This divide and important dichotomy, a choice we have to make, is brillianlty exposed in the article by Mi Tar below.

Mi Tar writes:

We live in times of a hidden war between “one person, one vote” and “one dollar, one vote” ideologies. The reason why it is hidden is because we use the same terms for both: democracy, voting, consensus, etc. We govern our governments each having one vote, but in our companies shareholders commonly hold votes proportional to their share. Some people are claiming that the latter is a better approach and everything should be decided through markets and power. I believe that using power (physical or monetary) to make decisions is barbaric and that our civilization progress was to introduce a more true democracy, one person, one vote. But I do not believe even that is the end of our developments in this respect and we should continue developing our collective governance. Moreover, I do not believe that these two positions are necessary the only possibilities, and some combinations might also exist. In some way we might even already have that: using “one person, one vote” to decide the rules under which we operate, but using “one dollar, one vote” to decide how to split the profits.

Anyway, all this could be a topic of some other longer blog post. Here I wanted to explain this existing tension between these two ideologies to present how they have existed in decentralized technologies as well and why Bitcoin’s blockchain is so innovative.

Traditional perspective on decentralized systems is that you have agents which communicate with each other to form a system. Many decentralized protocols use some form of voting to decide on common decisions, e.g., to which new state they should all transition. What the majority of agents vote for is seen as the correct new state for the whole system (so called consensus). This means that there can be up to half of malicious agents and the decentralized system will still operate correctly.

But sadly it is not so easy. The issue is that if membership of agents in the system is open, then a malicious agent can join the system multiple times with “puppet” agents, and because each agent gets one vote, can then enforce its view of system’s state. This is know as the Sybil attack. In centralized systems this is not a problem because you can have a centralized entity controlling membership.

The ingenious solution made by Satoshi Nakamoto for Bitcoin’s blockchain is to replace this “one person, one vote” voting with “one dollar, one vote” voting. In Bitcoin’s case you vote with CPU cycles, not dollars. Even if you create multiple “puppet” agents they all have to share the same amount of CPU cycles you have at your disposal so you do not really gain any advantage over others.

This innovation revived the interest in decentralized technologies. A hope emerged that we could completely decentralize all aspects of our society and remove intermediaries who require fees we do not like, or can abuse power they have. We have seen many projects embark to achieve this.

But while the solution is ingenious and is an innovative shift in a perspective, it has not solved the problem at a fundamental level. As such it has issues we have to be aware of.

“One dollar, one vote” voting is the most suitable for use cases where we are already used to such voting: markets and companies with shareholders. But we have to be wary of attempts of everything being transitioned to this type of voting because we might lose true democracy of “one person, one vote” without even noticing. This is often not conscious and is just a consequence of uncritically applying blockchain technology to the problem. Especially if blockchain is already used for other aspects of a project.

While I can understand that some people like transition to “one dollar, one vote” for all aspects of a decentralized society, I would like to warn especially people who otherwise do not align with this ideology to be careful when embracing blockchain as a technology of choice for their projects. For example, projects around the platform cooperativism idea.

Another issue is that “one dollar, one vote” environment is susceptible to concentrations of power, like any other environment which is built around power. While initially it looks like such voting is democratic as well, through time an oligarchy forms. This can be seen in Bitcoin as well, where all mining is now effectively done only by a very few large mining pools.

We can see that while “one dollar, one vote” voting solution addressed one technical challenge, it brought new (but known elsewhere) challenges to the technical realm.

A consequence is that we have not really solved the problem of a decentralized true democracy where each user person would have only one vote and where we would have an open membership. We still do know how to do achieve both at the same time. This can be seen with all governance issues of Bitcoin and Ethereum communities. One could say that those communities are not interested in true democracy, but the real issue is that they do not really have a choice at the moment. We do not yet know a necessary solution (and are we even working on it?). So we have to decide what to do in meantime: use centralized technologies which allow true democracy, or use decentralized technologies which do not?

Moreover, in meantime, when somebody talks about voting, consensus, and democratic decentralized technologies, listen very carefully if they are talking about “one person, one vote” or “one dollar, one vote”.

Photo by justgrimes

The post ‘One citizen, one vote’ vs. ‘One dollar, one vote’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I have a strong feeling that certain headlines and assertions about the Brexit result are  if not factually wrong, at least very misleading. I refer to statements that summarize charts and tables like the ones above in this way:

• “The U.K.’s Old Decided for the Young in the Brexit Vote”
• “Brexit is a middle finger from the baby boomers to young people like me”
• “Young screwed by older generations”
• “Young voters wanted Brexit the least – and will have to live with it the longest”

Fact is, it was very clear, well before the vote, that opinions varied greatly across age ranges and that

•  “Britain’s young people will suffer most from an EU divorce”
• “Voter turnout would be crucial“
• “Young voters might hold key to Brexit vote“

I suggest that a crucial, and still largely overlooked issue here is in the complete title of the last link I gave, which is “Young voters might hold key to Brexit vote—but will they use it?“. Quoting from there, in late May Ed Miliband:

• “alarmingly [noted that] 1.5 million young people aged 18 to 24 who are entitled to vote are not on the electoral register with a further 2 million people aged between 25 and 35 not registered either”
• declared that “Today is a call to arms to all young people to register to vote… Be in no doubt: if young people don’t exercise their vote, this referendum will be lost and so will many of their futures”

Now, let’s assume that the numbers in the screenshot above also represent  the opinion of those 3.5 millions of young people who did not register to vote (because, a) why not, if it’s above all a generational issue, and b) if not, the whole “young betrayed by elders” argument loses sense).

If this is the case, it means that  today there are in UK about 1,800,000 people (1.5M*0.6 + 2M*0.49) who want (or should want, in their own interest) to “Remain”, but did not register to vote accordingly. But three days ago, Brexit won because  “Remain” got 1,269,501 votes LESS than “Leave” (16,141,241 vs 17,410,742).

I DO hope I am wrong. Because if  I am right, it means that:

• certain headlines are false, and young UK voters were “betrayed” from their own non-voting peers as much as from their elders. No, more, actually: because the elders did perform their duty, that is show up to vote according to their opinions, their interests and those of their generation
• whatever bad things will come from Brexit, both in the UK and everywhere else, is “the fault” of those young non-voters, at least as much as of the myopic, egoist, etc.. older voters
• the sooner we put to rest this whole “old Britons betrayed young ones” storyline, the better for everybody

In general, this whole story also shows, or confirms, that:

• Just in case you still believed it: the whole concept that “Digital native” means “someone who is surely able to use the Internet for her own good” is pure and total crap. Too many UK “digital natives” were far from being “digital savy” (as their peers in any other country, of course!). Whoever lived in UK and had any kind of Internet access in the last six months also had easy access to understanding how incertain the referendum outcome was, and how different the two choices
• Too many people who are “more digital” also are, all too often, too disengaged. From Brexit to Climate change, everywhere:
  1. “[in the Brexit vote] it’s pretty clear that young people played to type” (i.e, they went to vote in smaller percentages)
  2. “With issues like climate change, the same tendency seems to hold… [T]he conventional wisdom holds that young Americans… should be more engaged with and concerned about the issue of climate change than older Americans.[New data, however] reveal that Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are, for the most part, split on the issue of global warming and, on some indicators, relatively disengaged when compared to older generations.”

People can grow up disengaged for a LOT of external reasons outside their control. In many countries, however, young adults who (pun intended) remain disengaged only have themselves to blame for that. Because, if my calculations above are right,  the most important lessons here, for young people in UK and everywhere else, are:

• stay informed, and above all:
• EVERY VOTE COUNTS. EVERY TIME. Even if the effect is not visible for years. Brexit happened last Thursday also because, for years, too many young people in UK did not vote for more pro-EU representatives. Limiting one’s civil and political action to voting would be idiotic, but everything but voting, on principle, is much more idiotic. There always is a lesser evil: if not for tomorrow, in the medium/long term. Think ahead. Voting is not Candy Crush. It is a powerful weapon, that can detonate years after you (do not) caste it

Now do yourself and everybody else a favour, because the whole world has to live with the results of certain choices, not just those who (refuse to) make them: please make sure that this post is read by everybody who, next November, will be called to elect the next president of the United States.

Photo by Carlos ZGZ

The post On Brexit, young people “betrayed” by their elders, and voting appeared first on P2P Foundation.