Human-First: Decentralizing Identity and Governance in the Era of AI
words.democracy.earthThis reminds me of a previous job. The management—none of which were technical people—just loved the idea of investigating “the blockchain” and “IoT” and “machine learning” and “AI”, but had no clue what it meant. I left after a couple of months.
Has anyone else read this article and had the same experience as me? I genuinely second guess myself when reading it: have I lost the ability to read? Am I stupid? I read all these words on the page yet I have absolutely no comprehension of what was said. What on Earth was written on the “formalising humans on the blockchain” section for example? There sure are a lot of words, but nothing actually got said.
What, exactly do they want to do with a blockchain and why? It’s a simple question.
Oh, they have some cryptocurrency token they want to sell. Gotcha.
The why blockchain question is addressed in the first sentence. Of course, it is a short answer - it's not explained further because we have an entire paper just dedicated to that which most of our readers are familiar with: check paper.democracy.earth for that. Happy to answer any specific questions regarding formalizing humans on the blockchain, it is definitely a dense subject, but a key point for expanding the positive impact of crypto (if done right!).
No it isn't. There's no need for a blockchain here, and you either know it and just want to make some $$$ selling your pointless tokens, or you're clueless about the tradeoffs associated with a blockchain.
You obviously won't talk about anything technical to do with the blockchain: how the consensus algorithm works and why you chose it, who sells the coins and why, why you need coins, what security guarantees it has, why having all nodes of a network sharing a copy of the same ledger and constantly engaging in a protocol to agree on the state of the ledger is at all a good idea, and so on and so on... You just want to argue with me a bit to muddle the waters so people side it's one side against another and the truth lies somewhere inbetween. Fact is, this project makes no sense.
Following the link in the article to the white paper "The Social Smart Contract" there is a detailed explanation of the entire project (paper.democracy.earth) - reading this, I think the answer to "what do they want to do with a blockchain and why" becomes more clear - the project is about building a digital governance platform i.e. tokenize democracy, which enables new forms of digital voter representation and participation. This article is focused on the evolution of the project's token architecture i.e. the how, vs. the what/why.
Regarding the meaning of 'formalizing humans on the blockchain" - I think the point here is, social media and the nation-states (driver's licenses, passports) are the centralized entities that control formal identity - this project is layout out an approach to decentralize the ability for a person to claim a digital ID, which is a keystone challenge to be met for digital governance to not be overrun with bots and sybils like current social media platforms are.
Also if you research the co-founder, he is a college drop out game developer and founder of a political party in Argentina - pretty far from an MBA type.
reminds me of this (no disrespect to the owners) : http://www.demiurge.technology/culture
I sincerely thought that was promotional material for some religion or cult
Perhaps the text was generated by AI? :)
AI on the blockchain.
Yep I closed it immediately. And this is someone who actually reads this stuff.
The really baffling thing is how this made it to the front page of HN.
Apparently this was a Y Combinator startup launched in 2015.
Wow
> What, exactly do they want to do with a blockchain and why?
Here’s my take: they want to enable voting online with some level of trust. One major problem with online voting is ensuring each voter only votes once. In traditional voting (e.g. for a political office) the government is the one ensuring each eligible voter only votes once. Since the point of this is to “decentralize” voting, they need a complicated cryptographic approach to stand in for the governments role in ensuring one person one vote instead.
And how, exactly does a blockchain help with voting? Be specific: what is being hashed, what signatures, where? What kind of cryptography and exactly how is it used? It’s so frustrating when these MBA types just wave their hands and say “decentralisation!”
Why do they have three types of coin they want to sell? So you’re suggesting the whole point of this is for voting with governments you don’t trust. Why would such a government implement this then? How does having the entire blockchain public to all help with voter anonymity? Do blockchain schemes actually have a good record of not being hacked (answer: hell no). The article never made any specific claims as simple as “we are using s blockchain because...”
Basically, they used a lot of buzzwords to try to confuse people into “investing” in their coins.
Blockchains help with governance and identity (which are the same thing) by instituting global personas that can signal preferences in a censorship-resistant way. If you do not think there is a dire need for such mechanisms of global governance you might not have been reading the news of the past decade. The tokens are going to be granted as human rights, each with a specific functionality and reasoning behind them (identity, voting credits that account for time, and votes). You also have it completely wrong that this is meant to be used by governments: it is a peer-to-peer governance system. Any organization, collective, digital community can apply it - including a government - but the design is centered on the individual, not a centralized authority. Finally, I suggest you go do your research about the organization and history of hacktivism behind it and you might find that this could not be further away from a bunch of MBA types waving decentralization. Here are some links to get you started: https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democra... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UajbQTHnTfM https://www.dropbox.com/s/sifogl4zimwkkei/Democracy%20Earth%... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJfT-0v5AJI
As I said: be specific.
You obviously won't talk about anything technical to do with the blockchain: how the consensus algorithm works and why you chose it, who sells the coins and why, why you need coins, what security guarantees it has, why having all nodes of a network sharing a copy of the same ledger and constantly engaging in a protocol to agree on the state of the ledger is at all a good idea, and so on and so on... You just want to argue with me a bit to muddle the waters so people side it's one side against another and the truth lies somewhere inbetween. Fact is, this project makes no sense.
Quadratic voting on the blockchain should be a library you can throw into your blockchain project, not its own token with such a marketing effort behind it.
It should also be a thing that actually exists and makes sense first.
I fail to see how they solve the central issue: validating that someone is actually a human and not a bot.
Even the hash of the video of the father declaring the birth of his daughter; all it proves is that the video was _created_ before some specific date. It _doesn't_ prove that the details in the video are real, or even that the video wasn't just created by an AI.
that’s why it’s a voting mechanism and not based on artificial intelligence. only humans can acknowledge other humans. in the original paper is referred to as “attention mining”.
I think most of what they say is fear mongering and totally irrelevant. For example, the image that says "the biggest threat to democracy: these people never existed" and showing the AI generated faces. How is that the biggest threat to democracy? Aren't things like the two party system, a corrupt media that pushes political agendas instead of reporting objectively, social media polarizing people with echo chambers and feedback loops which create social fires over simple things, etc more of a threat to democracy than spoofed AI people walking into a voting booth? I understand that they would like to push their platform as a saving grace, but it seems like yet another crypto scheme that is trying out the political angle.
Democracy Earth actually started as a political party and then moved to working with blockchain technology due to the censorhip-resistance and incorruptibility properties. I recommend you research the organization. The article argues that many of the problems you mentioned can ultimately can be traced back to AI and the centralized internet architecture underlying it. If all you could get from it is that fake AI people will be walking into voting booths than clearly you did not give it the serious consideration these ideas deserve.
Your only comments on your account defend the organization and you have not disclosed your apparent affiliation: https://words.democracy.earth/@paulaberman