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https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform

Home of the Cicada Direct Democracy and Dapp Platform
https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform

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Home of the Cicada Direct Democracy and Dapp Platform

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README 

        
# Introducing Cicada



@laugh1ng.m0nk3y - @jade.rabb1t.23 - @ox.head.826



[cicada [AT] iamcicada.com]



Version 2016.28.11.GA.003



Cicada is a revolutionary distributed direct democracy (DDD) platform that will unleash the true power of the people, allowing tomorrow's Founding Fathers to run an entire nation from the palm of their hand. It's powered by a radical new blockchain that's completely immune to centralization and pays you to secure it with a practical Universal Basic Income.



The inspiration for the idea was threefold.



The first seeds came from author Daniel Jeffries' work on [_The Jasmine Wars_](http://meuploads.com/the-jasmine-wars/), an epic saga of family, love, and war where China transforms into the world's first direct democracy, running on a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized application platform. Despite the fictional setting, it turns out that not only is this technology possible, many of the building blocks already exist.



The second inspiration came from the hard realization that technology has turned against us. The slightest youthful indiscretion can haunt a person online forever because someone captured it on a cell phone camera. Companies demand more and more of our data but can't it safe. People are tracked down and harassed in the physical world for things they said on social media. The Internet promised us a more open and transparent world, but instead we are tracked at every turn.



The second inspiration was the Arab Spring. After the Arab people rose up and threw off decades of brutal repression, they wound up right back where they started, with one dictator swapped out for another.



Cicada holds the potential to break this vicious cycle forever.



The Cicada platform delivers the following features:



1. A decentralized, people-controlled  **universal ID, called the HUID or Human Unique Identifier, that is unique to every person on the planet**. Paradoxically, this ability to identify everyone uniquely is the key to providing ultimate privacy.

2. An "Info Wallet" linked to the HUID **returns control of personally identifying information (PII) to individuals** by allowing them to share only tiny pieces of their information via quickly generated sub-IDs. Sign up for a website and send them a sub-ID that only allows access to your name and email. At an e-commerce site, give them a different sub-ID with your credit card, name, and address. Best of all, simply revoking the key means people no longer have access to your data.

3. **The HUID can make large-scale data breaches a thing of the past.**  Modern corporations, governments, and other organizations have to store copious amounts of personal information, making them a target-rich environment for increasingly sophisticated hackers. Yet every day it seems like [another big company is attacked](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/) and people's PII leaks onto the web, costing the economy billions of dollars a year. The average cost of a data breach  [now stands at a whopping $4 million per incident](http://fortune.com/2016/06/15/data-breach-cost-study-ibm/). The solution is simple: Don't store that information in the first place, because then there's nothing to steal!

4. One beautiful side effect of the system is that it provides **a workable ** [**universal basic income (UBI)**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income). A radical  **new blockchain pays users to secure it**. The more people participate, the more they earn, so people will want to stay on the network as much as possible. And since everyone is drafted to secure the network, **everyone gets paid**. The new blockchain is completely immune to the centralization that plagues Bitcoin mining, thanks to a unified client/miner that only allows one miner per person, linked anonymously to an HUID. Miners are randomly drafted into built-in pools, so everyone contributes and nobody dominates, but the system remains secure through a Distributed Proof of Work (DPoW).

5. **The DPoW is also incredibly energy and storage efficient, able to run on a cell phone without draining the battery or hogging memory**  and requiring no specialized ASICs. Because miners are only drafted randomly, the traditionally CPU-killing mining operations become only an occasional, barely noticeable resource spike as the network scales. A distributed hash table (DHT) of historical blockchain transactions eliminates storage issues because miners are no longer required to keep a copy of the entire blockchain.

6. As the system matures, the HUID will make it trivial to apply for a new job, sign up for a website, or simply buy things in person or on the web, **saving huge amounts of time and driving onboarding costs to almost zero**. Imagine joining a new company, sending them your sub-ID, and getting access to the right documents on the network, access to the company intranet with their VPN, and having your stock and benefits packages automatically attached to your ID, all within minutes.

7. The Cicada platform also  **includes a robust, end-to-end verifiable, direct democracy voting system**  that uses automatic adaptive filters to protect against voter fatigue and prevent impractical, dangerous, and disingenuous ideas from ever reaching a national vote.

8. **The voting module gamifies voting by giving voters incentives for constant participati**** on**, such as lottery prizes and tax-free shopping days. Rewards are only for long-term participation and never for individual votes, so we de-incentivize disruptive behaviors and promote useful ones.

9. The voting system also allows for automatic, hybrid, or manual voting. Want to vote on guns and abortion but let the system vote for everything else? You can.  **An auditable vote tracking system** will learn your worldviews, vote on your behalf, and track all of your decisions while giving you a grace period to change them.

10. **A citizen proposal filtration system** keeps crazy ideas from ever coming to a national vote by routing them through ever-larger layers of people. Think Trump's wall or Hillary's free education plan is nuts? You're not alone. In a direct democracy, those proposals would die at the fringes and never make it to a large scale popular vote.

11. Cicada also uses an  **encrypted messaging system that has the potential to end the crypto wars forever**. It builds on David Chaum's idea for  [PrivaTegrity](https://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity-plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/), but takes the idea much further. Instead of turning decryption control over to nine geo-centralized cloud servers, we simply return the power to the people through voting.  **Smart contracts lock up various keys that can only be used once** and only be unlocked by a 2/3rds majority at the national level. Other sub-keys might be granted to law enforcement for a short period of time. However, unlike in our current system, **if the agencies violate the public trust, we can simply revoke their keys** until they fall back in line with the will of the people.

12. Cicada functions **even if all centralized communications infrastructure fails** , as it can fall back to using a military-style mesh net for peer-to-peer connections between all nodes.

13. Lastly, Cicada takes malware writers' tricks and uses them against them, protecting the binaries on everyone's cell phones with checks against a software blockchain, ensuring the end user application **refuses to start if it's infected or compromised**.



Cicada promises to give us the robust, secure, privacy-powered Internet we were always promised. It has the power to return control back to the people, prevent corruption through automated checks and balances, increase transparency, and dramatically simplify everything from security to eCommerce, all while paying you to run it.



[The white paper](https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/blob/master/README.md is the first step on the journey. The challenges behind the undertaking are massive, but the potential rewards are so vast that they simply can't be ignored.



Imagine this: The next time there's an Arab Spring, instead of trading one dictator for another,  **they simply replace their leaders with code.**