In a 3 part series I take a look at what cryptocurrency technology can do for politics and how it could literally take over the world!
In Part 1 I took a quick look at what we know as representational democracy, its history and some of its imperfections.
In Part 2 I introduced direct democracy and how it is already being used today.
In this final part I will talk about how blockchain and other technology is already being used to change politics.
Direct democracy, by definition, hinges on the ability of the electorate to vote. However the main problem facing any voting system is a matter of security and fundamentally trust. In the current world of representational democracy, governments usually pay a large number of volunteers to gather, sort, count and check the ballot papers. Sometimes an electronic counting system may be used too. But every stage of the voting process is carefully designed so that any individual cannot affect the vote count, and hence the required trust is kept low. But no process is perfect, and all it takes is a rogue group of organised individuals to affect the process. This clearly isn't an efficient or secure way of conducting regular votes.
If you then put voting online it opens up a whole new set of issues. Traditional websites are a centralised technology, with one organisation having control over the content and database, even if there are multiple instances spread over the globe for resilience. This means that any traditional voting website is vulnerable to tampering. Whether it be through external hacking or internal influence. Every organisation will claim that they are at the cutting edge of security technology and processes, but fundamentally the technology is flawed. When all is said and done the data is sitting in a database on a hard disk and somebody, somewhere has access to change that data and is vulnerable to being influenced. To use the words of poet Alexander Pope - To err is human (we all make mistakes).
Bitcoin Logo
This is (finally) where bitcoin comes in. Bitcoin uses a blockchain which fundamentally is a decentralised database of independently validated transactions. It is decentralised because there are many independently owned and run networked computers running the same software called nodes. And each node has an entire copy (or at least has validated an entire copy) of the blockchain. The blockchain itself is just a long list of all transactions that have ever happened and set up in such a way that anyone can check it is correct. Additions to the blockchain are agreed by consensus, or in other words, everyone has to agree that the transactions are correct mathematically. In that sense the protocol itself is democratic!
Importantly, the transactions in the blockchain could represent almost anything, whether it is transferring money for an item, or (aha!) voting on an issue.
But hang on a minute, what's to stop a rogue group of organised individuals from running nodes and messing with the software? To err is human, haha!
They can and have! The good news is that it is easily detectable and causes what is known as a hard fork. So even if the evil Macrosloth put all of their computing power behind a new copy of the software which falsified transactions, everybody else would know and would ignore their contributions. It also costs the rogues money since each contribution to a blockchain takes a considerable amount of processing, which in turn uses electricity and computing equipment.
So how does Steemit use blockchains?
Steemit's principle is that a post's content has inherent value and uses blockchains to track that value for the owner. The value of a post is quantified in Steem tokens and is changed by other users upvoting and downvoting that post. Each vote is a transaction that is put into the blockchain. As more transactions are put onto the blockchain, more Steem tokens are generated and are distributed between new posts.
Cool, so when's the first political blockchain vote?
Well someone's already there! Follow my vote is developing a blockchain system that is being promoted for use in all of the US's votes that I touched on in Part 2. If you want more information please visit their site; it has a wealth of information (including videos!) and is a really nice website.
If Follow my vote is accepted in the US, politicians had better watch out. I foresee the technology growing and being combined with websites like Loomio and Change.org to create a platform that could literally take over the world. Although in Part 2 I portray these websites as a solution to direct democracy over representational democracy, in reality with direct democracy you can still have a balance between the two, like Switzerland has. If you want to vote for a person to represent you, you can. If you want to vote for a particular solution to an issue, you can do that too. All it takes is for the issue and solution to be proposed and for enough people to back it.
Plus, don't forget that another major cornerstone in a country's power besides politics is its economy and financial system, much of which could be (and is being) replaced by cryptocurrency. I believe that over the next century the world will see a revolution in decentralisation and true and direct democracy. Exciting times!
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