Hi there!

Over the past few years we've learned a lot about with digital decision-making, but had never before formally presented our results. Here's the correction to that. Today we introduce a report with some learnings on the most meaningful pilots that we have conducted throughout the years:

• Peace Plebiscites, Colombia, 2016
• Referendum for the Chief Executive in Hong Kong with Civic Data Hong King and Pop Vote, 2017
• Participatory Budgeting, Blockstack.org, 2018
• Appropriation Bills, Democratic Caucus of the Colorado House of Representatives—United States, 2019

The democratizing promise of the Internet has succeeded to transform the cultural layer of humanity, while its potential to improve the institutional layer remains mostly unrealized. Despite increasing global connectivity, democracies around the world have failed to leverage technology to increase societal participation in its processes and decisions. On the contrary: the past 14 years recorded global declines in political rights and civil liberties with participation rates reaching all-time lows, whereas ‘digital authoritarianism’ — governments utilizing automated surveillance systems against their citizens — is on the rise.

The response to the COVID-19 health crisis has seen Eastern and Western governments doubling-down on their digital overreach, which is detrimental to the citizen’s right to privacy, the right to participate in public affairs, and the right to access public data. In parallel, parliaments around the world have been forced to venture into digital democracy and have shifted to video-conferencing to run their debates.

Democracy Earth Foundation is a U.S. (CA) 501 © (3) non-profit founded in 2015 building open source & censorship-resistant democracies able to be deployed anywhere where there’s an internet connection. Throughout the years, four pilots were carefully chosen and executed to test assumptions about digital democracies and gain new information, in partnership with private, public, and third sector organizations. These case studies took place within three governance systems (direct democracy, representative democracy, and liquid democracy) and three voting principles (plural voting, one person-one vote, and quadratic voting).

In the following report, we look at five indicators to measure the performance of the pilots: participation, delegation, pluralism, and support. Although more pilots are needed to verify our findings, we have extracted important conclusions and identified key challenges standing in the way of e-voting mass adoption.

We hope that readers can learn from these examples, make more informed decisions regarding digital democracy implementations for their communities, and continue advancing the available knowledge on those matters!

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Presenting our Pilots Report was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hoy anunciamos una nueva versión de nuestro software de gobernanza Sovereign 0.7, compatible con MolochDAO.

La plataforma se ha adaptado completamente para mostrar eventos de smart contracts basados en el código de MolochDAO. En esta nueva versión, es posible ver todas las propuestas enumeradas en un DAO, verificar los resultados en curso, explorar la actividad de cada dirección que interactúa con el DAO y filtrar las propuestas por período actual. Es compatible con dispositivos móviles y de desktop.

Esta es una versión read-only, pero un primer paso clave para permitir la compatibilidad total entre el desarrollo heredado del software Sovereign y las diferentes implementaciones de MolochDAO en blockchains basados en Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM).

Aquí están los links para explorar:

• Demo: moloch.democracy.earth
• Repositorio: github.com/DemocracyEarth/sovereign
• Release: github.com/DemocracyEarth/sovereign/releases/tag/0.7.0

¿Qué es un DAO?

A lo largo del año de 2019, el ecosistema blockchain vio la maduración de una clase específica de contratos conocidos como DAO (Organizaciones Autónomas Distribuidas). En un DAO, un grupo con un interés compartido agrupa fondos, y luego los procedimientos de votación sobre la asignación específica de los recursos se realizan de acuerdo con las reglas escritas en smart contracts, que funcionan como una especie de constitución confiable y automatizada. Esta es una nueva modalidad institucional, que surgió como una posibilidad debido a la creación de Ethereum, una red blockchain que permite correr programas Turing-completos (sin restricciones a su computación), lo que lleva al crecimiento del desarrollo de contratos inteligentes para aplicaciones descentralizadas.

El primer DAO ampliamente conocido, llamado TheDAO, fue hackeado infamemente en 2016 — lo que llevó a la suspensión de la experimentación con los contratos de gobernanza dentro del ecosistema. Tres años más tarde, MolochDAO, una organización construida por participantes de la red Ethereum, encabezó una clara reversión a esta tendencia con 6096 ETH (USD $ 938,269.68) para financiar y avanzar en el desarrollo de la infraestructura pública relacionada con Ethereum 2.0 — la próxima versión del protocolo. El contrato MolochDAO supera la Tragedia de los Comunes (donde los incentivos individuales están desalineados con resultados óptimos a nivel global) con una característica conocida como la función RageQuit: se produce un período de gracia después de que se aprueba cada propuesta, durante el cual los miembros pueden salir libremente del DAO y liquidar sus acciones.

El cofundador de Democracy Earth Foundation, Santiago Siri, se unió a MolochDAO usando selloutdao.com, un contrato donde se venden los votos de la DAO escrito por Mariano Conti de MakerDAO durante el hackatón ETHBerlin. El smart contract implicaba que por 0.5 ETH (USD $ 75.00), un comprador podía enviar una propuesta a MolochDAO a través de la dirección de Mariano, utilizando sus acciones preexistentes como miembro, y luego votarlo con sus acciones (pero sin su participación activa).

Fue un experimento sobre “soborno automatizado” y transparente, destinado a probar los límites de la influencia del dinero en gobiernos sobre blockchain. Santi obtuvo 389 votos a favor, y cero en contra, de su propuesta de unirse a MolochDAO — y ahora es un miembro activo del gremio.

MolochDAO se está convirtiendo en el smart contract más ampliamente adoptado para implementar DAO en la blockchain Ethereum, tal vez porque solo consta de 400 líneas de código y ajustes específicos de teoría de juegos que reducen el riesgo de participar en un DAO. Debido a su tracción y eficacia, varios grupos nuevos clonaran el contrato de Moloch para su propio gobierno, creando un ecosistema floreciente de nuevos DAOs. Algunas de estas nuevas organizaciones son YangDAO, que financia la creación de memes en Internet para el candidato presidencial de los Estados Unidos, Andrew Yang, y OrochiDAO, que permite la coordinación de eventos de manera descentralizada.

Con el nuevo lanzamiento de Sovereign, nuestra visión es proporcionar visibilidad y facilitar la creación de DAOs que puedan incorporar diferentes mecanismos de votación.

Para comenzar, ya hemos trabajado en un Moloch 👹 de Votación Cuadrática .

La Votación Cuadrática es un mecanismo diseñado por Glen Weyl (autor de Mercados Radicales) y el movimiento RadicalxChange. Con el Voto Cuadrático (VC), los votantes pueden expresar la intensidad de su preferencia tanto como quieran en apoyo de una causa, pero el fanatismo se penaliza a un ritmo exponencial: la mayor cantidad de votos en la misma opción agota rápidamente el presupuesto del votante. Al hacerlo, proporciona un resultado claro sobre si las intensas preferencias de las minorías superan a las débiles preferencias de la mayoría. Los votantes elaboran sus prioridades y encuentran un terreno común, proporcionando una expresión más matizada de las intenciones colectivas que ayuda a prevenir la polarización. En Abril de este año, Democracy Earth implementó el primer Voto Cuadrático oficial en el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos para el Estado de Colorado.

Si bien los smart contracts tradicionales apuntan principalmente a entregar resultados automatizados a medida que realizan funciones financieras, los DAOs difieren al estructurar un conjunto de opciones que no se pueden automatizar y, por lo tanto, requieren alguna forma de atención consciente en su proceso. Al estar destinados a la gobernanza, los DAO imprimen la entropía humana en la cadena, ofreciendo un camino prometedor como base para una métrica que permita detectar sybil identities (identidades duplicadas).

Mirando hacia el futuro, nuestro objetivo es transformar Sovereign en un navegador de DAOs, que pueda leer y proporcionar información sobre todos los contextos políticos del ecosistema que aspira a gobernar no solamente Ethereum sino eventualmente las redes digitales en su dimensión trans-nacional. Si bien estos son experimentos muy tempranos, pueden comenzar a informar diferentes formas de construir una identidad que sea interseccional e intersubjetiva.

Más novedades pronto!

Let’s keep talking

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Democracy Earth Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in San Francisco, California. Democracy.Earth. On twitter.
Donate: opencollective.com/democracyearth
ETH Support:

Anunciando Sovereign 0.7 | Compatible con Moloch 👹 was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we are proud to announce a pivotal release for our governance software: the 0.7 Moloch-compatible Sovereign.

The platform has been fully adapted to display events from MolochDAO smart contracts. In this new release you can see all listed proposals in a DAO, check the ongoing results, explore the activity of every address interacting with the DAO, and filter proposals by current period. It's Mobile and Desktop compatible, and — importantly — routing URLs are adapted to match the structure of block explorers like Etherscan.

This is a read-only version, but a key first step towards enabling full compatibility between the legacy development of the Sovereign software and MolochDAO forks on EVM-compatible blockchains.

Here are the links to explore it:

• Demo: moloch.democracy.earth
• Repo: github.com/DemocracyEarth/sovereign
• Release: github.com/DemocracyEarth/sovereign/releases/tag/0.7.0

What is a DAO?

Throughout the year of 2019, the blockchain ecosystem saw the maturation of a specific class of contracts known as DAOs, Distributed Autonomous Organizations. In a DAO, a group with a shared interest pools funds, and then the voting procedures on the specific allocation of the resources is done according to the rules encoded in Smart Contracts — that work as a sort of trusted, automated constitution. This is a new institutional modality, which emerged as a possibility due to the creation of Ethereum, a blockchain network that permits Turing-complete computations (able to process computable contracts), leading to the growth of Smart Contract development for decentralized applications.

The first widely known DAO, named TheDAO, was infamously hacked in 2016 — which led to experimentation with governance contracts being put on hold within the ecosystem. Three years later, a clear reversal to this trend was spearheaded by MolochDAO, an organization built by stakeholders invested in the Ethereum Network that pooled 6096 ETH (USD $938,269.68) to fund and advance the development of public infrastructure related to Ethereum 2.0. — the next version of the Ethereum protocol. The MolochDAO contract overcomes the Tragedy of the Commons (where individual incentives are misaligned with globally optimal outcomes) with a feature known as the RageQuit function: a grace period ensues after each proposal is approved, during which members can freely exit the DAO and liquidate their shares.

Democracy Earth Foundation’s co-Founder Santiago Siri joined the MolochDAO using selloutdao.com — a bribing contract written by MakerDAOs Mariano Conti during the ETHBerlin hackathon. The smart contract entailed that for 0.5 ETH (USD $75.00), a buyer could send a proposal to MolochDAO through Mariano’s address using his pre-existing shares as a member, and then vote on it with his shares (but without his active involvement).

It was an experiment on transparent, “automated bribery” aimed at testing the boundaries of blockchain governance. Santi obtained 389 votes in favor — and zero against — his proposal to join MolochDAO, and is now an active member of the guild.

MolochDAO is becoming the most widely adopted smart contract to deploy DAOs over the Ethereum blockchain — perhaps because it only consists of 400 lines of code and specific game theoretic tweaks that reduce the risk of participating on a DAO. Due to its traction and effectiveness, several new groups forked the Moloch contract for their own governance, creating a burgeoning ecosystem of new DAOs. Some of these new organizations are the YangDAO, funding the creation of Internet memes for the US Presidential candidate Andrew Yang, and OrochiDAO, enabling event coordination in a decentralized way.

With the new Sovereign release, our vision is to provide visibility and facilitate the creation of DAOs that can incorporate different voting mechanisms.

To kickstart things we have already worked on a Quadratic Voting Moloch 👹.

Quadratic Voting is a mechanism pioneered by Glen Weyl (author of Radical Markets) and the RadicalxChange movement. With QV voters are able to express the intensity of their preference as much as they want to in support of a cause, but zealotry is penalized at an exponential rate: more votes being put in the same option quickly exhaust the voter’s budget. By doing so, it provides a clear output on whether the intense preferences of minorities outweigh the weak preferences of the majority. Constituencies elaborate on their priorities and find a common ground, providing a more nuanced expression of collective intentions that helps prevent polarization. In April this year, Democracy Earth implemented the first official Quadratic Vote in the U.S. Government for the State of Colorado.

Looking into the future, our aim is to transform sovereign into a DAO Browser, that can read and provide information on the many different protocols in the ecosystem. While traditional smart contracts are aimed mostly at delivering automated outcomes as they perform financial functions, DAOs differ by structuring a set of choices that cannot be automated away and thus require some form of conscious attention in their process. Being intended for governance, DAOs imprint human entropy on chain, offering a promising path as a substrate for an anti-Sybil registry.

While these are very early experiments, they can begin to inform different ways of constructing an identity that is both intersectional, and intersubjective.

Stay tuned!

Let’s keep talking

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Democracy Earth Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in San Francisco, California. Democracy.Earth. On twitter.
Donate: opencollective.com/democracyearth
ETH Support:

Announcing Sovereign 0.7 | Moloch-compatible 👹 was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we celebrate the landslide victory of Hong Kong pro-democracy parties in the District Council Elections — taken as the de facto protest referendum. We take this opportunity to share information about the 2017 referendum that we participated in and the different kinds of cyberattacks suffered by the initiative, in hope that they can be learned from and new efforts can improve upon the experience we had.

The shadow referendum for the Chief Executive in Hong Kong was an initiative implemented by Civic Data HK and PopVote in partnership with Democracy Earth Foundation, in 2017. The official Chief Executive Election is largely considered illegitimate by the population of Hong Kong. Participation, including nominations and voting, is restricted to a small committee — at the time, 1200 people or 0.03% of the registered voters, who amounted to 3.7 million. It has also been historically perceived by civil society as a major vulnerability, as most of its nominees tend to be loyal to Beijing and thus can threaten Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Since its implementation in 1997, activists have been battling to bring universal suffrage to this election, and in 2013 a referendum led by PopVote was held to elect proposals on new ways to elect the Chief Executive, garnering an astounding number of 800,000 participants — one quarter of the registered voters. That event was closely tied with the beginnings of the Occupy Central and Umbrella movements, a 79-day occupation of the city demanding more transparent elections, which began 4 months after the referendum was held. The proposals were generated by local parties and civil society, and the winning choice was that nominees for Chief Executive of Hong Kong should have the support of at least thirty five thousand registered voters, or one percent of the voting population — otherwise, all parties could elect a nominee given they had at least five percent of the votes in the previous legislative election. The referendum received considerable coverage from the western media as it received one of the largest known DDoS attacks to date, executed by the Chinese government.

Drawing from this experience, Civic Data HK and PopVote partnered with Democracy Earth Foundation to develop a voting mechanism based on encrypted infrastructure. The aim was to provide a robust defense from Chinese attacks against a new upcoming referendum: an open primary process where citizens could nominate civilians for the Chief Executive Election. Anyone could participate by submitting a letter of intent, and whoever got one percent of the registered votes on the platform would enter the list of candidates, therefore implementing what had been democratically decided in 2014.

Due to a smear campaign (discussed below) our team decided to not implement the blockchain-based cryptographic key architecture that was initially devised for the referendum, but the code is available on Github for anyone willing to look into it: https://github.com/lucasisasmendi/r2bot-family.

Instead, together with our partners we designed a simpler infrastructure utilizing the Telegram app, due to its encryption and polling functionalities. Additionally, Telegram presented a higher difficulty target for attacks as you need a phone number to register, and after downloading the app, additional information was required in order to prevent duplicate votes. Citizens could vote from their phones, or from polling stations that were set up around the city, to ensure all could participate.

Cyberattacks

As the campaign unfolded, the referendum received four types of cyberattacks:

1 — The first one was targeting the accounts of the organizers. We suspect that during the time period of the election there was a hack within the telecommunication operator that sent SMS confirmations for resetting Telegram accounts. By intercepting those SMS messages, hackers were able to access the accounts of some of the organizers.

2 — There were attacks targeting the physical polling stations, with interferences in the Wi-Fi signal causing slow connection. It took a long time for tablets to record new votes, leading to long lines and a constant need to reset the Wi-Fi.

3 — Since Telegram was not available in Chinese, our team built a modified front-end for the app in the local language. The third kind of cyberattack was an exploit at this modified front-end that bypassed the phone verification process in order to create fake accounts, thus delegitimizing the initiative.

4— After we were able to provide a fix for the phone verification exploit, attackers managed to elaborate botnets that would send more API requests to the app than Telegram allowed for. Thankfully, the Telegram team did not shut down the services — instead, their team was extremely responsive, helping us screen bots and offering unlimited API requests during the referendum.

In parallel to those four cyberattacks, the most important strike to the referendum was a smear campaign that derived from concerns raised by the local IT Security Officers. They questioned the security of the voting information on the modified Telegram client, and false rumors quickly spread on national media saying that sensitive voter data, such as Hong Kong ID numbers, was leaked. Organizers went before the Privacy Commissioner for personal data of Hong Kong providing every necessary evidence that no such leak had happened, yet still the rumors undermined confidence in the process leading to small participation: over 65.000 participants, or 1.75% of the registered voters.

The vote enabled both positive and negative signaling: the winning candidate, John Tsang, received 90.7% of positive votes, while Carrie Lam received 95.3% of the negative votes. In contrast to the popular sample, Carrie Lam was officially elected Chief Executive of Hong Kong — by 777 Election Committee Members.

Kudos to our team Virgile Deville, Lucas Isasmendi, & CivicDataHK and PopVote for the incredible efforts. We invite cryptographers to continue developing methods that can enable disenfranchised populations to signal their preferences under secure, incorruptible and privacy preserving methods.

Let’s keep talking

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Democracy Earth Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in San Francisco, California. Democracy.Earth. On twitter.
Donate: opencollective.com/democracyearth
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Referendum for the Chief Executive in Hong Kong with Civic Data Hong Kong and Pop Vote — 2017 was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Earth Citizen 🌍,

The past week saw blockchain technology shaping the agenda in the ongoing tensions between the United States 🇺🇸 and China 🇨🇳.

Arguing that the prospective Chinese digital Renminbi is a political threat, Zuckerberg openly pitched Libra to US regulators as an instrument for American influence. Xi Jinping replied by calling his country to seize the opportunity afforded by blockchain technology — which was followed by an unusual increase in the Bitcoin price, deemed by many as a Chinese statement.

While that could have been interpreted as a support to the decentralization enabled by public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, it did not take very long for Xi’s views on how the technology can be used to foster his centralized and authoritarian government to become clear.

Amidst the Libra x China conundrum, here at Democracy.Earth we are coding the alternative:

The upcoming release of Sovereign will provide a social networking interface to the MolochDAO governance framework. In a DAO, voting and subsequent resource allocation are done according to the rules encoded in Smart Contracts, that work as a trusted, automated constitution. After The DAO’s infamous hack in 2016 — which put a hold on experimentation — this year we are finally seeing the emergence of a new wave of organizations that are succeeding to organize & gather funds upon DAOs. More specifically upon the MolochDAO framework.

Being aimed at Humans, these new DAOs are creating metrics for on-chain human activity, trailing the path to a decentralized & sybil resistant identity framework. Additionally, although being at a very early stage, they demonstrate how it is possible to coordinate resources in a distributed way. Avoiding centralized organizations — such as Libra — or centralized states — such as China.

If you are a part of an organization that is interested in utilizing a DAO for its governance, click here to sign-up in order to be contacted by us upon our next release!

Next Monday, Nov. 4, we’ll be with Glen Weyl from the RadicalxChange movement, who is coming to Madrid 🇪🇸 to share his work researching and shaping the next generation of political economy. We consider Glen one of the most important activists today, and the RadicalxChange movement is a natural ally of Democracy.Earth!

👉 You can read more about the first Quadratic Vote in the US government 🇺🇸, that we implemented in partnership with RadxChange at the State of Colorado here.

👉 Register to the event (its free!), and come say hi to us!

News From The Front | Devcon5, Osaka 🇯🇵

Earlier this month, our team went to Devcon5, the annual gathering held by the Ethereum Foundation. This is the most important event for us in the blockchain ecosystem, as it brings together a community that has a lot of synergy and many shared goals with Democracy.Earth.

Here are some news from the front:

• One of the most interesting events was the Proof of Humanity Meetup: here’s a video with snippets of it where you can watch members of Kleros, uPort, DAOstack and many other projects thinking about creative solutions to one of the main challenges of Web 3.
• We are still waiting for the recording, but here is a summary from the presentation of our co-Founder Santi.
• Check some of our favorite picks from the Devcon5 talks that are already online!
• It was amazing to finally meet in person Audrey Tang, the Digital Minister of Taiwan. Check her incredible class on radical transparency and democracy tech here.

Thank you for reading, be well and keep in touch!

Let’s keep talking

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Democracy Earth Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in San Francisco, California. Democracy.Earth. On twitter.
Donate: opencollective.com/democracyearth
ETH Support:

Democracy Earth 🌎 | News from the front… was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are honored to share that Democracy Earth received a USD $228k grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TFWC) in order to continue developing our efforts on Machine Learning resistant Turing Tests that can be used as proofs of identity.

As you may know, our research throughout the years points to the development of a secure identity protocol as a crucial step to enable sovereign governance on blockchain networks. TWCF is an unmatched supporter for this effort. They fund research and development in some of the most reputable institutions around the world, tackling relevant themes for us such as artificial intelligence, information theory, individual freedom and free markets. Being among the organizations supported by them is an enormous validation and a true honor.

With TWFC's grant our goal is to build a protocol able to model a one-human-one-node graph that can be a source of legitimacy in the governance of digital networks. We don’t expect this protocol to narrow down an identity to a one-dimensional number (username, surname, etc), but instead to leverage the social aspect of identity — the different groups and social ties that form it. In doing so, we won't be limited to the governance of specific organizations or institutions, but instead create a path to signal voter rights that can benefit all networks.

As a hypothetical use-case, let's imagine that tomorrow a decision held by MakerDAO — a ~$400M credit smart contract network that regularly has its community voting over interest fees — can be contrasted against a probabilistic consensus that defines how democratic these decisions were: then we can signal legitimacy within that decision. If we have an effective way of proving in the future that MakerDAO is a more relevant “Central Bank” to Venezuelans than the Central Bank of Venezuela itself, then this fact can exert political power even in legacy Venezuelan politics.

The key challenge to achieve this is to formalize humans in decentralized networks. In order to do so, we must prevent one single node from controlling multiple entities, a problem known in distributed systems as the Sybil Attack (Douceur 2002). On the Web 2.0, traditional solutions to this kind of problem are variations of the CAPTCHA challenge, which employs an algorithm to determine if there is a real human behind the screen or if it's a bot. However, employing an algorithm to block another algorithm creates a structural vulnerability: the pattern of defense can always be learned and hacked by the pattern of attack. Therefore, in order to protect the network from artificial intelligence exploits our protocol aims to validate singular humans with something far more powerful than computation processing: attention, a.k.a. human processing.

This a significant element, because it is a design that places network controls with its members, instead of a third-party entity such as Facebook or governments.

Machine Learning resistant Turing Tests

In order to join the network, members must submit a proof that they are really a human. A machine’s perception threshold can be measured using Turing Tests, tasks designed to tell robots and humans apart. So a human-based consensus that can't be gamed by software, by definition requires participants to submit Machine Learning resistant Turing Tests that can be uses as proofs of identity. Attestation mechanisms that go beyond pattern recognition and can place human intelligence at the center of network governance - in other words, they must be hard for computers but easy for brains to process. These attestation mechanisms will enhance our ability to measure the information threshold needed to establish a political border between human and machine intelligence.

A couple of examples are videos (such as the blockchain-based birth certificate of Roma Siri, daughter of Democracy Earth co-Founders Santiago Siri and Pia Mancini), and some variations of Winograd Schema Challenges. However, Machine Learning resistant Turing Tests can only help us solve part of the problem: to prevent a single node from controlling multiple identities we also need to employ reputation algorithms that can grant attestation rights to the nodes able to earn more trust from the network. That can serve as a protection to the network in that members will be able to stake their reputation on each other. Finally, to prevent the risks of bribes and centralization (inherent to reputation algorithms), we will implement randomized voting through the use of cryptographic lotteries that can incent users to attestate family and their social environment first.

Stay tuned for our first MVP: we are looking forward to begin testing with our community over the next few months!

Citizenship in a Networked Age @ University of Oxford

As a part of our collaboration with TWFC, our team also had the honor of joining the Citizenship in a Networked Age conference, which took place in April 2019 at the University of Oxford. The conference was centered around the question “What makes a good citizen in the age of decision-making through algorithms and artificial intelligence?”.

In order to search for answers, TWFC and the University of Oxford gathered some of the leading minds in academia and industry for 2 days of enriching exchanges. We learned enormously, and also brought our own perspective on the key role that identities play in our networked societies, and the importance of creating independent means for citizens to identify each other.

Let’s keep talking

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Democracy Earth receives Templeton World Charity Foundation R&D grant was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Adding any ERC20 token to Metamask is a pretty simple process that should only take you a couple minutes. For the $HOUR token here's all you need to do:

1 — Open the Metamask extension on your browser (on Chrome you can find the icon next to the address bar).

2 — Click on the "Menu" option:

3 — Scroll down the menu until you see the "ADD TOKEN" option in the bottom.

4–Select "CUSTOM TOKEN", and on the "Token Contract Address" field paste the following address:
0x00319f722bd546182cb2c701ca254146d3f084fc .

5- The two other fields will be filled automatically. Hit "NEXT", and on the following screen "ADD TOKENS". You will see that your new $HOUR token balance will show!

If you have any difficulty with the process feel free to reach out to our team at hello@democracy.earth !

Let’s keep talking

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Tutorial | How to add the $HOUR token to your Metamask was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stack’s token holders made their voices heard, and February’s final App Mining results give a great insight into use cases for decentralized apps: creating documents (Graphite), sharing and receiving professional recommendations (Zinc) and encrypted document signing (Blockusign).

However, the Top 10 ranking includes many newcomers providing incredible services to users as well:

Metrics that matter

This is our third month since the official start of App Mining’s vote — with a total of 300k in payouts. As we work to transform our governance platform into a powerful tool for the Blockstack ecosystem, there are a few metrics that we care deeply about:

The first is participation rate. Engaging voters is an enormous challenge for any governance process. Through a close collaboration with Blockstack’s fierce team, we have a current outstanding 32% voter turnout. This is the result of a hands-on approach, carefully on boarding voters and walking them through every step of the process with constant, rich communications. Our aim is not only to maintain this metric as the project scales and complexities increase, but to continue growing it on a monthly basis with design choices that can foster more engagement.

The second metric concerns the percentage of apps that received votes. Our primary concern is to enable a fair process for all the excellent teams and technologies being built on Blockstack. Currently, ~80% of registered apps have received votes. We grew that number through our ongoing exchange with App Miners, paying close attention to their feedback. Some of the new features that came as a product of that were enabling Miners to access the platform, interact with voters and receive feedback from them, and to randomly sort the apps.

Again, we are excited to continue improving so as to surface the most optimal results with our voting platform! This is only the beginning.

Let’s keep talking

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App Mining’s February Results are in! was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Democracy Earth’s token architecture is designed to model a humans-first political economy

Blockchain networks opened the possibility of new institutional models built with open source code, able to resist censorship and scale participation globally. However, Bitcoin’s original white paper description of “one CPU one vote” shaped the entire crypto-industry to think governance centered around machines, not people. Although a fundamental right to privacy bent early blockchain design toward anonymity, this property significantly limits the governance capacity of protocols. A simple example of that pertains to Quadratic Voting: one of the best governance models that can be implemented digitally, yet its execution depends on ensuring no participant votes more than once on the same issue — an impossibility under a fully anonymous solution.

Formalizing humans on the blockchain

The relevance of formalizing identities online can be inferred from centralized networks: major internet platforms such as Facebook and Google established themselves globally by achieving a sufficient level of consensus over their identity credentials, thus creating a trust layer on top of which a myriad of social applications could be built. The only former alternative able to reach such widespread use pertained to nation-states: our passports and national ID cards.

The creation of a global identification system outside of the strict control of nation-states increased communication and knowledge creation. It formed a networked social infrastructure that facilitated the emergence of multiple borderless political movements. However, being highly vulnerable to Artificial Intelligence exploits such as addictive algorithms and bots generating false identities & content, the underlying architecture of current centralized protocols exposes society to political manipulation and data theft. Not coincidentally, we are currently living the age of digital authoritarianism, and democracy is in global recession for the 12th consecutive year.

The rules applying to the protocol of a consensus layer for identities have wide-ranging implications, fundamentally shaping the entire structure of applications built on top of it. Those applications in turn determine the ways in which individuals and society are able to organize and develop — and because they are designed for a purely digital context (vulnerable to privately-owned algorithms, bots and sybils), the current model inevitably results in a post-truth environment ruled by the algorithmic optimization logic the apps are built with.

As we continuously work researching and implementing different forms of digital democracies, our experiences highlight that any such endeavor is undermined by both artificial intelligence exploiting the identity protocol, and corruption by third parties controlling a voter registry (legacy systems). This led us to understand that for democracy to grow anywhere with an Internet connection, a distributed consensus on human identities is a fundamental requirement. Determining who has the right to participate and who doesn’t cannot be an afterthought of democracy: it is its elemental task. In that sense, governance and identity are the same thing. If we are to enable a humane society — in the very literal sense of it, a society capable of giving precedence to human logic ahead of artificial intelligence — then the next consensus layer for identities must place human consciousness at the center of the network’s governance.

Democracy Earth Foundation's goal is to model a “one human one node” graph, providing protocol specifications able to serve as a source of legitimacy in the governance of digital networks. Looking at identity as a spectrum where at one end we have the identities of the people we know well and in person, and on the other completely encrypted anonymity — everything else falling on a continuum — our model is a probabilistic one. To inform this probabilistic model, our indicators will be built over the social aspect of identity, involving a bi-directional process — on one side, an identity claim and on the other, its subsequent endorsement by validated entities.

Turing Impossible Proofs

A machine’s perception threshold can be measured using Turing Tests, tasks designed to distinguish robots from humans. Thus, to achieve a human-based validation of identities requires by definition a Turing Impossible Proof, i.e. a claim that requires processing capability that goes beyond pattern recognition and puts validation control with humans rather than artificial intelligence.

Perhaps the first Turing Impossible Proof of record is the video birth certificate of Roma Siri, daughter of Democracy.Earth cofounders Santiago Siri and Pia Mancini — made in a simple format that is easy for a fellow human to decode, but presents a high difficulty target for machine processing. A proof can remain private and secret — only a hash goes on-chain, able to certify the contents and timestamp the original proof — enabling node validation without broadcasting the entirety of the information contained in the proof.

As artificial intelligence increases capabilities to mimic real human beings, the Proof of Identity format must always be open for debate.

Modeling a humans-first political economy

Governance and identity also have a symbiotic relationship from an economic point of view: a vote only has value when it comes from a legitimate voter. Thus, the matter of legitimizing digital entities is fundamental to building a working political economy. While strictly financial transactions can be completely anonymous, political transactions only have value if able to ensure that the entities involved in it are legitimately entitled to be a part of the decision in question. Our three-token architecture composed of the ERC 725 SELF token, the ERC 20 $HOUR token, and the ERC 20 $VOTE token is designed to encompass this process.

In order to grant participation rights to all humans, Democracy Earth is developing a protocol based on consensus (voting), and able to generate a probabilistic model that can measure if any given digital entity attempting to join the network is living (not an AI or bot), and singular (connected to a single individual with no replicants in the network).

The proof of identity protocol with its three-token foundation (outlined below) will be built on the Sovereign layer, employing reputation algorithms, cryptographic lotteries and zero-knowledge proofs to protect the network against Sybil attacks and collusion while ensuring privacy. Although details will change as the network adapts to new challenges over time, its fundamental building blocks are as follows:

ERC 20 $HOUR

Quadratic voting has been the subject of intense research as an optimal governance model, able to prevent majority abuse, speculation and extremism. Its purely mathematical structure makes it a scalable and market friendly version of democracy able to be deployed over the Ethereum blockchain.

In order to allow for a quadratic function to effectively govern the supply of $VOTES, we split the original $VOTE token functionality described in The Social Smart Contract into two tokens: the $VOTE token and the $HOUR token. Every $HOUR will correspond to one hour of time — an evenly distributed and scarce resource — with Ethereum’s blockchain serving as a universal clock. At a block creation rate of 15 seconds, the token distribution mechanism will grant the right to 1 new $HOUR token at every ~240 blocks, or 1 hour of Elapsed Time since identity generation.

The $HOUR token, distributed as a Universal Basic Income awarded to every verified identity in the network, quadratically converts to $VOTES as a means of taxing intense preferences and in effect bringing a desirable rationalization to the allocation of $VOTES. Both are ERC 20 tradable tokens: while there is no limit to how many tokens one can own, the Democracy Earth political economy ensures political liquidity to every participant and exponentially taxes extreme preferences by design.

ERC 20 $VOTE

The principal utility of the $VOTE token is identity validation. It will be used as the vehicle to legitimatize claims of identity (Turing Impossible Proofs) on different TCRs. When the $VOTE score for a given hash related to a Turing Impossible Proof reaches the consensus threshold, a check on the claim “Are you Human?” is issued for a provided SELF ERC-725 identity (described below). Although the full protocol for joining the Democracy Earth network is being constructed to protect it against sybils, bots, centralization and collusion, the quadratic supply of $VOTEs makes it a deliberately robust vehicle for identity validation.

In addition, the $VOTE token will act as a means of signaling preferences on our blockchain-based, social-media-like governance platform Sovereign . Whereas a ‘like’ on Facebook becomes part of an algorithmic computation designed to corrupt your attention, a ‘like’ on a blockchain is instead an accountable, transparent, and incorruptible $VOTE. Again the symbiotic nature of governance and identity is in evidence, with a participant’s actions on the platform adding to the information available regarding its originating identity.

ERC 725 SELF

A non-fungible ERC 725 SELF token will join the Democracy Earth network when a given Turing Impossible Proof reaches the $VOTE score threshold and a check on the claim “Are you Human?” is issued. ERC 725 is a non-fungible identity token specification on the Ethereum blockchain. Being built upon a permissionless network, this new identity credential places controls back with users, instead of having them locked into particular registrars. Its specifications enable owners to unlock transactions, certifications, voting and proxy representation on the blockchain — activities owned by the users, and which can add to their own portable reputation.

Looking forward

It is difficult to overstate the profound implications of the model described above. Formalizing identities is the crucial component for blockchain networks to finally unlock their transformative powers for society through tangible social applications. By creating a layer of trusted credentials that protects privacy, we envision the construction of incorruptible digital democracies, peer-to-peer lending, Universal Basic Income (starting with our own $HOUR), among countless of profoundly innovative solutions being enabled over blockchain networks.

As a common thread, such initiatives can foster human development by enabling disintermediated individual agency, independent of the main current identity providers, i.e. nation states and major internet monopolies. They can enable human logic to prevail over artificial intelligence.

When John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, he ended with a plea for a “…more humane and fair civilization of the mind.” Humane being a powerful choice of word, being used to describe the aspirations of an age giving rise to digital governance. Decentralizing democracy matters as the nation-state keeps failing a growing global society. It is worth remembering the last words published by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi:

“Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.”

The real risk of formalizing humans on the blockchain is not doing it.

As we launch Sovereign on Mainnet, this is the long-term thinking that will guide our development. It’s a challenging path, but if half the battle is knowing the direction forward, we are well-equipped. Join us!

Let’s keep talking

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Humans-first: decentralizing Identity and Governance in the Artificial Intelligence Era. was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stacks token holders made their voices heard through Democracy Earth’s community vote platform, and contributed to January’s $100k payout across all apps. Graphite led the final rank once again with a 20k payout — meanwhile, many new apps made it to the Top 10, such as Sundly, Mevaul, and DPAGE! You can check the full report here.

App Mining is a bold initiative supporting the development of new decentralized apps with 100k paid every month. As one of the App Reviewers we provide a key part of it: the governance component, allowing Stack’s token holders to express which apps should be supported. This month, our software has evolved to include always-on voting and enabling direct public conversations between token holders and App Founders throughout the voting process.

This kind of flexibility and rich communication speaks directly to the improvements on governance that we support. Our development is also highly informed by the input of all the different stakeholders involved, and we are bullish on the kinds of results that can be achieved when a network is collaborating as intensively and diligently as Blockstack’s !

You can find out more about App Mining here.

See Blockstack’s official announcement of January’s results.

Let’s keep talking

Twitter | FB | Git| Instagram | Telegram | YouTube | Podcast |Subscribe

App Mining’s January results are live! was originally published in Hacktivism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.