Blockchain networks opened the possibility of new institutional models built with open source code, able to resist censorship and scale participation globally. However, Bitcoin’s original white paper description of “one CPU one vote” shaped the entire crypto-industry to think governance centered around machines, not people. Although a fundamental right to privacy bent early blockchain design toward anonymity, this property significantly limits the governance capacity of protocols. A simple example of that pertains to Quadratic Voting: one of the best governance models that can be implemented digitally, yet its execution depends on ensuring no participant votes more than once on the same issue — an impossibility under a fully anonymous solution.

Formalizing humans on the blockchain

The relevance of formalizing identities online can be inferred from centralized networks: major internet platforms such as Facebook and Google established themselves globally by achieving a sufficient level of consensus over their identity credentials, thus creating a trust layer on top of which a myriad of social applications could be built. The only former alternative able to reach such widespread use pertained to nation-states: our passports and national ID cards.

The creation of a global identification system outside of the strict control of nation-states increased communication and knowledge creation. It formed a networked social infrastructure that facilitated the emergence of multiple borderless political movements. However, being highly vulnerable to Artificial Intelligence exploits such as addictive algorithms and bots generating false identities & content, the underlying architecture of current centralized protocols exposes society to political manipulation and data theft. Not coincidentally, we are currently living the age of digital authoritarianism, and democracy is in global recession for the 12th consecutive year.

The rules applying to the protocol of a consensus layer for identities have wide-ranging implications, fundamentally shaping the entire structure of applications built on top of it. Those applications in turn determine the ways in which individuals and society are able to organize and develop — and because they are designed for a purely digital context (vulnerable to privately-owned algorithms, bots and sybils), the current model inevitably results in a post-truth environment ruled by the algorithmic optimization logic the apps are built with.

As we continuously work researching and implementing different forms of digital democracies, our experiences highlight that any such endeavor is undermined by both artificial intelligence exploiting the identity protocol, and corruption by third parties controlling a voter registry (legacy systems). This led us to understand that for democracy to grow anywhere with an Internet connection, a distributed consensus on human identities is a fundamental requirement. Determining who has the right to participate and who doesn’t cannot be an afterthought of democracy: it is its elemental task. In that sense, governance and identity are the same thing. If we are to enable a humane society — in the very literal sense of it, a society capable of giving precedence to human logic ahead of artificial intelligence — then the next consensus layer for identities must place human consciousness at the center of the network’s governance.

Democracy Earth Foundation's goal is to model a “one human one node” graph, providing protocol specifications able to serve as a source of legitimacy in the governance of digital networks. Looking at identity as a spectrum where at one end we have the identities of the people we know well and in person, and on the other completely encrypted anonymity — everything else falling on a continuum — our model is a probabilistic one. To inform this probabilistic model, our indicators will be built over the social aspect of identity, involving a bi-directional process — on one side, an identity claim and on the other, its subsequent endorsement by validated entities.