Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

25 percent of Indians who did not have

them, and helping to eliminate

inefficiencies in national ID card

programs due to issues like ghost IDs

and duplicate IDs.

PrecedentCoin: Blockchain

Dispute Resolution

Another Blockchain 3.0 project focuses

exclusively on using the blockchain for

more effective dispute resolution.

Precedent is conceptually like “The

People’s Court or Judge Judy on the

blockchain.” So far there has been no

way to take advantage of a centralized

repository of precedents used to resolve

disputes, so Precedent is developing a

concept, framework, altcoin, and

community to implement a decentralized

autonomous legal procedure

organization (as described in further

detail in “The Precedent Protocol

Whitepaper.” Precedent’s “polycentric

decentralized legal system” makes it

possible for individual users to pick the

legal system and features they like,

emphasizing the ongoing theme of

blockchain-enabled personalization of

governance and legal systems. The

Precedent legal/dispute-resolution

community is incentivized to develop

with the community coin, PrecedentCoin

or nomos.

In the same way that a decentralized

community of miners maintains the

Bitcoin blockchain by checking,

confirming, and recording new

transactions, so too functionally do

“dispute precedent miners” in the

Precedent community by entering new

disputes, resolved disputes, and

precedents on the dispute resolution

blockchain (the blockchain entries are

links to securely stored off-chain content

with the dispute/precedent details).

Precedent runs as a blockchain

metaprotocol overlay (structurally like

Counterparty). Proof of precedent is

envisioned as part of the system’s

consensus mechanism (analogous to

proof of work or proof of stake in

Bitcoin mining). The Precedent system is

radically peer-to-peer; users dictate

what it means for a dispute to be

justiciable (appropriate or suitable for

adjudication), and they can fork the

protocol if new standards are deemed

preferable. The tokenized altcoin,

Precedentcoin or nomos, is used for

community economic functions like

paying to submit a dispute to the network

and remunerating “miners” for

community dispute resolution tasks

(conceptually like community “jurors”

or “citizen dispute resolvers”).

It should be noted that, as the project

points out in a white paper, “The

Precedent Protocol is strictly concerned

with the justiciability of the dispute in

question and is wholly agnostic to the

justness or fairness of the outcome.”

Thus, there is potential risk for abuse, in

the form of buying or collectively

achieving a strange or unfair decision by

consensus. The project aims to decide

only the justiciability of a dispute—the

point of law, not the point of fact.

Liquid Democracy and Random-

Sample Elections

Other blockchain governance efforts

focus more directly on developing

systems to make democracy more

effective. In the model of a DAS

(distributed autonomous society), there

could be a need to set forth standardized

principles for consensus-based

decentralized governance systems, and

decentralized voting systems such as that

offererd by BitCongress. 116 Other projects focus on other ideas such as

delegative democracy, a form of

democratic control where voting power

is vested in delegates, as opposed to

representatives (as many congressional

and parliamentary models today). One

such project is Liquid Democracy,

which provides open source software to

facilitate proposition development and

decision making.

In the Liquid Democracy system, a party

member can assign a proxy vote to any

other member, thereby assigning a

personal delegate instead of voting for a

representative. A member can give her

vote to another member for all issues,

for a particular policy area, or for only a

particular decision for any length of

time. That vote can be rescinded at any

time. Under this system, a person can

become a delegate for multiple members

within a polity very quickly, wielding

the political power normally reserved

for elected representatives as a result.

But, a person can lose this power just as

quickly. This is the “liquid” in Liquid

Democracy, a process that can also be

referred to as “transitive delegation.” If

someone is respected as a trusted expert

in a particular area, he can gain

members’ votes. As a result, every

person within a Liquid Democracy

platform is a potential politician. 117

There are clearly many potential issues

with the Liquid Democracy platform as

currently set forth. One concern is

stability and continuity over time, which

could be resolved with agent reputation

mechanisms, broadly confirmable and

transferrable if stored in an accessible

blockchain.

The idea of delegated decision making,

supported and executed in blockchain-

based frameworks might have wide

applicability beyond the political voting

and policy making context. For example,

health is another area for which

advocacy, advice, and decision making

are often delegated and poorly tracked

with almost no accountability.

Blockchain technology creates an

opportunity for the greater accountability

and tracking of such delegation. For