a deal of financial freedom to people that don't enjoy very much financial freedom today whether it is that their currency itself is broken and therefore all payment systems are effectively broken in their in their environment or whether it is restrictions on the way that they can use their money this really addresses that and then i think on the second point i'm unsure to be honest i think that in places like venezuela where there is a strong motivator i think we'll certainly see that type of adoption whether other communities or other countries see that much value and and the transition costs associated with transitioning to a new system of money it's not without disruption and so i think they have to see the value there question is can we communicate that value and demonstrate that value to the point that entire countries are willing to you know take the plunge right revolution in the air so well that that's of course the master ned system as a revolution the way that's all been set up and so walk us through that again you

know full disclosure of course the dash master knows voted in the show that we did here on our team last year a great american pilgrimage and we had a lot of fun with that and cross country and we spread the gospel to america hopefully that came off to everyone's satisfaction but walk us through you know how that master no works again because that really is the secret sauce i think aside from the excellent technology right the way that the treasury system works is that ten percent of our block reward is set aside for what's called a monthly superblock it's essentially a monthly budget anyone is free to put a proposal up to the network that says here's what i want to do and here's what i'm asking for in order to go do that and the mass ruins themselves vote on those the highest ranking proposals pay out first until that treasury budget is gone so at the end of the month a snapshot is taken of those votes the highest proportion rank proposals pay out first and really anyone with a good idea doesn't have to come from dash core group or some centralized entity or . right anyone can participate in this dash core group gets its funding in this way

and can put a proposal up to the network now in venezuela they identified this need and they identified the specific needs that people needed to be on board in venezuela they needed education they needed conferences and things to learn about it they needed incentives to sign up merchants they need to customer service these are the things that are required to actually see this get adopted and so they put forward those proposals they got voted in and we're seeing a great deal of success with it and now those same groups are putting forward more and more proposals to enhance what they're doing there grow their teams expand the ecosystem and so it really is a system that feeds upon itself and allocates funding towards where success is being seen it seems awfully democratic it's perfectly democratic and if it's more like it i liken it to being a shareholder if you own one or more master notes you get one or more votes in

proportion to you know the amount of dash that you hold and so you know it really is shareholder activism excel a stakeholder active at the minute invisible democracy a set of all the posturing of speechmaking about what weil do if i get elected it's like here's the treasury let's all figure out how to spend it right now and i think everyone's lives better today exactly and unlike a shareholder of a company that gets to vote once a year on who the board of directors are that make all the decisions they have much more control over the immediate decisions on a month to month basis right so it's really time yeah real time democracy riot all right a time you want to dash while it's easy just go to dash watch it on your phone and there it is and you can front and get involved right away thanks for being on the kaiser report well thank you for having me already take care well that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacey herbert want to thank our guests ryan taylor he's the c.e.o. of the dash corps if you are a just on twitter it's kaiser report and. i yell. hello

and welcome to worlds apart extra this is in addition to our regular show interest focus on the people behind the story is if asked in the most oppressive soviet the russian leader joseph stalin is likely to be among the first to come up with the great terror of the nine hundred thirty still haunts this country with millions executed to the what is much less known is that there are only a year before the purges began stalin sought to well for the lack of a better word democratize the soviet society and the society pushed back against that these paradoxes of soviet power came to life thanks to the work of an american academic from maryland who were found here in northeast russia almost nine thousand kilometers away from the old lines they. are going to be there

a little. calmer. there girl with the only really monitor. samantha long is an assistant professor at the state university has been teaching here on an almost six years in the morning she's trying to expand her students' english vocabulary by discussing beauty and fashion in the afternoon she scours the local archives in search of documents which shut the light on a much heavier subject in the early years of the soviet state. i . wouldn't be surprised to find a graduate from. university teaching at the university of pittsburgh but i think the opposite is still quite exotic how did you up here well i started writing my dissertation on the one nine hundred thirty six constitution and when i looked in

the archives in moscow there was just an overwhelming amount of material so i needed to focus on the region and one of the regions i found a lot of material from cure of funding was a little bit difficult to come by it's not necessarily the most sexy topic you says no to most sex a topic but i think it's a very counter-intuitive topic on many levels how did the idea pop into your well there's a difference actually how i came to them like constitution and stalin seem like two things that shouldn't go together so i wanted to see what this was about how serious a project this was whether it was really just a propaganda exercise as it had been described or if there was something a little bit more substantive now here is one of the most extensively researched areas of the soviet history and it's also the one that comes with a lot of accept the conventions. this was strictly to tally terror and state where everything was decided top bottom line here you are coming

out with a book suggesting that stalin actually tried to encourage what he saw at least as genuine political participation why would he need something like well russia is very very big and at the time it had incredibly poor infrastructure and very few members of the communist party in rural areas to govern it so governing desirous empire of the soviet union and modern russia has always been difficult simply because of the expanse and the fact that the population is not densely settled russia has a very peculiar relationship between people in power and it's usually assumed the leadership surprises the people's demands for raw. but i take it from your book that in the case of the nineteen thirty six constitution it was actually the other way around that stalin was actually more liberal and progressive society could take yeah i was quite surprised when i was looking at particular hevia scorpius which is

the rate. the ability to have rights when you stand trial to not be arrested without the sanction of the prosecutor etc people were not interested in that that was something that was designed as part of actually reforms to get away from this revolutionary reality legality and sort of equal. implementation of both punishment and arrests and people weren't interested people had a lot of problems with crime in the countryside and it tended to be crime that the state didn't prioritize things like drunken beating fast hooliganism that post a real threat arson to people's daily lives prioritize so they wanted the ability to arrest people that destabilized their lives on the spot now you told me before the. people in academia really advise you against using the word democracy

when it comes to stalinist russia because they include this notion of civil society that is central to today idea of democracy but. what you're describing just there wasn't talent terrorism about point of time either there was somebody in moscow with a limit the security apparatus and the rest of the country was essentially a lots of self governance is that an accurate. challenge hereon ism is in general has sort of been debunked within academia simply because more regional studies have proved that they simply didn't have the manpower or the infrastructure to monitor people frequently you know i look at collective farms where they have seen district level officials once every one or two years so the rest of the time they're busy doing whatever they want on their own people in the west would see stalin's out for its courage this. popular participation as a sham because they would think that genuine democracy would be of the impediment

to his. with what you're saying. it may have been quite the opposite that he saw it as a means of strengthening his power simply because again as you said he didn't have enough resources and enough manpower to reach every little corner for he actually gives an interview with roy howard in which he discusses his views on democracy he sees it as a whip in the hands of the people to deal with incompetent local officials he encourages them to be active to root out those who are not doing a good job he says you know this person is not building a school if this is gertie if they are not providing the service he she tell us vote this person out because moscow simply didn't have the resources to monitor every single. region so there was this notion of political accountability oh very much so now i note that stalin himself was the head of the constitutional

commission he personally worked on the drafts making edits i believe you started some of this. have you been able to draw any ideas about his own psychological profile based on things that he you know kept in took out not necessarily his psychological profile but he tended to be more practical then the other drafters of the original draft was written by a couple of states and it tends to include a lot of very ideological things for example there was a clause in there that parents should teach their children to hate capitalists. stalin and moves that because it's not really constitutional material a lot of the things he pulled out tend to reappear in legislative initiatives things like the number of hours people should work that sort of thing this constitutional was adopted barely a year before the great terror which saw a millions of people either executed or son to the gulags. whenever the subject

comes up in russia always some terrorist on stalin and much less so on the. role the society at large played in allowing that to happen or even facilitating. the whole process having spawn so much time citing the correspondence between you know ordinary people on ventilators do you think these progressive constitution offers an insight into the horrors that followed directly after well i know that the one nine hundred thirty seven repression is one of the reasons that scholars often say to deal with the constitution you list you said how can you be serious about democracy if you then turn around violate everybody's rights and kill a bunch of people my research has shown that. certainly there were instances in the provinces of people using their new constitutional rights in ways that were threatening to the local power structure so having these new locus of power people were asking to open up churches people were collecting money to bring back priests

and so a lot of this is genuinely threatening to the locals and so they certainly would like to get rid of them and arch getty has postulated that you see a lot of pushback from the regional bosses who are threatened by the opening up of the one nine hundred thirty six constitution and that leads to repression how much is the process are for oppression driven from the center and how much is it locally was it locally mission well the thing is that the repression is sort of multi-pronged you have for example actions against national minorities that tends to be mostly driven because they already have catalogs of these people they have been watching a lot of the national minorities and those also tend to be religion national security issues you know particularly poles koreans. in this area people from the baltic states are often monitored then you also have the center just simply giving large quotas of the numbers of people that need to be arrested. and they let the locals decide who fills that quota but interestingly enough by nine hundred thirty

nine or nine hundred forty most of them have had their sentence commuted and they're back in another position of power that's interesting i heard some western scholars complain of the haphazard nature of access to the archives i wonder if you needed any f.s.b. clearance for bad do you have you ever got needs no active american spy well people joke about it i've been told to them a very nice spy well most of the spies are usually very nice they have to go into group graces with people it's never been a problem in the archive part of it maybe my topic the constitution isn't particularly political right now and my current work for this is on collective farms which again is not sensitive if i was doing something on the secret police or even the second world war it may be a little bit different but here they've been great with access.