Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform

Universal income as a replacement for all current Government social support functions is an idea that came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role in social support, and forcing people to take control of their own lives. Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs - i.e. they don't really support it, since that's untenable.

PoW and PoS blockchains follow libertarian ideology and fundamentally libertarian ideas of how the world should work - "no ability for the Government to see what you're doing and tax it" is pretty much the rallying cry of its proponents, or it was about three years ago when I was into it. (Oh, along with a healthy dose of "companies can do no wrong, and if they do, it's your fault".) The political goal is to remove the Government's (and therefore the banks') role in trade. Centralised "blockchains" as used by banks are irrelevant there, and shouldn't even use the same word.

Direct democracy is, unfortunately, something that heavily overlaps with libertarian ideology - again, it severely shrinks or removes the role of Government in political decision-making processes.

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?

> Universal income [...] came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role

I don't think it's meaningful to credit the idea to a single ideology. It's an idea that has popped up many times, in many forms, over time. I first came across it as a tool to ensure basic human dignity for all, which is more important to me than silly discussions about "big" or "small" government.

> Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs

That, too, is an overly broad statement. The Socialists I know who oppose universal income all do it (a) because they think that labor is a value in itself, and that everybody should work, or (b) because they somehow think that a basic income profits Big Capital. I haven't heard any say that they think five government support programs are better than one government support program.

Making everything about government size seems to be a US thing. These are not discussions we usually have in Europe. (Except, sometimes, about the EU itself.)

Given globalism, many cultures with clashing political beliefs tend to end up as residents of the same countries, states, counties, cities, even individual ridings. Representative democracy was never designed for this use-case. Countries—or at least city-states—used to have pretty uniform cultures overall.

So, a much bigger bullet to bite: if we want representative democracy to continue to function under global-freedom-of-movement conditions, we might have to legislate some form of incentivization toward "intentional communities" that have more self-coherent political zeitgeists, such that the representatives of those communities can actually faithfully represent some clear set of beliefs, rather than just pandering vaguely to mutually-conflicting beliefs.

In short: it's culture ghettos or disenfranchisement.

(My evidence for this stance is that existing self-selected culture ghettos—the Chinatowns and Little Indias of the world, when they're large enough to "run themselves" as cities/townships in a regional district—actually tend to have local laws and policies that a supermajority of their residents prefer, and very little in the way of complaints. When most everyone in a place is from one culture, it's much simpler for everyone in that place to agree on what they want; and then it's much more evident when local politicians are doing a bad job of giving them what they want, so they tend to oust those until they end up with effective politicians.)

Thanks for posting this. It's always interesting to see people's reactions to my work.

Usually when people do find it though, the series of comments that follow it tend to fall into a few categories. I will paraphrase and give my answer to these questions generically rather than answer every individual question:

1) "I've zeroed in on this one aspect of the system instead of the whole and found a flaw that invalidates the whole thing."

In particular this comes up around the subject of an ID. Usually it centers on "biometrics are how the system is secured, those are gameable, this will never work." In fact, the primary method of controlling the spread of fake IDs is the reputation system is NOT the biometrics system which is merely a first barrier to entry. It is the reputation system. And that reputation system is different from rep systems that exist today which basically consist of people voting thumbs up or thumbs down which is not what I describe. Most of the misunderstanding around that is because the original paper was not as clear as it could be on that aspect, so I wrote up a second paper that breaks down the ID system and Rep Bank in much more detail. That paper is here:

https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/blob/...

2) "This will never work because of XYZ reason I just thought up after glancing at this a few seconds."

Those questions are always answered in the document. I encourage you to actually read and do so with an open mind.

3) Some comment/focus on whatever my supposed ideology is.

People have zero idea what my ideology is and debating something based on whatever you imagine my ideology to be is not very useful. It's a fallacy of composition. Also my ideology can't be deduced from the paper, largely because I don't much like ideologies and I don't really have one. I look at every problem or issue atomically, to be solved on its own merits, thus my beliefs run the gamut. Also, whatever I think about things is pretty much irrelevant. The system stands on its own and it has nothing to do with what I do or don't believe. The only thing I really believe is "locking in open" as Tim Berners-Lee put it. That is: open systems are better and decentralized systems in particular are key to the future.

4) "Direct democracy can't work because people get tired or aren't smart enough to vote on everything."

I outline many solutions to this, in particular systems that can vote for you based on answering a series of questions, or systems that work in hybrid mode that allow you to vote on only the things that really matter to you, say abortion and guns, as well as full voting so that you can vote on everything if you are a highly engaged citizen. I also propose an easy solution to the California ballot problem where every stupid thing comes up for vote and where stuff only gets on there based on big money. It routes votes to ever increasing numbers of users and only the absolute most important votes would ever make it a national vote. Lastly the system allows for expert panels to create legislation that is fast tracked by the system. This would be a dramatic improvement on what we have now where unqualified politicians vote on everything from science to military to personal issues. Having groups of competing economists propose bills, or scientists writing science policy would be a major improvement to the current system. Lastly, the paper also outlines a method for breaking down bills into simpler terms for various folks to make it easier to read them and engage with them.

5) "You're an idiot, why even bother doing something like this?"

This is utterly pointless commentary that comes from folks who haven't done much and spend most of their life running other people down for trying something new. Not very useful or cool.

6) Not understanding that every single layer of the system expects some level of exploitation and it doesn't matter if you found a few ways to game it.

The system always trusts there will be some level of gaming the system. It's expected and dealt with. Central systems are not a panacea to this, despite most arguments thinking that's the case. Their is all kinds of exploitation of centralized IDs for instance. The decentralized ID system will have some level of people hacking it and it really won't matter as long as the system is resilient enough to keep the blast confined and to update itself to deal with new attacks, which the build in security chain combined with the reputation systems deals with very effectively.

7) I get it and how do we build it? Congrats. Join decstack.com and let's talk.