Appendix A — ❓ Frequently Asked Questions

People have questions. Here are answers, with appropriate levels of sarcasm for particularly ridiculous objections.

Why This Isn’t Completely Insane

“This sounds like an illegal bribe.”

Reality: The current system of “legal” lobbying is a slow, inefficient bribe that produces war, disease, and existential risks like nuclear apocalypse or Skynet. Our transparent incentives produce peace, health, and human flourishing. In a world where leaders fund campaigns with crypto and sell access, we’re applying market realities to save lives. The consequentialist math is clear: continued misallocation leads to preventable deaths, destruction, and possible extinction. Our “soul” is in the outcome: preventing that fate by making healing more profitable than killing.

“A global referendum is not a real protest. It’s a flawed analogy.”

Reality: A cryptographically secure, on-chain list of 280 million verified supporters is not an “analogy”; it is the largest, most powerful political mandate in human history. It is a direct threat to the power of traditional media and captured political parties. It is a political entity in its own right, capable of swinging elections and forcing change. Clicks on a screen are the new boots on the ground.

“A government’s promise to pay is unenforceable. This is a fantasy.”

Reality: This doesn’t rely on courts for enforcement. The system funds campaigns against leaders who break their promises to their own people. Enforcement is based on creating direct political and financial consequences for individual leaders who defy the mandate from their citizens.

Technical & Security Objections

“This is too complicated to build.”

Reality: We’re assembling proven components, not inventing new technology. DAOs like MakerDAO already manage billions securely. We use battle-tested solutions for treasury management, governance, and secure voting integrated into a unified system.

“280M people can’t be verified reliably.”

The Challenge: Stop fake votes across 280 million people.

Our Solution: Several computerized methods to catch fake votes:

  • Government IDs: Connect with national e-ID systems (Estonia, India, EU)
  • Biometrics: Fingerprints and face scans to ensure real, unique people
  • AI Fraud Detection: Computers that spot fake patterns and suspicious behavior
  • Mathematical Verification: End-to-end verifiable voting with zero-knowledge proofs

Bottom Line: We use proven technologies that already verify millions of users globally.

“Aren’t blockchains environmentally disastrous? How can you save humanity while boiling the oceans?”

Reality: This is a valid concern based on early blockchain technology. However, the DIH will be built on modern, energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms, which consume over 99.9% less energy than their Proof-of-Work predecessors. Our commitment to global health includes planetary health; we’ll build this the right way.

“The crypto world is full of scams. Why should we trust a plan built on such a risky foundation?”

Reality: We’re not creating speculative assets, we’re using proven technology for transparency and corruption resistance. We use technologies that already secure billions with appropriate safeguards and legal compliance.

Political & Strategic Feasibility

“This is politically impossible - you can’t just redirect military budgets by referendum.”

Reality: Military budgets are redirected all the time through political pressure. The question isn’t whether it’s possible, but whether enough pressure can be generated. The $7T fossil fuel subsidy proof-of-concept shows that massive economic reallocation is achievable when the right incentives align. This isn’t asking for unilateral disarmament - this asks all nations to move 1% together with a 1% Treaty, maintaining relative power balances.

“The 3.5% rule applies to civil resistance movements, not global online referendums.”

Reality: Mass participation creates political legitimacy regardless of format. The 3.5% rule is a historical benchmark for successful movements, and 280 million verified supporters create an unignorable political mandate with electoral consequences.

“Independent expenditures don’t work against entrenched incumbents with deep pockets.”

Reality: Independent expenditures work when they’re massive and targeted. We’re not competing dollar-for-dollar with military contractors - we’re creating a system where supporting the treaty becomes the politically safer choice than opposing it. When 3.5% of humanity has voted for this, opposing it becomes electoral suicide.

“You’re competing with military contractors who have decades of relationships and influence.”

Reality: The strategy doesn’t compete. It offers better returns and co-opts their existing networks. Don’t fight them, buy them.

“Won’t reducing our military budget by 1% make our country more vulnerable?”

No. In fact, it makes every country safer.

The 1% Treaty is designed to be geopolitically neutral. Since every nation reduces its military spending by the same percentage at the same time, the relative balance of power remains identical. No country loses its strategic advantage over its rivals.

National security is actually increased for two reasons:

  1. Every potential adversary has 1% fewer resources for offensive weapons
  2. The greatest modern threats are not always conventional armies. A global pandemic can inflict more devastation than most military conflicts. The DIH acts as a planetary defense system against these biological threats, providing a far greater return on investment for protecting citizens.

Free Rider Problem & Enforcement

“What stops a country from cheating or ‘free-riding’ on the system?”

This is the classic “free-rider problem.” The solution is to create overwhelming incentives that make it the rational, self-interested choice for the key decision-makers within a country to comply.

A country doesn’t make decisions; people do. We make it politically and financially ruinous for them to make the wrong one.

  • For Politicians: Supporting the treaty means giving massive health benefits to voters, attracting billions in research funding to their districts, and gaining access to a powerful global political platform. We fund massive independent expenditure campaigns to support allies and unseat opponents, making it political suicide to oppose the will of 3.5% of their voting population.

  • For Corporate & Financial Leaders: Compliance unlocks access to the world’s most powerful economic bloc and the opportunity to invest in and profit from the multi-trillion dollar health innovation ecosystem. Non-compliance means being locked out of key markets and technologies.

  • For Scientists & Research Institutions: Joining means access to a new, $27B+ annual pool of research funding, an amount that can double or triple the research budgets of entire nations.

Making It Personal: Countries can’t be bribed. But the humans who run countries have mortgages and kids and retirement accounts just like everyone else. We let them invest too, give them a cut, provide family security (leaders’ families get diseases too), and offer political insurance through massive independent expenditures.

“Why cut military if others won’t?”

Why This Objection is Overstated: The US already can’t account for $2.5 trillion in assets, more than 250 times the $10 billion annual US contribution to this plan. Redirecting 1% is trivial compared to existing waste. Other nations’ military spending is relatively small (US represents ~40% of global total). Even if holdouts don’t comply, they won’t catch up to US capabilities.

Here’s the thing: If we don’t do this, we’ll probably all die from nuclear war or get eaten by robots. A U.S.–Russia nuclear exchange would loft ~150 Tg of soot and cause global famine killing >5 billion people. Even if this plan only works partially, it’s still better than the alternative. Which is death.

Financial & Economic Questions

“What if this fails? Where’s my return?”

Response: Our financing follows two simple rules, not the usual Wall Street bullshit. We’re not making money by gambling on stocks or crypto. We’re making money by taking a tiny slice of the $16.5 trillion humanity wastes on violence every year.

The model targets a 270%/year return for investors, compared to the best hedge funds, while guaranteeing at least 50% of income for the mission. Even in a partial success scenario (e.g., US/EU/UK adoption), the model provides a year-one cash payout of 2.6X the initial investment.

Risk Mitigation: Assurance Contracts (funds returned if goals aren’t met), clear milestone gates for funding release, and diversified repayment from multiple government commitments.

“What stops a few billionaires from buying up all the bonds and seizing the treasury?”

Reality: This is a critical design challenge for any decentralized system. To prevent plutocratic capture, we’ll use voting systems that make it impossible for rich people to buy control. This includes quadratic voting, where the cost of each additional vote increases, making it prohibitively expensive for any single entity to dominate. We may also implement identity-based systems that grant voting power based on reputation and participation, not just capital. The goal is a system governed by its active stakeholders, not just its wealthiest ones.

“Why not just rely on philanthropy?”

Reality: Relying on donations would force us to compete with the very ecosystem we aim to support. Philanthropy is a finite, zero-sum game. A massive fundraising campaign for the DIH would inevitably cannibalize the existing pool of donations, effectively stealing funds from the thousands of vital health charities already doing critical work.

The goal is not to reshuffle a small pot of charitable giving, it is to tap into the multi-trillion dollar firehose of government spending. Furthermore, philanthropy treats the symptoms of a broken system. It doesn’t change why politicians keep doing stupid things for money. This isn’t just about funding more research; this is about permanently shifting the global allocation of capital and talent from destruction to creation. Only actually moving the money can do that.

Implementation & Efficiency

“How do you prevent waste and ensure the money actually helps patients?”

Reality: The decentralized FDA uses decentralized pragmatic trials that cost $500 per patient vs. $41,000 traditional trials - an 80X efficiency improvement proven by the Oxford RECOVERY trial.

Compare this to the NIH RECOVER initiative: $1.6B budget, $53,333 per patient, zero completed trials in 4 years. With the same $1.6B budget, the dFDA could run 2,800 trials enrolling 2.8 million patients vs. NIH’s zero completed trials. The evidence is overwhelming: decentralized pragmatic trials deliver 80X more patients treated per dollar spent.

“How does this help patients vs. just funding more bureaucracy?”

Reality: The DIH flips the funding model on its head. Instead of grants going to institutions, the money is directed by the patient. Funding is allocated as direct subsidies for patients to enroll in eligible clinical trials. A computer program helps rank trials by which diseases kill the most people, but patients make the final decision. Researchers and institutions only get paid when patients choose to join their study. The best research gets the most patients because patients aren’t stupid, they’ll pick the studies that might actually help them.

“Isn’t this just another layer of slow, inefficient global bureaucracy?”

No. The DIH is engineered to be the opposite of a typical bureaucracy.

  • 80X More Efficient: The DIH’s entire purpose is to fund a research model that is 80 times more efficient than the current system
  • Decentralized by Default: It is not a single, top-down organization. It is a “coalition of coalitions” where funding decisions are made by decentralized groups of experts, patients, and advocates in each specific disease area
  • Automated & Transparent: Most treasury functions are executed by transparent smart contracts, not by committees. The DAO’s role is primarily for high-level strategy and emergency overrides, not day-to-day management

Economic & Resource Allocation

“Why focus on reducing military spending? Shouldn’t we just increase health research funding directly?”

Reality: This is not about nominal dollar figures; it is about the real allocation of a finite pie of global resources. The world’s top scientists, engineers, and manufacturing capacity are a limited resource. If we simply “increase health spending” through new appropriations, but the military budget also continues to grow, no real resources have been shifted. It’s an inflationary wash.

A direct, treaty-bound reallocation is the only mechanism that forces a true shift of these finite resources. By cutting 1% from military budgets, this approach isn’t just moving dollars; it’s freeing up the physicists, data scientists, and supply chains that were serving the military-industrial complex and making them available to cure Alzheimer’s. This is how you change the game.

“Don’t we already spend enough on medical research?”

Reality: The world spends 40 times more on military force than on medical research. The $20-27 billion unlocked by the 1% Treaty would represent a nearly 40% increase in the entire world’s budget for medical R&D. It is a massive, not incremental, sum of money. This new funding, when deployed through an 80X more efficient model, will have a multiplicative impact on the rate of cures.

“What about the millions of jobs in the defense industry? This is a threat to their livelihoods.”

Reality: This is not about cutting productive jobs; it’s about redirecting a tiny fraction of the budget that is currently lost to waste and transforming it into a new engine for job creation. The U.S. contribution to this plan, for example, is equivalent to less than 0.5% of the trillions the Pentagon already cannot account for, money that isn’t funding jobs productively right now.

We want to take that wasted money and use it to create jobs in medicine instead. The same brilliant engineers building guidance systems can build next-generation medical imaging devices. The same logistics experts managing military hardware can manage supply chains for delivering trial medications. This is a net job creator, transitioning our most valuable human capital from a cycle of waste to an industry of creation and healing.

“This plan feels anti-military and disrespectful to the soldiers who protect us.”

Reality: This initiative deeply respects the service and sacrifice of individual soldiers. Our criticism is aimed at a budgetary system that fails them. When trillions of dollars are unaccounted for, that is money that isn’t buying better equipment, training, or support for our troops in the field.

We propose redirecting a fraction of that waste to protect soldiers and their families from the threats that are far more likely to harm them, like pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and chronic disease. This is about retooling our national security to truly protect our protectors and the nation they serve.

Execution & Team Capability

“Can your team actually build this?”

Response: We’re going to hire a few very smart people instead of building some enormous bureaucracy that would eat money like a hungry pig. These smart people will then hire other smart people to do the actual work. It’s cheaper and it works better.

Mitigation: Advisory board of constitutional scholars, DAO experts, and former officials; phased rollout with pilot countries.

“What if major powers sabotage it?”

Response: Start with friendly countries (US/EU covering 55% of spending), using bribes to pull in others, holdouts like Russia (<10% share) can’t derail the math. Sabotage attempts (e.g., disinformation) are countered by blockchain verification.

Alternative: Unchecked geopolitics risks nuclear winter (US–Russia exchange scenarios modeled at ~150 Tg soot leading to >5B famine deaths)—this reduces that by 1% globally even with partial adoption.

Mitigation: Multi-layered security (AI fraud detection, diplomatic backchannels); focus on mutual benefits over confrontation.

Source: Consolidated from original FAQ.md and enhanced with project tone and updated cross-references