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On self sovereign human identity.
https://github.com/DemocracyEarth/paper

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On self sovereign human identity.

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• URL: https://github.com/DemocracyEarth/paper
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  DEF: 1

  Title: The Social Smart Contract

  Author: @DemocracyEarth.

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  Status: Active

  Type: Paper

  Created: 2017-06-08

  License: MIT

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=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.)

* [[#Manifesto|Manifesto]]: For idealists. Diagnoses global political context and argues for a paradigm change.

* [[#Paper|Paper]]: For builders. Describes the building blocks for a system that can be implemented by anyone, anywhere.

* [[#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 our shared 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 that are 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 ever-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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Controversies cyberbullying, threats of violence and other controversies], 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 ballot boxes are 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 sheets of paper, 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 ledger (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 that is 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 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 Network Theory and Natural Self-Assembly.===

All natural structures--from whirlpools to political-economies--spontaneously emerge from energy differentials. From a generative standpoint, structure is just a thing lying in-between an energy differential which disperses the energy without generating too much entropy (disorder) (Prigogine, 1977). At the Big Bang, the energy of this universe was packed into a dense (low-entropy) singularity. Over 13.8 billion years of expansive cooling, countless entropy minimizing structures emerged. Some of those structures are still found today....

Knowing that the most sustainable structures are those that minimize the production of disorder, we should ask ourselves what kinds of new orders we can bring to societies of the present age. The mathematics of network theory offers many useful abstractions to think about more useful social orders. Networks can be thought of as composed of nodes (people, in our case), and edges (interpersonal relationships) (Xiao Fan Wang & Guanrong Chen, 2003⁠). When a node realizes some potentially (de)stabilizing bit of information, it may utilize its available edges to convey the insight to all other nodes; and, perhaps, bring about some new functional synchrony. The average path length of a network quantifies the number of edges needed to communicate information between any two pairs of nodes. The magnitude of this quantity is linked to the cost of building edges. When the cost of building new edges is very high, complex networks tend to minimize the total number of edges by self-assembling into a "small-world" topology. In such a case, most nodes develop only local edges. A few "richly-connected" hubs develop long-range edges between otherwise local communities. Conversely, when the cost of building edges is very low, networks may adopt fully connected networks.

The cost of building interpersonal relationships between individuals is related to the kinds of communications technologies the population has available (Benedict Anderson, 1983). Early in human evolution, we developed spoken language. Consequently, members of tribes could pause from rubbing elbows/sholders, stand on a mound of earth, and enunciate subjectively useful information. Written--and then printed--languages allowed information to be mass-distributed. And while the transition from spoken to printed language certainly dropped the cost for individual people to reach a broader population; the range of print capital is limited by the cost of printing and distributing paper. From the perspective of network theory, the average path length between all people had decreased; but, there was still a large reliance on richly connected hubs, e.g. publishing houses, to convey new insights between any two people.

In the 21st century, telecommunications and the app-verse have dropped the marginal cost of interpersonal communications to nearly zero. Distributed digital ledgers such as that implemented by democracy.earth could act as a centralized communications hub for planet-wide discourse. This kind of "global public sphere" would look roughly star-shaped (or spoke-shaped). Each person could reach all other persons via just two edges: one to upload the insight onto the blockchain, and the other to (filter and) browse. The kinds of political-economies we might realize through this more efficient network structure should increase the overall sustainability of human societies by allowing our norms and behaviors to dynamically synchronize around the granular perspectives of a real democracy composed of all connected persons.

Prigogine Ilya. Time, structure and fluctuations. Nobel Lecture in Chemistry, 1977.

Xiao Fan Wang and Guanrong Chen, "Complex networks: small-world, scale-free and beyond," in IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6-20, 2003.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso Books, 2006.

===1.5 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 understanding 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 leading 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.

===1.6 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, arbitrary 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 for 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.

===1.7 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 for 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.



==2. Paper.==



  It is the technology that we do not control the one that is used to control us.



[https://twitter.com/earlkman '''Emiliano Kargieman'''], space hacker (1975).


A foundational principle of democracy is the right to be heard. Today most of the world’s population is not heard: having a voice is an accident of birth. Individual and collective voices are politically and economically silenced by ‘illiquidity’ - the marginalized are given no instruments to broadcast or amplify their voice. Modern democracy is the birthchild of the ''Printing Press Era'': printed constitutional systems dependent on wet ink contracts and the speed of the postal service. Representative democracies are an accident of the information technologies of the 18th century.

[[File:/images/liquid.png|Direct democracy vs. Liquid Democracy.]]

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. It is the most flexible form of democratic governance that can be constructed with digital technology, operating as a hybrid that enables direct or delegated voting at any time. There are few precedents of trustworthy bottom-up environments that have led to authoritative content, [https://www.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia] being a pioneering case. But if history is any guide, the last time civilization faced [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment a paradigm shift regarding encyclopedic enlightment] it was precisely in the epoch preceding the rise of modern democracies.

This paper details the implementation of a liquid democracy using [http://github.com/DemocracyEarth/sovereign Sovereign], our democratic governance application that operates with blockchain tokens using a basic set of smart contracts. Simplicity in the design and language used to express this design matters for the purpose of a genuinely democratic device. No technology will ever be able to satisfy democratic aspirations if it can only be understood by an elite. As cryptographer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Merkle 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.



===2.1 Token.===

An ideal voting system must be able to satisfy to the greatest possible extent these conditions:

* '''Secrecy''': a voter must be able to cast a vote in secret.

* '''Verifiability''': a voter must be able to verify the tallied votes.

* '''Integrity''': the system must be able to verify the correct vote tally.

Additionally, due to the risk of coercion through physical violence or threats in contexts prone to political violence, an option that is able to protect coerced voters must be introduced:

* '''Resistance''': a voter must be able to override own vote if necessary.

In the work led by researchers Hosp & Vora, an [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/24d5/5c866a7317dae11d37518b312ee460bc33d3.pdf Information Theory approach was taken to model voting systems] leading to the conclusion that a natural tension exists with a system aiming for ''perfect integrity'', ''perfect ballot secrecy'' and ''perfect tally verifiability''. All three cannot be simultaneously achieved when an adversary is computationally unbounded, able to brute force a system if unlimited time or memory are available. For this reason we consider it indispensable to implement digital democracies using blockchains. With network effects already in place, blockchains are able to verify transaction integrity and prevent token double-spending. Furthermore, [https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/454.pdf the Bitcoin blockchain is not safe in an asynchonous network but is safe and live (for unknown block-depth or ''confirmation count'') in a ''partially synchronous network'' such as the Internet]. Bitcoin’s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system ''proof of work''] model achieves this by rewarding computational capacity verifying transaction blocks (what is often referred to as ''mining''), leading to a network “300 times more powerful than Google’s resources” according to pioneer [http://twitter.com/balajis Balaji Srinivasan]. For this reason, our design is based on tokens within a blockchain network operating as ''political cryptocurrency''.

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. Rights aim to satisfy overall legitimacy in the governance of an institution. While money is the language of self-interest, votes express the shared views of a community. Political currency is not strictly meant for trade but for social choice.

{| class="wikitable"

|-

! scope="col"| Feature

! scope="col"| Coins

! scope="col"| Votes

|-

! scope="row"| Utility

| Trade.

| Governance.

|-

! scope="row"| Mining

| Computation (e.g. Proof of Work).

| Attention (e.g. Proof of Identity).

|-

! scope="row"| Liquidity

| Scarce.

| Guaranteed.

|-

! scope="row"| Signal

| Self interest.

| Social choice.

|-

! scope="row"| Value

| Space (material goods).

| Time (information).

|}

====2.1.1 Implementation.====

Considering that value [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin can be driven by memetic capacity], the Democracy Earth token granting voting rights will be branded with the single most important message any democracy can convey: ''vote''.

The ''vote'' token can be implemented using smart contract code across a variety of blockchains that permit [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness Turing Complete] scripts, including Bitcoin. Our design is blockchain agnostic in recognition of a computer science field still in its infancy where significant innovations remain to be invented. Nonetheless we are working on implementing the ''vote'' token under these smart contract environments:

* '''Ethereum''': Using a set of [https://github.com/ethereum/solidity Solidity] smart contracts under the [https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard Ethereum ERC20 token standard].

** '''Rootstock''': We are taking the necessary steps to make Solidity code compatible with [http://www.rsk.co/ Rootstock's smart contract interpreter for the Bitcoin blockchain].

* '''Lightning''': With the activation of [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segregated_Witness segregated witness] in the Bitcoin protocol that enables routing of payment channels with the [http://lightning.network Lightning Network protocol], liquid democracy delegations can be mapped using satoshi-level transactions carrying an attached ''vote'' identifier. Blockchain settlement cost must be covered by the implementing organization.

Also, multi-chain implementations are encouraged in the spirit of seeking greater experimentation and collaboration regarding these technologies.

===2.2 Voting.===

The ''vote'' token aims to be a standard for digital democracy able to interoperate with other tokens, setting a common language for the governance of blockchain based organizations. Within the context of liquid democracies, a range of voting transactions is permitted with ''votes'':

* '''Direct Vote''': Selfish voter Alice is allowed to use her tokens to vote directly on issues as in a direct democracy.

* '''Basic Delegation''': Alice may delegate ''votes'' to Bob. As long as Bob has access to those tokens he can use them to vote on Alice's behalf.

* '''Tag Limited Delegation''': Alice may delegate ''votes'' to Charlie under the specified condition that he can only use these tokens on issues carrying a specific tag. If the delegation specifies that delegated ''votes'' can only be used on decisions with the ''#environment'' tag, then Charlie won't be able to use these anywhere else but on those specific issues. This leads to a representation model not based on territory but on knowledge.

* '''Transitive Delegation''': If Bob received ''votes'' from Alice, he can then delegate these to Frank. This generates a chain of delegations that helps empower specific players within a community. If Alice does not desire to have third parties receiving the votes she delegated to Bob, she can turn off the transitive setting on the delegation contract. Circular delegations (e.g. Alice receiving the tokens she sent Bob from Frank) are prohibited since the original allocation of ''votes'' from an organization to its members carries a signature indicating who is the sovereign owner of the ''votes''.

* '''Overriding Vote''': If Bob already used the delegated ''votes'' he received from Alice but she has a different opinion on a given issue, as the sovereign owner of her votes Alice can always override Bob's decision. Voters always have the final word on any given decision with their original ''votes''.

* '''Public Vote''': Often referred to as the ''golden rule'' of liquid democracies, all delegators have the right to know how their delegate has voted on any given issue with their ''votes''. In the same way congressmens' votes are public, in liquid democracies competing delegates on any given tag have an incentive to build a public reputation based on their voting record in order to attract more delegations.

* '''Secret Vote''': A method that is able to guarantee ''vote'' transactions untraceable to the voter. This is indispensable in contexts of public elections held within large populations that have a high risk of coercion. Even if perfect secrecy on ''vote'' transactions is achieved, users can still be fingerprinted with exposed meta-data. For this reason, research on integration with blockchains designed for anonymous transactions with a proven track record is encouraged. This might include a mining fee to settle the ''vote'' transaction that can be either subsidized by the implementing organization or directly paid by voters. We recommend research and integration of secret ''votes'' with these blockchains:

** Ethereum: uses [https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/213 precompiled contracts for addition and scalar multiplication on the elliptic curve alt_bn128], for [https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/212 pairing checks], which permit [https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/10/12/byzantium-hf-announcement/ zk-SNARKs], also see [https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/zk-snarks-under-the-hood-b33151a013f6 here], [https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs#finalized-eips-standards-that-have-been-adopted as implemented] in the [https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/10/12/byzantium-hf-announcement/ Byzantium hard fork].

** [https://z.cash ZCash]: implements shielded transactions using [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof zero-knowledge proofs].

** [https://getmonero.org Monero]: uses [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature ring signatures with stealth addresses].

===2.3 User Experience.===

User Experience (UX) is a critical aspect of a decentralized architecture and becomes even more important as the redundant layers of centralized architectures condense to the user. In a centralized internet architecture, the user does not own the interface or experience. In a decentralized internet architecture, the user interface (UI) should be based on the user's perspective. In this sense, transactions get done under three distinct views:

* '''Self''': Using a public identity related to an individual.

* '''Organization''': In representation of an organization that extended representation rights to individuals (e.g. workplace, club, political party, etc).

* '''Anonymous''': Without any connection to a public identity.

This understanding of ''SELF / ORG / ANON'' shape-shifting requirement highly influenced our interface and token design. At any given time a Sovereign user can adopt any of these modes to interact with decentralized organizations.

====2.3.1 Liquid.====

Sovereign aims to make liquid voting immediate and simple. Any friction in the process must be avoided and the delegation widget should be constantly exposed in the interface while browsing issues or looking at member profiles. For this purpose, Sovereign uses a ''liquid bar'' that permits transacting ''votes'' with a single gesture either on mobile or desktop devices.

[[File:/images/liquid-mobile-ux.png|Sovereign mobile interface displaying decision, ballot and liquid voting.]]

The ''liquid bar'' allows these actions:

* '''See available ''votes''''': Since in a liquid democracy a user can have 1 or more delegated ''votes'', having a constant reminder of the balance helps the user understand his or her current power within the system. If some of the ''votes'' were delegated with strict conditions (e.g. a ''Tag Limited Delegation''), this means that a user won't have the same amount of ''votes'' available to spend on every issue.

* '''See cast ''votes''''': A percentage value with the amount of ''votes'' currently cast on other decisions or delegated to other members of the community is shown. The user can tap or click at any time on that value to view a complete list of the issues where he or she is currently having a ''vote'' and decide whether to keep them there or make a strategic change.

* '''Slide to ''vote''''': The user can use his thumb (or mouse click) to slide the ''liquid bar'' handle and upon the release of it he or she will be prompted a confirmation request whether to ''vote'' or not.

* '''Tap to ''vote''''': If the user does not want to allocate more than 1 vote, he or she can simply tap on the ''liquid bar'' handle once and will be prompted to confirm a single ''vote'' transaction.

* '''Remove ''votes''''': At any time, as long as the poll is still open, the user may remove his or her ''votes'' from a decision by simply sliding the ''liquid bar'' handle back to the initial position.

We see this interaction as a step forward from the ''like'' pattern found in social media. ''Likes'' limits voting to mindless clicks and can be inflated at will. Since ''votes'' operate as a scarce resource in the system, they cannot be generated at will and always require a minimum of tactical thinking regarding how a user's interaction will influence a specific decision. ''votes'' have real implications to the user as a stakeholder of a decentralized organization while ''Likes'' only serve their controlling corporations.

====2.3.2 Delegations.====

A ''liquid bar'' also displays the ''vote'' delegation relation a user has with any other member of an organization. Delegations go both ways:

* '''Sent''': A user must be able to delegate any of his available ''votes'' while checking the current delegated amount (if any).

* '''Received''': A user must be able to understand how many ''votes'' were received from someone else.

Every time a member profile is displayed on Sovereign, the current delegation status between the user and the member is shown.

[[File:/images/delegation-relation-votes.png|View of vote delegation relation with another member.]]

====2.3.3 Agora.====

Sovereign also has a debating component codenamed ''Agora''. Debating is likely as important as voting in any democracy. Agoras display ''threaded conversations'', a successful design pioneered by [http://reddit.com Reddit] and [http://news.ycombinator.com Hacker News]. We consider this UX pattern as the best way to engage in thoughtful conversations online as they have the most valued comments bubble up, helping sort the information for a debate using the collective intelligence of the community.

But unlike web based applications, Sovereign does not allow testimonial interactions: instead of permitting infinite ''upvotes'' or ''downvotes'', if the user agrees with a comment from someone else in the platform, it will trigger an instantaneous delegation of a single ''vote''. Hence Agoras permit:

* '''Upvote''': Send a single ''vote'' delegation from the user to the commenter.

* '''Downvote''': If a user disagrees with someone's comment, a ''downvote'' can either retrieve a ''vote'' from the commenter back to the user if there was a previous delegation. Or if no delegation relation exists among them, then a ''downvote'' will act as a penalty sending a ''vote'' from the commenter back to the funds of the organization implementing the Sovereign instance. The criteria for this kind of penalty can be set in the ''constitutional smart contract'' of the implementing organization.

This will make delegations more frequent across the platform. Debates constantly exposed to the risk of ''vote'' transactions means that they are subject to real political impact. This mechanism can help reward good arguments and punish the influence of trolling without requiring the need to develop moderating authorities in the system.

====2.3.4 Fact-based Debate.====

In order to anchor decisions in concrete facts and shared truths, a [https://words.democracy.earth/thecaseforcanonicaldebate-34811166bbb0 canonical debate solution] can be applied. Debate has historically been held wherever people interested in the subject happen to meet, both online (in forums, social media, news outlets and so on), and offline (through public debates and personal encounters). This is inefficient and somewhat ineffective, as information must be repeated (often imperfectly), and can be lost in the chaotic shuffle. The antidote to this problem is to define a single canonical place to focus all the discussion relevant to a claim so that the collective knowledge of the group may accumulate. By becoming the de-facto canonical location for reference information, Wikipedia has grown to be the largest encyclopedia in the world. It is time to define a similar platform for disputed facts and other topics of debate.

A canonical debate is similar in structure to an [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map argument map]. A debate centers around a single claim of fact or truth. Participants can then propose arguments in support of or attacking the claim. Other participants may then propose new arguments which attack or defend those arguments, and so on, until all possible arguments are exhausted. A canonical debate makes a simple, yet profound alteration to this model which permits collective knowledge to accumulate. While a typical argument map evaluates each argument as a single, self-contained entity (is this a good argument?), a canonical debate considers an argument to be composed of two distinct parts to be discussed separately: the truth component (is this argument based on fact?) and the impact component (is this argument relevant, and is it important?). By making this distinction, it becomes clear that the basis of fact upon which an argument stands is actually a claim all of its own. Thus, an argument is actually the use of one claim to support or attack the proposed truth of another. While an argument map may be viewed as a standalone tree of arguments and sub-arguments related to a single claim, the canonical debate is actually a complete graph of claims, each of which is a debate in its own right, being used to support or disprove others.

The result of each of these debates is a score which indicates the level of confidence in the truth or validity of the claim. We can imagine this score as a percent value, from 0% to 100%, where 0% indicates that the statement is completely false, and 100% indicates that it is considered to be undeniably true. When a claim is used as an argument to support or attack another claim, there is a second score, as previously mentioned: its relevance, which can also be debated. If relevance is also on a scale of 0% to 100%, then we can say that the STRENGTH of an argument is its relevance times the truth of its base claim, which results in a final score that is also between 0% (an argument that can be totally ignored) and 100% (an argument that can't be denied and is of maximum importance). In this way, the graph of claims demonstrates how our knowledge can accumulate: imagine several claims that have been "proved" on the basis of some other claim (for example, "Eggs are bad for your health"). If new evidence appears that invalidates the previous base claim, it can have an impact on all its related claims (e.g. "The government should ban the production of eggs").

There are many ways to calculate this score, including using popular opinion (a vote of confidence), and creating an objective score based purely on the weight of arguments and evidence. A score is simply a mathematical model which attempts to approximate what may be considered "truth". Unfortunately, each model introduces some kind of bias into the result. For example, showing popular opinion can introduce a bias in favor of the more popular vote (c.f. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect the Bandwagon Effect] ). On the other hand, trying to formulate a completely objective score encounters serious challenges in the case of purely subjective evidence (such as with eyewitness information that lacks supporting physical evidence). Therefore, the platform should support viewing the results of a debate from multiple perspectives and models.

The multiple perspectives offers another opportunity for this type of platform. A debate in which the only results are shared (that is, there is only one outcome that must be accepted by all), anyone who disagrees may be alienated by the platform. Just as there is often a [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-43339804 Not My President] movement following elections, a debate with the "wrong" outcome would create a "not my debate" movement, forcing people to gather outside the canonical debate, and defeating the purpose. A canonical debate can account for this by letting participants view the outcomes based on their own beliefs ("Other people think eggs are good for you, but I know it isn't true."). By allowing users to see the results based on their own beliefs, they can feel free to see the outcome of other debates based on their personal beliefs as well. It would also then be possible to see the collective views (anonymously) of someone else who disagrees with you. And, as a final benefit, it would be possible to see inconsistencies in your own beliefs, or in the beliefs of others.

One final aspect of canonical debates that is important to note is the necessity of providing context. Context in the informal sense of the word is often used to mean the scope of a debate, the conditions and information necessary to understand exactly what is being said. In a canonical debate, this is satisfied by the act of "using" one claim as an argument in proving or disproving another claim. The argument is being provided within the context of the target claim, and debates over its relevance are specifically about the usability of the one claim within the context of the other. One other challenge related to context is establishing a rigor with respect to the exact definition of a claim in order to ensure that all participants are discussing exactly the same thing. For example, if a claim is made about "Paris", it should be identified whether this term refers to the city in France, the city in Texas, or the mythological prince of Troy. There should also be a way to differentiate between, and navigate amongst, varying levels of specificity. In the example "Eggs are bad for your health", it might be more interesting to hold a more specific debate first, such as to establish that "Eating eggs more than 3 times a week can raise levels of bad cholesterol", or claiming more specifically that "Eggs are bad for women over 40 years of age". The solution proposed for this mechanism is to associate each claim with exact references, known as "Contexts", to elements of a knowledge graph, such as the [https://www.google.com/intl/bn/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html Google Knowledge Graph], or [https://wiki.dbpedia.org/ DBpedia]. By linking claims to specific points on a knowledge graph, it becomes possible not only to disambiguate statements, but also to easily navigate between claims which are related to subjects across multiple dimensions (e.g. to navigate from a debate on the health of eating eggs to something more general (the health of eating animal products), something more specific (the health of eating quail eggs), or something related more laterally (e.g. other things you can do with eggs, like cooking them or throwing them).

While the Agora supports a discussion between individuals, the canonical debate removes the arguments from the people making the argument in order to eliminate certain types of bias, and to focus the discussion on the reasoning and the information available. Each argument is made anonymously, and no deference is given whatsoever to those that may be considered experts in the subject area. However, experts are not excluded from the debate - the effect is quite the opposite. An "expert" in this context is anyone that can bring the best and most relevant arguments to the table. True experts are those that can provide real evidence, and discuss points down to the minutest details. Unlike the disordered debates held online through social media platforms, which can drown out expert information in favor of popular or entertaining statements, a canonical debate is structured in such a way as to elevate those arguments with the most substance.

=== 2.4 Pilot ===



  Blockchain could disrupt voting, just as it has currency, and could apply to any democratic government.



[https://www.oecd.org/gov/innovative-government/embracing-innovation-in-government-colombia.pdf '''The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development'''], Embracing innovation in government: global trends (2016).


In October 2016, following a shocking, almost universally unexpected No to peace in the Colombian referendum that put at risk years of negotiation between the government & the marxist narco-guerrillas, Democracy Earth piloted the Sovereign liquid democracy platform in a [http://plebiscitodigital.co/ digital plebiscite] enacting a symbolic vote among the diaspora of ~6 million expatriate citizens. Instead of giving a voter the binary option, the pilot enabled people to vote separately on seven individual sub-themes of the proposed treaty, as well as to delegate their votes to more knowledgeable voters, with results revealing important nuances in voter preferences not captured in the referendum, including the [https://words.democracy.earth/a-digital-referendum-for-colombias-diaspora-aeef071ec014 deal breaker that emerged]: an overwhelming “No” among pilot participants to one particular statement of the treaty regarding political participation of the FARC.

[[File:/images/colombia-use-case.png|Colombia use case data..]]

The pilot study had the [https://www.oecd.org/gov/innovative-government/embracing-innovation-in-government-colombia.pdf additional impact] of increasing the media and political profile of blockchain-enabled, decentralized liquid democracy in Colombia; a blockchain-savvy political party has sprung up, the Partido de la Red Colombia party (“The Net Party”), while the Colombian government’s Centre for Digital Public Innovation (CDPI) is investigating the technology as well.

===2.5 Smart Contracts.===

When Claude Shannon wrote his [http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf foundational 1948 paper on Information Theory], he was able to demonstrate how circuits can perform logic functions by expressing a binary state of 1 or 0 (true or false states). Since then, digital technology has shaped the dynamics of all kinds of information systems. With this in mind we focused on building an efficient design for a governance machine able to operate with blockchains that keeps its human operators as sovereign rulers by means of the vote. In the same way bits move in computers signaling a true or false state, ''votes'' signal a boolean value for institutional decisions to be recorded under smart contracts.

''vote'' tokens operate within the institutional boundaries created by this set of contracts: Organizations, Members, Issues, Ballots and Budgets. These are the building blocks that help create a governance circuit that can scale to operate liquid democracies within communities of any size.

[[File:/images/vote-liquid-democracy-smart-contracts.png|VOTE Liquid Democracy smart contracts..]]

====2.5.1 Organizations====

The entity or institution implementing a Sovereign instance is referred as an Organization. This entity acts as a governing authority defining what Members will be allowed to participate in its decisions and granting them ''vote'' tokens. Since Organizations can live in a decentralized network, the requirements to enable an entity to operate with ''votes'' are similar to those found while setting up a website:

* Domain: Every organization must have its own domain name (e.g. ''democracy.earth'' on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP). Some may even have a namespace running as a Top Level Domain or TLD (e.g. ''.earth''). This reference code for an Organization within an open network, whether it's the legacy web as in HTTP or new emergent networks for decentralized domains such as [https://blockstack.org Blockstack], is crucial to help build a semantic layer that effectively describes Issues without the risk of having voters manipulating tags in a closed system (referred to in Section 2.6.5 as ''squatting''). Domain names help describe an Issue as well as restricting the scope of a delegation contract.

* Constitution: Every organization has a ''Constitution'' that defines its foundational rules in the form of a smart contract. The ''constitutional smart contract'' describes how Members, Issues and ''votes'' connect within the system.

=====2.5.1.1 Constitution=====

The ''constitutional smart contract'' determines how ''votes'' will be allocated to members among other governance decisions. Allocation conditions are a prerogative of the organization depending on its goals: in some cases it can be aligned with financial rights (e.g. the shareholders of a corporation getting one ''vote'' per share); in other cases it can be assigned based on an egalitarian distribution to all members (e.g. taxpayers within a jurisdiction each getting the same amount of ''votes'').

The basic settings to be found in a constitution are:

* '''Decentralized ID''' (or URL): An identifier that helps refer to the Organization anywhere on the network and that it is connected to its Domain.

* '''Bio''': A basic description of the organization including its name, website, address, jurisdiction (if applicable).

* '''Funding''': The amount of ''vote'' tokens this organization will manage and how these will be allocated to every member and grant access to Budgets.

* '''Membership''': Requirements to become a valid member within the organization. This criteria defines the voter registry that guarantees a fair electoral process of a democracy and can be scrutinized by its members.

** '''Open''': Anyone can freely join an organization.

** '''Voted''': Existing members must vote on applicant members. A percentage criteria must be set for approval.

** '''Fee''': The organization requires a payment for membership approval.

* '''Content''': Defines who is allowed to post Issues in the organization.

** '''Open''': Anyone (whether a member or not) can post. Only members get the right to vote.

** '''Members''': Only approved members have the right to post.

** '''Special Members''': Members that meet certain criteria (e.g. a minimum of delegated ''votes'' or ''votes'' received under a specific tag) have the right to post.

** '''Anonymous''': Defines whether anonymous content is allowed to be posted.

* '''Moderation''': Describes the rules that help define a code of conduct among members of an organization.

** '''Ban''': An amount of ''downvotes'' required to ban a member from participating in the organization and the penalty attached to it (e.g. a period of time)

** '''Expulsion''': If an organization is based on ''Voted Membership Approval'', a member can receive negative votes from other members signalling that such identity has been corrupted or is no longer part of the organization. This criteria can be established as a minimum percentage required.

* '''Voting''': The allowed Ballots to be used for the decisions to be made by the organization and specific settings such as ''quadratic voting''.

* '''Reform''': The requirements to change any of the rules set in a ''Constitution'' (e.g. a special majority).

Templates defining common practices for specific kinds of organizations are encouraged to simplify organizational setup. This will be aided and abetted through work with the Democracy Earth Foundation partnership with [https://aragon.one/ Aragon], who is working on a digital jurisdiction that will make decentralized organizations efficient. Sovereign will include templates for corporations, political parties, trade unions, clubs and cooperative businesses among others; whatever form the organization takes, Aragon's decentralized network ensures that a company will always work, even in the face of malicious tampering by hostile third parties or abusive governments.

====2.5.2 Members====

Every Organization has members that get the right to vote on the decisions of the organization. Membership criteria is defined in the ''constitutional smart contract'' and is key for the trust in any democratic environment. Among the most common ways to subvert an election is through voter registry manipulation. Securing this aspect with cryptographic means as well as an approval protocol is critical. Once a member is approved within an organization, he or she gets a specific amount of ''votes'' to be used for its governance.

All Organizations who take the responsibility to approve or disapprove Members, contribute with this task to the ''Proof of Identity'' process described on Section 3.3.

Compatibility with decentralized identity protocols is encouraged for the purpose of guaranteeing decentralized governance. The [https://opencreds.github.io/did-spec/ specification of DIDs (decentralized identifiers analogous to the web's URIs)], proposed by the [https://www.w3.org/ W3C] enabling self-sovereign verifiable digital identity is recommended.

====2.5.3 Issues====

An organization consists of a collection of ''issues'' each describing a decision to be made by the members. Membership properties described in the ''constitutional smart contract'' define a member's voting and posting rights. An issue in its most basic form has these properties:

* Description: Text of the decision to be made.

* Tags: Categories that describe the decision within the organization. This helps members navigate across issues, define areas or teams within an organization and limit the scope of a delegation of ''votes''. If the implementation is done with blockchain environments that are used to manage a fixed taxonomy (like [http://blockstack.org Blockstack]), a common distributed language for tags based on decentralized domains helps to make the democratic environment more fair as it avoids members trying to control naming conventions for their own benefit. For this reason, within an open network Tags that describe Issues or are used to constrain delegations, are pointers to other Organizations. This is detailed in the ''Proof of Identity'' process.

* Signatures: Members that are authoring the proposal. It can remain anonymous if an organization's governance rules allows it.

* Ballot: The presented options for voters to participate on this decision.

* Budget: An optional element that may include locked funds in a cryptocurrency address that can trigger an action if a decision is voted in support.

* Timespan: For the final tally, an open poll must also set its scope in time and define the kind of decision being made. There are two types of decisions:

** Tactical (limited in time): These are contracts that receive ''votes'' until a closing date is met, where a given block height within the blockchain implementing the ''vote'' smart contracts can be set as the end line for the electoral process. Once all transactions have been tallied and a final result is recorded, all tokens get returned to the corresponding voters and can be used again on future decisions.

** Strategic (unlimited in time): 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 contract ballot without a closing date, it is part of the strategic decision. A common use for strategic decisions can be the members voting for approval of other members within the community of an organization.

====2.5.4 Ballot====

An issue can be implemented with any possible ballot design according to the specifications defined in the ''constitutional smart contract'' of the organization. The building blocks for a ballot are its Interface, Options and Criteria.

=====2.5.4.1 Interface=====

By default Sovereign provides the most commonly used choice mechanisms for ballot interaction. Further innovation on ballot interfaces is encouraged.

* SingleChoice: One selectable option.

* MultipleChoice: One or more selectable options.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting Cardinal]: A given score per option with a pre-defined range of values.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting Ranked]: Sortable options as ranked preferences. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem Arrow's impossibility theorem] must be taken into consideration for any innovation regarding ranked ballots. This theorem states that rank-based electoral systems are not able to satisfy fairness on three key aspects at the same time:

** '''Unrestricted domain''': all preferences of all voters are allowed.

** '''Non-dictatorship''': no single voter possesses the power to always determine social preference.

** '''Pareto Efficiency''': if every voter prefers an option to another, then so must the resulting societal preference order.

=====2.5.4.2 Options=====

In order to enable the information processing of ''votes'', ballots carry boolean values expressed in their options. This lets ''vote'' transactions signal a ''decision state'' that will act as a force modeling the institutional choices for the implementing organization. This makes all decentralized organizations also into programmable institutions. Options can then be:

* True: It will signal a true boolean value if selected (often described with 'Yes' or 'Positive' label strings).

* False: Signals a false state (e.g. can display 'No' or 'Negative' labels).

* Linked: The option is connected to another decision within the organization.

* Candidate: A member or list of Members from the organization. This helps elect authorities within the organization or it can be used for membership approvals.

=====2.5.4.3 Criteria=====

Finally, counting methods for the final or ongoing result of a decision within an organization.

* Plurality: A simple majority wins a decision.

* Majority A minimum percentage is required for a winning decision.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method DHont]: Widely used by Nation-State elections based on member lists.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_method Webster/Sainte-Laguë]: Widely used alternative to DHont based on member lists.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method Schulze]: Commonly used by open source communities and Pirate Parties using ranked choice ballots.

* [http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf PageRank]: Counts votes weighting voter reputation in a graph.

====2.5.5 Budget====

Every Organization can have 1 or more cryptocurrency addresses to fund its efforts. Sovereign permits funding an Organization with Bitcoin and, in its Constitution, defining criteria for how these assets get distributed among Members:

* '''Percentage for ''Proof of Identity''''': Applicant Members can submit their ''Proof of Identity'' evidence to get membership approval to an Organization. If ''votes'' approve the new member, it strengthens the reputation of a self-sovereign identity in the open network by rewarding him or her a fixed amount of Bitcoin to permit hashing the ''Proof of Identity'' on a blockchain. Some Organizations may allow a bigger reward than others, effectively creating a Reputation score that can protect the network against ''Sybils'' or false identities. This process is detailed in [[#Executive|Section 3]].

* '''Percentage for Issues''': Members seeking to use resources from the Organization can request them by attaching a Budget to an Issue. A Member can request to use funds from a pool specifically reserved for this. If the final tally of a decision reaches a certain value (true or false), it can then enforce the final decision by unlocking coins or triggering a transaction sending the requested assets to a specific address.

===2.6 Security.===

With Sovereign we are aiming to provide a lightweight governance framework that permits all stakeholders of an organization to participate and enforce decisions through the use of cryptography. But it is important to state that we are not aiming for a democratic system based on mob-rule or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majoritarianism ''majoritarism'']. History offers sufficient examples on how a blind majority can end up failing the aspirations of a republic often putting demagogues in power.

[[File:/images/ideal-democracy.png|Ideal democracy.]]

Our main goal is to deliver a system able to guarantee the greatest amount of legitimacy while empowering the most knowledgeable voices in any community. The difference between fact and promise is simple: while the art of politics consists of sustaining the fiction that breeds trust in established institutions (e.g. politicians during campaigns), cryptographic proof of events delivers a more reliable method for trusted governance. The incorruptible nature of blockchain transactions provides an incentive for people not to lie, hence organizations storing votes and decisions in them get driven by facts rather than promises. Corruption can be fought at its root as we develop a new sense of citizenship based on digital networks.

Still, liquid democracies can be gamed in different ways with outcomes dominated by the unintended consequences of two dynamics representing extreme ends of the participation spectrum:

* '''Lack of delegation''' leading to a ''polyopoly'': extreme fragmentation of voting power.

* '''Abundance of delegations''' leading to a ''monopoly'': extreme concentration of voting power.

Each outcome impacts one of the two axes measuring the quality of democratic governance. The incentives on the ''vote'' political economy are designed to keep a stable equilibrium aiming to guarantee the highest level of legitimacy and fact-based decision making.

To become a trusted environment for decentralized governance under large communities (cities, nations or global scale), Sovereign must be protected against different kinds of attackers: ''Mobs'', ''Corporations'', ''Sybils'', ''Fakes'' and ''Big Brother''.

====2.6.1 Polyopoly.====



  a.k.a. ''Mobs''



Among the most notable research projects on the field is [http://www.tdcommons.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=dpubs_series Google Votes]. This was an internal implementation made for Google employees led by engineer Steve Hardt where he created a liquid democracy plug-in to be used on the internal version of Google+. The project had the following numbers in terms of impact:

* 15,000 participants.

* 371 decisions.

* '''3.6% of delegated votes''' in total.

The small percentage in delegations means that Google Votes operated more as a direct democracy than a liquid democracy. Delegations occured mostly among those users who actively campaigned to attract them (e.g. vegans in a team hoping to gather power to choose office snacks). The risk of few delegations is that it opens the democracy to the known risks of mob rule. Although this might keep legitimacy high, the quality of the decisions being made by an organization becomes more political than factual. Knowledgeable voices able to address specific problems within a community become disempowered.

To increase delegation frequency, these happen every time self-sovereigns get validated. On the ''Proof of Identity'' process (see Section 3), users are able to natively generate their own ''votes'' as long as their individuality gets endorsed by other identities. Also since the ''vote'' token operates in a blockchain, delegations don't need to necessarily happen within the Sovereign application: messaging applications, tweets and e-mails can be sent with vote addresses or QR codes attached to them making the vote token able to be broadcast across multiple networks.

====2.6.2 Monopoly.====



  a.k.a. ''Corporations''



When the German Pirate Party implemented [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback Liquid Feedback], a pioneering liquid democracy software developed in 2009, it reached a participation level of ~550 affiliates that led to [http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/liquid-democracy-web-platform-makes-professor-most-powerful-pirate-a-818683.html 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. In liquid democracies ''celebrities'' can become extremely influential being able to attract most of the delegated votes. An attacker willing to subvert an election can promote a TV star wearing a QR code to get a sudden influx of delegations from fans and viewers, instantly becoming a monopolizing force. Monopolies are a threat to liquid democracies since they can disincentivize less fortunate voters to participate, hijacking the legitimacy of the decisions being made.

=====2.6.2.1. Quadratic Voting.=====

A key setting of a liquid democracy system is to permit [http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/ quadratic voting]. In quadratic voting, the number of votes spent increases quadratically with the number of votes received. That is, if Alice wants a proposal to receive one vote, she can spend one vote on that issue. But if she wants the proposal to receive two votes (i.e., voting twice), it will cost her four votes. To provide 100 votes to a single proposal, i.e., vote 100 times, she must spend 10,000 votes (100 x 100).

Quadratic voting works to avoid monopoly power by decreasing the marginal benefit of additional votes. A celebrity who collects 1,000,000 delegated votes only gains spending power equivalent to 1,000 votes if applied to any single issue. Individuals are therefore disincentivized to delegate votes to someone who has already been delegated a significant number of votes. If Alice has 100 votes, they would be worth 10 votes if Alice uses them all herself to vote directly on a proposal (10 x 10 = 100). But if Alice delegates her 100 votes to Bob, who already has 2,500 votes, then those 100 votes from Alice are only worth about 1 vote when spent by Bob on a single issue (because Bob would go from being able to vote 50 times on a single issue to being able to vote 51 times).

If some organizations desire a more vertical chain of command (e.g. corporations), quadratic voting can still be disabled in the ''constitutional smart contract'' of a Sovereign implementation.

====2.6.3 Sybil Attack.====



  a.k.a. ''Identity Theft''



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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack sybil attack] (a name taken from an homonymous [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(Schreiber_book) 1973 book] turned later into a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(1976_film) 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 it indispensable that for ''votes'' to be granted they must get validated through a protocol (social and algorithmic) that works as ''Proof of Identity''.

====2.6.4 Fake news.====



  a.k.a. ''Gossip''



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''.

=====2.6.4.1 Hard Promises=====

Corporations and public institutions are prone to corruption because decisions often happen in secrecy behind closed doors while accounting happens over time. Effectively, organizations are ''decision laundering'' by disconnecting accountability from the decisions. The lack of an incorruptible timeline storing financial and political decisions enables such inaccountability. The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(book) ''Leviathan'' State] is an inefficient machine: although it proclaims itself as the sovereign ruler for any given population by means of force, whoever is in charge of running its bureaucracy can still be corrupted making the whole house of cards fall apart. This distance between fact and accounting is the source of gossip.

The building blocks of institutions consist of facts that define agreements. But the kind of facts 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 by all members of society acknowledging the intellectual property rights that a company has over its product. In this way, institutional reality helps scale economic relations and reduces 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 [https://twitter.com/aantonop/ Andreas Antonopoulos] states: “We’re used to systems of soft promises and reversible transactions.” If the government (or any other kind of central authority) wants 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 and Puerto Rican citizens with their own defaulting governments in the past decade. Blockchain based organizations on the other hand offer an alternative of ''hard promises'': agreements stored in smart contracts strictly protected by cryptography that no single third party can corrupt. Rather than regulating human behaviour post-facto as government law does, blockchains guarantee transparency by default incentivizing honest behaviour since every participant is aware that institutional events will be available for open scrutiny.

====2.6.5 Squatting.====



  a.k.a. ''Big brother''



A liquid democracy operates across domains. Setting up an Organization within a network of delegatable ''votes'' is analogous to spinning up a server on the web. Domain squatting is the practice of occupying abandoned or unused web addresses in expectation of a profit. This has led to a billion dollar market having the most commonly used words (identifiers) as the best kind of digital real estate, e.g. [http://sex.com Sex.com] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com#Highest_price_paid_for_domain being the highest price paid domain].

On a large scale, liquid democracy's game eventually grows around the Tags being used to describe delegations and issues. In a closed system, the most used Tags point to a reduced universe of relevant voters leading the delegations related to them. Reduced voter participation increases the prediction ability of a democracy, reducing the moments that open up for collective decision-making. Democracy thrives as long as participation is incentivized. To prevent this exploit, financial and political interests must be aligned. ''Tag squatting'' can be prevented if the taxonomy used to make liquid delegations and issue descriptions operates in an open network: Tags refer to Organizations that are registered under a decentralized domain name system, considering that every Organization needs a domain name. [Blockstack.org Blockstack's blockchain] specializes in decentralized domain names, currently managing over 70,000 Dentralized IDs (DIDs). These are obtained via a ''Proof of Burn'' process where users burn Bitcoin in exchange for Blockstack tokens that permit registering a new namespace.

Words define political ideas. The social narrative built by the art of politics consists of deciding on semantic intention. Power defines the theatrical impressions that are imprinted in our memories each time we say ''left'', ''right'', ''free'' or ''equal''. Language is a legacy code that enables large scale human collaboration and its virtues cannot be denied.

----

All of these strategies attack the core of how a decentralized organization institutionalizes itself. In other words: define the risks on how Democracy Earth allocates ''votes'' to its members on the blockchain as a decentralized entity. For this reason, we detail in [[#Execution|Section 3]] a rollout plan for ''votes'' that raises strong defenses against these kind of attacks and paves the way for a global democracy.



==3. Execution.==

[[File:/images/humans.png|Humans on Earth.]]

A pressing fact that goes to the core of what is behind the political and economical challenges of the 21st century is the rise in population growth: [https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/ United Nations estimates that by the year 2100 the world will surpass 10,000,000,000 sapiens]. In other words: the planet’s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity carrying capacity] will be reached by the end of this century.

Clues on the risks of running out of resources can be found in the cultural legacy of islands (as discussed in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed Jared Diamond's Collapse]. A far away land such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Easter_Island Easter Island] was during most of its history a closed system lacking any contact with the rest of the world. Its population had no means for survival other than its own resources, constantly facing the dangers of famine, epidemics and civil war. Even though these menaces seem far off under a globalized economy, the sudden rise in human population during the past century is the driving force behind increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the collapse of public infrastructure unable to deal with massive migrations. Refugees are escaping wars that seek to secure energy resources for a future that is coming at us fast as the pace of technological innovation accelerates. Though some such as [http://www.spacex.com/ SpaceX] have already put escape plans into place, including private efforts to reach Mars in the upcoming decades (resembling the biblical story of Noah's Ark), the urgent call to safeguard humanity as a whole must be both amplified and answered.

Distribution of opportunity and intelligent collaboration across the globe cannot be achieved peacefully unless every voice gets heard, without exceptions. Global governance is the next logical step in a world already connected over the Internet. Blockchains lead towards the possibility of liquid governance laying out the foundations for a democracy of peers. Permission from established Nation-States is not required: citizens anywhere in the world can embrace this change using sovereign networks.

===3.1 Rights vs. Debt.===



   “What is justice?” the philosopher asked.

   “Pay your debts and don’t lie” Kefalos (capital), a wealthy arms manufacturer, replied.



'''Plato''', ''Republic''. Philosopher (428-348 BC).


Although politics and economics are often perceived as different realms, history teaches that money means power and power means votes. In order to effectively promote democracy it is essential to address both.

The association of debt, morality and wars remains at the root of the economic mental models of society. Coins were first created by the great empires to finance wars by enabling the purchase of provisions for soldiers in distant regions and rewarding them for victory. Soldiers could loot silver and gold from conquered cities and then exchange it afterwards as the emperors minted coins with the precious metals in order to create markets. Eventually empires would also ask for a share of those coins to be given back as a tax that was directed at the maintenance of the army. The moral narrative was that citizens were ''indebted'' to the emperor for their security, for being alive. Debt evolved to justify any form of coercion sustaining the power hierarchies in countries anywhere. Lack of liquidity is the most tangible and immediate barrier to freedom under which the majority of humanity finds themselves.

The ''vote'' token will be distributed as a '''Right''' opposing the historical association of '''Debt''' and morals, generating a new breeding ground for transactions that are not based on the possibility of coercion. It aims to bring equivalence to transacting entities, restoring balance and fairness as the new moral standard. Democracy Earth's core motivation is enabling freedom and personal sovereignty, a possibility that can only be reached if individuals are able to say 'no' and choose an alternative order uncoerced and free. This cannot be achieved with induced scarcity as it is often found in most crypto assets, but rather through a guaranteed access to ''votes'' to every member of society turning governance rights into a liquid instrument.

For this reason, [http://democracy.earth Democracy Earth Foundation] will generate an ''Initial Rights Offering'' of ''vote'' tokens designed to reach everyone on Earth under a process that will offer two mechanisms: crypto funding for anyone willing