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BitVote draft
There are over 7 billion people in the world, but only a fraction has direct influence on decisions that affect everyone. So-called ‘concerned citizens’ may like causes on Facebook, whip up a Twitter storm or take part in street protests, but who really listens? Passion is often met with a couldn’t-care-less attitude and absolutely nothing happens in response to these calls.
BitVote aims to change this by being a neutral tool to access and express public opinion efficiently, without astroturfing. Each and every viewpoint is given the opportunity to be part of a decentralised, digital ecosystem that transcends all cultural divides and is resistant to human manipulation. Without dictating any ideals whatsoever, it’ll use the internet – a platform the majority can access – to end the marginalisation of voices and involve everyone who cares.
All you'll need is your body and any device that connects to the internet, a link to a project you feel strongly about – this can be your little sister's girls scout campaign or a petition to protect net neutrality – and you're set to cast your vote in a system that doesn’t depend on an elected individual’s power. Inspired by the influence the SOPA blackout (read about it here) had on political decisions made without consulting the people it would affect, BitVote will facilitate an alternative platform for 'distributed governance' in a manner that is compatible with all current systems.
Vote with your life!
You can start your own BitVote by adding your own link to a cause or join an ongoing BitVote for a link that already exists on BitVote and allocate actual days, hours and minutes to it. Measured from the time you register to the time you vote, you'll earn vote hours you can dedicate to as many causes as you want.
Every voter earns 24 vote hours a day simply by being signed up to the system, which means that if you don’t spend any, you’ll have 9000 vote hours after being registered for one year. These vote hours can be spent as you like, depending on how important each cause is to you. If you registered a year ago, you could allocate 6 months to your sister's girls scout fundraiser and 6 months to net neutrality. Or a whole year to the fundraiser. Or 11 months to net neutrality and 1 month to the fundraiser. Or you could save up your vote time for when something more important comes along. You can decide how to use your ‘life currency’ as BitVotes.
Decentralised, neutral but compatible... and up to you to interpret!
BitVote will work entirely on its own, meaning it's a decentralised system that doesn't need to be managed by a human being. It will use a cryptographic block chain mechanism similar to BitCoin to achieve this (see below for more info). Everybody will have access to the voting history and the coding in order to secure transparency and avoid manipulation. It’s a ‘living system’, so once it’s up and running, it’ll develop by itself and everybody is encouraged to improve it.
Everybody must be given an opportunity to use BitVote. The system can't supply rural populations with laptops, but it can make voting so straightforward that anybody who is able to seek out a device with internet access can vote.
Ideally, BitVote doesn't need to know who you are. Complete anonymity is a challenge however, because the system will need some information to identify you as a human being and ensure that there’s only one BitVote ID per person. (see Sybil Security Approach paper for suggestions on how this could be proven) This is something we still need to figure out, your ideas are welcome!
The system has to be neutral and therefore compatible with existing governments, movements and technologies. The vote hour mechanism ensures that there are a great number of variables to be analysed in a multi-dimensional way, which means that BitVote can be used for a vast variety of projects in a diverse way.
How can BitVote support your cause?
Since it works without a central body managing it, its fundamentals function undeterred and everybody has access to all the voting cases, it's completely up to you to interpret the meaning of each result.
For example, if a large number of people use a small amount of voting time on a particular cause, is this more important than a small number of people using a large amount of voting time on a particular cause? It’s up to you to decide, because BitVote won't and can't — its system is compatible, but inherently neutral to subjective analysis.
A journalist may use a BitVote to support a claim he's making. A politician may use a BitVote to find out whether an idea he wants to push forward has a lot of support. Occupy could start a BitVote to justify a protest. A Scottish citizen could start a BitVote to back up the Scottish independence referendum. Time Magazine might want to find out what stories the public cares about. Businesses may want to research if a new product is in demand. The usage cases are endless.
Maybe you own a business or NGO? Feel that your community is neglected? Or maybe you're a furious morning paper reader who can't get enough letters to the editorial team? How you use BitVote is up to you!
On top of that, BitVote is also completely neutral but compatible with any third party add-ons. Facebook plugins, tools to make it accessible to the deaf population or applications to analyse the available voting data can be created by voters, app creators, coders, researchers, businesses, and governments or anyone who wishes to do so. You could, for example, write a program – possibly similar to Google Analytics – that can analyse the impact many votes by few people have on a certain case, etc. (see example above)
A concern may be that there's a substantial part of the world's population – the elderly, rural tribes or just generally less tech-savvy people – who don't use the internet that often. It is, however, exactly these people that BitVote has the potential to empower. Scarcity of votes – meaning that your vote hours aren't bottomless and thus gain value over time – will allow users to 'save up for something special'. So, although BitVote may be mainly used by activists, journalists or – for the lack of a better general term – 'first-world hobby philosophers', the ones who'll have a great impact on a major issue will in fact be voters who don't use the internet that often! When something extreme happens – imagine someone wanting to go to war – 'less tech-savvy people' will be motivated to vote and will have more impact than 'the first-world hobby philosophers' who have already spent a lot of their votes on smaller issues.
BitVote is collaborating with Ethereum – an initiative to create an open network that uses the block chain technology to encourage the creation of decentralised apps. The great minds at Ethereum have mastered all major aspects on the technical back end of BitVote: vote chain, decentralised system and scalability. A more complicated aspect is the ID system. Proving that there can only be one voter per ID is indeed the biggest challenge, but the team has some suggestions.
The value of votes is derived from scarcity, so if anybody is able to double their vote hours through using multiple IDs – which is ‘a Sybil attack’ – then the vote units aren't trusted to have that value. So in order for BitVote to be efficient, it needs to be protected from Sybil attacks, meaning every voter can only have one ID. Sybil attacks are a problem that many organisations have, and currently there is no satisfactory solution. The team does, however, have some approach plans, such as the use of ‘ID pools’ or ‘active authentication’ to solve this issue. Please see ‘Sybil Security Approach Summary’ for more info.
In order for BitVote to be honest and decentralised it will work on a cryptographic block chain, which can be defined as 'a distributed append-only database'. BitCoin was the first system to use a database that was provably append-only, but recently initiatives such as Ethereum are embracing the technology to encourage its use for non-currency applications. Unlike a normal database, where you can put something on it and then simply take it away again, a block chain is a database that you can only add to. This means that there is a history that cannot be deleted and 'a current state' – in BitVote’s case this would be all the links and votes at a current time. No central system can or should oversee it, which means it can’t hide any information and ensures it’s trustworthy.