DEF: 1 Title: The Social Smart Contract Author: Santiago Siri <[email protected]>, Herb Stephens <[email protected]>. Comments-Summary: No comments yet. Status: Active Type: Process Created: 2017-07-14 License: MIT Replaces: 0
An Initial Rights Offering from Democracy Earth Foundation.
The lack of contemporaneous political systems able to address citizens’ needs without corrupted mechanisms requires to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. On this paper we propose how to organize society and eradicate the corruption of traditional governments by connecting public resources to a democratic system using smart contracts. As humanity approaches Earth’s carrying capacity with an expected population of 10 billion by 2100 we see indispensable the creation of a blockchain based organization for planetary governance that can guarantee preservation of life and natural resources in an age where intelligence is breaking apart from organisms. We detail how to build a blockchain based democracy on a networked commons enforceable with encryption and we offer a path to fund this decentralized government with a rights offering mechanism (analogous to Initial Coin Offerings) that will use its assets to strengthen the political role of the internet across all jurisdictions.
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.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 has factual debate replaced by a post-truth mindset. This is a consequence of the drastic expansion in communication channels that shrank attention spans 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.
Engagement through the traditional channels is weaker among younger generations, 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 eco chambers like 4chan.org where anonymity led to political incorrectness or gab.ai consolidating the alt-right community in the USA. Needless to say: endogamy only makes polarization stronger and no solution is in sight within these services but rather the risk of reinforcing present scenario of tribal polar societies relativizing truth while risking preservation of resources.
Democratic processes seen during high-stakes elections are often prone to fraudulent behavior with gerrymandering becoming commonplace and a strong link between what the major political parties spend and the percentage of votes they win. In developing nations exploits are literal having ballot boxes burnt by large parties to suffocate the chances of smaller competitors.
This paper 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 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.
In a world that has succeeded in the globalization of financial assets while keeping political rights enclosed to limited territories, new forms of governance must acknowledge the networked commons connecting humanity and progressively weakening the legacy of national frontiers unable to address pressing issues such as climate change, rising inequality, terrorism, automation and 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 Bitcoin as programmable money without Central Banks and Ethereum enabling smart contracts without the need of Judiciary Courts requires a third 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.
We pioneered digital democracy having authored some of the most prominent open source democracy software as ranked by the Github community including the original design of DemocracyOS, a simple direct democracy project we created in 2012. We founded the first digital political party in the Americas, the Partido de la Red (Peers Party) that ran for its first election in the city of Buenos Aires in 2013 obtaining 1.2% of the votes. In 2014 we shared our experience in the TED stage reaching over 1.2 million viewers. During 2015 and 2016, Silicon Valley's Y Combinator and Fast Forward funded our efforts to start the Democracy Earth Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to the mission of borderless governance.
The experience and lessons learned led us to begin the open source development of Sovereign. Our technology is a blockchain liquid democracy, a method that enables direct voting on issues or the ability to delegate voting power on specific topics to peers over a secure network without central authority. The goal is to guarantee the greatest amount of legitimacy in terms of participation while aiming to enforce the most efficient decision made by the crowd. By operating with tokens signaled on a blockchain, 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 Blockstack, Civic and Consensys among others.
Sovereign's codebase is able to deliver a mobile and desktop application for voters and organizations willing to implement a blockchain based democracy. Our aim with the ideas proposed on this paper is to continue the paved road of implementations that enable cryptographic open-audit voting and integrate our software with blockchains able to guarantee the sovereign rights of users.
We can consider elections implemented by states, provinces and city municipalities as 8 bit democracies. If we consider each candidate a bit in the system then a citizen’s input during election day is limited to a few bits per cast vote. That’s the bandwidth of the 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 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 on key districts. In our experience with the 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 or otherwise votes would get stolen. The larger an election’s territory is, the less likely an analogue system can guarantee a fair process. And the high implementation costs end up limiting elections to a handful of days per year (if any), rendering democracy an exception rather than the norm on how governments get elected.
- Electronic voting: proposals that deliver solutions based on electronic voting machines aim to secure the process through a digital interface yet the same logic of few elections per year legitimizing professional politicians is served. Machines can effectively help avoid 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 on this field (including the Supreme Court of Germany) recommend using electronic voting machines that leave a paper trail or any alternative medium for vote proof. But even if setup is to be trusted: the nature of computing systems to keep logs cannot guarantee vote secrecy. Any logging of a digital voting system should be public by default over a ledger syncing outputs using a distributed consensus mechanism on a shared network. In short: a blockchain.
A consequence of the U.S. Presidential Election of 2016 is that the fear of foreign intervention has become a leading threat to the security of electoral processes. But foreign attacks rarely consist on hijacking voting machines: directly manipulating votes can be easily traced and it is very expensive to impact on a scale large enough to satisfy an attacker. A more efficient approach is 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.
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: 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 Apple versus FBI case requesting the jailbreak of an encrypted phone; or the historical dispute between 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.
The origins of digital cryptography goes 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 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”: In an era where 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).
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 can have to think for itself. But on the modern internet: privacy is illusory when using Facebook, Google or any web based service. Even though they pretend being the gatekeepers of online privacy, theoretically Facebook can still impersonate any of its 2 Billion registered users if they ever wanted to. They hold the largest set of identities in the world surpassing the governments of India and China. And the fact that 97% of the reported revenue from Google and Facebook comes from advertising severely conditions the experience that users get with their technology. It is in their 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 algorithms accountable to anyone but their own board. None of their services are really free: personal sovereignty is given away in the same way the natives in the american continent got distracted watching their own selfies in shiny mirrors 500 years ago while the european conquistadors swept their entire way of life at a whim. Uncensored, free and sovereign debates on the future of humanity are being eaten by useless likes that only help perpetuate these corporate monopolies. And Fake news exploits (as they were used during the U.S. elections) or content spreading like wildfire (as it happened during the Arab Spring) demonstrates that any effort to stop international influence on national politics is futile as societies spend their time online.
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. Vertical apps that only get sporadic use are not able to move the needle. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms already became by proxy the main interface citizens use to influence everyday politics. But the unseen consequences of giving personal data away through centralized web services can be many and with relevant 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.
During our experience in Y Combinator we got acquainted with notorious entrepreneurs from around the world. It was within this community that we learned the story of a former Blackwater employee that used to be in charge of piloting UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones) that attacked terrorist targets in the Middle East. From an office in Dubai he was able to drive and get the live feed of a drone flying over Syria or Pakistan. But the striking revelation he made was that the decision whether to kill a terrorist or not wasn’t made by the human operator (or a supervising authority) but by an Artificial Intelligence that called the shots over the internet. This AI was provided by a Silicon Valley company: Palantir. Founded by Peter Thiel (seed investor and Facebook board member), it is a company that is often described as a Facebook spin-off to provide intelligence services to the CIA. Palantir is credited with having found Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
We are already living in an era where an AI can decide on the fate of human lives and this opens up ethical and moral questions. Palantir employees tend to offer a devil’s advocate argument along the lines of “would you rather trust a stressed human unaware of all the variables or rather an AI capable of processing multiple factors at once?” According to Stanford Professor Peter Asaro, “the difference between a human and a machine when it comes to killing is that a human always requires a justification. A machine can never justify itself.” He is currently leading the International Committee for Robot Arms Control aiming to get a United Nations resolution equiparating the risks of weaponized AI to Nuclear Bomb proliferation. Machine Learning can be constantly improved either by increased brute force using more powerful hardware or by cross-pollinating with other trained sets and algorithms. 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.” As the capacity of silicon intelligence matches Moore’s Law growth rates, humanity as a whole must ask itself how is going to govern the reins of this unprecedented power.
Aware of the risks in AI, Y Combinator’s President Sam Altman and Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk (both former partners of Thiel) have founded in 2015 the non-profit foundation OpenAI to open source machine learning code and promote friendly AI. But if there’s any lesson learnt from leaps in the field is that algorithms alone are not as relevant as the datasets used to train them. Which brings up the question on who provides Palantir with data reliable enough to let them be the sovereign deciders of life or death in the battlefield. Face recognition in social networks such as Instagram (owned by Facebook) or Snapchat do not only take social graph information to pinpoint identities to faces but also incentivize users filming themselves wearing 3D virtual masks that in the backend help structure a more accurate mapping to enable face recognition not just in pictures but also on video. Face recognition technology matters to drones: if their AI kills an american hostage in the battlefield, the further development of their intelligence risks being halted.
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.
Sovereign is he who decides to be the exception.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 internet use cases. But the consequence has been a privatized ecosystem: closed code, walled gardens and surveillance capitalism as the defaults 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 on today’s internet he requested the need to draft a Magna Carta for the Web.
On this internet, voting has still 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 entirely kept by the network owners.
Sovereign technology able to operate in peer to peer networks, preserving anonymity, encrypting data, decentralizing infrastructure, with open source code and free (as in freedom) 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. And it’s not a far fetched possibility: conquering personal sovereignty is already a reality for those who run their finances with bitcoin and other crypto hodlings. As investor 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 and enable systems of free association that help break the political and financial coercion that modern Nation-States 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.
An ideal voting system must be able to satisfy in the greatest possible extent these conditions:
- Secrecy: voter must be able to cast vote in secret.
- Verifiability: voter must be able to verify tallied vote.
- Integrity: system must be able to verify correct vote tally.
- Resistance: voter must be able override own vote if necessary.
The advantages of democracies under decentralized networks are many and fundamental to its historical purpose. In our experience implementing digital voting systems for decisions of Partido de la Red we detected that if the 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 in controlling server and database integrity. We have found on internal elections held in early 2017 discrepancies between information reported by database auditors and the logs voters kept in their local machines. Date manipulation in vote emission, erased records and sudden ban of registered accounts where proven and denounced leading to a generalized perception of fraud in the whole process. Offline techniques such as adversarial counting are used in traditional elections when the outcome is close to a tie, having authorities of all involved parties audit a manual vote count. But if an election happens within a large population adversarial counting reduces the cost to subvert it by having an attacker only needing to bribe a few authorities from a competing party to secure a result.
Centralization of resources is the single point of failure in elections and is incompatible with democracy. Blockchains increase the defense of voting systems by enabling a shared resource that has scorekeeping as its main function while avoiding the need for central authority. This permits unprecedented designs of electoral systems: with a blockchain-based democracy every single voter can audit the votes without requiring any kind of access rights to specific 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 actor. Voters are not just mere participants but also sovereign gatekeepers of the whole process. Every single one of them. This kind of transparency cannot be delivered by traditional electoral systems, analog or electronic.
Our design is based on modeling voting rights with transactional blockchain tokens. What differentiates a vote from money (or in broader terms: a political economy from a financial economy) is that political currency is designed to guarantee participating rights under fair conditions to all members within an organization. Hence rather than a coin offering we will model our token allocation process as a rights offering.
Rights are not driven simply by holder self-interest but rather aim to satisfy overall legitimacy in the governance of an institution. The conditions for right allocation can be set by the pre-established rules of an organization: in some cases it can be aligned with financial rights (e.g. the shareholders of a corporation); in other cases can be assigned based on an egalitarian distribution to all members (e.g. tax payers within a jurisdiction).
A token granting participation rights has voting as its main function hence we will brand our token simply as VOTE. The VOTE token can be implemented using smart contract code across a variety of blockchains that permit Turing Complete scripts. Our design is blockchain agnostic in recognition of a computer science field still in its infancy where significant innovations remain to be detected. Nonetheless we will develop and implement the first version of the VOTE token using Ethereum and take necessary steps to make our code compatible with emergent environments such as RSK’s bitcoin smart contract interpreter.
A VOTE can be implemented with any possible ballot design and counting procedure. In elections ballots can be single choice, multiple choice, ranked choice among many other designs. Counting methods may include the D’Hont method (widely used by Nation-State elections) or the Schülze method (commonly used by open source communities and Pirate Parties), depending on the chosen ballot design. In order to enable the information processing of the token, a VOTE transaction can signal a decision state from the voter that will act as a force modeling the institutional choices for the implementing organization. A VOTE transaction can then be a:
- True Statement: the VOTE is sent in approval of the attached ballot or in specific support to the interests related to a receiving address.
- False Statement: the VOTE transaction is sent in rejection.
- Tactical (Time limited polls): These are decisions that receive VOTEs until a closing date is met, where a given block height within the blockchain implementing the VOTE smart contract can be set as the end line for the electoral process. Once the transactions have been tallied and a final result is recorded, all tokens are returned to the corresponding voters and can be used again on future decisions.
- Strategical (Time unlimited polls): Never-ending, open polls that are perpetually registering the consensus of a decision state. VOTEs can be retrieved by voters at any given time if they feel the need to discontinue their voice in support or rejection of a decision. But as long as the token is assigned to signal a preference on a poll without closing date, it is part of the strategical decision.
For VOTEs to be trusted tokens, the system must be protected against the two main subversive strategies that democracies deal with:
- Identity Manipulation (a.k.a. sybil attacks): Whoever has the ability to control the registry of voters of any given election can directly influence the end result. A classical example is registering defunct members of society to vote in an election. On decentralized networks this is commonly referred as a sybil attack (a name taken from an homonymous 1976 film based on a character that suffers a multiple personality syndrome). Sybil nodes are those that identify themselves as independent actors in the network while they all are under the control of a single operator. In decentralized environments sybil attacks are the most common threat and for this reason we consider indispensable that for a token to be activated it must get validated through a protocol (social and algorithmic) that works as Proof of Identity (addressed on section 3.5).
- Gossip Dissemination (a. k. a. fake news): It is no coincidence that the battlefield of modern democracies is disputed in the media. News organizations have unprecedented capacity to shape voter perception. Across different jurisdictions worldwide, governments wage an internal war between the State and the largest local media conglomerate. This is the playbook behind Donald Trump and his fight against the CNN & New York Times tandem; or the reason Vladimir Putin invested significant resources to create Russia Today in order to have a way of presenting alternative facts. Controlling the message tends to matter more than truth itself. Free media and independent journalism are a fundamental requirement for stable democracies. But if evidence of institutional facts are hard to prove, the room for manipulation is greater than the room for truth to prevail. Traditional institutions are secretive and lack transparency even if they are public offices. Blockchains enable a way of storing institutional facts that guarantees transparency in organizations. In this sense, fake news can be fought with a new institutional model able to store Hard Promises (addressed on section 3.6).
For a democracy to reach global scale, the tokens must find the means to effectively represent the interests of 7 billion lives and able to increase supply based on population growth. United Nations estimates that by the year 2100 the world will reach population of 10 billion sapiens. This pressing fact goes to the core of what is behind the veils of climate change, refugees and rising inequality. How to optimize the distribution of opportunity to a population close to reaching the planet’s carrying capacity by the end of this century must be urgently addressed.
We will issue an initial setup of 7,500,000,000 VOTEs, setting the golden rule: one VOTE per living person. With an estimated population growth rate of 1.1%, an average of 82,500,000 tokens will be added every year (i.e. a rate of 2.6 new tokens per second). Even though we are aware that it’s unrealistic to reach 100% of the globe’s population by taking the precedent of Facebook’s current user base of 2 Billion, being Democracy Earth Foundation an organization aiming for planetary governance we will tie our monetary policy to the constant reminder of how many lives are at stake and whose interests must be taken into consideration. As cryptographer Ralph Merkle stated:
We do not call upon ordinary untrained citizens to perform surgery, fly airplanes, design computers, or carry out the other myriad tasks needed to keep society functioning, what makes governance different? The problem is readily understood: if we give governance to “experts” they will make decisions in their own best interests, not in the best interests of us all.
By connecting every VOTE to a living person, every financial metric derived from the token will instantly reflect the capacity of its holders to promote and build a borderless self-sovereign democracy. A VOTE’s Market Capitalization will be synonym of Democratic Collective Welfare, and the value of a single VOTE will become a unit reflecting the purchasing power of an individual if an even distribution of the token was ever to be reached. The Democracy Earth Foundation will keep track of the token distribution within each nation, making it a reliable metric for the penetration of digital and decentralized democracy in populations living under a common set of cultural and genetic values.
It must be noted that even if we remain skeptical about the chances of Nation-States for planetary governance, this does not mean we don’t acknowledge the traditions and values binding the people of a nation together. In the same way blood ties evolved to signal identification of a family considering the widespread use of surnames attached to given names; territorial ties (nationality) is likely to become a third name among global citizens.
The smart contract driving VOTEs will signal for every token three states aimed at satisfying the voting use cases for all kinds of organizations and providing the means to guarantee trust of a VOTE’s core function. Every VOTE token can then be:
- Anonymous: The token can be traded at market value and used for voting purposes if no identity is required for an organization implementing its use. Corporations and private institutions (often referred as Anonymous Societies in most jurisdictions) can benefit by having a voting token secured over a blockchain that can easily interoperate with other crypto assets. As its detailed on section 3.7, VOTEs are designed for liquid democracies and can be used by organization’s as small as two people.
- Identified: The rights to a VOTE can be obtained without a monetary transaction by means of a Proof of Identity (detailed in section 3.5). A self sovereign citizen able to provide reliable evidence of his/her own identity and, in order to avoid any kind of central authority, also able to gather sufficient peer approval of this proof measured with a reputation algorithm will have an Identified VOTE token. This state has as an incentive granting the holder rights to participate in all governance decisions related to the VOTE economy. If a VOTE has been connected to an identity, it cannot be traded on the market and instead it will trigger a Basic Income Mechanism (detailed in section 4.3) aimed specifically to the token holder.
- Corrupted: Aware that attacks from adversaries aiming to subvert VOTE tokens are likely to happen, a feedback loop able to detect corrupted tokens will be put in place using the same voting algorithms implemented for approvals. If sufficient peers voted on the falsehood of a Proof of Identity tied to an Identified VOTE (reasons being duplicate detection, false information or fraud) then the token acquires a corrupted state and all the tied benefits to it are instantaneously lost locking out holder’s ability to transact in any way with it. If the token was used to signal votes, all peers or issues will loose these votes. Scrutiny of corrupted tokens will be of relevant used for the further improvement of vote tallying and Proof of Identity algorithms.
PENDING.
PENDING.
According to NYU professor David Yermack, newborn Roma Siri became the first baby to have a blockchain valid birth certificate. The process, even though symbolic at the time, is relatively simple to replicate with everyday technology.
PENDING.
The building blocks of institutions consist of facts stored in contracts. But the kind of facts these agreements contain are of a very specific type. Institutions are not built with objective facts that are scientific, measurable and independent from human judgment; but rather inter-subjective facts that build the social world within a community setting the relations of property and rights. For example, the notion that every red can of soda belongs to the Coca Cola Corporation is not objective but an inter-subjective fact agreed upon all members of society acknowledging the intellectual property rights that company has over its products. In this way, institutional reality helps scale economic relations and reduce the information required for organizations to transact.
The bureaucracies that protect these agreements depend on promises, i.e. “all money kept in banks will be there tomorrow”. But as Andreas Antonopoulos states: “We’re used to systems of soft promises and reversible transactions.” If the government (or any other kind of central authority) wanted to confiscate private funds stored in a bank, nobody can stop them from breaking that promise. This has been the experience of Greek, Argentine, Venezuelan or Puerto Rican citizens with their own defaulting governments in the past decade. Blockchain based organizations offer an alternative of hard promises: agreements stored in smart contracts strictly protected by cryptographic keys that no single third party can corrupt. Corruption is at the core of every broken promise between representatives and their constituencies. It is due to the weak dynamics of central authority that fraudulent behavior gets rewarded. Inside trading, monetary inflation, capital controls are some of the behaviours that tend to apply to all but the friends of those in power. By removing the need of central authority, blockchain-based institutions (whether public or private) operate with higher defenses against corrupted authority. And as far as regulation goes, cryptography cannot be stopped since doing it would require prohibiting mathematics.
The goal we have set for the Democracy Earth Foundation is to pioneer blockchain governance by implementing a universal voting token compatible with any kind of institution. This technology can be used for the decision making process of multi-stakeholder organizations, private or public, small or large. As a collective decision instrument, we are aware that the main challenge of democracy is not only scaling participation but also scaling the understanding of what is being voted. In that sense the aim for this token is to enforce the preferences of a specialized majority that is knowledgeable on the conflicting issues while guaranteeing protections to all participating minorities.
A liquid democracy is based on a dynamic representation model that works with a bottom-up approach: citizens are able to freely elect within their social graph (friends, colleagues, family) who they want to have as representatives on a specific set of topics. Because power dislikes being democratized, there are few documented experiences of liquid democracies but all of these offer insights on how to improve its dynamics on future iterations.
If Alice has a peer Bob that is knowledgeable on environmentalist issues, then Alice can delegate Bob her voting capacity to have him represent her on any issue with the ‘environment’ tag. At any given time Alice may override Bob’s vote if she is to have a preference on a specific issue, but for the remaining time Bob will act as Alice’s representative. This representation model is not based on territory but on knowledge and can be applied anywhere with a common language. There are few precedents of trustworthy bottom-up environments that has led to authoritative content, Wikipedia being a pioneering case. Liquid democracies bridge key attributes of direct democracies (legitimacy, voter sovereignty) with the best characteristics of representative democracy (empowering specialized voices, long term thinking, accountability).
In the context of a blockchain, as the complexity of delegations increases, for users to be able to track their delegations (and keep delegates accountable) the simplest design for the network to scale requires using tokens that operate as political currency. If Bob receives delegations from Alice, Charlie and Dave, this accounts for the right to have a voting capacity of 4 votes (his own plus the 3 delegations). But at anytime Bob might decide to delegate his votes to Frank whom he considers a more knowledgeable authority. As a delegate he can either send his own vote or decide to transfer any of his received delegations as well. But if Dave does not desire for Frank to delegate the vote he has given to him, he must be able to specify this condition on a smart contract that will limit Frank’s capacity with Dave’s delegated tokens. The guiding principle is that a sovereign voter must always have full rights on how his voting tokens get used.
Among the few documented liquid democracy implementations there is Google Votes. Engineer Steve Hardt created a liquid democracy plug-in to be used on the internal network of Google+ made for the employees of the company. With 15,000 participants, 371 decisions were made on a wide range of issues that went from choosing office snacks to setting vendor preferences. The published paper states the golden rule of liquid democracies:
If I give you my vote, I can see what you do with it.
In the same way congressmen votes are public, on liquid systems competing delegates on any given topic have an incentive to build a public reputation based on their voting record in order to attract more delegations. We consider that a system able to satisfy delegator trust while being coercion resistant must be able to separate vote casting security from vote verification. The implementation of web based voting system Helios is able to preserve voter anonymity without corrupting vote integrity. On this system the means to audit a vote can be verified with a private key issued for the voter once the vote is cast. Under a liquid democracy context, the audit key is generated for every delegator in the smart contract establishing the rules for the tokens sent to a delegate that will represent the delegator’s interest.
Another key finding from the Google Vote implementation was the lack of delegations: only 3.6% of votes were effectively delegated, keeping the system a direct democracy for the most part.
PENDING.
When the German Pirate Party implemented Liquid Feedback, a pioneering liquid democracy software developed in 2009, it reached a participation level of ~550 affiliates and led to a linguist professor becoming the most influential member of the party. Martin Haase was in charge of translating all uploaded propositions in the system to a neutral language in order to avoid any ideological bias, making him grasp 167 delegations from other members. The consequences of having a monopolizing leader in a liquid democracy environment goes against the spirit of an ecosystem that aims to incentivize more participation rather than less. For this purpose a key setting on any liquid democracy system is to enable quadratic voting when it comes to delegations, where the cost for Alice to delegate votes to Bob increases exponentially. Alice may only be able to delegate Bob one, 2, 4, 8, 16 or even 128 or 512 votes hence making any significant delegation to him tax the delegator by drastically reducing her opportunity cost of delegating to other members. These will prevent the rise of any monopolies or duopolies within the market dynamics of the system, always granting an incentive to participate for every member of an organization.
PENDING. Content splitting. Colombia. Interface. Semantics.
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“What happened to the governments?” I inquired. “It is said that they gradually fell into disuse. Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship — but no one on the planet paid any attention. The press stopped publishing pieces by those it called its ‘contributors,’ and also publishing their obituaries. Politicians had to find honest work; some became comedians, some witch doctors — some excelled at those occupations…”Jorge Luis Borges, Utopia of a Tired Man. Writer (1899–1986).
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TED, FastForward, Y Combinator, Singularity University, World Economic Forum.
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Cesar Hidalgo (MIT); Balajis Srinivasan (21.co & Anderssen Horowitz); Andrea Antonopoulos (Bitcoin Evangelist); Peter Asaro (Stanford); Naval Ravikant (Angel List); Guillermo Rauch (Zeit); Andrew DeSantis (E8); Greg Slepak (Open Turtles); Demian Brener (Zeppelin); Manuel Araoz (Zeppelin); Ralph Merkle; Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin); Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum); Vlad Zamfir (Ethereum); Joseph Lubin (Consensys); Ryan Shea (Blockstack); Vinny Lingham (Civic);