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Is Digital Voting Ready for Post-Nation-State Governance?
Recorded: March 19, 2026 Duration: 1:09:42Space Recording
Full Transcription
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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Oh I'm going to go to the next video. I Oh I'm going to go to the next video. Music Hello, hello.
Mic check.
Hey.
Hello, hello.
I'm going ahead and giving everyone speaker access to make it all for speaking.
If you have any trouble, let me know.
I can send another invite.
Hello. Hello, hello. Okay, I'll be kicking off in a moment.
Just going to wait for a few more people to file in.
Lewis's co-host, are you able to give people speaker access as well?
Uh... Just checking in case I drop out later. I invite speaker.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay, so most of you have already been to some of these past calls, so you know anybody
can speak at any time, so we're giving mic access to everyone, just so everyone has it.
So we're ready to go.
Last time I dropped out because X doesn't like me so
Lewis is also co-host so he can he can jump in if he needs to be
back up. Good morning.
Morning, afternoon, and evening, wherever you are across the world, everyone.
Fortunately, unfortunately for me, I'm in Asia, so it's getting quite late.
So after this is dog walking time.
There once was a time where it was always morning in crypto.
It is.
I would say my go-to phrase is usually good morning to everyone,
but it gets confusing when I accidentally greet people at the local coffee shop.
Good morning when it's evening. Okay, cool. So anyways, I'm going to go ahead and kick off.
So just a quick highlight. This is not a formal dialogue.
It's not like panel discussion.
We're giving everyone speaker access
so you can jump in at any time through the dialogue.
So without further ado, just want
to give a quick introduction to everything.
So I'm Anthony.
I'm from Shutter Network.
Going to be the moderator for today's discussion.
So I just want to thank everyone for joining.
So this is the X space on is digital voting ready for post nation state governance.
And this is actually our third conversation in a series exploring digital voting readiness.
And I know many of you have been part of this from some of the beginning. And then we have some new faces.
So just kind of give a quick overview of why we're doing this.
So just going to give a quick overview of why we're doing this.
So back in November, PSE, the Privacy Stewards of Ethereum, and Shudder released the State
of Private Voting Report, which looked at how ready privacy-preserving digital voting
systems actually are today.
And the findings were actually pretty clear.
The systems had drastically improved.
And now they offer strong scalability, audibility, and maintaining ballot secrecy. And
in some cases, they're actually more transparent and verifiable than traditional systems. However,
we wanted to know, was the world ready for the adoption? So we've been holding these X spaces
to have these discussions. So the first X space, we looked at DAOs and the readiness of private
voting applications there. And then the second one that we did a couple of-Space, we looked at DAOs and the readiness of private voting applications there.
And then the second one that we did a couple of weeks ago, we looked at digital voting and local and national elections.
Now we're taking it one step further in the evolution of the conversation.
We're looking at digital voting readiness in the context of post-nation state governance, also known as network states.
So these are virtual communities that organize beyond
physical borders and coordinate around a shared ideology and identity. So what's really cool is
we have such a good variety of people in this discussion today. And I really want to take a
minute just to highlight some of the people in the room just to talk about the variety of it.
just to talk about the variety of it. So we have Louis from Shutter Network and Shutter,
as you know, they put together Shielded Voting, which is the most widely used private voting
system in DAOs that's on Snapshot. We also have with us Jordy, and he's the lead at Bogdoni and
their other voting protocol, DaVinci Vote.
And they're an open source voting protocol.
And they've been working on a lot of cool ideas
and initiatives across the space,
from looking at DAOs, from real world voting,
and in this space as well.
And so I also asked Jordy to share a new product
that they launched last week.
So hopefully, he'll dive in that a little bit later.
Then we have Oren as well.
He's from a group that used to be formerly Enclave.
I saw recently it's now renamed Interfold,
also focusing on privacy, voting, and governance
for stronger democratic systems.
And then we have Lasha, who's the co-founder of Rarimo.
Sorry, they have the Freedom Tool.
And this is an open source platform
for secure autonomous voting designed for protests, polls,
and governance.
So again, it's really cool that we
have these really great players that
are focusing on these voting solutions
across the range of spectrum.
But we also have people from the legal, regulatory, and government space as well.
And so we have Adam from a DAO, really interested in seeing a little bit of what he could share a
little bit later today, but really helping DAOs and Web3 projects incorporate, as it says on the X account, in the only jurisdiction that
explicitly recognizes their unique structure. So it shows that people, organizations within the
space, DAOs, Web3 projects, network states are needing their own support system and regulatory
authority to help them. Then we have ZeroXAlex from Polaros.
And for those that don't know, Polaros is a leading decentralized arbitration platform
for disputes on the on-chain economy.
Then we also have Alex as well, also Neto, also known as Neto.
And he's from Blockful and Anti-Capture, and they focus on DAO governance design systems.
Florian, who's the founder of Blockchain Lawyer,
who's been working in this intersection of law
and blockchain space in 2014.
And then I also want to go and just give a quick introduction
to some of the people that are championing
and building these post-nation state communities.
So we have Josh, who is the founder of Bread Coop, Bread Cooperative, and it's a worker-owned collective using technology to improve their lives of ordinary people.
But he also hosts a really incredible podcast, which is known as the Blockchain Socialist, which focuses on the intersection of crypto and the left.
And then we have Mehmet, who's the co-founder and CEO of Web3 Hookas.
He's also the core contributor to Zookas.
And I'm really excited to hear a little bit about you, to hear a little bit more of the pop-up cities that you've been working on and building these uh experiments and communities worldwide um and then
uh with us a little bit also here today um is beat jedlichka um who is the president president
of the free republic of liberland a sovereign state on the banks of the danube river structured
as a constitutional republic with elements of direct democracy, enabling direct citizen participation.
So we have a really stacked and very diverse group of people from voting protocols, the
legal regulatory, and these nation state, post nation state communities.
So just to reiterate, this is not a panel discussion.
This is an open dialogue where you can jump at any time,
raise your hand, react, disagree,
let's keep the conversation going.
So there's a lot to cover.
But to start, what I want to do is I want to set the tone.
And I want to highlight what's happening
in these post-nation states, these network states today.
So I want to hear from the people in the room that are actually
building these groups today.
So I want to hear if you can give us a quick picture of what
you've been building and what enables, what are you able to,
what does this enable that the current nation state system
fundamentally can't so for this maybe we can start out with beat if you would like to go and share a
little bit of what you've been doing within that space sure sure very excited to be with you guys
and i'm actually on this very special meeting that is about voting. We are talking with Karel Janecek, who
is very famous Czech mathematician and also high frequency trader.
And he has his own very strong ideas on voting ecosystems.
And I didn't know that I'm on this meeting
until like a couple of minutes ago.
But what a coincidence that we just met together.
And I have to correct you because Liberland, it's not a direct democracy.
We are direct meritocracy.
We really wanted to evolve democratic systems into something better.
As you probably know, the founding fathers of the United States were quite
fearful of democracy as a concept.
I mean, let me remind you that Plato and Socrates
had their own lesson from democracy.
Plato was actually murdered democratically
at the very beginning of democracy itself.
So I am here to really bring about a new system
of governance for nation states.
And as you probably know, Liberland is kind of a traditional nation state
from some aspects as well,
because we do have territory.
We do actually already follow Montevideo criteria.
We do have a couple of state recognitions already,
and we've been in this space for almost 11 years,
building our governance on blockchain
and experimenting with different systems.
And what this meeting and Karel, you know, maybe you can say just hi.
Hello.
Hello, everybody.
It's great to have him.
We're in his place in Prague.
Karel has his own very strong opinions about negative voting, that it should be basically
part of the traditional democratic systems.
But in some sense, I have a small eureka today because we can actually combine
both meritocracy, which is basically corporate governance and negative
voting together, and we could come up with very new form of governance, which
hasn't even been tried in corporate world but it could really be
the right answer but the fact that Liberland is meritocracy doesn't mean that we don't have
breaks we have democratic breaks if if somebody doesn't like what the meritocratically elected
congress has proposed the democracy can get rid of it we are also republic because our state
cannot organize anything else but security,
justice, and diplomacy. We really want to stick to the ideas of founding fathers of United States.
And, uh, we are also a little bit of monarchy because we give some sort of
veto power to, to the important, uh, biggest supporters that have formed
Limberland, uh, in similar way that Liechtenstein or
or House of Lords operate.
So we have that element as well inside our system.
I tried my best over the last 11 years to combine the best elements of each
constitution, which I saw worthy to be part of Liberland ecosystem.
And just one more technological update from me, and that's it for my intro,
is that we have built a substrate ecosystem where it was very easy to basically test all these
concepts. We got hacked by our own CTO. We were saved by the fact that we were standalone
blockchain, so we managed to get out of that trouble. But now when all these concepts are tested and and well working and also ethereum has
developed into new and more modern design with the cheaper gas fees we're moving ourselves to
ethereum to be able to stop worrying about security of our chain but focusing on the
principles itself that's the plan for next three months.
And also I just last thing, I would really love to invite you for the anniversary
of Liberland, which is between 11th to 13th of April, great opportunity to
physically visit Liberland.
You can also join us online, but it's actually main part is in Liberland
itself, but great opportunity to discuss elections discuss blockchain uh blockchain systems discuss privacy and all these other goodies so if you
would like to see Liberland the best opportunity is in less than months from now on 11 to 13th of
April and Carol please yes uh please uh let me make just a little bit more precise. The voting system D21, which I'm the author of, is based on the effect of multiple votes.
Primarily the negative aspect, it's not primarily about negative voting.
There is the option, the possibility to cast also negative vote.
But the minus, what I call minus vote must be such that it is less than half of the plus vote.
OK, so if we use D21 for, let's say, one winner, we can have each voter can have up to three votes,
one vote for one person and possibly one vote against.
So it's D21. What is it? It's the IH21 Institute of Humanity of the 21st century, IH21.cz or org.
But if you do the voting method, if you search, you will certainly find it. And then again,
the primary feature is the effect of multiple votes. So more votes, more plus votes than the
winning candidates for each voting person. And let me say that it is one of the things that it brings is that we are
partially solving the effect of one of the problems of democracy, that each vote,
one person, one vote, and it's regardless of the person is educated, giving to the
system, or if it's somebody who is just abusing the system with D21, the advantage is that with multiple votes, the people who are more,
let's say, knowledgeable, who give more energy, attention to the democratic process,
they will be able to use efficiently all the votes, while people who are on the other side,
who, let's say, have only one populace to whom they admire and that's it,
will not be able to use all
the votes effectively so in the end we are reaching the the the situation where people
who deserve it so to speak deserve it more have actually higher voting power while keeping
the the voting right completely equal and that that's, I believe, it's an advantage
because I mean, it's a big discussion,
but if you want to limit voting rights,
it might have big unexpected consequences as well.
Okay, enough from us.
Sorry for taking a little bit longer.
No, that's great.
That's great.
Looking forward to hear from you, Greg.
Definitely appreciate you going through all that.
I'm really excited that you all are moving
to Ethereum for one.
I think everyone here is definitely very supportive of Ethereum.
I love that.
And we'll dive a little bit more into the voting stuff a little bit later.
So there's definitely room to talk about that a little bit more.
So I also want to hear from a couple others that are looking at building
like movements or communities within the space.
I mean, I know Mehmet, you've focused quite a bit
on the space.
Josh, you've been going and building a movement
and discussions and thinking about the space as well.
So I'm just wondering if anybody else would like
to share a little bit as well.
Hello everyone.
Hi everyone, I am Mehmet, Mehmetmet said i am living in turkey in cash actually
with was uh with us last in the do cash and it was an amazing experience with him uh i have been
in this space for nine years but last four or five years i am building a community in cash and
we will actually first permanent web 3
have been Kaush over the years like we hosted everyone from global leaders, founders and
top-level first community members of all levels right here in the like small-town Mediterranean
coastal and actually we started after a pandemic so many digital nomads and boilers started to move
around the world and Kaush is became like one of the digital nomads boilers hub like Dubai or Bali or some of
Balkan cities.
And after the Russian-Ukraine conflict, both countries' nomads came to Kash and they suddenly
live here and actually are joining us from this moment for web3 hub
how we came to zulkash idea of course we inspired from a movement but we realized we are living on
the top of the treasury which one is the many inventions happened in anatolia you know, like Mesopotamia invented the tokens, clay tokens after agriculture revolution.
And this innovation came to Anatolia, actually,
right, our region, right, our area.
And it felt actually they,
Lydians abstract the value from goods to coin money.
And Lycian, Lycian states actually abstract the value from goods to coin money and the liquid liquid liquid stays actually
abstract reputations from people to vote actually it's very interesting right uh two abstractions
happened here and we start like uh go deep in history and we are trying to is we are inspiring
from history because all governance problems repeated many times all around the time.
And now we have new tools like blockchain and AIs.
Can you hear me, by the way?
Because my connection is...
Yes, I hear you perfectly.
Perfect, right.
So, two inversions happened here and we started like starting Zulkash, Zulkash grew up this
Asia.
It's a pop-up stand living experimental here.
Vitalik was online with us and also joined us and he made a very good speech in the first
democratic parliament in the history in patara and from this patara patara is actually
like first democratic parliament in the history it's like located in cash and even american
founder fathers and the constitution inspired from their institutions so uh last two years
actually last years uh last one year our team is working about ZOOGOV protocol and we
are focusing about...
Actually, ZOOGOV is an open source governance SDK.
We tried to build open source governance SDK.
It's still actively being built.
And we are designing around zero knowledge identity and flexible voting mechanism. Zero Knowledge Identity and Flexible Voting Mechanism. But last month we focused on other problems because we see many projects about their solving privacy problems, security problems, legal problems.
But everyone heard about Tali, right? two days ago they decided to stop a project and they were the one of the biggest DAO governors
too actually they were serving for over 500 DAOs as I remember so there is an epistemic
gaps also maybe we need one more abstraction from brain capacity because when brain capacity
hit the limits when human hit the limits we are making one abstraction like trade to coins.
If we reach up to numbers number, when we can't communicate more than 150 person and
when we start living in city states and we are making also reputation abstraction.
Now we are in the like under the data bombard bombing right like from digital screen and
everywhere and we see like the governance participation is so low like some of them
is like less than 6%.
How we can convince people how we can solve problem this how we can solve this problem so there is an epistemic gap uh people
are not so many times uh they doesn't know what for they are voting and they don't know the results
in a zoo code we are building like agent ai and it can summarize uh giving a
giving a short brief
and what we are voting for and what is the result,
like simulation for future.
And we are believing it helps people
to willing to participate in governance procedures.
Okay, great.
Thanks for giving me a quick overview and thanks for sharing some of the
problems that you see as well. I think that's very insightful for this discussion, which
actually leads me into the next part. So Veet actually talked about this where whenever
you're going and looking at how you want to go build Liberland, you are able to look across the globe,
you're able to look at different models, different frameworks,
and you're able to go and pick and choose what would be the best thing for that.
I think that's pretty cool because we're sort of in the rare position,
being in a place, putting together post-Nation states
or something new from scratch,
we're able to start from basically without so many limitations.
So what I want to do is I want to open up the room
to a larger question.
We all know the current systems.
We know the problems with DAOs.
We know the problems with traditional voting.
And we also know what's absolutely essential.
What are some of the problems that we absolutely need to avoid
within these post-nation states, these network states, and what are some absolute essentials
based on what you've seen? Anybody want to take this on or kick off?
No, I'll jump in. This is Adam from MyDAO. I work with the government of the Marshall Islands
on our Web3 innovation and especially supporting DAOs with legal structures.
You know, someone brought up already, you know, more nuanced voting methods than simple
one person, one vote, which has concerned people ever since the beginning of
time. And someone else brought up Tally shutting down. And I think one of the interesting things
to note about Tally was that they had a pretty basic, generally one token, one vote or one person,
one vote system. And you look at an alternative like Aragon,
which is also one of the original DAO tooling platforms that has been aggressively building alternative methodologies for decision making and governance into their technology for years now.
And they're actually doing very well. So they're growing fast. I was speaking with their CEO the other day.
I think they're seeing a lot of success.
And you can probably attribute that to the same thing,
which is building more flexible governance mechanisms
and just a more diversity of governance mechanisms
into the technology.
At MyDAO, where we have over 300 Web3 projects,
many of which are DAOs, or at least are doing on-chain governance, certainly a trend over the past couple of years has been a move away from just one person, one vote, or one token, one vote into governance systems that are designed in more nuanced ways for the community they represent.
they represent. Even things like futarchy, which you could argue is meritocratic in a way,
like Veed brought up meritocracy. Really, it's a direct market-based decision-making mechanism
where people buy and sell decisions, in a sense, to help determine the direction that the governance
goes. And I just think that these new creative approaches, there's a good chance that they're
going to see more success than the model we started out with in crypto, which was just keeping it simple, whether that was for our own reasons or for technological reasons.
100%, 100%. I think those are really great points.
And that's maybe answering the
first question right the what is some some new things that we can do uh really excited about
that as well maybe i can just touch on the essentials that you asked about anthony
um i think the cool thing is now that we have the opportunity to create a new
uh or to to kind of start from scratch a little bit in this space,
in this post-nation states governance space, that we can bring the essentials over from
physical voting, which is privacy and to a certain degree verifiability, but bring those
into digital, which the real world doesn't even have yet.
So like those are essentials from physical voting
in the real world that needs to be essential
also for digital voting.
And if we're building in a space
where we can start from scratch,
we can build it digitally right from the get-go.
And I think the really nice thing,
especially in this kind of dilemma
between privacy
and auditability and verifiability is that we are all,
I think converging on this really nice stack.
And I think last time we touched upon this
and that last Twitter space, we touched upon this already,
which is this, we can use the knowledge proofs
for verifiability and we can use homomorphic encryption or Elgar Mile
to count votes or tally the votes in the encrypted form.
And we can use threshold encryption
to split up the keys for this basically.
And that kind of that stack,
I think Da Vinci is working on that same stack. Shutter, we're working on this stack. I think Da Vinci is working on that same stack. Shutter, we're working on this
stack. I think there's also outside of blockchain, the Bellinios protocol, very similar. So I'm
really excited about this stack finally kind of enabling, solving this dilemma of privacy
and verifiability. Yeah, and that's essential. But it's essential, but it's not even
like there for the real world in digital voting.
Cool.
And then, Ruchero, go ahead.
Hello, everyone.
Happy to be here.
Some of you know me already by other names.
I guess I'm sorry I'm on the bus if it makes noise,
background noise.
I hope you're hearing me well.
Yep.
I hear you perfectly.
So my understanding, and I've been working on this field
for a couple of years now,
is that the technology is mature now.
It's mature. Obviously it's not perfect.
It can always be more fast, use less resources, easier to implement, etc. More options,
more features, more types of voting. But we can safely say that today that voting in presence in paper and voting online on the blockchain with the cryptography is the same thing in terms of security.
This is my understanding.
So the technology, it's not a technology issue.
Now it's absolutely a societal issue.
what I feel and I felt this for a while now
what we are missing
is a strong use case
what I mean
we have had already
parliamentary voting
elections in Estonia
everybody knows this is the Emirates
we already have a lot of voting
in Daos
we have voting in a lot of fandoms
football clubs you name it we have tried but we are yet to pick something which is very sensitive
in society today and do a mass scale voting i'm not sure what this issue could be and which
country is best fitted for this type of strong use case exercise but I have some
ideas and I would like to hear from you your thoughts from what I just shared.
From my side, I would say answering to the maturity of the technology is that I think we made great advancements, but I don't see right now any voting solution that
have enough security guarantees to kind of be put in place from the point of view of physical voting.
So I think we need more resources on this side,
more reviews from people that already knows a lot
about cryptography and technology.
And I think there's a big elephant in the room
that nobody talks about, and is that device security.
Nowadays, we all rely on probably more mobile-oriented OS, like iOS or Google.
In that case, iOS is a closed system, and Google seems that it's pushing Android to be also closed.
And we can have the best cryptographic guarantees
at the protocol level.
But if we don't have also the best security guarantees
at the mobile level, so at the hardware level,
I think we are not quite yet ready
for doing like mass scaling voting
in any kind of nation state.
I mean, we are better and we are
in a good position than we were in the past, but yeah, I think we should be very cautious about
this. From the other side, most of our, let's say, economical, financial, banking interactions are made from from mobiles and electronic devices.
But I think that given that you can have a lot of legal consequences of misusing these tools,
and they're also centralized in some way, they can kind of, if they have any problem, they can just
redo the history of the transactions that were fraudulent in some way.
But I think for voting we need to even give more guarantees that from the financial system.
That's my take on the maturity of the technology.
Cool. Anybody else want to share some thoughts? I'm actually quite kind of curious as well about the within like a nation state you have you have courts you have legal bodies you have all these
different systems that check balances and check everything.
In a post-nation state or network state, you don't have all that. So what are the systems that
actually ensure that things stay together and stay legitimate and that it's trustworthy?
So I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts around there. But yeah, I will go and pass it to Alex.
Yes, thanks.
So yeah, at Kleros, I think we've
thought about this for a few years now
and starting to build up about this.
So basically, about the justice system, what we see in traditional nation state is like it's quite slow and basically you need to be in the same jurisdiction.
So it's not a good fit for everything related to the crypto economy and the new economy.
you know that's what CLAROS is done for because it's basically a decentralized
dispute resolution system that is cross-border so you don't need any to be based in a specific
jurisdiction like you can have a contract between like two people that are in two different
jurisdictions with the idea of private law they agree on the contract together and they agree to
have Cleros as an arbitrator for their case and it could be solved. And we also can solve
disputes that happen from this new kind of community and organization and thinking about a network state and thinking about
daos all these new entities that live on the blockchain and they don't have like some of them
don't have an entity that is incorporated in a specific jurisdiction so i think it's these tools
are getting built uh cleros is one of them when it comes to decentralized justice
and decentralized dispute resolution.
But there are many more that we need to have there
around digital voting, like many, many, many are there.
But I also want to emphasize that what we want on the long term
is to increase the legitimacy of this tool.
And I think it should go in both directions.
And that's what we are also doing at Cleros.
We are working with some government.
Some of our case were recognized legally.
I'm thinking about Mexico, for instance,
there was a case that was recognized legally binding,
in Argentina as well. So I think we should go in both directions and should also have some recognitions from network
states. I think there may also be an opportunity to reframe the question a little bit. You know,
when I saw the question initially, I thought maybe it should be,
is digital voting ready for post-nation-state monopoly governance? You look at what they're
doing in Liberland and that network state became successful enough to become a nation-state.
And you look at nation-states that are small island nations, like the Marshall Islands,
but especially others that are projected to nations like the Marshall Islands but especially others
that are projected to be literally underwater in 50 years due to rising sea levels those nation
states may become network states and you can also just look at island nations that are doing things
like the Marshall Islands with distributing UBI now optionally through digital currency to digital wallets and say, well,
these small nations are also a little bit like network states in some ways in terms of their
size and their scope and their needs. So it may also just be interesting to look at what states
are doing with digital voting and how the transition and relationship in the future may be between states and network states.
And even considering that, you know, people will still, for the foreseeable future, have to live and work physically somewhere.
And so that's likely to be in a nation state for the foreseeable future, even if they also belong to network states.
And so maybe there is some role of the nation state
and their monopoly on power and their ability to arrest
or enforce agreements that will be a necessary component
of even network state governance?
I think that's an interesting point.
There's a bit of a parallel between the idea of a network state and simply the kind of diaspora of people from any given nation states living outside of their nation state.
If I'm an Australian living in the US currently, and so Australia, my relationship with Australia
while I'm in the US is functionally quite similar to if Australia were a network state, right? I had this purely remote relationship with Australia
as an entity and as a state whilst living abroad.
And so, yeah, there probably is some lessons to be taken
from network states in terms of how nation states deal with and kind of account for and provide for their diaspora living abroad.
Yep, that's a really good point there.
So I just want to hear a little bit more from some of the other people in the room, from the different perspectives.
So for example, I'm curious to hear a little bit from Josh, if you would like to share
a little bit, because I know you've been speaking quite a bit with a number of people around the space
of network states and building a movement of people to go and develop around different ideologies i'm just kind of curious kind of stuff that you've been doing within this space and to
just hear general thoughts as well hey yeah sure um so hard for me to know where to start i think um i mean for context um
you know i to be i'm i'm super anti network states to be perfectly honest with you guys
um i think it's a really a really silly idea and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in reality.
And I'm taking this mainly from network states as defined by Balaji, who wrote the book.
I read the book, the entire thing, and it was not a very good read to be my opinion.
And spent like many, you know, I have like, I don't know, something like 15 or so podcast episodes, probably talking to different people about network states, their critiques of kind of the things that Bellagio lays down and the issues with him.
of their critiques of kind of the things that Bellagio lays down and the,
and the issues with him. And yeah, so I think, you know,
I think what's the most frustrating thing about it, the concept is that it,
it's like, it's close on a lot of things,
things that people were already doing.
And then Bellagio kind of made this term that tried to claim a lot of different
things at the same time and turn it into something that I think would be a very
dangerous direction.
Yeah, I think it's, I would have, you know,
I would be very critical of like the Liberland situation and what they've been doing.
I find it kind of a little bit abhorrent what they're doing, to be honest.
The, you know, the piece of land that they're taking, that they're trying to claim, they have really no legitimate claim over.
They don't really have, they don't have any nation state, like real recognition in any meaningful sense. I think it's very dangerous.
Some of the ideas, if they were put into practice, kind of what they would be in the
nation-state context. I'm all for like experimentation with governance and with
voting. That's like a big part of what I do and what I work on as well I just think that the kind of approach that
projects like Lieberland this kind of like very free market fundamentalist
approach is I mean like he already said you know he mentioned it kind of a shame
that he left so quickly right after speaking but yeah clearly he's someone
who doesn't believe in democracy and uses this term meritocracy to kind of like paint over the reality of like the thing that he's trying to build.
Yeah, I see your hand up.
Josh, I'm really glad you brought that up about the dangerous part.
brought that up about the dangerous part. And I actually had in the back of my mind, like,
what prevents power concentrations within these groups? That's why I was very curious about
Xerox Alex and legal and all that stuff. I'm curious, like, what aspect of danger
were you highlighting when you were saying that? And then because you highlighted this danger, is there anything
that could be possibly done that could alleviate some of those concerns of dangerous?
Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing that you're talking about definitely,
Like in any, like having no, uh, yeah.
Stop gaps for, for inequality in like the,
the specific systems that they're talking about, um, being a,
essentially what,
what they're calling for is like a centralization machine for, um,
for capital to accumulate and for capital itself to be a form of power,
but they just call it meritocracy which
the term meritocracy was actually made in jest it was like a joke when the guy who made that term
like it doesn't exist um so i think inequality is like a really big one um a lot of the types of
inspirations that these types of projects take include places that have a lot of, you know,
slave labor, I mean, or just like very poor labor practices for migrants that come to work there.
So I think, yeah, to me, I'm more in the camp of, I'm not necessarily saying that all voting needs
to be one person, one vote. I think there's definitely room for experimentation.
There's definitely room for figuring out what types of voting systems work and
in what context and, you know, having, I mean,
things like quadratic voting I think are really interesting.
They don't have to be, you know,
based on the amount of money someone holds like kind
of how gitcoin was doing it at one point um in the context of a nation state i think it is really
important to have more of an equal say across across like large swaths of people um
so yeah i mean to me it's it's more like to prevent these accumulation of power, it requires like checks and balances.
It requires like people to be able to express their opinion if they don't like it just because someone has more money than someone else is something that they deserve more say.
And that's, in fact fact how the world works today so um i think if we really want to build
something alternative something different than what the the failures of the institutions that
we have today i think we have to actually be looking at more democracy rather than less
um and to provide the the levers of of control and power like to broader swaths of people rather than less.
That's great. I'm going to pass it to Futuro, but as
Futuro answers and shares a little bit,
I'm curious to get other opinions around checks and
balances that Josh was
highlighting that we desperately need for
something like that.
But yeah, Futuro, go ahead.
I was wondering,
because I've heard of the nation's network state idea
and concept and I think I understand it abstract
from an abstract point of view.
I don't think it's such a disruptive idea in itself, but I'm curious to know
Is the audience here familiar with the cooperatives and how cooperatives are different from corporations for example?
If you could give a really quick explanation
Okay, so
from from the answers I guess the most of the audience is not familiar and
Well, I run a cooperative
And I think they can play a role in
the evolution that we are living and how society is going to be different from what it is today.
Basically, cooperatives, they don't seek profits.
They're like a corporation.
They can do whatever they can.
They are a legal entity.
They are registered.
They are recognized. they can be put in
in courts but they do not seek profits they just seek activity and where i'm from is a niche thing
it's not very popular but i i have a feeling it can be a importance it can play an important role
in the future.
But look, and I finish.
We have expert people here in the audience,
and if they say that technology is not yet ready for sensitive things,
how can we have...
I guess that answers the question
in the topic.
Just wanted to chime in on the comment about
the network state at a high level
and not necessarily loving Balaji's book.
You know, if anyone's not familiar with a book called The Sovereign Individual,
which was written 20 years prior by James Davidson and Lord Reese Mugg,
that was a big inspiration for the network state.
And I think even mentioned by Balaji as, you know, kind of being a predecessor idea.
And to me, it's much broader.
It's a much better made, thoroughly made argument for kind of a trend of sovereignty into the future from which you could draw the conclusion that the network state is what results.
The network state is what results, but also broader predictions and identification of trends in terms of just the future of sovereignty in general that I think would be worth anyone checking out if you haven't yet read that. Oh, anybody want to add on?
Okay, no worries.
So next question, I want to pass it to jordi so jordi's actually uh launched a product uh last week uh
with vocdoni davinci um and i think it's a quite an interesting platform that would be relevant
for this conversation jordi do you want to go ahead and get and give a quick share yeah sure
uh so yeah basically the idea we had is that since the protocol that we are developing around digital voting and so on, it gets more ready and more ready.
We wanted also to showcase what you can build with the protocol, because I mean, the protocol is just like the base layer, but then you can build a lot of different tackle this kind of identity problem. And in the past November,
we got a grant from Ethereum for the World Initiative. And yeah, the idea was to implement,
on top, I mean, to integrate some kind of ZKE legal document verification. So we partnered with Self, which was founded by the founders of
Zelo too. So the idea was that, okay, we want to create a platform where people, kind of a change
point in some way, where people can ask questions and then
you have verified people from a certain country that you can verify with your passport or
with national identity or even having some, I mean, verifying using some utility bills.
And then you kind of get rid of the problem about people that is not from that country
to have a say on that specific thing
for that country.
And yeah, we presented Ask for the World.
You can find it at asktheworld.davinci.ninja.
And the idea was to showcase the power of a decentralized voting protocol integrated
with this kind of ZK validation layer.
So basically, you can just go to the website, you create a voting process, and then you can share
this voting process via link. So putting it on Twitter or via mail or whatever other platform.
And you don't need any kind of Web3 knowledge for voting.
So you have a really easy UI, and then you
can just have your say there in form of a vote.
But when we talk votes, it's just a way of agreeing
or disagreeing on something.
So I think it's really interesting
for running public consultations, doing in on something so i think it's it's really interesting for uh running kind of public
consultations doing some diaspora polls community governance uh it i think it's also super
interesting for cities and institutions and even even for those and yeah the idea is is to
to showcase what what you can build on top of ofVinci and what you can do with solutions like Self or ZK Passport
or the Rarimo Passport app.
So, yeah, and the cool thing about this for me,
it's always to abstract all the technology we are building,
but I think because I think we are really kind of focused on the web-free world
and at the end this is very niche.
And I think we should start building technology
that people can use without any prior knowledge of technology.
In that case, I would say that the downsides of this first version
is that even that you cannot scan an NFC
passport or national ID using the browser, you need to download the Self app or whatever,
or any other app that you want to integrate.
And yeah, in that case, for example, Self just works on the CELO-Needwork, but we have
been talking with them to see if they
they are going to deploy in other networks or have some kind of cross-chain communication
seems that that yes so yeah this is just a first product that we we want to keep to keep improving
so yeah if you have any any suggestions for improving it, feel free to
share the feedback with us. But I think it's something kind of nice, to be honest.
I really like this idea and the product. Just curious, why does it need the
cello or the blockchain part for? Because when you create a voting process,
the DaVinci contracts are deployed in the cell network
and also for the passport verification,
the self-app uses the public registry of the passports in the cell network.
So for creating a voting process, you need to interact with the blockchain
and then you need gas for
for that specific blockchain but this is just for the creation part for the voting creation part or
the poll creation part then for the voters you don't need anything any gas or any any web3 stuff
cool and then and then the vote counting and everything is happening on chain or off chain
And then the vote counting and everything is happening on chain or off chain?
Yeah, the vote counting is using the sequences network that we have and everything is validated
and uploaded on chain. So you have all the cryptographic guarantees on the smart contracts.
Right now we sell, but at some point will be mainnet and any other network. That makes sense to be the Python.
Yeah, that's a really good example of bridging the,
as I said, kind of the real world.
People could now run a poll or something.
Yeah, and this also is really nice,
at least for the European perspective, because it seems that next year we will have this European wallet
and the idea is that every citizen will have this European identity.
So it's issued by the government on top of the passport and its national identity system,
but they will be compatible.
so at some point you can even do some cross-nation voting. So yeah, the idea is
So at some point you can even do some cross-nation voting.
to keep working on this and to keep integrating other identity systems and at some point try to
merge these kind of documents and electronic identities issued by governments. So in that sense, we can have more reach to, let's say, citizens.
Great.
So we just have four minutes left.
And so what I want to do is go around and do final thoughts.
So we've covered a lot of topics.
We've looked at a lot of different areas. And I just want to get some final thoughts. So we've covered a lot of topics. We've looked at a lot of different areas.
And I just want to get some final thoughts for everyone.
If there is something you want to share, such as a key takeaway,
do you think voting is ready?
Do you think there's aspects that we need to look into?
Is there more information that needs to be gathered?
Go ahead and share your thoughts.
And I'll start with Babzi.
Yo, thank you very much for giving me the mic,
so far.
Well, I'm Babzi.
I'm from Lagos, San Diego.
I noticed you guys have been talking about the ZBK passport,
people, mostly European countries,
the United States and the rest of the continent.
You guys are not talking much about the African perspective to things.
I think probably, I don't know, probably one of you guys might be interested in like
destroying this on African communities, maybe African DAOs or something like that.
What this means for us is kind of entirely different.
The kind of problem we face here with e-voting. Like with voting is very, very, very different
from the problem you guys face there.
I don't know, probably it's something that could be
test drawn on, probably protocol first.
It could scale, if we put the scale,
they'll probably scale it to communities
then probably national level.
That's just my point of view to this
because voting is kind of critical in currently my country my country is over
300 million people only only like 20 million votes why because you could you
could easily get killed or locked up or like sent to jail for voting for the wrong choice or wrong party that's
what happened this is a life experience this is a lived experience kind of i don't know maybe we
could do something we are talking about the future of decentralized governance and i think africa
also needs to be included in one of these things. That's just my take to things.
And thank you for all of you that have been speaking.
I've been listening.
And yeah, I took one or two things to take away.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to point out.
So thank you very much for giving me the mic.
JOHN MUELLER 1 Great.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Go ahead, Futuro.
Yeah, I'll take the risk of being wrong, but I'll say this again.
I believe technology is mature enough.
I mean, if you have end-to-end verifiable systems, how much better can technology be? Sure, the user terminal can be
captured with virus, whatever can be captured, but
the voter himself will notice that his vote is not counted well because it's end-to-end verifiable. So
I'll give this that
the general public is not educated on the technology.
Even if the technology is mature enough, the general public is not educated.
So how can the voter then verify its vote?
How can the voter be sure?
I think this is education of the public is an important next step and i mean how many times do we vote
not in a show of hands with the friends to go to the restaurant but
for serious things and how many organizations exist that have big numbers of people that make part of this organization. How many?
I don't think there are many. I think we need to create use cases, we need to create something
sensitive that will draw attention to what we are building. And I hope that people from
the technology side will keep on improving the algorithms and new people outside of the technology aspect will start to show up and to bring this technology to where it needs to be.
Great.
I know if people have to go, they can.
But if somebody wants to go and share a couple last final remarks, please keep it short.
I'll just go. Hi, everyone. Lashaf, Freedom Tool. Basically, I came in to listen to all this
community. It doesn't matter if we agree with the nation-state or the charter cities and all
these predecessors from a form we're trying
to experiment with. I think that what the problem that is on the surface does not matter
we run it in real world with a certain communities or groups of people or the structures of these
network cities. The problem is that most of the time we don't know what to vote for or why to vote for.
Like all the structures and the decision making and Liberland speech was exactly like a depiction of it.
It just shows you that there is no real shift in the process of governance, right?
So when we talk about the DAOs or those structures and where even the treasury management is not given away straight away and you have this kind of gatekeeping by the founders or the creators early on, these are the friction points.
So it does not matter what technology does or where we reach and how much of a secure guarantee is we provide because security is always relative to something, right?
All these starting points of these communities
have not really figured out the basic decision-making
that leads to certain outcomes.
And expecting people to give these tools
and for them to just share this opinion or participate because it's such a call leads to really zero results. They're plagued in that term that we're not really shifting the mechanism where we will show each individual that using this tool, you're going to have an instant outcome and execution of a certain verdict.
And that's why nation states and the elections who participate more or less where there is democracy and ability to influence this decision are good.
influence this decision
good and like we love
benchmarking
how can we scale to that point
but I think
we need to fundamentally
rethink how these
organizations or groups of
people coordinate with each
other and then we can think about
scale ups
Great, one more? with each other and then we can think about scale-ups.
Great, one more.
Yeah, thanks for this. Just remember to keep an eye on small nation states
and nation states and their transition towards network states
or how they participate in them
as part of where we look to see trends in this area.
Absolutely. We'll definitely be watching those space.
So thank you so much for everyone.
This is our third X space within the series and probably our last one.
What you can do is you can go back to our feed and you can see the other two with no problem.
They all have the same visual, so not too difficult.
And if you're curious as well,
what I'll do is I'll post in the latest X thread as well.
I'll put the link to the State of Private Voting Report
if you'd like to have a look at the voting applications
that were reviewed a couple of months ago
as they're quite interesting.
Anyways, thank you so much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
It's been very insightful.
Until the next one, have a good one.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks all.
Bye-bye.
Bye, thanks.
