- Crypto democracy overcomes the limitations of representation and other indirect forms of democracy without suffering from the problems inherent to any direct or grassroots democracy.
- Crypto democracy uses distributed ledger technology, proxy voting, algorithmic agents, and crypto-economics to get every voter presenting themselves instead of being represented.
- Crypto democracy can scale from small communities with just a few members to virtually entire humankind.
- Forming consensus and expressing a jointly made decision is a key task in cooperative organisations.
- Grassroots ballots have serious disadvantages: Too many decisions; not everyone can be an expert in everything or pay continuous attention; debate and deliberation don’t scale.
- Representation by sending delegates into parliament to speak on behalf of the constituents has been the only alternative to grassroots ballots for many centuries.
- The paradigm of representativeness is deeply enshrined in almost every political system: We select a representative sample to represent the will of all.
- The major disadvantage of representation is the party platform -voters have only the choice of electing delegates who offer a full set of policies (e.g. conservative, labour, green). The voters have to support always the entire platform and can’t chose details. Elections take place only in long intervals in-between which voters have no further say in decisions.
- In recent years an alternative to representation has been formulated: ‘Proxy voting’ or ‘deliberative democracy’ or ‘liquid democracy’. In this model everyone can present themselves instead of being represented. Every voter can not only decide on every ballot but also start initiatives by proposing any decision. Voters can delegate their vote to others, per ballot, per topic, or generally, however, they can withdraw their delegation any time to support different proposals. The advantage is that delegates will present clear programmatic visions on topics rather then an entire party platform. Decision making is much more engaging and direct, without the disadvantages of grassroots models.
- Forming consensus in a cooperative organisation
- Overcoming the party platform
- Avoiding over-simplified yes/no decisions without requiring everyone to be an expert at everything
- Staying as engaged as desired for each participant
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Representation = aggregation: People are regarded as elements of different sets which are represented by typical specimens, the representatives. One speaks for the others: The representative is the only one who will be heard from the outside. Works well if people are homogenous regarding their needs and preferences
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Presentation> No two people are the same (As we clearly see now through web analytics, targeting, social media, etc.): ”Speak with us, don't speak for us." Let's listen to every voice without ironing out the differences: Presentation instead of representation.
Proxy voting requires a well designed online platform with strong user centric design in the frontend and high security in the backend.
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First, in the earlier iterations of proxy voting systems (e.g. in the Pirate Party in Germany and Italy, in the County of Friesland, and in the Slow Food movement), the main criticism aimed at the lack of transparency: The system suffered from all disadvantages as all other electronic ballot systems. The database serving the ‘source of truth’ is either centralised or potentially inconsistent.
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A second serious issue concerned the deliberation: The way decisions are discussed and negotiated suffered all the ailments of toxicity of social media -trolling and bullying, destructive criticism, clashes of uncompromising opinions.
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A third question is how to keep voters informed and make them aware of their options: How to see which ballots are relevant, and how to find potential delegates. And forth, secrecy of the vote was not compatible with transparency and accountability.
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The first issue can be addressed with blockchain technology serving a secure, distributed, consistent and immutable source of truth. Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are cooperative entities that can be mostly or fully distributed and map "classic" cooperative organisations. Decentralised Identities (DIs) provide the rights and policies (verifiable claims, VCs) of the cooperative members (voters, actors).
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For the second, consensus mechanisms on the basis of crypto economics can incentivise participation and penalise destructive behaviour. Deliberation can take place on a social media platform integrating the crypto-economic incentive structure. This could potentially be integrated with existing co-working solutions like Slack.
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The third demands for a recommendation engine, an intelligent agent learning the individual voter’s preferences and opinions.
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The fourth is solved with zero-knowledge-proofs guaranteeing accountability for secret voting Proxy voting Delegate votes for each topic according to proximity and other matching criteria ('Liquid Democracy’) Feedback All decisions and all results of ballots are fed back and influence future elections
Immutable records, no single point of failure, tokenisation as built-in mechanics to incentivise consensus and other behaviour etc.; Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and Decentralised Idientites (DIs) deliver cooperative structure and governance for the processes.
Authenticity and integrity guaranteed through zero knowledge proofs
Constructive participation incentivised Fine tuning of parameters is constantly monitored to assure stability and fairness
All actions are monitored and create an image that feeds continuous check of the votes and delegations
The system of Crypto Democracy is governed by a set of parameters such as stickiness of delegations, maximum number of delegations, size of quora, timings, etc. For a specific distribution of preferences within the electorate, these parameters can be set to achieve an optimum of fairness, stability, and diversity. The adjustment of the parameters is done algorithmically in the game theoretic way of crypto economics. An elected council of wardens can be installed to oversee these adjustments and define the rules to which the system should be optimised.