When I say liquid democracy, the first thing for me is to explain what kind of democracy
we envision as an organization.
The basic idea of liquid democracy has always been that of a hybrid between representative
democracy and direct democracy...where you can vote directly on the issues you care about,
or you delegate your voting power to someone you already know and trust.
A friend..a colleague..whoever you want to put your trust in.
That's the democracy side of things..giving you that plasticity in the way you make decisions
and in the things you care about you can be very direct ...and with the things you simply
don't know about..you delegate that choice.
But the liquidity element is also very important, because it speaks about the possibility of
guaranteeing something that can serve the purpose of a medium of exchange.
*That* is liquidity.
We explore the idea of universal basic income in our paper The Social Smart Contract...because
we see the possibility of issuing a token that is giving us a human right as long as
you can validate your sovereign identity.
If we have that backbone constructed on a blockchain of decentralized identities, then
UBI and democracy both can be built on top of that, and both need each other.
Because UBI prevents financial coercion in democracy and because democracy guarantees
that nobody's getting an unfair share of the UBI.
They both really need each other like a yin and yang, and the key to unlock this is engaging
in this global collaborative effort of achieving a proof of identity protocol that hopefully
- we believe - needs to bring in action human attention so we make sure that humans are
governing humans and not machines.