Hypothetical - Moon Station Government

Basically, my question was getting at "how easily could one person misbehaving epically screw the entire colony?" or, alternately "How many things to the colonists need to do 'just so' to keep it all viable?"

The more easy for an individual to screw things up for everyone, and the more ways the colonists need to all work together in very specific ways, the more "rigid" the system needs to be, but it should not be a shred more rigid than that.

That's obviously not a complete answer to what sort of government, it's more my initial thought about how one would start thinking things through.

It sounds like the sum of UOPs is constantly inflating, possibly by a large (but perhaps nearly constant?) amount. This might or might not be a problem, but it seems to me to at least be a barrier. I don't know enough about economic modeling, especially for this particular case, to decide whether spending UOPs on bids negates this or not. It seems like it would, but I can't justify that.

It depends how competitive the voting is. Lets say we have two people Jim and Bob. The average amounts of UOPs you can get from being in charge is 5000, let say they both have the same fixed costs for flunkies (2000), it makes sense to bid anything up to 2999. They will both still get a profit of 1 UOPS. If either of them think they can improve on the average they might bid more than 3000, and if they aren't well calibrated they would lose UOPS.

The big worry is collusion to keep bidding low, so that they can both gain control.

If UOPs are a currency, how are exchanges regulated? Can one write them into a will to be inherited? Can one purchase them with regular money? Can one give them to another politician in order to negotiate a policy?

I'm not sure. If the market is competitive I'm hoping the transfers won't need to be too heavily regulated as no one should gain too much, so they won't be able to give much away without sacrificing their ability to gain a post. The worse that might happen in willing things is someone incompetent might be given them, and then you have a time period of not very good governance, and that person loses most of their UOPs and can't get control again. But that might happen with things like alzheimers or other brain injury.

Can one donate them to another politician in order to see him or her elected? What about demanding that donation be a loan, perhaps with interest?

These seem necessary for new politicians to be introduced into the system, so I wouldn't regulate them too much.

Its design is loosely inspired by learning classifier systems where nepotism/collusion is not too much of a problem, so I don't know how it will interact with live humans. It might be like communism, nice in theory but not practical.

I'm planning to try it out at some point, on the small scale.

Not quite. Systems differ on how the value signal is created and transferred.

When I upvote you on lesswrong I create a new bit of karma and give that to you. I could sneakily go through all someone's old posts and upvote them all, in order to artificially inflate their karma (if it was important people would do this, they would also increase their post count subtly so that they could get more different things to upvote).

In the system I am describing there would be limited numbers of posts (as in positions in government, rather than posts on a message board) that you can get UoPs for serving on.

There is also not much you can spend karma on, so there is not much incentive to game the system. In a system where you need UoPs to get a post, there would be a lot of incentive, so the karma system would need to be robust to cheating.

Also I can't give you some of my karma. It does not form a currency, which would be needed for governance with it.