We are 21st century citizens interacting with 19th century institutions based on 15th century information technology.
Technology is progressing at an ever increasing speed and it's changing our lives on a fundamental level. Yet the way citizens in modern nation-states are interacting with politics is very much outdated. We are using an Analogue Democracy in a Digital Era. It's therefore time to upgrade democracy.
Democracy Earth Foundation wants to do exactly this. They argue that, with rise of open source software and peer to peer networks, political intermediation is no longer necessary. With these new technologies it's now possible to participate in democratic policy making by directly voting on issues. To make this a reality Democracy Earth set out to build Sovereign, an open source and decentralized democratic governance protocol for any kind of organization.
The Sovereign app is build on the following principles:
- Liquid Democracy: Vote on issues you care. Delegate power to those you already trust.
- Own Your Data: Sign with keys only known to you and a blockchain, not big brother.
- Borderless governance: Participatory budgeting with bitcoin & smart contracts.
With this blockchain app, Democracy Earth is introducing liquid democracy as a modern-day alternative to representative and direct democracy. Liquid democracy makes in possible to vote directly on issues or to delegate voting power on specific topics to peers over a secure network without central authority. This is also called a Blockchain Liquid Democracy.
Democracy Earth explains it as follows: "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." This is what Democracy Earth means by building a borderless peer to peer democracy. For everyone, anywhere.
Democracy Earth is also redefining the concept of citizenship by introducing a cryptographically induced equality. In their white paper, it states "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." This means that in the digital world not national sovereignty is central, but individual sovereignty.
In order to avoid central authority, it further introduces the concept of attention mining which incentivizes participants to strengthen the trust of votes by performing simple tests aimed at detecting replicants. In this process of Proof of Identity 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.
Listen to Founder Santiago Siri on why Crypto Politics beyond the Nation-State is important >
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