 I'm from democracy.earth and we're an organization that is trying to figure out what democracy means or stand for democracy within crypto networks, any kind of network, including nation states. So we're an organization that is in the middle of activism, politics and crypto and hacking. So every coin has two sides and in governance, those two sides, it's certainly moving between the land and the cloud. This was a thesis originally exposed by Balaji Sirini Vasan. He's now the CTO of Coinbase, so he certainly is closer to the cloud now. But if we look closely at what's happening in the land and the cloud, the land is pretty much broken. See, the voter turnout, even in developed nations, has been going down since the 70s. There's complete lack of citizen control in electoral processes, no transparency. Nation states are fragmenting and there's the rise of autocrats, which some people perceive as a very bad thing and other people perceive as just an acceleration of the system ending soon. The land consists of governments, consists of those entities that control the territory, consists of those entities that control our bodies. And the cloud consists of those entities that control the mind, that control information. And the challenge that we're facing right now is that the influence of social media in democratic processes around the world is undeniable. And social media, we know this problem very well. There's centralization of data, no ownership of identity, there are farming user attention. I'm preaching to the choir probably over here. So what's the origin of the nation state? Most historians agree that after 30 years of war in Europe, they came to negotiate the Treaty of Westphalia, which was a peace treaty that brought a particular novelty in the process to deliver peace in Europe that was this principle of non-domestic intervention. We will draw borders and you don't mess on my domestic affairs and I won't mess on your domestic affairs. And this gave rise to a new consciousness on how to execute politics. Notoriously in France, for example, was the rise of Cardinal Richelieu who started prioritizing the interests of the state over Catholic or religious interests or over monarchical interests. So for example, keeping fragmented Germany, which seems to be like a pattern across Europe throughout history, was strategically relevant for France who made strong alliances with German people in order to keep strategically stronger relative to Britain. So the origin of the nation state is this Nash equilibrium of nations where the best move is not to move. If I attack this nation, then this nation will attack me. So we are all threatening each other in a way that keeps an equilibrium of power and we can try to keep the peace within an extended territory. So eventually these equilibriums start breaking apart and notoriously is the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall, according to the thesis of the sovereign individual, is not the beginning or the end of the communist or the Soviet bloc and the triumph of western civilization and capitalism, but it's actually the first episode of a greater mega-political trend that has to do with the end of the nation state. And the reason I'm picturing Tetris there is because the same year that the Berlin Wall fell, the most successful video game in the western world was Tetris that was developed by a Russian who never saw a dime. Actually the Russian government still saw the royalties of that, but it was a game about bringing down a wall. It is a game about bringing walls down. So it's certainly interesting to see that how digital technology has been shaping and influencing our perception of the world since the early days, even in handheld devices. So now the problem with these equilibriums is that eventually you have these players that exploit them, that find some specific strategies and specific vulnerability within the countries or within the nations that are trying to sustain the peace and get the benefits. Notariously, it was Napoleon in the 19th century, Hitler in the 20th century, and now we're witnessing this strange fight between Russian interests subverting democracies around the world through the use of false propaganda, fake news or maybe real news, who knows, by exploiting social media, by exploiting the algorithms that have been used before to actually instill or tumble governments elsewhere, like in the Arab Spring, where Facebook was also very influential in driving those riots in Egypt. So the interesting thing now is that it's having an impact home. The big question after the election of Donald Trump is whether or not there was influence of social media or fake propaganda, fake Russian propaganda in the election in America itself. So it's interesting that the election of Trump seems to be very much directly connected to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of the Russian money after the end of the Soviet bloc was actually being laundered using Trump Tower and Trump properties around the world. So we are witnessing these greater geopolitical trends that are shaping up our relation with the political world that we're living in. The bottom line is that the internet is incompatible with nation states. I think this is a very relevant narrative that we need to start putting out there. We need to start getting everyone to embrace the fact that we have globalized commerce, we have globalized merchandise and finance, but certainly keeping political tied to silos, to territorial silos is no longer possible in a world that is already connected by the internet. So I think that a big lesson of the trauma that came after the election of Donald Trump through fake propaganda exploiting Facebook algorithms coming from Russians. And Mark is that, let's assume the fact that the internet is incompatible with nation states. So how bad is it really? Are we in this Mr. Robot world where everything is coming down, our democracy has been hacked, are we getting all kinds of weird thoughts in our minds as we keep interacting with these networks? Well, I always wonder when I was watching this show, Mr. Robot, what would it look like if suddenly everything hacked and how would it be portrayed in the media and we would get all paranoid trying to get our cash out of the bank. Something that I actually experienced many times living in Argentina. Well, it is pretty bad actually. Like, a very quick search on Google gives me these headlines from all different kinds of news sources that are about these massive identity leaks. 50 million users on Facebook, you got one title saying 29 million, another title saying 90 million, one, only one is already enough. LinkedIn, 6.5 million stolen passwords is actually 72 million, Uber, 57 million users data, Equifax, 143 million credit reporting history of Americans in the U.S. So it looks really, really bad when you start putting all of these headlines together. And actually, there is people putting these headlines together. There's someone that is actually, this is a very cool decentralized application, by the way, it's 45 gigabytes. It's not as big as the blockchains out there, but it's getting big. That is aggregating each and every single one of these leaks on a single text-based file that you can access via BitTorrent. And for example, this file has 1.6 billion email password combinations. And if you are wondering if your email password combination is there, I have done a test with my friends, 80% chances is that it is there, at least a password that you'd use until 2012, 2013, from what we've been able to analyze from this. And like everyone is there. You can look, I look for the president of Argentina, I look for a lot of personalities. And I look for Zuckerberg, of course, Karma. And the interesting thing is that among the, of course, many of these are probably not real, but these look pretty real to me. And the thing about Sack is that he's colorblind and he cannot see the color green, so it makes you wonder, maybe this could be some of the passwords he used on the past. It's Karma. Tom York said that the idea of Karma was a good idea because the minute you start believing in it, it becomes true. So there you go, Sack. So we, someone said the other, people don't vote. That's bullshit. People vote every day. Voting is the main interaction of what we do on the internet. We call it likes on Facebook, we call it, it's links on Google. Google is basically tallying links, it's counting votes. Voting is the main interaction on how we use the internet on a daily basis. The problem is that this kind of voting is just surveys that are being designed to increase the advertising revenue from these companies. And computation itself began in the 19th century as a way to be able to effectively tally votes in a much more speedy manner. So the challenge of what we're facing right now is that we need to figure out a way to change this interaction by something that is able to carry value, by something that is able to become valuable to the users, not to the owners of the network. So we are at Democracy Earth, we're thinking about tokenizing the like interaction and tokenizing it with every token. Not just our token or a specific token, but every single token that is out there. Let's make use of the ERC protocols in a way that can foster more opportunities and more moments where we can start transacting these tokens in interesting and creative ways. And each one of these tokens has their own governance logic embedded in its code. So we can have different governance mechanisms competing in a common playground. You know, we have to go against advertising, which is the model of the web. And advertising is just slang for corporations corrupting our attention. That's advertising. They are telling, you know, advertising is about telling you what to think, what to desire. And, you know, in a democracy, you need to have a free and healthy mind. It's not healthy for a democracy to have your opinions being shaped by organizations whose 97% of revenue depends on corrupting your attention. So I'm going to make a quick demo here to show you what we're talking about. About the recent, the upcoming release of Sovereign, which is our liquid democracy application that we're working at Democracy Earth. So I have here a quick instance. This is running locally on my machine. On the previous talk, someone said, we need products. People want to use products, not protocols. So we're trying to shape up our technology as simple as possible, to have a social media look and feel. There are some patterns of social media that are very, very good for democracy. They ask me anything pattern. It's a very good pattern for deliberation. And simply here, you know, we're going to be launching this, by the way, on November 15. So very, very soon, you log in with Metamask, you sign the transaction. It recognizes your address if you already have an account. On this account, I am Che Guevara, so go figure. And you can start simply posting, you know, let's take over Cuba. Oh, actually, they already done that, but this is just a demo. So the idea is to replace the like button with any token, you know, any token, any ERC20, any token that operates on the network itself. Let's say we can use some decentralized, if you want to make this a debate on virtual reality or something. And you can even restrict it by nationality. Maybe we want to talk to a specific, you know, people that use this token from a specific country and that have this country associated with their ID. And as simple as that, you just post content and you engage people on debating this issue. Whoever votes on this proposal, you know, we support two types of voting, off-chain voting by simply signing a verification that will use your balance in that signature so you can use your stake to vote in an off-chain way. And online, on-chain voting by simply making a transaction on the blockchain, which is more secure, less corruptible. We just want to allow and provide a toolkit that allows for all kinds of democratic transactions happening across social media. The interface also has this threaded conversation, which is, you know, trying to bring together a little bit of the best of Reddit with the best of Twitter and find interesting ways to use the tokens. For example, stake tokens on hashtags and discuss on how to use stake tokens on specific hashtags in the platform is another idea that, you know, we are actually implementing. So let me tell you about what the reality of implementing these types of systems. The background of Democracy Earth actually started as a political party in Argentina called Partido de la Red or the NET Party that has candidates committed to voting Congress always according to what people decide online. We run for elections in 2013. We got 1% of the votes. And in 2017, we actually had a very big internal decision in the party that was very high stakes. Everyone had a very strong position on this decision and was whether the party would be allowed to make alliances with other parties or not. You know, would be willing to deal with the traditional political system or we would maintain ourselves as a purest party, you know, not working with anybody else. And the interesting thing about that internal election is that because it was a very high stakes election, there were central points in the organization that were prone to corruption. And in particular, it was the database administrators. We didn't have a blockchain implementation back then. So whoever was running, whoever had control of the database had the ability to delay the registration of certain voters and accelerate the registration of other voters benefiting the outcome of the election to their bias rather than keeping the election as a whole neutral. And this election took only 100 voters. But this effectively happens and I've seen it in elections in Latin America in Argentina when it's also about millions of voters. The moment the authorities of the smaller parties are not there, the authorities of the larger parties start stealing the votes from the smaller parties. So there are a lot of points that are prone to corruptibility in democratic processes. So this experience, you know, where we saw suddenly the DB admins tumbling the election to their own bias by delaying registrations and accelerating others was a very clear example in our view of what needs to be built in terms of technology to prevent this type of behavior. So we need decentralized, self-sovereign, civil-resistant citizenship. And I highlight citizenship because, you know, identities are very broad, you know, concept and it can be tied to many different things, machines and humans, but, you know, we're specifically concerned about the role that humans play in decentralized networks. And this is the big problem that we've been trying to crack at the at democracy.earth. What is the approach that we think that could be pursued forward in relation to tackle this problem? So first, I'm going to use as an example the way that I did the birth certificate of my daughter. If you look for the coin desk article, meet the blockchain dad. That's me. Three years ago, I did the birth certificate of my daughter by simply doing a proof that is, you know, I wrote there, Turing Impossible. Something that requires enough bandwidth that will exceed computing capacity or commonly available computing capacity and that requires some kind of human judgment of the proof. In the case of my daughter's birth certificate, I've used video. I simply shot a video of myself in the hospital, my wife, that she was like very, very mad of me doing that video. My mother and my mother-in-law as witnesses, each one of them stating their own identity. And the last moment of the video, I'm shooting the Bitcoin blockchain with the last block of the blockchain and the hash related to that block so I can demonstrate that that video was shot in that moment of time. Now, that video is only for me. I don't need to publish this video anywhere. I don't need to share this video on any platform. This strictly can be a strictly private video. And in case of conflict in the future, I can use the evidence. What I submit is among trusted peers. I simply submit a hash and these trusted peers can develop a consensus that works as a trust graph. And it's done strictly through voting. And the reason that this has to be done strictly through voting is that in order to acknowledge human participants in networks, AIs, machine learning, software only recognizes patterns. It never really recognizes human participants. It cannot acknowledge other humans. Only people can acknowledge other people. So we need to put in place a protocol that really brings the attention variable in the way the consensus is being built. So a democratic trust graph. Then the score of this trust graph, it can be based on reputational algorithms like PageRank. The score of this trust graph then helps mean a claim that can be put on an ERC725 identity. And the claim that we care about is simply asking if the proof that is being on the hash that is going to be included in the ERC725 is a non-civil human. Is it a human being or not a machine? And does it have keys in the system already? That's the main claim that we need to verify by doing a democratic trust graph that uses these types of proofs. The challenge is to build a system that can be deployed in those places where identity is being denied. There are 65 million refugees in the world right now. Refugees are those who no state actor anywhere in the world is giving them an identity. I work very closely with Julio Coco. Julio Coco is an activist in Venezuela in Caracas. He runs a Twitter account that has over 300,000 followers. He's giving workshops on blockchain technology every weekend. And the challenge that when I met Julio in Caracas three or four years ago, he asked me, Santiago, what is politics to you? And I gave him a lame answer like, I don't know, the art of the impossible. And he said, no, no, no, no. Politics is one thing and one thing only. Politics is what you say in a given moment in time. That's all politics about. What you say in any moment in time. And my mind kind of exploded because that's literally what blockchains are. We've been using blockchains mostly for financial systems. But when it comes to governance, when it comes to politics, is by understanding what is being said and what kind of meaning is being attached to a specific transaction. And something that Coco asked me back then is that he has a very important need to organize his network of dissidents using social media, using digital networks. But it's a very huge risk because all of the ISPs are controlled by the government to expose any kind of identity, even email or any kind of identity that could track them down inside Venezuela. So being able to organize online while preserving their anonymity by being able to effectively signal identity and at the same time signal the legitimacy of those identities, but without revealing any personal information is extremely relevant for these political communities to organize in an environment, in a dictatorial environment like the one that Venezuela is being transformed into. The metric we care about in what we are designing as a system is fundamentally inclusion. We have a lot of metrics to benchmark and measure crypto networks out there. Most of them are tied to financial performance, but the challenge for us is to figure out a mechanism that we were by allocating this claim on ERC725 identities that at the States that you are effectively a human participant and you don't hold keys in the system and by doing it through a democratic consensus that can use a trust graph, then what we can end up measuring in the network is how many people we are including. We should be able to easily include each one of us in this room or each one of us in the city, in this country, eventually scale hopefully if the roadmap of Ethereum is able to deliver the whole world. So I will end up with a closing statement from a beautiful text written by John Perry Barlow in 1996, a declaration of the independence of cyberspace and he ends that beautiful manifesto saying we will create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace, may it be more humane. And I highlight his choice of words by saying that this network needs to be humane. We need to put power in people's hands. The AIs are already ruling the world. AIs have already put a meme in the White House. So we need to maybe more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before and he's talking to the industrial governments of the past. Beautiful text, I encourage you to look for this. And you can follow me on Twitter, I'm at Santicity, santicatdemocracy.earth. We're gonna be launching the new version of Sovereign, which is Liquid Democracy in a social media format enabled by with every token that is out there, not just our token. And we're gonna be launching this November 15. So if you register on the website before November 2nd, I've heard, you're gonna be hearing interesting news from us that we cannot share in public probably due to regulatory aspects and stuff. So thank you and yeah, if there are any questions. We have time for one, maybe two questions. Does anybody have a question? Oh, no. I have one question given that no one else does. Oh, great, we got someone, not me. I'm not sure if you, I'm not sure, thanks for your talk, it was a nightmare. I'm not sure if you mentioned it, but I think it's really important, especially in governance, to also think about the transitional moment when people are not on chain, are not in the blockchain, right? And how do we cope with this transitional moment, right? Because you talked about inclusion. What is this chasm that will basically be a challenge to basically create from one point inclusion while excluding the ones that are not in the inclusion, if you see what I mean? It's a critical question. We're doing a bunch of projects right now. For example, we're working with the Congress of Buenos Aires and we're, you know, we have implemented with them before a digital democracy platform, traditional web app. And now we're gonna take the opportunity to try to figure out how to airdrop at least one token on each of the validated accounts using a traditional mechanism for validation through a phone call and through email. And we're gonna, on this pilot, you know, we're gonna airdrop the token, then it's the matter of will they be able to use the token? Probably a lot of them not, because of gas cost or, you know, because, you know, getting to teach them how to install MetaMask, we have still those onboarding barriers. But at least we can start doing, you know, voting mechanisms that have no gas cost, like off-chain signing a message and using that as a way of, you know, tallying the vote eventually, you know, signaling the vote. And those techniques can hopefully be a very cheap way to get people starting using, you know, blockchain-based networks without having a huge payoff on gas, that the gas would be on us. I think we need to find very simple ways of using blockchains. Now, not the, you know, most people out there are expecting a user experience that is web-like. So, you know, thinking from the economics and from the user experience side of things, you know, making apps that look like the traditional web apps, but at the same time are able to expose you in a much more frequent basis to not just to the idea of tokens, like on crypto Twitter, but to, you know, start getting curious enough to, you know, get some actual tokens, get some actual, you know, cryptocurrency and understand what's the purpose behind each one of those tokens. We are also, you know, providing governance to crypto networks. I think that the stage of the industry right now is crypto for crypto. A lot of the projects are thinking in those terms. We're working with BlockStack, providing the governance for their developer platform. All of the subsidies that BlockStack keeps to developers are being decided by the governance we provide with Democracy Earth. We're gonna be working with the governance of Decentraland, which is a very exciting project, has already implemented some solutions around voting, and we are eager to provide, you know, the governance interface for any token that's out there. That's why we're making our application multi-token.