?

A citizen of multiple societies can seek regular employment in any parent society that the individual is a citizen of and no other society.

A citizen of multiple societies can seek social employment only in the society of primary citizenship.

A citizen of multiple societies can buy something using the Utopian Mortgage only in the society of primary citizenship and only if the citizen's claim fraction in that society is greater than 0.95.