Liquid Democracy

Wouldn’t it be great if we could do away with elections? And just vote on an ongoing basis for all issues, as and when they come up?

Wouldn’t it be even better if we could terminate the contract, with immediate effect, of any public servant who does not perform according to contract?

Sure, there are large challenges to overcome, if we want to manifest actual democracy for the first time ever.

Naturally, those incumbents (be they political or corporate) who are currently gaming the system for themselves and their cronies will do anything to prevent this happening. Which means they are against any kind of decentralization and DAO’s, and why they are dragging their feet WRT renewable energy. With the very interesting exception of the explosion of renewables in China. If China can do it, why aren’t the rest?

For blockchains to work reliably, there has to be reliable electricity, i.e. with more than enough redundancy. ‘How’s it going, Minister of Energy? Not so good? Kerzhang! Well, s/he’s gone. Who’s next? Wait a minute...do we really need a human for this job?’

You get the picture. The same applies to transport, mining, education...need I go on?

Furthermore, everybody has to have access to the internet, a device, and the skills to use it. SpaceX’s Starlink project will go a long way to getting every human on the planet connected to the internet.

A major challenge is security. When we interact in real life, we know we’re interacting with a real human. That allows you to make a lot of assumptions, and gives you a lot of guarantees about the interaction you’re having. Digitally...for all you know, you could be talking to a machine. This exposes us to ‘deep fakes’ which can fool us into thinking we’re talking to a real human, or reading an article written by a real human.

establish a highly functioning decentralized network capable of managing and executing voting in a fraud and manipulation-proof way, creating sybil-resistant (duplicate resistant), AI resistant and privacy preserving solutions are key.

n its core a voting system does not have to know who you are, it just needs to know that you haven’t voted twice.

As the stakes get higher, the interests become conflicting and actors are capable and willing to use any means in their disposal to win an election and democracy needs to become resilient in these extremely hostile environments to be able to function efficiently.

Creating a proof of unique human identities on the blockchain is a daunting task. However, achieving this goal enables the creation of social blockchains, allowing the creation of efficient democratic mechanisms, universal basic income, portable credits and many other wild social ideas.

The obstacles standing in the way of this development are serious, such as sybils, or duplicates and AI manipulation.

One of the ways that is being attempted in order to address this problem is web of trust, or people vouching for other people in order to get validated as unique humans, similar to Proof of Humanity. The running risk of such an approach is that decentralization is only partial, with some nodes having more power than the others. In order to bypass this risk, decentralization should be achieved by other means, such as sortition. Sortition being the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. This can be further refined to: not giving power to those who want it.

Idena uses a web of trust mechanism, where new users have to be invited into the network by existing users. After registering on the network, users are required to create their own versions of reverse Turing tests, so this approach belongs to the “AI hard” category, given that all tests are created by humans.

hile humans have a 95% success rate at solving these reverse Turing tests, 60% of AIs can solve these ‘riddles’. Not great, considering that adversarial AI’s are developing at an increasingly rapid, perhaps exponential, rate.

By using learnings from Turing tests and the concept of the web of trust, in Proof of Humanity a user must provide their names, a short description, a photo for display and a video to verify that they are real humans. To be listed, a user must be vouched for by a set number of already confirmed identities drawn by sortition. This kind of mechanism makes it hard to create fake identities, because a successful attacker would immediately lose their identity if they failed in a second attack.

It seems like it will be an ongoing war between these ‘proof of personhood’ or ‘proof of identity’ methods and adversarial AI’s. Perhaps similar to the way sexual animals became sexual only to stay one step ahead of viruses. What will happen when quantum computing becomes the norm?

Idena’s current answer is: The threat is mitigated by encryption of the reverse Turing tests (named ‘flips’). Each flip is available only for those participants who solve it during the validation session. There are around 10-15 persons who see it. The flips that have been used for validation are encrypted: Only 2 out of 4 images of a flip are publicly available to make it impossible to easily collect huge datasets.

In addition, adversarial noise can be added to flip images to make a neural network result in incorrect outputs.

Both Proof of Humanity and Idena incentivise membership and maintenance with the payment of a stipend, called ‘Universal Basic Income’.

Clearly it’s a long and challenging way before systems like these actually replace the current mode of governance. But considering the current erosion of what democracy there is, caused primarily by increasing oligarchization, these projects must be lauded for the their efforts, and supported as much as possible.