Liquid Democracy is a more direct form of democracy which would not be feasible without an infrastructure that enables rapid, secure, transparent, and trusted continuous voting. Ethereum’s smart contracts, despite some currently unresolved scaling issues, provide a promising foundation for building that infrastructure. This post can be broken up into 3 functional areas that essentially explain what Liquid Democracy is, how Hive Commons is approaching implementing it on Ethereum, and how we anticipate using it to bring about social change.

A Quick Primer on Liquid Democracy

There are many ways to implement a democratic process, but if we were to put the two most well known forms on a spectrum you would have Direct Democracy on one side, and Representative Democracy on the other. Liquid Democracy would fall somewhere in the middle.

Direct Democracy works well in situations where you have relatively few but incredibly important issues to decide on, but does not scale well when there are many issues, or issues which require expertise in a specific field. In these cases it is impractical for everyone to be well informed and make an educated choice about each issue. Representative Democracy resolves this problem by allowing the population to vote less frequently. Instead of directly voting on issues, voters elect representatives who specializes in the governance of the community — freeing up everyone else to focus on other things. Unfortunately, the economic incentives of representatives are only loosely tied to the best interest of the public, so the result is sub-optimal for the group.

Both Direct Democracy and Representative Democracy have their problems, but can Liquid Democracy really do a better job?

Yes, Instead of always voting directly, or electing representatives that vote on your behalf for a set period of time, Liquid Democracy enables voters to fluidly delegate their vote or override their delegates position as they see fit. In some forms of liquid democracy, voters are even able to delegate their vote to multiple people based on the type of issue in question. It is essentially the best parts of both systems without any obvious trade-offs. The result is a system that, at its core, is less susceptible to economic capture and more likely to reach outcomes that benefit the general voting population.

That’s the basics, but for a more thorough examination of Liquid Democracy compared to other forms, I highly recommend Dominik Schiener’s 2015 post on the subject.

Historically, the biggest problem was that it was not possible to implement until now. The good news is that with ubiquitous access to the internet and significant innovations in modern cryptography a functional liquid democracy is totally feasible. In fact, there is quite a bit of active research and development in progress… In addition to our project, the team at Giveth is working on an implementation of delegated governance to direct charitable donations and is encouraging other developers to build and adapt it for other use cases. Aragon , a blockchain governance startup that recently raised 24 Million Dollars, is actively pursuing Liquid Democracy as a core governance model for DAO entities on their network. In addition, CommitETH, the Status backed project, is working on integrating liquid democracy based governance directly into Github to enable SNT holders to direct the larger open source project. As much as we can (and they are willing) we’d like to collaborate to build out a general purpose implementation of liquid democracy that can be adopted in a wide range of decentralized community governance applications.

In the spirit of that, I’d like to share our thoughts on the user requirements and technical implementation choices we are considering for Hive Commons’ implementation of Liquid Democracy.