DEF: 1 Title: The Social Smart Contract Author: @DemocracyEarth. Comments-Summary: No comments yet. Status: Active Type: Paper Created: 2017-07-14 License: MIT Replaces: 0
=The Social Smart Contract.= An Initial Rights Offering from [http://democracy.earth Democracy Earth Foundation].
==i. Abstract.==
In a world that has succeeded in the globalization of financial assets while keeping political rights enclosed to territories, we need to build new models of democratic governance that enable humanity to collaborate and address pressing global issues. Democracy Earth Foundation is building free, open source software for incorruptible blockchain-based decision-making (voting) within institutions of all sizes, from the most local involving two people to the most global involving all of us. Uneven distribution of opportunity around the globe due to the perpetual confrontation between national governments has led to accelerated climate change, rising inequality, terrorism and forced migrations. Democracy Earth Foundation considers that the technology stack that includes Bitcoin as programmable money without Central Banks, and Ethereum enabling smart contracts without the need of Judiciary Courts, requires a new layer that signals incorruptible votes beyond the territorial boundaries of Nation-States. This transnational network will act in accordance with the personal sovereignty of its members and protect their human rights with encryption. In our Initial Rights Offering we offer a token called ''vote'' that will grant participation rights to every human with decision-making as its main function. Our proposal introduces cryptographically induced equality: as long as any person is able to validate his or her self-sovereign identity, they will receive a corresponding share of ''votes'' that is equal to the share of every active participant in the network. We define a ''Proof of Identity'' process that avoids central authority by introducing the concept of ''attention mining'' which incentivizes participants to strengthen the trust of ''votes'' by performing simple tests aimed at detecting replicants. Finally ''votes'' get dripped to valid participants under a ''Universal Basic Income'' mechanism with a goal of finding a proper equilibrium in the historical tension between money and politics. We seek nothing less than true democratic governance for the Internet age, one of the foundational building blocks of an achievable global peace and prosperity arising from an arc of technological innovations that will change what it means to be human on Earth.
==ii. Contents.==
This text is structured in three parts, each aiming to satisfy a different readership target (and all of whom may reside within the same persona.)
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[[#Manifesto|Manifesto]]: For idealists. Diagnoses global political context and argues for a paradigm change.
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[[#Paper|Paper]]: For builders. Describes the building blocks for a system that can be implemented by anyone, anywhere.
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[[#Execution|Execution]]: For pragmatists. Specifies how to execute these ideas for impact.
We do not intend this text to remain fixed. It is published under an open source license and we welcome contributions from anyone, as our goal is for this document to be a living roadmap for planetary governance. Democracy as the ability to trust each other to the greatest possible extent is a defining force shaping the trajectory of history. Our mission echoes urgently across the globe, encompassing all of humanity: the need to make of our home a place of peaceful coexistence. The [http://democracy.earth Democracy Earth Foundation] has performed [[#Background|extensive research]] on voting systems, cyberpolitics and blockchain networks; we stand at the forefront of a public conversation regarding the internet as a planetary jurisdiction.
Following [https://twitter.com/lsukernik/status/892101885771034628 the example of Satoshi Nakamoto], prior to sharing our ideas in written form we have undertaken to write code first, in order to properly understand what can be done. To this end, more than [https://github.com/DemocracyEarth/sovereign 30,000 lines of code have been written since October 2015], which in turn has driven our research, use cases, and the ideas presented herein. This is our proposal.
==iii. Background.==
We pioneered digital democracy having authored some of the most prominent open source democracy software [https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=topic%3Ademocracy&type=Repositories as ranked by the GitHub community] including the original design of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCgfd7dNb0 DemocracyOS], a simple direct democracy project we created in 2012. We founded the first digital political party in the Americas, the [http://partidodelared.org Partido de la Red] (Peers Party) that ran for its first election in the city of [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/e-voting Buenos Aires in 2013]. In 2014 we shared our experience in [https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era TED] Talks reaching over 1.2 million viewers. During 2015 and 2016, Silicon Valley's [http://ycombinator.com Y Combinator] and [http://ffwd.org Fast Forward] funded our efforts to start the [http://democracy.earth Democracy Earth Foundation], a non-profit organization committed to the mission of borderless governance.
Our experience combining both the political and technological challenges of democracy led us to think and design around the notion of how we could build a political party using smart contracts, or rather a lightweight form of governance anyone can implement at a low cost. We began the development of [http://sovereign.software Sovereign], a '''''blockchain liquid democracy''''' that enables direct voting on issues as well as the ability to delegate voting power on specific topics to peers over a secure network without central authority. By operating with tokens signaled on a blockchain all votes become censorship resistant and immediate audit rights can be granted to every voter without needing to provide access to servers or private infrastructure, thus making the system open and transparent for all. Our work is driven by open source software development practices and cooperates with key projects aiming to secure identity in decentralized environments including efforts from [https://blockstack.org/blockstack_usenix16.pdf Blockstack], [http://civic.com Civic] and [https://whitepaper.uport.me/uPort_whitepaper_DRAFT20170221.pdf Consensys] among others.
[[File:/images/sovereign.png|Sovereign.]]
[https://github.com/DemocracyEarth/sovereign Sovereign's codebase] delivers an adaptive mobile and desktop application to voters and organizations standardizing incorruptible decision-making in a blockchain-based democracy. Our aim is to continue paving the road of implementations that enable [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/adida/adida.pdf cryptographic open-audit voting] and integrate our software with blockchains able to guarantee the sovereign rights of users.
==1. Manifesto.==
Democracy is always a work in progress, it’s never an absolute idea or it would otherwise be a totalitarian ideology just like all the rest of them.'''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mujica José Mujica]''', President of Uruguay (2010–2015).
Current democratic systems governing societies under the territorial domain of Nation-States have grown stagnant in terms of participation and are leading towards increased polarization. Constituencies are provided with tailor-made media that satisfies their own endogamic beliefs, pulling society apart as discourse and factual debate are replaced with a [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Post-truth_politics post-truth] mindset. This is a consequence of the drastic expansion in communication channels, accompanied by every-shrinking attention spans and rendering thoughtful analysis expendable. Centralized 20th century information distribution created uniform narratives, realities and identities. The Internet has fractured them. Instances of political participation in the so-called modern democracies are not apt for information abundant contexts and have remained without change since their inception.
[[File:/images/bipartisan-votes-us-congress.png|Bipartisan votes in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1981, source: The Rise of Partisanship (2015).]]
Engagement through the traditional channels is weaker among younger generations, [http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do often not going out to vote and unlikely to engage in party politics]. Meanwhile online activism is increasing with social media becoming the dominant arena for political clashes. This includes Facebook and Twitter (where gossip dissemination is predominant with ''fake news'', ''bots'' and ''trolling'' among other campaign optimizations) and emergent echo chambers like [http://www.4chan.org/ 4chan.org] where anonymity led to political incorrectness or [https://gab.ai/ gab.ai] consolidating the ''alt-right'' community in the USA. Needless to say: endogamy only makes polarization stronger, and our tribalized societies have shown a tendency to continue relativizing truth [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/climate/trump-paris-climate-agreement.html risking the preservation of resources] and the survival of future generations.
Democratic processes seen during high-stakes elections are often prone to fraudulent behavior with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering ''gerrymandering''] becoming commonplace and a strong link between what the [https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_48_Ferguson_et_al.pdf major political parties spend and the percentage of votes they win]. In developing nations exploits are literal having ballot boxes removed, broken and even burned by large parties hoping to suppress the chances of smaller competitors.
This document proposes a solution that will tackle both the political and technical issues currently weakening the prospects of democracy in the world by offering an alternative that can be adopted directly by citizens and implemented using peer to peer networks. As the internet becomes the dominant force in modern politics we see an indispensable need to develop digital technology for voting that can be securely deployed in any geographical location and for communities of any size.
With internet growth [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32884867 reaching over 3 billion lives] (far surpassing major religions and Nation-States) and the development of encrypted networks known as blockchains permitting incorruptible transactions with permissionless audits, there’s no reason stopping mankind from building a borderless commons that can help shape the next evolutionary leap for democratic governance at any scale. Even in regions where internet penetration is below 50%, the digital gap is not based on socio-economic factors but it is rather a generational divide. According to Rick Falkvinge, founder of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party Pirate Party]: “Politics moves at glacial speeds: nothing seems to happen until suddenly a strenuous noise gets everyone's attention. It is slow because it often takes one generation to die for the next one to take over. And today we live in a world that has the ''offline generation'' in charge and the ''online generation'' growing up”.
[[File:/images/age internet.png|The digital divide is generational more than socioeconomic, source: Pew Internet & American Life Project Surveys April 2000-April 2012.]]
New forms of governance must acknowledge the networked commons connecting humanity and progressively weaken the legacy of national frontiers and its inherent inability to address pressing global issues such as climate change, rising inequality, terrorism, automation and forced migrations. Uneven distribution of opportunity around the globe due to the perpetual confrontation between national governments led to the rise of these issues in the global agenda. We believe the technology stack that includes [http://bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf Bitcoin] as programmable money without Central Banks and [http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/index.html Ethereum] enabling smart contracts without the need of Judiciary Courts requires a new layer that signals incorruptible votes beyond the boundaries of Nation-States. This transnational network will act in accordance to the personal sovereignty of its members and protect their human rights with encryption.
===1.1 Legacy.===
We can consider elections implemented by states, provinces and city municipalities as democracies within which we are reduced to being passive recipients of a monologue. Citizens are called in-between substantially long periods of time, during elections, to provide a basic input: essentially accept or reject players in the same system. This is the bandwidth of the legacy system that is our so-called ''modern democracies''. Under these systems less than one percent of the population is able to vote on legislation or execute budgets while the rest are legally forced to outsource their full citizenship rights to a representing minority that eventually figures out how to perpetuate itself.
The technology behind ''representative democracies'' can be grouped in two sets:
- '''Analogue elections''': usually paper ballots and ballot boxes with authorities responsible for counting votes and reporting fraudulent behavior. Even though these systems are stable in developed nations, they suffer from severe lack of participation. Barriers are implemented with requirements such as the need to register to vote through an excessively bureaucratic process that ends up blocking a majority of disenfranchised voters. Authorities also gerrymander districts by exploiting survey data in anticipation of electoral outcomes. Even though these systems are easier to audit, this also means that they’re easier to corrupt: in developing nations ''analogue elections'' get subverted by mobs representing large parties that burn or 'disappear' ballot boxes, threatening auditors from smaller competitors and letting violence overrun the process in key districts. In our experience with the [http://partidodelared.org Partido de la Red] running for the City Congress of Buenos Aires in the 2013 elections we found out that no effort mattered more than having sufficient party auditors to cover every district in the city else votes would get stolen. The larger an election’s territory is, the less likely an analogue system can guarantee a fair process. Further, high implementation costs end up limiting elections to a handful of days per year (if any), rendering democracy an exception rather than the norm regarding how governments actually get elected. Moreover, the traditional analogue election process has the shape of a pipeline, where votes navigate throughout, from the voter's hands to a central server. In that pipeline, votes from each ballot are manually summarized on sheet of papers, which are later scanned and transmitted to a central office. There, the received sheets are manually loaded into a central server which computes the count of votes. In this schema, when navigating this process, a vote is handled by any number of different human actors any of whom could, intentionally or unintentionally, introduce fraud at any point. Electronic election aims to shorten this pipeline, with the goal that no human is able to handle votes: voters interact with a device (e.g., an electronic voting machine) which transmits the encrypted votes to a central server or to a shared ledged (e.g., a blockchain).
[[File:/images/nation-state-voter-turnout.png|Territorial voting.]]
- '''Electronic voting''': proposals that deliver solutions based on electronic voting machines aim to secure the process through a digital interface yet with the same logic of few elections per year, with the net effect of new technology serving the same purpose as old voting technology i.e. that of legitimizing professional politicians. Machines can effectively help avoid [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clientelism clientelist] techniques used to corrupt an election but open a whole new surface of attack by exposing ballots to the risk of undetected hacks and foreign intervention. Experts in this field ([https://www.ndi.org/e-voting-guide/examples/constitutionality-of-electronic-voting-germany including the Supreme Court of Germany]) recommend using electronic voting machines that leave a paper trail [https://www.amazon.com/Voting-Wars-Florida-Election-Meltdown/dp/0300198248 or any alternative medium] for vote proof. Another approach to secure and transparent voting systems are efforts to make voting machines [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/open-source-software-hacker-voting.html open source and auditable by the public]. Technology can also be introduced directly by citizens using smartphone apps to perform ''parallel vote tabulation'' to report partial tallies across different polling stations as a safeguard against official reports. By their very nature, computing systems keep logs and cannot guarantee vote secrecy. For this reason any logging of a digital voting system should be public by default and trustless, operating with a distributed ledger syncing the outputs of a shared network. In short: a blockchain.
Traditional analog and electronic elections are strictly for long-term, representative democracies with elective periods ranging from 4 to 6 years. But the underlying dynamic of these systems is that officials are pre-elected from the top-down and presented for citizens to legitimize with their vote. The argument that citizens lack the knowledge and preparation to fulfill political responsibility and don’t have enough time in their daily lives to engage in public affairs is weak on merit: more often than not public servants require input from experts on specific fields to draft legislation. As well, thanks to the Internet, mobile phones, social media and satellites, we observably live in a world full of citizens routinely engaging in debate on political issues (albeit lacking any chances of genuine impact.)
===1.2 Geopolitics.===
A consequence of the US Presidential Election of 2016 is that the [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/16/qa-russian-hackers-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-us-presidential-election fear of foreign intervention] has become a leading threat to the security of electoral processes. But although voting machines are an extremely vulnerable target, ([https://blog.horner.tj/post/hacking-voting-machines-def-con-25 defcon 25 had a large selection of voting machines, all of them were exploited]) foreign attacks have a simpler method than hijacking voting machines because directly manipulating votes potentially can be traced, is very expensive, and difficult to execute on a scale large enough to satisfy an attacker. A more efficient approach is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Dyn_cyberattack instilling public fear by collapsing internet infrastructure days prior to an election] in a way that can help push favoritism on a candidate that is perceived stronger than the other one. This kind of cyberattack able to trigger a shift in voter perception is nearly impossible to trace as political subversion and reveals the inherent conflict that a digital commons has with territorial democracies.
[[File:/images/hacked-america.png|Impact of DNS cyberattack (October 21, 2016) & Presidential Election (November 6, 2016).]]
This happened two weeks before the US 2016 election when a botnet coordinated through a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices executed a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Distributed_DoS Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack] that affected Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn Inc. bringing down major websites in the US including Amazon, Paypal, New York Times and Wall Street Journal among many others.
===1.3 Land vs. Cloud.===
In the near future, electrons and light flow freely, and corporate computer networks eclipse the stars. Despite great advances in computerization, countries and race are not yet obsolete…[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/ '''''Ghost in the shell'''''], graphic novel (1995).
The 21st century is witnessing a growing conflict between ''The Land'': governments that monopolize the law on territorial jurisdictions by restricting the free movement of physical goods and bodies; and ''The Cloud'': global corporations that monopolize access to user data able to track and target ideas via personalized advertising. In this world freedom is an illusion: our bodies belong to governments, our minds to corporations. Notorious battles from this conflict include the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_dispute ''Apple versus FBI''] case requesting the jailbreak of an encrypted phone; or the historical dispute between [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/06/trumps-new-travel-ban-raises-the-same-silicon-valley-objections/?utm_term=.0854c54536d6 Silicon Valley’s cosmopolitanism seeking flexible visas and Washington D. C.’s nationalism raising migration barriers]. As this scenario unfolds, encryption plays a role of growing significance to protect the human rights of digital citizens as it can help them break apart from the ''cloud versus land'' trap.
[[File:/images/the-land.png|The land: monopolies on force.]]
The origins of modern cryptography go back to World War II when Alan Turing built the first proto-computers to decrypt Nazi messages. Since then encryption has been legislated in the USA in the same manner kept for traditional weapons: it is included in the ''Munitions List'' of the [https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/itar.html International Traffic in Arms Regulations] and related software and hardware must deal with export restrictions. And even though encryption is often considered a right protected under the First Amendment arguing that “code is speech”, its defensive nature indicates that it must also be protected under the umbrella of the Second Amendment since it holds the same reasoning behind the “right to bear arms”, to wit: in an era where [http://twitter.com/Snowden whistleblowers] are revealing how the ''Deep State'' spies on citizens anywhere around the globe, encrypted information is the only realistic guarantee that anyone has to be protected from government abuses (and the corporations that back them).
[[File:/images/the-cloud.png|The cloud: monopolies on data.]]
Secrecy is a fundamental property of free and fair elections as it is a mechanism that helps avoid coercion from those in power and prevents the risk of elections being bought and sold for money. Privacy is the best guarantee a conscious, free mind has to think for itself. But on the modern internet, privacy is illusory when using Facebook, Google or any web based service. Even though Internet monopolies pretend at being the gatekeepers of online privacy, theoretically Facebook can still impersonate any of its 2 Billion registered users should it ever desire to. Google and Facebook hold the largest identity databases in the world -- surpassing the governments of India and China -- while [https://twitter.com/AdrianChen/status/832452637320556544 97% of their reported revenue comes from advertising] severely conditioning the kind of experience that users get with their technology. It is in their corporate interest to gather as much information as possible to profile people in order to stay competitive in the attention market, and both companies filter information fed to users with [https://medium.com/@piamancini/future-scenarios-for-algorithmic-accountability-and-governance-17cd436d22a0 algorithms accountable] to no one but their own board. None of their services are really free: personal sovereignty is unwittingly given away to technology giants today in the same way the natives 500 years ago on the American continent were distracted watching their own ''selfies'' in shiny mirrors even as European conquistadors swept away their entire way of life. Uncensored, free and sovereign debates on the future of humanity are being eaten by useless ''likes'' that help only to perpetuate these corporate entities. ''Fake news exploits'' (as they were used during the U.S. elections) or critical content spreading like wildfire (as it happened during the ''Arab Spring'') demonstrate that any effort to stop international influence on national politics is futile as societies spend most of their time online. Simply put, the Internet is incompatible with Nation-States.
===1.4 Intelligence.===
I can’t let you do that, Dave.'''HAL 9000''' on ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (1968).
The best civic tech is tech that gets used every day. Already, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have become by proxy the main interfaces citizens use to influence everyday politics. But the unseen consequences of giving personal data away through centralized web services can be many, with relevant - even dire - implications for the future of humanity. The information architecture of how personal data is stored, shared and monetized is fundamental to understand sovereignty in the 21st century.
A looming threat is the use of unrestricted Artificial Intelligence (AI) that gets fueled by user generated content without any kind of public supervision. That was evident in a former Blackwater employee’s revelation to us on how data gets weaponized: from an office in Dubai he was able to drive and get the live feed of a drone flying over Syria or Pakistan, but surprisingly the decision whether to kill the target wasn’t made by the human operator (or a supervising authority) but by an AI that called the shots over the Internet “at least 90% of the time“. This AI was provided by a Silicon Valley company often 'credited' with providing intelligence services to the CIA and leadng to the capture of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
The issue of AI deciding on the fate of human lives opens up ethical and moral questions. Eventually not even human researchers are able to properly understand how an AI is behaving, becoming a threat if it is a key component of military grade technology. According to author Yuval Noah Harari, “Intelligence is breaking apart from living organisms and it won’t be monopolized by carbon beings for long.” Consciousness is the new political frontier being drawn, a line between machines and humans. In other words: understanding whether we are using the machines or the machines are using us. How we structure human organizations —and govern the code running them— defines who is in charge. As the capacity of silicon intelligence matches Moore’s Law growth rates, humanity as a whole must ask itself how it is going to govern the reins of this unprecedented power.
===1.5 Decentralization.===
Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt '''Carl Schmitt'''], political theorist (1888-1985).
The achilles heel of data hungry, attention farming internet monopolies is their need of a centralized information architecture. They rose as the ''superhubs'' in what used to be the promise of a web-shaped network by implementing the winning solutions to the leading online use cases. But the unintended consequence has been a privatized ecosystem: closed code, walled gardens and centralization of power in a few hands paving the way for a full [https://youtu.be/IrSn3zx2GbM?t=10m34s surveillance society] on what could otherwise be a borderless commons. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the ''world wide web'' protocols, pointed out the intrinsic risks of today’s internet he requested the need to draft a [https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_a_magna_carta_for_the_web Magna Carta for the Web]: “Unless we have an open, neutral internet we can rely on without worrying about what's happening at the back door, we can't have open government, good democracy, connected communities and diversity of culture. It's not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it.“
Centralization is the single point of failure in elections and is incompatible with democracy. In our experience implementing centralized digital voting for decisions of Partido de la Red, we detected that if an election is high-stakes (all or most members have a biased interest in the outcome), the likelihood of the system being corrupted increases. The biggest risk lies in those who are responsible for controlling servers and database integrity. We discovered in the case of [https://asamblea.partidodelared.org/topic/58eaf4739b96a611009bc3fc internal elections] held in early 2017 there were discrepancies between information reported by database auditors and the logs voters kept in their local machines: manipulation in vote emission data, aribitrary modification of poll closing date, erased records and sudden ban of registered accounts were proven and denounced leading to a generalized perception of fraud in the entire process. Centralized digital democracies without any consideration for cryptographic security are toys useful for playful purposes but can be dangerous when implemented in real scenarios under fraudulent hands.
Meanwhile, traditional elections have a technique known as ''adversarial counting'' when the outcome is close to a tie. Authorities of all involved parties participate in a manual vote count. But when an election happens within a large population, ''adversarial counting'' reduces the cost of subversion, requiring an attacker to bribe only a few authorities from a competing party to secure a result. Any kind of system that requires trust from participants ultimately runs the risk of having its whole structure collapse if any authority is fraudulent.
[[File:/images/blockchain-permissionless-audit-voting.png|Blockchain democracies enable permissionless audits.]]
Decentralization is a requirement of democratic elections. Without it there will always be room for corruption. Blockchains enable trustless systems by eroding the need of human authority and increasing the defenses of vote integrity with a shared resource that has scorekeeping as its main function. This permits unprecedented designs for electoral systems. '''With a blockchain-based democracy votes become censorship resistant and every single voter can audit an election without requiring any kind of access rights to infrastructure.''' By storing vote data in a blockchain rather than in private servers or ballot boxes, audit costs become abstracted and are turned into a guaranteed right for every participant. Voters are not just mere spectators but also sovereign gatekeepers of the whole process. This kind of transparency cannot be delivered by traditional electoral systems, analog or electronic.
===1.6 Sovereignty.===
On today's internet, voting has emerged as the main interaction. Every time users ''like'', ''upvote'', ''heart'', ''link'' or ''retweet'' content they are signaling a preference that serves a feedback loop generating better recommendations for them. But the action won’t go any further: it’s a ''fake vote'' that lacks institutional implications. ''Likes'' in social media operate as worthless tokens that can be inflated with a single click even though they set the price of advertising dollars. Network effects turned this interaction into a metric that highlights the influence of a specific idea within a crowd, often being a tool for those in power to survey society’s needs. But the financial and political benefits of these transactions are kept entirely by the [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-donald-j-trump.html network owners].
[[File:/images/web-voting.png|Web voting.]]
Sovereign technology able to operate in peer-to-peer networks, validating identity, preserving anonymity, encrypting data, decentralizing infrastructure, with free (''as in freedom'') open source code can completely disrupt the described landscape.
Throughout history only three kinds of sovereigns prevailed: the ''sovereign tribe'' where a crowd follows a leader; the ''sovereign king'' loyal only to God; and the ''sovereign republic'' with continental lands governed under one law. Blockchains operating in cyberspace are giving rise to a fourth kind: the ''networked individual''. It’s not a far fetched possibility -- achieving [https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transition-Information/dp/0684832720 personal sovereignty] is already a reality for those who run their finances with bitcoin and other crypto holdings. As investor [http://twitter.com/naval Naval Ravikant] puts it: “You can cross an international border carrying a billion dollars in bitcoin entirely in your head.” This kind of sovereign act is unprecedented even for contemporaneous Heads of State.
The widespread adoption of blockchains is giving rise to a model that initially grew under the shadows of established institutions but eventually will render them obsolete. Blockchains are automated bureaucracies that offer significant financial benefits in terms of transaction costs while abstracting the need of intermediaries. They enable systems of free association that help break the political and financial coercion that governments and banks impose by restricting the right to vote or limiting access to capital. A technologically advanced society can flourish beyond territorial domains anywhere there is an internet connection with digital citizens becoming part of a new kind of diaspora.
With this diagnosis, in [[#Paper|Section 2]] we map the basic building blocks for a decentralized liquid democracy. Once the tools are defined, [[#Execution|Section 3]] proposes an implementation that focuses on making the system secure and inclusive.