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Comment by nurple | Hacker News Reader

I'm not against it, coercion/bribery always seemed to be a bit of an underwhelming justification for it; I just have a difficult time seeing it being done at scale (at least at the same scale as mutating the records can apparently be done), and like you said, it seems to excessively complicate the task.

Even thinking of the possibilty of self-auditing, it leaves a large hole in the conceptual capability of validating the aggregate numbers.

What I'd like to see is a human-to-human system, even if electronic (a la "venmo me"), where groups of people gather, discuss the issues, and cast their votes to eachother in a tree. The recievers meet and transfer their counts to the root of their branch, and so on to the tree's root.

Every group knows their aggregate count, and even if you made the values of each node in the tree public it may be possible to keep the actual votes private outside of the individuals that make up each of the leafs.

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And while I'm at it, why not get even more revolutionary (pun intended): the concept of a representative democracy was formed in a time when the most efficent method of communication was to put either man or paper on a horse and make an arduous cross-country journey.

IMO, our current method of deciding what we should do with our collective power to be hopelessly outmoded. After all, that's the whole point of the federal government, to coordinate the pool of our resources towards common goals greater than we, either individually or as a (US)state-sized entity, could accomplish alone.

If we can effectively solve the problem of distributed consensus (hmmm, where have I heard that term), what purpose then do our "representatives" hold in a system where we can directly voice our will for the future direction of our union and the allocation of its resources?

In a system where we can instantly share our desires on some motion, and can shed the pomp, circumstance, and huge machinations of a once every [insert term here] concensus ceremony, we coud directly drive towards executing on a daily basis if we so desired.

This could even open up the possibility that individuals could delegate their opinion to one or a group of subject-matter experts they feel an alignment with under specific topics, forming subject-oriented representatives rather than popularity-oriented.

The thing is that these are ideas(maybe good, maybe bad), ideas can be tested, and in a fast-moving system ideas can be iterated on quickly and driven by data. We've found this methodology to be extremely effective in so many facets in our lives that it astounds me we don't consider a similar approach to improving the lot of all humanity in this crazy world.

I’m not ready to abandon representative democracy, but I agree technological advances have made a more direct democracy system sound feasible. I’m in the US where the design rules stated congressional representatives were never to exceed a 35,000:1 ratio, but the representatives removed that rule.

Yeah, it’s an idea I think about sometimes but don’t really get to try on in words. I get frustrated when reps hide unpopular actions behind bureaucracies and unelected bureaucrats against the people’s voice or best interests, like your example or something like net neutrality.

It’s getting more common to shift the system towards their ability to move unilaterally. In my home state, for example, this last legislative session they changed the referendum law to be non-compulsory on their part, with the argument that citizens are weaponizing it to stall land developers.

That was the only political redress we had available as it is becoming more common for the capital-captured legislature to ok plans that are unhealthy for the continued thriving of our communities in the name of money. As an example, severely oversubscribed water shares in the face of ultra high density housing is becoming a serious problem that they conveniently ignore when approving developments.

There are definitely more and lesser measures that would facilitate a shift back towards the citizenry, but it feels like less and less of a possibility every day our options get diluted in small ways.

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