Ethereum 2.0 Implementation: A Decentralized Process?
As an outsider to the Ethereum community, and for that matter the blockchain community, allow me to express my admiration, and even amazement, at an accomplishment that I would have thought was impossible: creation of a viable currency, exhibiting both fungibility and double-spend prevention, that is not issued by any central banking authority.
A big Bravo! for that accomplishment – and indeed for the blow it strikes against authoritarianism and for democratic governance of the world’s information infrastructure! This is truly a new age.
And yet a thinking person can’t help but wonder how a well-planned and managed process such as the staged transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake could be performed by a collection of unidentified individuals in a purely democratic and trustless process.
Are we to believe that Vitalik Buterin had no more to do with that project than any other holder of similar amounts of Ether? Was the Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-1011 just crafted by the Ether-holding masses in one big collective effort?
Well of course no one is suggesting anything of the sort. The fact is that decisions about Ethereum’s direction and day-to-day management are made by a core of individuals who understand its complexities. Might one say that those individuals are in… positions of… um… dare we mention the word “authority”? Isn’t this authoritative group central to the success of the effort?
Transactions can be managed by an algorithm. You could say that transactions can be governed by an algorithm. Again, before Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous paper, no one would have thought that possible, but the notion of fully automated authority-free currency transactions has proven itself to be viable in practice.
But Development and implementation efforts, unless they are performed completely by an AI, require decisions made by human beings who are in a position of authority to make those decisions. Those efforts must be governed. And as the decentralization advocate Lawrence Lundy-Bryan has noted, “There is no such thing as decentralized governance.”
There is good governance and bad governance and everything in between. The thing that has created all the energy behind decentralization is the incessant, habitual, compulsive abuse of power that we see coming from existing governments, corporations, and other institutions. Individual politicians, bureaucrats, parties and cabals incessantly look for ways to circumvent statutory and policy limitations on individual power.
Lundy-Bryan discusses trias politica, the formal name for the principle of separation of powers that is supposed to keep the power addicts from having their way. But trias politica is not good enough. Our existing forms of governance don’t provide what’s needed as we go forward into our increasingly digital global society.
It seems that trias politica, is due for not just an update but a version upgrade. Let’s call it Trias Politica 2.0. Trias Politica 2.0 must accomplish the goals of decentralization while also providing governance. In a significant way, early social media actually accomplished that.
Now for the good news. For the last 20+ years, a system of governance for the digital world has been in development. It’s called the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure. Actually, when you consider its origins it’s even older than that.
In 1981 Wes Kussmaul launched the world’s first online encyclopedia. It was a money loser, but fortunately, he and his team began adding social features to it. In 1982 the encyclopedia morphed into the Delphi social network.
Delphi quickly became financially sustainable. Like all social media of the ’80s, sustainability was accomplished without any of the insidious privacy invasions, audience manipulations, and tracking that was introduced when social media moved to the Web in the ’90s. Wes and his colleagues didn’t want to play that game, so in 1993 they sold the business to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corporation.
After the sale of Delphi and then the sale of a spinoff social media business in 1998, Wes began writing a book entitled Quiet Enjoyment, about bringing accountable anonymity to Web-based social media. Quiet Enjoyment used the metaphor of your car’s license plate to illustrate how accountable anonymity works. Anyone can see your car’s license plate, making you accountable for what happens on public roadways. But no one gets to know your identity unless there’s been an incident.
Of course that implies that somewhere there’s a database that maps the number on your license plate to the number on your driver’s license. So the question is, how do you ensure that the authority behind that database is not subject to abuse?
As word got out that Wes was working on the book, he was introduced to a group at the International Telecommunication Union that was building a system called the World e-Trust Initiative that resembled the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure that he was advocating. That led to his work with the World e-Trust group for a couple of years until their work started to gain the attention of the 180 member nations of the ITU.
As had happened with the internet itself years earlier, World e-Trust was seen as an additional threat to the sovereignty of the member nations – particularly those led by autocrats. So the ITU member states abruptly pulled the plug on the World e-Trust Initiative.
The leaders of the Initiative then came to Wes asking if he could carry on their work, independently of the ITU or its parent, the United Nations. Wes replied that he would accept the challenge, and gave the reasons why the successor to the Initiative should take the form of a municipality.
That reason came from the same place as the drive toward decentralization that came a few years later. It’s all about using digital technology to bypass the sources of abuse of power that had plagued the mapped world for millennia.
So here we have the first element of the solution to the challenge of providing accountability and anonymity at the same time in a governed environment:
First. The erasure of distance between the citizen and the seat of government means that the old apparatus of legislative representation can be replaced.
We have to move past those amusing old constructs called “national borders.” For decades now, IP packets have known nothing about those curious old lines on maps. Bitstreams don’t read maps.
(Fun fact: the ITU, International Telecommunication Union, the oldest international governance body in the world, was founded in 1865 to deal with conflicting national rules on encryption of telegrams. It seems that 158 years ago the world’s old geographical governance infrastructure was already dealing with the tendency of free-flowing bits to erase the borders that justified the existence of national governments.)
Consider the city where you live. If it’s like almost all other municipalities on Earth, participation by the governed is much more direct than with national governments and even states and provinces. Because city hall is physically nearby, activist citizens tend to show up for hearings and council meetings – no need to compete with lobbyists for the attention of a legislator in that layer of insulation called “Parliament” or “Congress.”
So trias politica 2.0 should be modeled after governance of a city rather than that of a nation-state. We now have approximately 4 billion people participating in social media. We need a city hall that’s just a few fingersteps away from all of them.
On March 7, 2005, the City of Osmio was chartered at the Geneva headquarters of the International Telecommunication Union, which is now a UN agency.
Learn about Osmio at https://osmio.ch. Start with its video entitled The Right Way To Certify.
It’s important to note that while Osmio inherits its duly constituted public authority from the ITU, it has no ongoing connection with the ITU or the UN. (One might say that an organization built on the concept of United People, bypassing national governments, is actually rather in competition with an organization called United Nations, but let’s not call too much attention to that for now.)
Besides being an online municipality, providing a way for people who have time, interest, and ability to participate in governance of communities that accept Osmio’s authority, Osmio is a certification authority. Osmio signs the accountable anonymity identity certificates of individuals who want privacy for themselves, and accountability from others they encounter online.
Using the participatory governance model of a municipality is the first step in fixing governance of digital spaces.
Second, governance by a mob of four billion people, all clamoring to be heard, would not be a pretty sight. We’ve all seen what happens when skillful manipulators of perceptions touch specific emotional pain points in susceptible target audience segments to get them to think their way and vote for something that’s against the audience’s own interests. Social media has given these perception manipulators tools to be even more disruptive to democracy’s effectiveness.
There is a solution to this problem, and it’s called “optimocracy.”
In an optimocratically-governed organization, policy decisions are made by commissions, each focused on one policy area, similar to the committees of legislatures.
Anyone may become a member of a commission and participate in the debate leading up to a vote. All debate is online, and may take the form of synchronous media (video, audio, real-time chat) or asynchronous media (forum-style), or a mix of both.
However, a member must participate in the debate in order to vote. Participation is established via a number of methods, including connection time verified by interactive quorum calls. The rules for participation and voting in an optimocracy may be seen at https://www.robertasrules.org/.
The participation requirement is an important step in eliminating audience manipulation. First, it ensures that each commission member hears all views, including those that they may not agree with. Second, people whose views are most manipulable tend to not have a lot of patience in hearing details about a variety of views. We’ve all encountered such individuals, who tend not to have an appetite for complexity and would like the world to be made simple for their convenience. In an optimocracy, the influence of the ill-informed is minimized by their distaste for complexity. Very simply, they don’t get to vote.
Each commission is led by a moderator, whose only job is to keep order. There’s also a chief moderator of the whole municipality who has a substantial amount of power – but nevertheless can be easily removed according to...
Third Moderators are elected by members of their commission according to a continuous plurality or majority vote. Each commission member must at all times maintain a standing vote of confidence, no confidence, or neutrality in their moderator. The individual’s standing vote is not visible to the moderator.
The result of the standing election works according to the formula
y=12sin(0.03x)+60
where
y = per cent of standing vote required by either incumbent moderator or challenger to win
x = number of days the incumbent moderator has been in office.
Thus a moderator has alternating periods where she can be more assertive without fear of being tossed out, and periods of vulnerability, where she needs to be extra mindful of her relationships with commission members. The function addresses the age-old question of whether strong, assertive leadership or sensitivity to the needs of constituents is more important. This accommodates both views.
Some might say that average people don’t understand trig functions and so would not understand how voting works. Others, including me, might say… “and your point is…?”
Fourth While members of commissions dealing with routine matters can and should publicly disclose their identities, members of commissions that deal in matters that affect the interests of autocracies should be anonymous.
The Accountable Anonymity provided by Osmio’s License Plate Credential means that when a commission member takes a stand that some authoritarian doesn’t like, they are not subject to retaliation.
Fifth, The Internet of People Protocol, part of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure, means that Osmio’s PKI identity certificate database contains no identity information! Your record or records in the database include your certificate’s public key, certificate serial number, an eight-digit identity reliability score – and the identifier of the Attestation Officer who enrolled you.
If someone comes to Osmio with a court order calling for disclosure of your identity because of a claim that you defrauded or defamed them or otherwise injured them, they will only get the identity of your Attestation Officer. It’s the AO’s job to decide whether the court order is valid. If it’s from the captive court of some dictator who’s unhappy with what you said about him in a blog post, the court order goes in the trash.
Again, we have seen that the operation of a system as complex as Ethereum requires governance, and again, the decentralization advocate Lawrence Lundy-Bryan is right when he says “There is no such thing as decentralized governance.” So take a good look at https://authentiverse.net/bnw to learn more about how PKI Done Right will accomplish the goals of decentralization while at the same time providing a system of governance based on accountable anonymity.