Balaji Srinivasan - Technodemocracy - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

techn democracy is what I think may come after cryptocurrency we go from magical internet money to magical internet votes and this is just an example yeah I'll show you a bunch of Graphics in a second a little I voted chachki and the running example will be my friend Brian Johnson and how he might be Al actually start uh a new party online and you get an I voted sticker for him so let me give motivation for this concept what is techn democracy why do we even want it then let's visualize it look at actually like a concrete app example and then how you might actually build this Vision at the network school so what comes after cryptocurrency well right now uh you know if anybody's paying attention to the Western world or the World At Large democratically elected leaders are very democratic unpopular this is from a few months ago a few of these leaders have already basically lost office and um this is something that it really doesn't matter what side one is on you you you know 49% is mad that the other 51% is winning and vice versa Global dissatisfaction of democracy on all sides has actually just been ramping over the last several decades and um so you know if we ask the question what's what comes after cryptocurrency the financial crisis crisis of 2008 led to cryptocurrency and in my view the political crisis of 2024 will lead to techn democracy and just to just to motivate this um you know Ron Paul and End the Fed and that sentiment in the late 2000s and early 2010s led to bitcoin and that wasn't abandoning capitalism it was in a sense revitalizing it and rebuilding it internet first and the you know declining confidence our institutions uh now what we can do is actually rebuild democracy internet first we've done it for capitalism with crypto now I think we'll do it for with with democracy and let me explain what I mean by that so let's just jump right into a concrete example so let's say that my you know friend collaborator colleague Brian Johnson founded the don't die party okay um and we'll use that to visualize a sample implantation so here is like an example app that could be built on farcaster you know farcaster protocol um and here is uh you know like a client he could build for it where you can sign up to the don't die party and basically it looks at first glance a lot like you know Twitter um where in this case you've got about 13,000 members of the don't die party that' signed up and um if you uh go uh and and look on the second tab what you start to see is the ideological Vector that defines this party and this group of people and how they differ from society at large they're much more in this case Pro capitalist or pro- libertarian pro- longevity than the population at large okay and you could imagine something like that for many different kinds of parties as I'll get to but you start to quantify ideology and how it differs from the population at large based on survey responses this is what this party stands for why does it exist and so let's say you actually went and applied to the don't die party what would happen in this you know hypothetical concept of techn democracy so it actually have three parts to it first you would follow not just the president of the party but the VP and the treasurer okay you'd essentially have you'd follow the party leaders okay the second thing you do is um you would fund the party and you'd basically pay for example party dues this just by itself makes it much more serious than typical political parties today because it actually makes demands on one's time and energy and in return for this funding you get in this case blueprint olive oil uh membership nft and you also start to attend events and the funds are used for organizing uh party events but the most important and the most technically interesting is this the the franchise you actually vote for the Slate um of all of these candidates and you give them limited but real permissions over your crypto wallet so in this example just like ooth or just like wallet permissions you flip some sliders and you say okay I'm voting for them for president VP and Treasurer I'm committing to follow norms and I'm joining their Discord Community for example and committing a 100 bucks and if I violate those Norms they can slash those 100 bucks for example and to be clear this is kind of like you know Bitcoin started at it was just play internet money it was like it didn't start at where it is today which is you know trillion dollar market cap it it basically started at 1 cent when it finally got a price so the first techn Democrat elections of this kind are like running for dog catcher they're the most you know limited simple kinds of things you could imagine but you are giving this leader limited power over your crypto wallet and just to explain what that is um this limited yet binding Grant of permissions over your wallet to a digital party is everything from that single primitive you can rebuild so much and you've actually done this already right you do this all the time um when you give wallet permissions right you are basically saying okay here is my let's say ethereum account here is a third party app I'm trusting ethereum the blockchain to give limited permissions over my wallet to this app for the greater good um you also do this uh offchain with something like ooth right like you give limited permissions over your property your digital property to a third party app for the greater good right and if you think about this this is actually very structurally similar to voting for somebody for office you're saying I want this person to have some power over me for example some ability to tax some ability to regulate and so on and so forth I will give up some of my assets some of my control but I think it'll be for the greater good I'll be able to allocate public goods for for everybody's benefit right it's actually more like you know for example joining a company and signing a contract than the typical uh vote which is not binding on either side as it'll get to like a typical campaign promise is not binding but um something like this is okay so just going forward a little bit basically um The Innovation is delegating permissions not to a thirdparty app but a new digital party right from a third party app to a third party or a fourth or a fifth right and uh you get your vote receipt like your nft your onchain thing it's a cryptographically verifiable vote which you can prove you joined you can see you others joined and any third party can verify that these are real people rather than Bots it's proof by running proof of human you can view everybody on either scan who voted for for your party and you can actually prove to the world that this poity exists nobody can deny and this is borderless just like cryptocurrency is so the old borderstone matter you can actually put together a party of like mind and actually start rebuilding polities one of the things that you do when you join a party like this is you attend party events that's where the budget is going towards so you've got something in Chicago you've got something in Amsterdam you have something in Bombay and you attend those events in these case like longevity meetups or workouts so let me discuss a few key Concepts behind Tech democracy and why we should expect it now so everything else is online you know 1990 for example people you know you were sending still physical mail you were using cash today 99% of transaction and communication is online but elections and legislation aren't yet fully online they are however partially online if we think about um how institutional voting Works in in Western democracies it actually has three parts take for example someone like uh my my my friend Vic um he has the Twitter vote he gains millions of followers he has the fundraising vote he gets millions of dollars and then there's the Fiat offchain vote where there's actual vote itself and these three things are different races that correlate with each other but they're not exactly the same so parts of existing voting are online and conversely online voting also exists internet voting also exists there's at least three kinds of Internet votes there's the daily Reddit or Twitter or or Hacker News or whatever up votes that determine what goes viral there's Dow votes that determine how many millions of dollars are allocated out of a treasury and then finally Estonia actually does internet voting where they use the equivalent of Hardware wallets to do cryptographically secure online voting and so how did Estonia carry out the world's first mostly online national elections so the technology and the preceden are there a lot of what we're doing in terms of leader selection is happening online but it's kind of in the PayPal era for Bitcoin we haven't taken that final leap of putting the settlement layer on on chain and that's the step right you go the same technology that securely sends one coin can securely log one vote right that's really the core concept we move the settlement layer on chain and you move it from Fiat to to crypto and so that's why the digital vote that I'm talking about is binding it's not a lar and the reason is crypto wallets control real resources so if you have a million crypto wallets whose partial control is pledged to a political leader with proof of consent and some time limitation on it and so on then you've got real resources and we know this in this audience but I'll just enumerate it you can think of there are being four phases of digital governance from discords to Dows to doors to drones right so discords that's just transactions you know the the crypto wallets that you possess give access to a Discord access to messaging Dows your crypto wallet can give collectively voting power over a dow and allocate millions of dollars but that's just a digital world the next step is the physical world so this is um an nft Smart Lock uh uh project where your ethereum wallet unlocks a physical door right this exact same prompt of you know like approve this transaction turns a physical lock now of course if you think about that that's that's the door to a hotel room but that could be the door to your car that could be the door to a crane to a plane to a truck to anything any piece of Capital Equipment any anything stationary anything you know that's Capital Equipment and they extend it one step further and this is the keys to the humanoid robots these are the keys to the self-driving car these are the keys to the drones basically this can script the physical world right that's where we're going over the next 5 to 10 years one one way one thing people don't really think about too much but it's very important is most web 2 systems get hacked but web 3 systems don't so the control plane for drones for self-driving cars or anything that's really important will eventually go onchain and your private Keys is anything if it's really important like your car is really important to you then if it's digitally controlled then that'll be onchain it'll be part of your crypto wallet the crypto wallet becomes Primary in a real sense so the the point is that if you have um a million people and uh you know for example access to their premises you know in what sense when do they give access to their premises well only um they Grant a wallet permission and only under these conditions can you search their premises or have you you can start thinking or or about a number of different ways where you can take millions of people's crypto assets and start aggregating them into a digital polity and so that means crypto wallets can control real resources it's not a lar it'll be thought of as a lar for a long time just like Bitcoin was alar for a long time again you'll start with elections for dog catcher but it can really reach unlimited you know levels of resources over time now let me go through some key features and then wrap up with how we make this reality so first as I mentioned this is a cryptographically verifiable vote right every vote counts because you can count all the votes the same technology we use to verify blockchains you can literally download things you can run a script over it as people have less trust in elections we restore trust in elections it's a streaming vote very very important basically you know there's not like one Twitter day where people you know over 24 hours can just go and follow you on Twitter instead when they feel like it they click the button and they follow right and so right now we're in this weird transitional era where it used to be election day for example in many countries and then it's become election period which is this weird hybrid where you have mail order ballots and so on now we can just move to purely streaming elections where if you want to pledge support to a candidate for a year or two years or five years you can just do so it's a streaming vote you start accumulating support right you have to wait till the in-person Fiat offline thing next a social smart contract so this is a port MTO of you know rouso and and you know the Nix saabo and vitalic work um but basically it's the social contract and the smart contract as one thing it is uh something where the right of the of the Govern are clearly enumerated you're not opting in to something you're not consenting to something that you didn't consent to basically the the same technology that's there to make smart contracts legible to make sure they're not hacking you we can leverage all of that to bring consent to political governance and in fact we can give provably limited government there's a maximum tax rate for example like when you opt into this poity it can only take in this case 100 bucks out of your wallet it can't take a th000 bucks right all these kinds of things permissions we've built for you know like crazy crypto things but we can now start to use them for governance truly Universal franchise so anybody from anywhere can vote from anyone right we use the power of the internet just like crypto anybody can send money to anyone anybody can pledge to anyone you just bust all the old Legacy borders that were ridden by colonial empires or that don't really map to people anymore and now you actually say our internet Community is actually primary and the physical is secondary just like everybody in this room how many countries are there but they're all into the same stuff ideologically moreover and this is even more important in some ways truly Universal candidacy you know for example in the US only uh you have to be a 35 years old and a natural born citizen to be president of the US so Elon couldn't be president many immigrant Founders couldn't be president so only maybe two % of the world four the US is 4% of the world half of that could be president of the US but if 2% of the world could be president of the United States 100% of the world could become president of a network State they could hold a techn democratic election build a party build legitimacy online show that millions of people from around the world verifiably voted for them and gave these permissions to them and you can build a new country in the cloud and then you you you get land on the Earth right so this is the the way that we actually form the state of the network State truly new polies so right now you you know democracy is about the denominator that is to say you know let's say you get 51% of the vote okay but what's the denominator what did you divide by that's a fraction right and that fraction the denominator is um usually all the people who live in that physical jurisdiction near you which could be gerrymandered and look really weird if you look at it on the map here we just just throw out those Legacy denominators and instead we say the denominator is everybody who's opted in right you can form a new polity that's non geographical that actually reflects people's consent and um another thing you can have you never have to ask okay who's the president who's in charge what powers does this bureaucrat have and so and so forth these can be permission grants just like in Google Docs you grant edit access view access and that's actually a digital right that you can grant audit Rev and so on all of that can now be done for you know what rights does the treasurer have over the community's wallet that can be audited that can be tracked right few more features this is 100% democracy as opposed to 51% democracy in 51% democracy it's like the barest level of legitimacy a candidate wins and 49% of people are mad at them and then a few more years later it goes 4951 the other way and that's just a recipe for instability and discontent right the whole point of democracy is the consent of the Govern and now we get to 100% consent just like a company literally nobody is part of this party slash network unless they want it to be there right like nobody is working at a tech company unless they want to be there and it's double opt in every single day the CEO wants you there and the employee wants to be there and those both parties are there same for this it's 100% democracy in that sense so it maximizes consensus but it also protects minority rights because it's 0.1% democracy a tiny tiny group of people can form a new political party digital party so a few more examples of what technical democracy enables um you I just talked about the don't die party but you could imagine oops it's not working ah there we go the Mars party okay so Elon uh could form the Mars party and this could focus on exploring Mars right and that's making content Mak movies thinking about terraforming all this stuff right the open source AI party um Daniel e or Donnie a as it made in this image could advocate for for this and and building these things you can imagine movement focused new parties and you don't necessarily need to call them parties you can call them collectives or organizations but in short techn democracy takes us from the two party to the end party system it could reopen political Innovation and note that in all of this I haven't talked at all about contesting Fiat elections that for basically the indefinite future just first build these things online finally just in terms of execution if you want to build this go and apply at the network School ns.com apply we accept our first class but we're going to be uh we have rolling applications online and we'll accept more probably starting in October or so as we scale capacity um so thank you very much