Liberland

04 Mar 2020 by rate3

After publishing my ratings of the Liberland project I still have one pending issue left - to review their "Constitution" and to compare it to decentralized governance solutions, which are slowly but surely gaining popularity in the DLT space.

Liberland is striving to be the first officially recognized libertarian Republic, which is, of course, hardly compatible with the direct democracy embraced by most contemporary decentralization governance protocols (f.e. Dodge or, for much lesser extend, EOS).

As wikipedia puts it: "The primary positions of power within a republic are attained, through democracy, oligarchy, autocracy, or a mix thereof … ".

As we can see, "democracy" under the republican form of governance serves just as a mean for individual or group actors to attain the power, which then becomes a major breach point in this protocol, attracting multiple malicious agents. Moreover, the Republic, where small groups of "representatives" take on themselves a disproportional power (or major governance functionalities within the main protocol) is particularly vulnerable to the Sibil attack.

Extract (wiki): "in a Sybil attack, the attacker subverts the reputation system of a network service by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence"

By a contrast, widely distributed, decentralized governance systems, led by the algorithmic consensus, are much less likely to be subverted by those types of attacks, specially when the number of nodes (or "decision making centers") reaches hundreds of thousands or millions.

Sure, the Liberland Constitution attempts to patch up the glaring holes in the existing Republican protocols (such as f.e. imposing shorter time limits on various representatives' stay in power or criminalizing bureaucratic errors) but it still considers the power itself being inherently bestowed into the hands of few selected individuals rather than proportionally distributed among all citizens.

Of course, this mistake is largely due to the historical inertia within the existing legal and managerial systems (specially on the countries' level) where a limited number of individuals, congregated in several national groups, have long ago breached the existing governance algorithms within their geographical regions, which allowed them to monopolize resources distribution as well as unrestrictedly apply the cohesive force to prevent any attempts to change the status-quo.

Consequently, the prevailing views on governance question even within the small community of "dissidents" is that we only need to restore the "normal" functionality within the existing pyramidal governance systems - not to completely redesign them changing the decision making flows from the bottom to the top.

That is, of course, the mistake, which we are not bound to make again in the view of the latest developments in the combined DLT, AI and IoT fields.

However, first we must override the prevailing view that the question of social governance is "ideological" - not purely technical one. Sure, those individuals, which have been disproportionately benefiting from the current hacks of existing systems would make all in their power to prevent us from doing that, including, by appealing to numerous "historical" precedent.

We should not be distracted by those attacks because there are absolutely no logical reasons to believe that mathematical consensus driven systems complemented by machine learning and empowered by IoT devices will be less effective in securing social and economic progresses, than the existing pyramidal, highly inefficient decision making bureaucratic machines, which often are either completely stalled or bypassed by one or several aspiring and resourceful malicious actors.

The result of such mechanisms long overstaying their due-date is not only periodic catastrophic events within our social and economic fabrics but also the enduring damage to natural protection layers, which shield us from a number of highly damaging exogenous natural influences.

Obviously, redesigning our governance mechanisms has became the question of our survival rather than that of ideology. Faced by this reality we should not turn our backs to our own latest technological achievements risking among other things that those technologies will be used by the same malicious actors to impose more unnecessary restrictions on our individual inoffensive actions.

From that view implementing multiple decentralized systems led by mathematical consensus must start from local, bottom levels in order to be aggregated into larger systems leading to the overall long-term world-system stability coupled with local sub-systems reactionary immediacy and flexibility in adapting to various unpredictable events.

Sure, we still have a question of current systems change and the new ones' implementation left outstanding. That might be seen by many as a breaking point. However, that's where we can come back to Liberland project, which presents itself one of the first contemporary attempts to renew the practical attempts to challenge the existing governance mechanisms by proposing some better (although so more slightly) alternatives.

For that I salute Liberland!