How Blockchains Can Help Create Little Democracies Everywhere - Ep.108

Glen Weyl, a political economist and social technologist, the coauthor of Radical Markets and a principal researcher at Microsoft, and Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth, discuss how blockchains can be used to create borderless democracies that can reach any citizen on earth and can be used not just by nation-states but in all kinds of communities such as the workplace, church or a social network like Facebook. We cover concepts such as quadratic finance and quadratic voting, and look at how forcing voters to have a budget for their votes changes voting behavior. We also dive into what needs to be put in place for blockchain-based voting systems to work, why identity solutions are crucial but also so hard to get right, and how we can prevent token-based governance systems from becoming plutocracies. Plus, we surmise that blockchain-based governance might be the 21st century political experiment and that someday, we may all be citizens of multiple communities.

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CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unchained

Microsoft: https://twitter.com/MSFTBlockchain and https://aka.ms/unchained

Episode links:

Democracy Earth:  https://www.democracy.earth

Santiago Siri: https://twitter.com/santisiri

Radical Xchange: https://twitter.com/RadxChange

Glen Weyl: https://twitter.com/glenweyl

Radical Xchange conference in March: radicalxchange.org

Radical Markets: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html

Democracy Earth white paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sifogl4zimwkkei/Democracy%20Earth%20-%20Social%20Smart%20Contract%20-%20Paper%20v0.2.pdf?dl=0

Democracy Earth cofounder Pia Mancini on early work with digital democracy: https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era?language=en

Santi on how blockchains could revolutionize democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UajbQTHnTfM

Wired article on Democracy Earth: https://www.wired.com/story/santiago-siri-radical-plan-for-blockchain-voting/

CoinDesk feature on Glen Weyl: https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-most-influential-blockchain-2018-glen-weyl

Vitalik Buterin blog post on Radical Markets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html

Paper by Vitalik, Zoe Hitzig and Glen on quadratic financing: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656

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