Consensus-based society with provable trust-free voting

[interlagos]

Consensus is difficult enough to get working within the context of people who live together in cohousing/ intentional community. Within the scope of a society, its lunacy. Maybe you are searching for another term?

I can start with simple example - there is a need to patch the road shared by 10 families in the neighborhood, nobody else uses that road (so they don't really care) and there is no central authority to call for. How would those families achieve consensus of who does what and who pays what.
It could be that one good guy just goes ahead and fixes it for everybody to benefit from it, but if that doesn't happen there needs to be a reliable mechanism to achieve consensus.

The only reliable mechanism for consensus is training and alot of dedicated work. A casual mechanism that you speak of is frankly impossible. In reality in order to make a decision, someone's opinion will always be overridden... (often for good reason...)

Yes, as I've already pointed out people have a choice to accept the result of the vote even if they disagree and stay within the community if benefits of staying out-weight the downsides of the vote or leave and search for better life. Spending a lot of time to achieve consensus is also an option but it might end up in an infinite loop with circular arguments and nothing will ever get done.

[lebing]

Consensus is difficult enough to get working within the context of people who live together in cohousing/ intentional community. Within the scope of a society, its lunacy. Maybe you are searching for another term?

I can start with simple example - there is a need to patch the road shared by 10 families in the neighborhood, nobody else uses that road (so they don't really care) and there is no central authority to call for. How would those families achieve consensus of who does what and who pays what.
It could be that one good guy just goes ahead and fixes it for everybody to benefit from it, but if that doesn't happen there needs to be a reliable mechanism to achieve consensus.

The only reliable mechanism for consensus is training and alot of dedicated work. A casual mechanism that you speak of is frankly impossible. In reality in order to make a decision, someone's opinion will always be overridden... (often for good reason...)

Yes, as I've already pointed out people have a choice to accept the result of the vote even if they disagree and stay within the community if benefits of staying out-weight the downsides of the vote or leave and search for better life. Spending a lot of time to achieve consensus is also an option but it might end up in an infinite loop with circular arguments and nothing will ever get done.

Ok - well thats not consensus then. I dont know what your system is, but definitions are important.

[myrkul]

Consensus is difficult enough to get working within the context of people who live together in cohousing/ intentional community. Within the scope of a society, its lunacy. Maybe you are searching for another term?

I can start with simple example - there is a need to patch the road shared by 10 families in the neighborhood, nobody else uses that road (so they don't really care) and there is no central authority to call for. How would those families achieve consensus of who does what and who pays what.
It could be that one good guy just goes ahead and fixes it for everybody to benefit from it, but if that doesn't happen there needs to be a reliable mechanism to achieve consensus.

The only reliable mechanism for consensus is training and alot of dedicated work. A casual mechanism that you speak of is frankly impossible. In reality in order to make a decision, someone's opinion will always be overridden... (often for good reason...)

Yes, as I've already pointed out people have a choice to accept the result of the vote even if they disagree and stay within the community if benefits of staying out-weight the downsides of the vote or leave and search for better life. Spending a lot of time to achieve consensus is also an option but it might end up in an infinite loop with circular arguments and nothing will ever get done.

Ok - well thats not consensus then. I dont know what your system is, but definitions are important.

It's called "democracy." Other names for this system are "majority rule," or "mob rule," depending on the attitude of the speaker towards the appeal to popularity fallacy.

But hey, as long as people know that when they cast a vote, they are agreeing to abide by and accept the outcome - no matter what it is, and voluntarily agree to that system, I'm fine with it.

[interlagos]

Consensus is difficult enough to get working within the context of people who live together in cohousing/ intentional community. Within the scope of a society, its lunacy. Maybe you are searching for another term?

I can start with simple example - there is a need to patch the road shared by 10 families in the neighborhood, nobody else uses that road (so they don't really care) and there is no central authority to call for. How would those families achieve consensus of who does what and who pays what.
It could be that one good guy just goes ahead and fixes it for everybody to benefit from it, but if that doesn't happen there needs to be a reliable mechanism to achieve consensus.

The only reliable mechanism for consensus is training and alot of dedicated work. A casual mechanism that you speak of is frankly impossible. In reality in order to make a decision, someone's opinion will always be overridden... (often for good reason...)

Yes, as I've already pointed out people have a choice to accept the result of the vote even if they disagree and stay within the community if benefits of staying out-weight the downsides of the vote or leave and search for better life. Spending a lot of time to achieve consensus is also an option but it might end up in an infinite loop with circular arguments and nothing will ever get done.

Ok - well thats not consensus then. I dont know what your system is, but definitions are important.

Consensus is a shared understanding of how to proceed working together.
If working together for certain individuals is not possible then consensus for them is to not work together.

PS: I haven't looked up the definition of consensus in any dictionary yet, I just made it up myself

[interlagos]

Consensus is difficult enough to get working within the context of people who live together in cohousing/ intentional community. Within the scope of a society, its lunacy. Maybe you are searching for another term?

I can start with simple example - there is a need to patch the road shared by 10 families in the neighborhood, nobody else uses that road (so they don't really care) and there is no central authority to call for. How would those families achieve consensus of who does what and who pays what.
It could be that one good guy just goes ahead and fixes it for everybody to benefit from it, but if that doesn't happen there needs to be a reliable mechanism to achieve consensus.

The only reliable mechanism for consensus is training and alot of dedicated work. A casual mechanism that you speak of is frankly impossible. In reality in order to make a decision, someone's opinion will always be overridden... (often for good reason...)

Yes, as I've already pointed out people have a choice to accept the result of the vote even if they disagree and stay within the community if benefits of staying out-weight the downsides of the vote or leave and search for better life. Spending a lot of time to achieve consensus is also an option but it might end up in an infinite loop with circular arguments and nothing will ever get done.

Ok - well thats not consensus then. I dont know what your system is, but definitions are important.

It's called "democracy." Other names for this system are "majority rule," or "mob rule," depending on the attitude of the speaker towards the appeal to popularity fallacy.

But hey, as long as people know that when they cast a vote, they are agreeing to abide by and accept the outcome - no matter what it is, and voluntarily agree to that system, I'm fine with it.

Unlike "democracy" (the loaded word I really wanted to avoid), the system I'm describing and society built around it is self-enforcing. Everybody has an equal access to the voting repository, everybody is free to find and point out the discrepancies in any course of action taken by other members. So it will only work if enough people would be willing it to work and if this system turns out to provide more benefits and better life than any other system or no system at all.

[phelix]

the technical side of trust free voting can easily be solved with namecoins (even directing votes to other voters) or colored bitcoins.

One problem is identifying voters while still letting them be anonymous. Even that can be solved by shuffling vote tokens with random people or people you trust.


More importantly the system also needs to have ways to determine if an upcoming question is important or not. It is impossible for all people to vote on every question somebody can come up with (why does Atlas come to my mind? ).

Depending on how many people think a question is important and how clear the outcome looks the system would have to determine the number of people necessary to vote to come to a result. Of course everybody should be allowed to vote if he wants to or does not like the preliminary result.

[interlagos]

the technical side of trust free voting can easily be solved with namecoins (even directing votes to other voters) or colored bitcoins.

The part of the trust-free mechanism is derived from the fact that votes come from the addresses that paid the membership fee with a currency spendable on a global market.
This removes the necessity of maintaining a separate database connecting "who paid the fee" with "who has voting tokens". I need to look more into Namecoins though. Last time I read about them there was a discussion whether they need to be destroyed or not when they are spent, that was probably a year ago.
Could you please describe the voting mechanism as you see it with Namecoins?

One problem is identifying voters while still letting them be anonymous. Even that can be solved by shuffling vote tokens with random people or people you trust.

Regarding identifying members vs anonymity of votes there is indeed at least one problem.
If the system provides benefits to members (pensions, sick leaves, etc) there needs to be a way to
identify who is eligible to receive them. At this point I can think of the following approach:
Split the membership fee into (a) public part and (b) voting part.
Those members who paid the public part of the fee become eligible to the benefits of the system. The voting part of the fee is anonymous and voting itself doesn't make any member eligible to any benefits just influence the voting outcome. I think it would be safe to assume that number of voting members should be less than or equal to the number of publicly registered members. On a local scale community needs to be cautious to an outside influence in the voting process, however on a large or global scale rigging the vote outcome becomes prohibitively difficult cost-wise since underlying monetary system has limited supply.

More importantly the system also needs to have ways to determine if an upcoming question is important or not. It is impossible for all people to vote on every question somebody can come up with (why does Atlas come to my mind? ).

Depending on how many people think a question is important and how clear the outcome looks the system would have to determine the number of people necessary to vote to come to a result. Of course everybody should be allowed to vote if he wants to or does not like the preliminary result.

I agree this would be an interesting challenge. People need time to do actual work too, not just chatting the whole day about how they are going to vote. The basic concept I can think of is that members send proposals of the change they are willing to make to an already existing consensus with a schedule to vote at least one week (or even month) ahead. If within this period enough members approve that the community indeed needs to look at this issue then the proposal is added into the voting queue.
Sort of how WEB2.0 content management and rating system is working today.

PS: on the side note...
Another area where this system can also be applicable is a company/corporation. Right now corporations are modeled after the idea of central governance - there is one chap at the top who issues commands to his "generals" and those in turn are in charge of small armies of developers which normally have no say at all. For people with libertarian mindset it might be hard to accept any managerial authority on top of them who would tell them what to do on a day-to-day basis. The system with provable trust-free way to achieve consensus might be easier to swallow. As an example, imagine working on something like building a Boeing 747. That would require a lot of people from many different areas of expertise to do a lot of work in a very coordinated fashion or it simply won't fly.

[Rudd-O]

Bitcoin actually provides the perfect voluntaryist solution to keep track of who has paid how much for what services.  You didn't chip in for school?  Your kids don't go.  You didn't chip in for the roads?  You don't get to use them.  All fully verifiable at any point in time.

Of course, politicians will never go for this itemized system, because they like to have full discretion on how to grab your money and spend it on prostitutes, cocaine, and murdering other human beings.  And who are you, lowly owner of that money they steal, to tell them how to spend it?

[interlagos]

Bitcoin actually provides the perfect voluntaryist solution to keep track of who has paid how much for what services.  You didn't chip in for school?  Your kids don't go.  You didn't chip in for the roads?  You don't get to use them.  All fully verifiable at any point in time.

This approach definitely has merit and I like it.
The problem arises when there are conflicts like who will build the road, who will build the school in a particular place, who decides that there is a need for road or school and how money we chip in towards these goals are going to be spent.
I look at this from the position that there is no central authority to decide that.

Of course, politicians will never go for this itemized system, because they like to have full discretion on how to grab your money and spend it on prostitutes, cocaine, and murdering other human beings.  And who are you, lowly owner of that money they steal, to tell them how to spend it?

The consensus-based system I'm describing works best when it starts small - the smallest unit would probably be a family, then neighborhood, then small village. If there is a tendency to grow it'd probably be better to keep original hierarchy in place (with local consensus rules) when communities join.
This way it would be easier to manage.

Also, the voting repository might need to be maintained in a decentralized manner and then there would be several servers with HTML interface to view it and work with it to verify (something like blockexplorer.com for blockchain). If there is a need for politician in this system it would be a simple role of secretary to execute non-decentralizable parts (if there are any) of the achieved consensus. Any deviation in execution from the achieved consensus would be immediately noticed.

The amount of coins collected through membership fees would constitute the organization's budget and it would need to be held in a public multisig address with multiple private keys spread across different secretaries of sub-communities in the hierarchy. But the whole structure and topology of the system is not enforced in the design itself - it is going be the choice of the people participating in it. They will decide whether to join or to split or to leave this system completely.

[myrkul]

Bitcoin actually provides the perfect voluntaryist solution to keep track of who has paid how much for what services.  You didn't chip in for school?  Your kids don't go.

That's a terrible example.

That's a terrible response.

[Rudd-O]

Bitcoin actually provides the perfect voluntaryist solution to keep track of who has paid how much for what services.  You didn't chip in for school?  Your kids don't go.

That's a terrible example.

That's a terrible response.

I'm amused at how often blatherblatherblather responds to my comments, even as he knows that he's on my killfile and I can't read anything he writes.

[myrkul]

Bitcoin actually provides the perfect voluntaryist solution to keep track of who has paid how much for what services.  You didn't chip in for school?  Your kids don't go.

That's a terrible example.

That's a terrible response.

Don't be an idiot. In another thread (about corporal punishment), you and Rudd-O are getting all righteous about child rights and acting like even the tiniest bit of behaviour modification is some kind of crime against humanity, yet you fail to see the bleeding obvious injustice when a child suffers due to his or her parents' inability to pay school fees. Hypocrite.

Ohhhh.... So you think school should be "free" then?

Good news! It is. It's called "homeschooling." Really, you should Google it.

If someone is providing a service for you, on the other hand, then they need to be compensated, don't you think so?

[myrkul]

Bitcoin actually provides the perfect voluntaryist solution to keep track of who has paid how much for what services.  You didn't chip in for school?  Your kids don't go.

That's a terrible example.

That's a terrible response.

Don't be an idiot. In another thread (about corporal punishment), you and Rudd-O are getting all righteous about child rights and acting like even the tiniest bit of behaviour modification is some kind of crime against humanity, yet you fail to see the bleeding obvious injustice when a child suffers due to his or her parents' inability to pay school fees. Hypocrite.

Ohhhh.... So you think school should be "free" then?

If it means that the children of jobless hippies get the same educational opportunities as the children of right-wing extremists, then yes. Free AKA: "libre". Or does liberty only apply to a privileged class whose parents can pay?

Good news! It is. It's called "homeschooling." Really, you should Google it.

If someone is providing a service for you, on the other hand, then they need to be compensated, don't you think so?

[Rudd-O]

Don't be an idiot. In another thread (about corporal punishment), you and Rudd-O are getting all righteous about child rights and acting like even the tiniest bit of behaviour modification is some kind of crime against humanity, yet you fail to see the bleeding obvious injustice when a child suffers due to his or her parents' inability to pay school fees. Hypocrite.

HAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

He's got me confused with any other statist who believes that not taking your children to an indoctrination camp somehow qualifies as "injustice".  So "obviously" (like the statist douche he is) he believes that, if you don't pay for someone else's school, that's "unjust"; therefore, since that is "unjust", and since I reject child abuse, I'm a "hypocrite".

And he has the audacity to preface this block of concentrated stupidity with "don't be an idiot"!  There's so much wrong in that blather³ quote, it's fractally wrong.

https://i.imgur.com/vzp38.jpg

Great amusement was had at this thread.

[myrkul]

...

If it means that the children of jobless hippies get the same educational opportunities as the children of right-wing extremists, then yes. Free AKA: "libre". Or does liberty only apply to a privileged class whose parents can pay?

Good news! It is. It's called "homeschooling." Really, you should Google it.

If someone is providing a service for you, on the other hand, then they need to be compensated, don't you think so?

Don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of child slavery or indebtedness.

Hmm. I wonder how all those private school parents will react when I tell them that they are practicing "child slavery"?

No, seriously. WTF are you talking about?

Matter of fact, don't respond here. I'll make a new thread. This is worthy.

[Rudd-O]

...

If it means that the children of jobless hippies get the same educational opportunities as the children of right-wing extremists, then yes. Free AKA: "libre". Or does liberty only apply to a privileged class whose parents can pay?

Good news! It is. It's called "homeschooling." Really, you should Google it.

If someone is providing a service for you, on the other hand, then they need to be compensated, don't you think so?

Don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of child slavery or indebtedness.

Hmm. I wonder how all those private school parents will react when I tell them that they are practicing "child slavery"?

No, seriously. WTF are you talking about?

Matter of fact, don't respond here. I'll make a new thread. This is worthy.

I wanna be on that thread, if only to read your replies, because I need some humor and blatherblatherblather is delivering.  Please post a link.

Also über LOL at blatherblatherblather equating homeschooling with child slavery and indebtedness.

[phelix]

@rudd, blabla and myrkul:  please keep this topic clean

the technical side of trust free voting can easily be solved with namecoins (even directing votes to other voters) or colored bitcoins.

The part of the trust-free mechanism is derived from the fact that votes come from the addresses that paid the membership fee with a currency spendable on a global market.
This removes the necessity of maintaining a separate database connecting "who paid the fee" with "who has voting tokens".
[...]

could I not pay the fees several times and then vote several times with your system?

I think most of the time it will be impossible to achieve consensus. What about the obvious ranked majority vote?

Could you please describe the voting mechanism as you see it with Namecoins?

namecoin is a decentralized name/value storage system. you can create identity or voting tokens to send to the voters. they can then set the value of these tokens. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66868

One problem is identifying voters while still letting them be anonymous. Even that can be solved by shuffling vote tokens with random people or people you trust.

Regarding identifying members vs anonymity of votes there is indeed at least one problem.
If the system provides benefits to members (pensions, sick leaves, etc) there needs to be a way to
identify who is eligible to receive them. At this point I can think of the following approach:
Split the membership fee into (a) public part and (b) voting part.
[...]

this kind of split is a good idea. you can send out the id tokens to all the voters, then send the vote tokens to the ids. anonymous vote tokens can then be mixed and set with the voting value. should not be too hard to implement.

More importantly the system also needs to have ways to determine if an upcoming question is important or not. It is impossible for all people to vote on every question somebody can come up with (why does Atlas come to my mind? ).

Depending on how many people think a question is important and how clear the outcome looks the system would have to determine the number of people necessary to vote to come to a result. Of course everybody should be allowed to vote if he wants to or does not like the preliminary result.

I agree this would be an interesting challenge. People need time to do actual work too, not just chatting the whole day about how they are going to vote. The basic concept I can think of is that members send proposals of the change they are willing to make to an already existing consensus with a schedule to vote at least one week (or even month) ahead. If within this period enough members approve that the community indeed needs to look at this issue then the proposal is added into the voting queue.
Sort of how WEB2.0 content management and rating system is working today.

sounds a little like the system of the pirate party...

PS: on the side note...
Another area where this system can also be applicable is a company/corporation. Right now corporations are modeled after the idea of central governance - there is one chap at the top who issues commands to his "generals" and those in turn are in charge of small armies of developers which normally have no say at all. For people with libertarian mindset it might be hard to accept any managerial authority on top of them who would tell them what to do on a day-to-day basis. The system with provable trust-free way to achieve consensus might be easier to swallow. As an example, imagine working on something like building a Boeing 747. That would require a lot of people from many different areas of expertise to do a lot of work in a very coordinated fashion or it simply won't fly.

definitely. should be possible for pretty much every group of people with some kind of common interest. the pirate party could need a better system

[interlagos]

the technical side of trust free voting can easily be solved with namecoins (even directing votes to other voters) or colored bitcoins.

The part of the trust-free mechanism is derived from the fact that votes come from the addresses that paid the membership fee with a currency spendable on a global market.
This removes the necessity of maintaining a separate database connecting "who paid the fee" with "who has voting tokens".
[...]

could I not pay the fees several times and then vote several times with your system?

I think most of the time it will be impossible to achieve consensus. What about the obvious ranked majority vote?

I was thinking along the lines of paying membership fee once per year and voting as many times as the need arises within that year. Also the fee is not refundable, so if the person or group decides to leave the system not only do they loose the benefits that the system provides they also loose their membership fee.
That should provide some stickiness to the system so it won't fall apart at the earliest occasion.

Consensus should be achieved by majority of votes which are all equal as the fee paid to enable this ability was also equal. I think it better keep it that way or otherwise big money will simply buy the outcome of the vote.

Could you please describe the voting mechanism as you see it with Namecoins?

namecoin is a decentralized name/value storage system. you can create identity or voting tokens to send to the voters. they can then set the value of these tokens. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66868

One problem is identifying voters while still letting them be anonymous. Even that can be solved by shuffling vote tokens with random people or people you trust.

Regarding identifying members vs anonymity of votes there is indeed at least one problem.
If the system provides benefits to members (pensions, sick leaves, etc) there needs to be a way to
identify who is eligible to receive them. At this point I can think of the following approach:
Split the membership fee into (a) public part and (b) voting part.
[...]

this kind of split is a good idea. you can send out the id tokens to all the voters, then send the vote tokens to the ids. anonymous vote tokens can then be mixed and set with the voting value. should not be too hard to implement.

Registering id tokens would probably create unnecessary centralization.
With Bitcoin private keys both parts of the fee structure could be decentralized.

For the voting part of the fee votes (messages signed with private key) would be cast into a P2P overlay network and land into a common repository shared among all the peers. It should be fairly easy to defend against spamming. Every node must check that the message is signed with the address that paid a full membership voting fee to a fixed public address within a year and check against repository that message hasn't been received already. If any of these conditions fail the message will not be re-broadcast.

For the benefits part of the fee members simply come to the nodes that "distribute" the benefits and claim their part by signing the message with the private key of the address they used to pay their membership benefits fee from. If one of the benefits, for example, is the school built with the organization's budget then claiming that benefit would simply be going into that school after confirming your membership with your private key.

More importantly the system also needs to have ways to determine if an upcoming question is important or not. It is impossible for all people to vote on every question somebody can come up with (why does Atlas come to my mind? ).

Depending on how many people think a question is important and how clear the outcome looks the system would have to determine the number of people necessary to vote to come to a result. Of course everybody should be allowed to vote if he wants to or does not like the preliminary result.

I agree this would be an interesting challenge. People need time to do actual work too, not just chatting the whole day about how they are going to vote. The basic concept I can think of is that members send proposals of the change they are willing to make to an already existing consensus with a schedule to vote at least one week (or even month) ahead. If within this period enough members approve that the community indeed needs to look at this issue then the proposal is added into the voting queue.
Sort of how WEB2.0 content management and rating system is working today.

sounds a little like the system of the pirate party...

PS: on the side note...
Another area where this system can also be applicable is a company/corporation. Right now corporations are modeled after the idea of central governance - there is one chap at the top who issues commands to his "generals" and those in turn are in charge of small armies of developers which normally have no say at all. For people with libertarian mindset it might be hard to accept any managerial authority on top of them who would tell them what to do on a day-to-day basis. The system with provable trust-free way to achieve consensus might be easier to swallow. As an example, imagine working on something like building a Boeing 747. That would require a lot of people from many different areas of expertise to do a lot of work in a very coordinated fashion or it simply won't fly.

definitely. should be possible for pretty much every group of people with some kind of common interest. the pirate party could need a better system

I need to look more into how pirate party is organized.
They should definitely like to play and experiment with these ideas.
I thought that Bitcoin Foundation would also make a perfect example of this system.

Also instead of having a centralized treasurer to manage the budget I lean more towards having multiple secretaries as representatives of smaller subgroups within the system each having control of a single private key of a common multisig address. So that any decisions to spend budget would need to be authorized by all secretaries of the subgroups. They would not have to argue but simply execute already achieved consensus.

In case if one of the multisig private keys is lost or destroyed there needs to be an underground vault with the full release key from the whole budget buried deep enough that stealing it would require a noticeable amount of time. Any unauthorized attempts to unearth it would be noticed and prevented.

[myrkul]

You know, there's already a system in place that ensures that your decisions make a difference, provides services only to those who pay for them, and allows the public to send messages direct to the service providers...


"The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote." -Ludwig von Mises

[phelix]

[...]
Registering id tokens would probably create unnecessary centralization.
[...]

so how do you prevent multiple votes? or don't ya?