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Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

190 points by dustingetz 9y ago

uptownfunk 9y ago
From the readme >Cicada is a revolutionary distributed direct democracy (DDD) platform that will unleash the true power of the people, allowing tomorrow's Founding Fathers to run an entire nation from the palm of their hand. It's powered by a radical new blockchain that's completely immune to centralization and pays you to secure it with a practical Universal Basic Income.
lvoudour 9y ago
>A true Direct Democracy (DD) requires representativeless government. The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it I think non-representative would suffice and it would sound better. Anyway, the project looks cool but I have a strong aversion towards direct democracy, referendums, etc. when millions/billions are involved
LukeB42 9y ago
Sounds cool. When are we expected to start tattooing HUID QR codes into eachothers hands, foreheads? /s
- mhluongo 9y ago
  It'll be implanted RFID chips, duh!
skummetmaelk 9y ago
Do people really think pure direct democracy is a good idea? Why? We already have a problem with legislators not understanding anything about many areas they are expected to create policy on. Why would Average Joe do any better?
- LukeB42 9y ago
  Because you're talking about Averaged Joes instead of a singular political career. Direct democracy, I'm guessing, would amortise absolute power corrupting absolutely by spreading the power thinly across the population.
  - neilwilson 9y ago
    Averaged Joes are not independent entities. They network. So you don't get the effect. What you get is design by committee. Or more accurate design by committee of factions. The idea that democracy is a great way of solving all problems is just as much an ideology as rule by technocrat.
    - LukeB42 9y ago
      Arguing the converse would be arguing that one representatives soul has more inherent decisive import than those represented and that's difficult to qualify or quantify unless the representative entity's God himself.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  AFAIK we have known for a long time that we are smarter together. See under "Variance and standard deviation" in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton for a well known example. That said I personally think this is an extreme case. I'll also admit that people - including me - are scaringly easy to manipulate in cases that are more complicated than this. Generally I'm more in favour of the Swiss system where you meet in town and vote by raising your sword. (disclaimer: I think this might have changed now - I heard this was how it used to be done by someone I know who grew up there a decade or two (I guess) before I was born. )
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    The Swiss have expert legislators that actually make the laws the way they want. Grossly simplified, the populace can force a decision, but the specific implementation of the decision is created by lawmakers and later accepted by the population. If it is rejected the lawmakers get to have another go. It is of course more direct than in America, though it is more a case of voters saying "We want this" and legislators saying "Ok, we tried to implement it in the best way we could. Do you accept?".
- losteric 9y ago
  Direct democracy works IF we have an educated electorate. Which America does not have, and will not have for at least a generation... all the same, it can work. An educated electorate does not imply subject matter expertise, it means ubiquitous critical thinking abilities... the ability to debate, ask good questions, analyze the credibility and argument of a subject matter expert, and having the humbleness to be persuaded.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    Which will never ever happen. Who has time to critically evaluate every single decision that needs to be made by an effective government? That is assuming of course you could make everyone rational.
    - losteric 9y ago
      Who says they would have to? Direct democracy = direct voting, not intimate involvement with every stage of policy. Representatives would still exist as subject matter experts that develop policy within their domain and act to convince the public. Ubiquitous critical thinking is sufficient to protect the public from demagogues and conmen - and that is an achievable goal (albeit politically challenging today)
- banach 9y ago
  It depends on ow you organize it, but ideally most decisions would be taken on the level of the people who are affected by it. If Joe doesn't understand before the election, he will understand after, and if he doesn't like the result, he can call for a new election. However, modern DD systems should support delegator/liquid democracy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy) which subsumes the benefits of representative democracy, while letting voters take back their vote from their delegate at any time.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    How is Joe going to know whether the tarriffs for imported salami should be 4% or 6.5%. How will he know that he made the right decision afterwards?
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      Maybe it doesn't make much difference? Maybe fine-tuning salami tarriffs is something that should not be done, and relevant legislators should be freed to perhaps produce salami themself?
      - skummetmaelk 9y ago
        In real government there are thousands of small decisions on small boring issues that combine to have huge effects. Sometimes I feel like people think politics is only about debating the big things that split party lines like gay marriage and abortion.
        thriftwy 9y ago
        I don't have any confirmations that these small decisions actually matter much. You can have salami makers lobby for 6,5% import tax then salami sellers lobby for 4% import tax for years before the same parliament, this consuming resources of society but bringing zero value to society at large. On other hand, we can still leave such decisions to relevant professionals and pass laws to gauge their work.
- apeace 9y ago
  I don't necessarily ascribe to direct democracy ideas, but if you want to learn about why some people think it's a good idea, check out "The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement" by David Graeber. It chronicles his experiences in the Occupy Wall Street movement and expounds upon the value of direct democracy.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  These days I think that direct democracy is better than bureaucracy. Why won't it? Provided that it's deployed slowly and tenderly. Maybe Average Joe doesn't understand your area. Then you have two options: - Educate Average Joe about the issue. - Make sure that Average Joe doesn't vote on the issue and only concerned citizens do. This usually requires that issue poses no nuisances for Average Joe. But right now, when legislators don't understand anything and create bad policy, we have ZERO options. Zero is less than two.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    Joe does not have the time to be informed about the pros and cons of every decision that the government needs to ask him about. It's simply not practical. Direct democracy would be handing over the machinery of government to marketing companies fed by lobbies.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      We don't need Joe voting on every single issue. Just give Joe 100 voting credits at the start of cycle and let him spend in on whatever votes he likes - or not. Separation of scope also helps - a.k.a. moving issues from statewide scope and to relevant provinces/communes.
      - skummetmaelk 9y ago
        If you give out voting credits, influencers will call for votes on many small, but hot, topics to expend all votes and then ram through what they want. It's too easy to hack. In most western democracies, not necessarily America. Representatives can be held accountable and any corruption is usually exposed with dire consequences for their party.
        thriftwy 9y ago
        It's also easy to counter. I can think how and so can you. What's the point of "ramming through" if it gets repealed in terror at the start of next cycle? Very potent point is that laws should be tried and then most of them should be repealed. Only a minority of laws should survive to permanence. Right now we pretend that we're capable of writing good laws from the first attempt.
- manigandham 9y ago
  > Why would Average Joe do any better? They wouldn't. It only works when the electorate is educated and rational - and that is almost never the case.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    They would. So long as your the Average Joe makes the correct decision 51% of the time in the long run we'll turn out fine.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      That makes no sense. What's the correct decision? All the people voting completely against their interests now think they're making the correct decision. Not all decisions or votes are equal and the outcome of an election can change what can even be voted on and by whom for the next round.
      - Spivak 9y ago
        I'm responding to the point that voters need to be rational and educated for a direct democracy to function. It only requires that voters have a bias, however slight, to making the 'right' decision. Don't think too much about how to define 'right' because you'll drive yourself mad. All that matters is the belief that in the long run people tend to make 'right' choices slightly more often than wrong ones.
        manigandham 9y ago
        That wasn't the point. The question is whether it's a good idea - and it's not when people don't know or don't care about what they're voting on, both of which requires education and rational (long-term) thinking.
        ZenoArrow 9y ago
        > "All that matters is the belief that in the long run people tend to make 'right' choices slightly more often than wrong ones." Do they though? I see people making the "wrong" choices very often when the "right" choice is inconvenient for them. I would include myself in that description too.
- AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
  1. It's harder to bribe all Joes. Much easier to bribe 500 people in a 300 million people. Actually, you may just have to bribe 100 or so, enough to tilt partisan things in your favor. 2. Direct democracy would not follow party lines, there is no need to. You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code. 3. Because any other forms of rulers get disconnected form people as soon as they start ruling 4. No "too-big-to-fail" ruler (dictator, king, plutocrat, oligarch, meritocratic, strongman). Entire country doesn't depend on single charismatic person. 5. It might have been difficult in the past, but in the internet age in USA, direct democracy has less things that would work against it. More information available, more means to communicate available, decent education available. 6. Find best people for the job. Ideas can come from anywhere. Implementer can come from anywhere. You won't get "I implement my idea, not you". "You stole my idea". etc.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    > 1. It's harder to bribe all Joes. It's easy to influence all Joes on the social media platforms virtually all of them use. > 2. Direct democracy would not follow party lines, there is no need to. Party line is less of a problem in countries with sensible representative democracies, i.e not FPTP. > You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code. I completely agree with you here, but like others you only talk about the big issues. Not the small day-to-day operation that must also be handled as well as all the small "boring" issues that face any real government. > 3. Because any other forms of rulers get disconnected form people as soon as they start ruling. Representatives are not rulers. > 4. No "too-big-to-fail" ruler (dictator, king, plutocrat, oligarch, meritocratic, strongman). Entire country doesn't depend on single charismatic person. I guarantee that if direct democracy was implemented you would have charismatic personalities telling people how to vote on day one. And they would be much better than influencers trying to use reason too. > 5. It might have been difficult in the past, but in the internet age in USA, direct democracy has less things that would work against it. More information available, more means to communicate available, decent education available. More information overload. More false information supporting your preexisting views. > 6. Find best people for the job. Ideas can come from anywhere. Implementer can come from anywhere. You won't get "I implement my idea, not you". "You stole my idea". etc. Just like today it would be the most charismatic that flow to the top. Perhaps it would be even worse since today only the representatives have to be charismatic. At least their aides and bureaucrats can be ugly and socially inept as long as they are good at what they do.
- logingone 9y ago
  I like the idea of visualising the decisions. Break down an issue into its constituent parts, then show all the graphs and see-saws - if you vote x, then it a, b, c will change like this, and l,m,n will change like this.
- joshuaheard 9y ago
  The same reason crowdsourcing works on sites like Yelp, Amazon, and TripAdvisor.
- rhizome 9y ago
  You can't even pretend that you did a single web search?
- MadcapJake 9y ago
  Legislators aren't ignorant, they just vote according to their corporate sponsors. Direct democracy incentivizes the citizen to learn the issues. My opinions aside, TFA details a system to relieve "voter fatigue" and knowledge domain issues (delegating a committee of experts to craft votable resolutions)
reitanqild 9y ago
Is this linked to the "cicada" where people solved riddles to find clues and apply for membership in something very secret?
- HalfTOXIC 9y ago
  I was thinking the same
erispoe 9y ago
Governments take thousands of decisions. Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? We risk ending up with a "democracy" where the power is really in the end of people having enough time and / or skin in the game to actually vote. Voter fatigue is already a known effect where places that vote the most are also the ones with the lowest turnout. California and Switzerland vote twice a year, they barely ever go above 50% turnout. That kind of system would be interesting for signature collection, however. It would then be easier, more fair and more secure to collect signatures to put something on the ballot. Today you really need money to do that.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  On that last point, remember we have things like Civitas we can use: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/
- harel 9y ago
  You can let gov deal with minor national wide issues, and delegate the important stuff to the people (thresholds to be agreed upon in advance and when in doubt defer to the people). Anything local should be handled in the same way by local authorities.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  That's why systems like Liquid Democracy have delegation features. You don't elect representatives, but you can delegate ("lend", if you will) your vote on certain issues to them. And revoke the delegation at any time. Maybe Cicada could be equipped with something like this, but sentences like "The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it." don't look like the authors have done a lot of research on the topic.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    This is a github post that tries to pass itself off as a "paper" (because it sounds official, right), and ends with "And that can change the world". Wow that's academic and objective. Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw. The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code. Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper. To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made? Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?
agentultra 9y ago
If someone were to go forward with an implementation it'd be nice to see a strong proof of the protocol to accompany this informal specification.
pmlnr 9y ago
This is a nice, long, well organised document on plumbing. Is there anything running to demonstrate at least a portion of it?
clarkevans 9y ago
I suggest the people who want to "fix politics" get involved and start very small: look at a single ward within a city. Don't try to replace representative democracy -- enhance it, automate it. If you've got a theory, start small, and run on it. Go out and get votes. Then, once you've been elected actually see the real world problems that exist. Or, even simpler, volunteer in a local state representative's office for a good few years till you understand the actual challenges. Make their job and their constituents involvement better. Radical change starts with modest beginnings.
- bb611 9y ago
  The scale of government which interests people is a direct product of the issues that interest them. Want to influence school policies? Almost 100% a local ward/district issue. Want to have a meaningful impact on almost anything else? It all happens at the state & federal level. In some states (CA being a prime example), a huge amount of even normally local education policy issues have been taken over by the state because of the way schools are funded. I have known plenty of people who went into local government and left after 3-5 years, because the fights are just as hard as at the higher levels, but the chance to engage in meaningful policy creation is almost nil. The professionals use it as a training/credentialing circuit, and the regular citizens generally seem to leave permanently.
harel 9y ago
I've been advocating blockchaining democracy for a while now. At the time I even bought a domain for this (continuousreferendum.com, which lapsed by now). Never had the time to learn enough to do this. I'm really really glad someone did. The future is right there. Now the real hard stuff is to get governments to transition to being 'pilots' and not 'navigators'.
narrator 9y ago
Gee whiz... everybody's really down on democracy in this thread. Ok, so when is someone going to write a distributed app for running a one party state?
homakov 9y ago
> initially utilizing both irises as inputs) to create public/private keypairs, we can generate a unique ID for each person on the planet wait, what?
5trokerac3 9y ago
> Nearly impossible to duplicate or steal So, if this was actually implemented as the one source of power and control in the world, somebody would figure out how to duplicate or steal it.
hhw3h 9y ago
As banach mentioned the key to making direct democracy work is making it liquid as well. If you can delegate your voting power totally or granularly on a per issue basis to other individuals--while maintaining the ability to revoke your voting power from said individuals you can get the benefits of representative democracy and direct democracy at once. Would love someone more informed to discuss the cons of liquid or delegative democracy.
thatcat 9y ago
A hybrid direct-represenative sort of organization could be formed using votebots to make decisions for people who don't have time to participate, but who could review the decisions later and change represenative bots if they don't like it based on their historical performance.
Confiks 9y ago
First of all, regardless of all the claims made in the document, I find it awesome to see such a gigantic writeup that tries to be at least a bit internally consistent. It reminds me of Bit451 [1][2], although that one was simply insane. So about Cicada: the document quickly notes that the 'human unique identifier' is at the core of the proposal. It is claimed that it "allows us to prevent Sybil attacks and ensure everyone has a voice in the system". It promises to do this with cryptography and 'biocryptics', a word which isn't really that widely used in the research community. It seems to mostly refer to anonymous biometrics authentication systems [3][4]. In that field I can find nothing about preventing Sybil attacks. Additionally, preventing Sybil attacks in a decentralized system, by relying on a biometric measurement that is fully under the control of an attacker seems doomed to fail. No matter how much cryptography you throw at it. There must either be some central party designating trust in a certain (anonymous) biometric, or there needs to be a web of trust that is sufficiently connected and resistant to manipulation. A combination, with good checks and balances and distribution of power, seems to be the way to go most of the time. [1] http://bit451.org/ http://bit451.org/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728231 [3] https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-1462.pdf https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-1462... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_biometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_biometrics
- MarkPNeyer 9y ago
  Here's a web of trust design that comes with a conflict resolution mechanism. https://github.com/neyer/respect https://github.com/neyer/respect http://s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf http://s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf
- ConfucianNardin 9y ago
  Their claim/assumption is based in trust of the enrollment system. Check the section on enrollment - this image is especially helpful: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/master/images/Enrollment-1.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada.... The enrollment software is supposed to be verified using "Challenge/Response", which is supposed to ensure the guarantees provided by the HUIDs. Of course, given enough incentive, this can (and will) be cracked...
olalonde 9y ago
> A new Distributed Proof of Work (DPoW) backed blockchain that is immune to centralization because of a unified client/miner with only one miner allowed per person, linked anonymously to a HUID. The whole blockchain thing is built on the assumption that we don't have this HUID thing which solves Sybil attacks. Now that Sybil attacks are no longer a concern, surely there must be a more efficient algorithm than PoW to secure the chain. > This ID is not centrally controlled, which will virtually eliminate all Sybil attacks, along with the vast majority of problems in peer to peer networks. It's trivial to stop Sybil attacks in a centralized system... Making the ID decentralized certainly does not help in that department. > A HUID generated through the intersection of revocable biometrics and cryptography. Aren't biometrics (and by extension, identities) trivial to generate?
fiatjaf 9y ago
I imagine this thing doesn't have a way to determine if the State is itself legitimate, or a way to achieve consensus on which State (of multiple ones that may exist in each geographic area) is the master-legislator. It probably assumes and hardcodes the current State.
fiatjaf 9y ago
This is too complicated. If a simple thing like Bitcoin fails to be mainstream because most people don't even want to start thinking through it, imagine THIS. Also, there will be so many room for bugs that the number of issues will make GitHub servers explode.
smokeyj 9y ago
If we were to talk about human organizational models the way we talk about network topologies the conversation would be so much more productive. We could talk about uptime, failover, backups, consensus and other objective qualities. No matter what form of government you support, I think the organizational model can be represented as some form of game (in the game-theory sense) that can be replicated and compared to other organizational models. For example, imagine a wide scale battle simulation where players join a team based on how the chain of command is organized. This would allow you to test centralized/decentralized/hybrid models or organization in a way that gets better over time. My prediction is that a hybrid model would win. Instead of a pure top-down, or bottom-up model - you'd have something like a RAFT protocol organizing the squads. This way there's no general you can take out, and there's consensus among what the battle plan is.
azinman2 9y ago
Forgive my cynicism but... “The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code.“ Aside from security, Luddites, equal access, hardware failures, trust issues, power shortages, and many other issues with depending on technology for gov to function... How does code beat guns?
- dkarl 9y ago
  > How does code beat guns? How does anything beat guns? In theory, the U.S. armed forces could depose the government, but culture and tradition ensure that it defers to democratic institutions. In a country with a history of coups, especially coups that have deposed harmful regimes, coups are regarded in a more positive light. They are thinkable and therefore possible. In the United States, given our history, things would have to change a lot (even much more than electing an incompetent, incontinent buffoon as president) before a coup would become possible. Direct democracy would be tenuous at first, perhaps assuming more and more responsibility over time under the watch of a representative government that gradually became a caretaker bureaucracy, with the trust and respect held by representative democracy institutions gradually transferring to the direct democracy institutions.
acd 9y ago
The underlying decision mechanism of distributed democracy is Wisdom of the crowd which means that together as a group we are much smarter than a single individual. "The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of a continuous quantity. At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds.[8] This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the median centered near the true value of the quantity to be estimated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd
- splintercell 9y ago
  Ah, the wisdom of the crowd which accurately predicted in 2016 the Brexit and election of Donald Trump.
c-smile 9y ago
Let's start from applying DDD to, say, W3C. Will we have better and faster arriving specs?
KaiserPro 9y ago
Hands up who has looked at twitter, and thought, I know, that'll be a great place to put unlimited power? no, not me either.
try_sincerely 9y ago
It's unfortunate this thing is so long on HN front page
kodfodrasz 9y ago
Does this have anything to do with Cicada 3301? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301
wadeboggs 9y ago
Cool readme, let's check out the code! Oh.
goodroot 9y ago
Of all places to be cynical, a den of code-oriented and clever people with the ability to propagate major social change shouldn't be one of them. A commendable and inspiring effort. Cicada is bafflingly ambitious; any system that proposes a 7billion person user base is hopefully geared to fight a very, very long and arduous battle. Good luck! I will happily root for anyone brave enough to tackle the inevitable problems of the future with an open and articulate vision. Shoot, maybe I'll even throw in a PR or two.
deleted 9y ago
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gt_ 9y ago
my new favorite README.md template
kstenerud 9y ago
I thank my lucky stars that this will never get off the ground. The last thing we need is another naive idealist defining the structure of our government.
gasull 9y ago
Without a monopoly of violence you don't have a direct democracy, but an opinion survey. This system doesn't enforce whatever is voted and decided.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Well, decision makers in current governments can't personally enforce anything either. You need a hierarchy that respects their authority. It'd also work with this system.
xg15 9y ago
If the past years have shown anything then that blockchain software - like any software - needs continous development, maintaining, bug fixing, clarification of edge cases, etc. In a world where "leaders are replaced with code", where does that place the Cicada developers?
deleted 9y ago
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190 points by dustingetz 9y ago

From the readme >Cicada is a revolutionary distributed direct democracy (DDD) platform that will unleash the true power of the people, allowing tomorrow's Founding Fathers to run an entire nation from the palm of their hand. It's powered by a radical new blockchain that's completely immune to centralization and pays you to secure it with a practical Universal Basic Income.

lvoudour 9y ago

>A true Direct Democracy (DD) requires representativeless government. The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it I think non-representative would suffice and it would sound better. Anyway, the project looks cool but I have a strong aversion towards direct democracy, referendums, etc. when millions/billions are involved

LukeB42 9y ago

Sounds cool. When are we expected to start tattooing HUID QR codes into eachothers hands, foreheads? /s

mhluongo 9y ago
It'll be implanted RFID chips, duh!

skummetmaelk 9y ago

Do people really think pure direct democracy is a good idea? Why? We already have a problem with legislators not understanding anything about many areas they are expected to create policy on. Why would Average Joe do any better?

LukeB42 9y ago
Because you're talking about Averaged Joes instead of a singular political career. Direct democracy, I'm guessing, would amortise absolute power corrupting absolutely by spreading the power thinly across the population.
- neilwilson 9y ago
  Averaged Joes are not independent entities. They network. So you don't get the effect. What you get is design by committee. Or more accurate design by committee of factions. The idea that democracy is a great way of solving all problems is just as much an ideology as rule by technocrat.
  - LukeB42 9y ago
    Arguing the converse would be arguing that one representatives soul has more inherent decisive import than those represented and that's difficult to qualify or quantify unless the representative entity's God himself.
reitanqild 9y ago
AFAIK we have known for a long time that we are smarter together. See under "Variance and standard deviation" in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton for a well known example. That said I personally think this is an extreme case. I'll also admit that people - including me - are scaringly easy to manipulate in cases that are more complicated than this. Generally I'm more in favour of the Swiss system where you meet in town and vote by raising your sword. (disclaimer: I think this might have changed now - I heard this was how it used to be done by someone I know who grew up there a decade or two (I guess) before I was born. )
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  The Swiss have expert legislators that actually make the laws the way they want. Grossly simplified, the populace can force a decision, but the specific implementation of the decision is created by lawmakers and later accepted by the population. If it is rejected the lawmakers get to have another go. It is of course more direct than in America, though it is more a case of voters saying "We want this" and legislators saying "Ok, we tried to implement it in the best way we could. Do you accept?".
losteric 9y ago
Direct democracy works IF we have an educated electorate. Which America does not have, and will not have for at least a generation... all the same, it can work. An educated electorate does not imply subject matter expertise, it means ubiquitous critical thinking abilities... the ability to debate, ask good questions, analyze the credibility and argument of a subject matter expert, and having the humbleness to be persuaded.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  Which will never ever happen. Who has time to critically evaluate every single decision that needs to be made by an effective government? That is assuming of course you could make everyone rational.
  - losteric 9y ago
    Who says they would have to? Direct democracy = direct voting, not intimate involvement with every stage of policy. Representatives would still exist as subject matter experts that develop policy within their domain and act to convince the public. Ubiquitous critical thinking is sufficient to protect the public from demagogues and conmen - and that is an achievable goal (albeit politically challenging today)
banach 9y ago
It depends on ow you organize it, but ideally most decisions would be taken on the level of the people who are affected by it. If Joe doesn't understand before the election, he will understand after, and if he doesn't like the result, he can call for a new election. However, modern DD systems should support delegator/liquid democracy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy) which subsumes the benefits of representative democracy, while letting voters take back their vote from their delegate at any time.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  How is Joe going to know whether the tarriffs for imported salami should be 4% or 6.5%. How will he know that he made the right decision afterwards?
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    Maybe it doesn't make much difference? Maybe fine-tuning salami tarriffs is something that should not be done, and relevant legislators should be freed to perhaps produce salami themself?
    - skummetmaelk 9y ago
      In real government there are thousands of small decisions on small boring issues that combine to have huge effects. Sometimes I feel like people think politics is only about debating the big things that split party lines like gay marriage and abortion.
      - thriftwy 9y ago
        I don't have any confirmations that these small decisions actually matter much. You can have salami makers lobby for 6,5% import tax then salami sellers lobby for 4% import tax for years before the same parliament, this consuming resources of society but bringing zero value to society at large. On other hand, we can still leave such decisions to relevant professionals and pass laws to gauge their work.
apeace 9y ago
I don't necessarily ascribe to direct democracy ideas, but if you want to learn about why some people think it's a good idea, check out "The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement" by David Graeber. It chronicles his experiences in the Occupy Wall Street movement and expounds upon the value of direct democracy.
thriftwy 9y ago
These days I think that direct democracy is better than bureaucracy. Why won't it? Provided that it's deployed slowly and tenderly. Maybe Average Joe doesn't understand your area. Then you have two options: - Educate Average Joe about the issue. - Make sure that Average Joe doesn't vote on the issue and only concerned citizens do. This usually requires that issue poses no nuisances for Average Joe. But right now, when legislators don't understand anything and create bad policy, we have ZERO options. Zero is less than two.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  Joe does not have the time to be informed about the pros and cons of every decision that the government needs to ask him about. It's simply not practical. Direct democracy would be handing over the machinery of government to marketing companies fed by lobbies.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    We don't need Joe voting on every single issue. Just give Joe 100 voting credits at the start of cycle and let him spend in on whatever votes he likes - or not. Separation of scope also helps - a.k.a. moving issues from statewide scope and to relevant provinces/communes.
    - skummetmaelk 9y ago
      If you give out voting credits, influencers will call for votes on many small, but hot, topics to expend all votes and then ram through what they want. It's too easy to hack. In most western democracies, not necessarily America. Representatives can be held accountable and any corruption is usually exposed with dire consequences for their party.
      - thriftwy 9y ago
        It's also easy to counter. I can think how and so can you. What's the point of "ramming through" if it gets repealed in terror at the start of next cycle? Very potent point is that laws should be tried and then most of them should be repealed. Only a minority of laws should survive to permanence. Right now we pretend that we're capable of writing good laws from the first attempt.
manigandham 9y ago
> Why would Average Joe do any better? They wouldn't. It only works when the electorate is educated and rational - and that is almost never the case.
- Spivak 9y ago
  They would. So long as your the Average Joe makes the correct decision 51% of the time in the long run we'll turn out fine.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    That makes no sense. What's the correct decision? All the people voting completely against their interests now think they're making the correct decision. Not all decisions or votes are equal and the outcome of an election can change what can even be voted on and by whom for the next round.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      I'm responding to the point that voters need to be rational and educated for a direct democracy to function. It only requires that voters have a bias, however slight, to making the 'right' decision. Don't think too much about how to define 'right' because you'll drive yourself mad. All that matters is the belief that in the long run people tend to make 'right' choices slightly more often than wrong ones.
      - manigandham 9y ago
        That wasn't the point. The question is whether it's a good idea - and it's not when people don't know or don't care about what they're voting on, both of which requires education and rational (long-term) thinking.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        > "All that matters is the belief that in the long run people tend to make 'right' choices slightly more often than wrong ones." Do they though? I see people making the "wrong" choices very often when the "right" choice is inconvenient for them. I would include myself in that description too.
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
1. It's harder to bribe all Joes. Much easier to bribe 500 people in a 300 million people. Actually, you may just have to bribe 100 or so, enough to tilt partisan things in your favor. 2. Direct democracy would not follow party lines, there is no need to. You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code. 3. Because any other forms of rulers get disconnected form people as soon as they start ruling 4. No "too-big-to-fail" ruler (dictator, king, plutocrat, oligarch, meritocratic, strongman). Entire country doesn't depend on single charismatic person. 5. It might have been difficult in the past, but in the internet age in USA, direct democracy has less things that would work against it. More information available, more means to communicate available, decent education available. 6. Find best people for the job. Ideas can come from anywhere. Implementer can come from anywhere. You won't get "I implement my idea, not you". "You stole my idea". etc.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  > 1. It's harder to bribe all Joes. It's easy to influence all Joes on the social media platforms virtually all of them use. > 2. Direct democracy would not follow party lines, there is no need to. Party line is less of a problem in countries with sensible representative democracies, i.e not FPTP. > You can have gun rights and abortion rights. You can have social safety net programs and curb illegal immigration. You can be tough on crimes and treat drug addiction as mental issue. You can have higher taxes but lower regulations. You can have higher military spending but no wasteful spending. You can have higher marginal tax rate while having simple tax code. I completely agree with you here, but like others you only talk about the big issues. Not the small day-to-day operation that must also be handled as well as all the small "boring" issues that face any real government. > 3. Because any other forms of rulers get disconnected form people as soon as they start ruling. Representatives are not rulers. > 4. No "too-big-to-fail" ruler (dictator, king, plutocrat, oligarch, meritocratic, strongman). Entire country doesn't depend on single charismatic person. I guarantee that if direct democracy was implemented you would have charismatic personalities telling people how to vote on day one. And they would be much better than influencers trying to use reason too. > 5. It might have been difficult in the past, but in the internet age in USA, direct democracy has less things that would work against it. More information available, more means to communicate available, decent education available. More information overload. More false information supporting your preexisting views. > 6. Find best people for the job. Ideas can come from anywhere. Implementer can come from anywhere. You won't get "I implement my idea, not you". "You stole my idea". etc. Just like today it would be the most charismatic that flow to the top. Perhaps it would be even worse since today only the representatives have to be charismatic. At least their aides and bureaucrats can be ugly and socially inept as long as they are good at what they do.
logingone 9y ago
I like the idea of visualising the decisions. Break down an issue into its constituent parts, then show all the graphs and see-saws - if you vote x, then it a, b, c will change like this, and l,m,n will change like this.
joshuaheard 9y ago
The same reason crowdsourcing works on sites like Yelp, Amazon, and TripAdvisor.
rhizome 9y ago
You can't even pretend that you did a single web search?
MadcapJake 9y ago
Legislators aren't ignorant, they just vote according to their corporate sponsors. Direct democracy incentivizes the citizen to learn the issues. My opinions aside, TFA details a system to relieve "voter fatigue" and knowledge domain issues (delegating a committee of experts to craft votable resolutions)

reitanqild 9y ago

Is this linked to the "cicada" where people solved riddles to find clues and apply for membership in something very secret?

HalfTOXIC 9y ago
I was thinking the same

erispoe 9y ago

Governments take thousands of decisions. Can we really expect people to dedicate their time to vote all the time on these decisions? We risk ending up with a "democracy" where the power is really in the end of people having enough time and / or skin in the game to actually vote. Voter fatigue is already a known effect where places that vote the most are also the ones with the lowest turnout. California and Switzerland vote twice a year, they barely ever go above 50% turnout. That kind of system would be interesting for signature collection, however. It would then be easier, more fair and more secure to collect signatures to put something on the ballot. Today you really need money to do that.

nickpsecurity 9y ago
On that last point, remember we have things like Civitas we can use: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/
harel 9y ago
You can let gov deal with minor national wide issues, and delegate the important stuff to the people (thresholds to be agreed upon in advance and when in doubt defer to the people). Anything local should be handled in the same way by local authorities.
tom_mellior 9y ago
That's why systems like Liquid Democracy have delegation features. You don't elect representatives, but you can delegate ("lend", if you will) your vote on certain issues to them. And revoke the delegation at any time. Maybe Cicada could be equipped with something like this, but sentences like "The concept is so new that the word representativeless does not even exist. We had to invent it." don't look like the authors have done a lot of research on the topic.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  This is a github post that tries to pass itself off as a "paper" (because it sounds official, right), and ends with "And that can change the world". Wow that's academic and objective. Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw. The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code. Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper. To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made? Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?

agentultra 9y ago

If someone were to go forward with an implementation it'd be nice to see a strong proof of the protocol to accompany this informal specification.

pmlnr 9y ago

This is a nice, long, well organised document on plumbing. Is there anything running to demonstrate at least a portion of it?

clarkevans 9y ago

I suggest the people who want to "fix politics" get involved and start very small: look at a single ward within a city. Don't try to replace representative democracy -- enhance it, automate it. If you've got a theory, start small, and run on it. Go out and get votes. Then, once you've been elected actually see the real world problems that exist. Or, even simpler, volunteer in a local state representative's office for a good few years till you understand the actual challenges. Make their job and their constituents involvement better. Radical change starts with modest beginnings.

bb611 9y ago
The scale of government which interests people is a direct product of the issues that interest them. Want to influence school policies? Almost 100% a local ward/district issue. Want to have a meaningful impact on almost anything else? It all happens at the state & federal level. In some states (CA being a prime example), a huge amount of even normally local education policy issues have been taken over by the state because of the way schools are funded. I have known plenty of people who went into local government and left after 3-5 years, because the fights are just as hard as at the higher levels, but the chance to engage in meaningful policy creation is almost nil. The professionals use it as a training/credentialing circuit, and the regular citizens generally seem to leave permanently.

harel 9y ago

I've been advocating blockchaining democracy for a while now. At the time I even bought a domain for this (continuousreferendum.com, which lapsed by now). Never had the time to learn enough to do this. I'm really really glad someone did. The future is right there. Now the real hard stuff is to get governments to transition to being 'pilots' and not 'navigators'.

narrator 9y ago

Gee whiz... everybody's really down on democracy in this thread. Ok, so when is someone going to write a distributed app for running a one party state?

homakov 9y ago

> initially utilizing both irises as inputs) to create public/private keypairs, we can generate a unique ID for each person on the planet wait, what?

5trokerac3 9y ago

> Nearly impossible to duplicate or steal So, if this was actually implemented as the one source of power and control in the world, somebody would figure out how to duplicate or steal it.

hhw3h 9y ago

As banach mentioned the key to making direct democracy work is making it liquid as well. If you can delegate your voting power totally or granularly on a per issue basis to other individuals--while maintaining the ability to revoke your voting power from said individuals you can get the benefits of representative democracy and direct democracy at once. Would love someone more informed to discuss the cons of liquid or delegative democracy.

thatcat 9y ago

A hybrid direct-represenative sort of organization could be formed using votebots to make decisions for people who don't have time to participate, but who could review the decisions later and change represenative bots if they don't like it based on their historical performance.

Confiks 9y ago

First of all, regardless of all the claims made in the document, I find it awesome to see such a gigantic writeup that tries to be at least a bit internally consistent. It reminds me of Bit451 [1][2], although that one was simply insane. So about Cicada: the document quickly notes that the 'human unique identifier' is at the core of the proposal. It is claimed that it "allows us to prevent Sybil attacks and ensure everyone has a voice in the system". It promises to do this with cryptography and 'biocryptics', a word which isn't really that widely used in the research community. It seems to mostly refer to anonymous biometrics authentication systems [3][4]. In that field I can find nothing about preventing Sybil attacks. Additionally, preventing Sybil attacks in a decentralized system, by relying on a biometric measurement that is fully under the control of an attacker seems doomed to fail. No matter how much cryptography you throw at it. There must either be some central party designating trust in a certain (anonymous) biometric, or there needs to be a web of trust that is sufficiently connected and resistant to manipulation. A combination, with good checks and balances and distribution of power, seems to be the way to go most of the time. [1] http://bit451.org/ http://bit451.org/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728231 [3] https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-1462.pdf https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-1462... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_biometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_biometrics

MarkPNeyer 9y ago
Here's a web of trust design that comes with a conflict resolution mechanism. https://github.com/neyer/respect https://github.com/neyer/respect http://s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf http://s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf
ConfucianNardin 9y ago
Their claim/assumption is based in trust of the enrollment system. Check the section on enrollment - this image is especially helpful: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/master/images/Enrollment-1.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada.... The enrollment software is supposed to be verified using "Challenge/Response", which is supposed to ensure the guarantees provided by the HUIDs. Of course, given enough incentive, this can (and will) be cracked...

olalonde 9y ago

> A new Distributed Proof of Work (DPoW) backed blockchain that is immune to centralization because of a unified client/miner with only one miner allowed per person, linked anonymously to a HUID. The whole blockchain thing is built on the assumption that we don't have this HUID thing which solves Sybil attacks. Now that Sybil attacks are no longer a concern, surely there must be a more efficient algorithm than PoW to secure the chain. > This ID is not centrally controlled, which will virtually eliminate all Sybil attacks, along with the vast majority of problems in peer to peer networks. It's trivial to stop Sybil attacks in a centralized system... Making the ID decentralized certainly does not help in that department. > A HUID generated through the intersection of revocable biometrics and cryptography. Aren't biometrics (and by extension, identities) trivial to generate?

fiatjaf 9y ago

I imagine this thing doesn't have a way to determine if the State is itself legitimate, or a way to achieve consensus on which State (of multiple ones that may exist in each geographic area) is the master-legislator. It probably assumes and hardcodes the current State.

fiatjaf 9y ago

This is too complicated. If a simple thing like Bitcoin fails to be mainstream because most people don't even want to start thinking through it, imagine THIS. Also, there will be so many room for bugs that the number of issues will make GitHub servers explode.

smokeyj 9y ago

If we were to talk about human organizational models the way we talk about network topologies the conversation would be so much more productive. We could talk about uptime, failover, backups, consensus and other objective qualities. No matter what form of government you support, I think the organizational model can be represented as some form of game (in the game-theory sense) that can be replicated and compared to other organizational models. For example, imagine a wide scale battle simulation where players join a team based on how the chain of command is organized. This would allow you to test centralized/decentralized/hybrid models or organization in a way that gets better over time. My prediction is that a hybrid model would win. Instead of a pure top-down, or bottom-up model - you'd have something like a RAFT protocol organizing the squads. This way there's no general you can take out, and there's consensus among what the battle plan is.

azinman2 9y ago

Forgive my cynicism but... “The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code.“ Aside from security, Luddites, equal access, hardware failures, trust issues, power shortages, and many other issues with depending on technology for gov to function... How does code beat guns?

dkarl 9y ago
> How does code beat guns? How does anything beat guns? In theory, the U.S. armed forces could depose the government, but culture and tradition ensure that it defers to democratic institutions. In a country with a history of coups, especially coups that have deposed harmful regimes, coups are regarded in a more positive light. They are thinkable and therefore possible. In the United States, given our history, things would have to change a lot (even much more than electing an incompetent, incontinent buffoon as president) before a coup would become possible. Direct democracy would be tenuous at first, perhaps assuming more and more responsibility over time under the watch of a representative government that gradually became a caretaker bureaucracy, with the trust and respect held by representative democracy institutions gradually transferring to the direct democracy institutions.

acd 9y ago

The underlying decision mechanism of distributed democracy is Wisdom of the crowd which means that together as a group we are much smarter than a single individual. "The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of a continuous quantity. At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds.[8] This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the median centered near the true value of the quantity to be estimated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

splintercell 9y ago
Ah, the wisdom of the crowd which accurately predicted in 2016 the Brexit and election of Donald Trump.

c-smile 9y ago

Let's start from applying DDD to, say, W3C. Will we have better and faster arriving specs?

KaiserPro 9y ago

Hands up who has looked at twitter, and thought, I know, that'll be a great place to put unlimited power? no, not me either.

try_sincerely 9y ago

It's unfortunate this thing is so long on HN front page

kodfodrasz 9y ago

Does this have anything to do with Cicada 3301? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301

wadeboggs 9y ago

Cool readme, let's check out the code! Oh.

goodroot 9y ago

Of all places to be cynical, a den of code-oriented and clever people with the ability to propagate major social change shouldn't be one of them. A commendable and inspiring effort. Cicada is bafflingly ambitious; any system that proposes a 7billion person user base is hopefully geared to fight a very, very long and arduous battle. Good luck! I will happily root for anyone brave enough to tackle the inevitable problems of the future with an open and articulate vision. Shoot, maybe I'll even throw in a PR or two.

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gt_ 9y ago

my new favorite README.md template

kstenerud 9y ago

I thank my lucky stars that this will never get off the ground. The last thing we need is another naive idealist defining the structure of our government.

gasull 9y ago

Without a monopoly of violence you don't have a direct democracy, but an opinion survey. This system doesn't enforce whatever is voted and decided.

mirimir 9y ago
Well, decision makers in current governments can't personally enforce anything either. You need a hierarchy that respects their authority. It'd also work with this system.

xg15 9y ago

If the past years have shown anything then that blockchain software - like any software - needs continous development, maintaining, bug fixing, clarification of edge cases, etc. In a world where "leaders are replaced with code", where does that place the Cicada developers?

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