Consensus & Voting

Out of the 9 most popular forms of blockchain consensus, 3 are the most important when it comes to establishing selective consensus for voting systems that actually work.

It's only a matter of time that votes will be publicly gathered and tallied on the blockchain.

As not all blockchains are equally constructed, neither are consensus mechanisms.

This is a simple diagram of what a blockchain voting system looks like.

A consensus mechanism is an agreement between parties that an activity has taken place. A blockchain is a record book of that activity.

Selective consensus thereby determines what kind of activities between what kind of parties can take place.

The first thing to understand with selecting consensus, is what determinants contribute to scale and security.

In adapting governance to various political or sociocultural contexts, you would probably want a system that has selective consensus that is also Turing unrestricted.

Turing unrestrictedness means that any Turing machine can be converted to an unrestricted grammar.

JFLAP defines an unrestricted grammar as a grammar that is similar to a context-free grammar (CFG), except that one side of a production or operation may contain any nonempty string of terminals and variables, rather than just a single variable.

In other words, if conditions in a specific geographic location change - such as how votes are administered, to whom, within what time frames, and for what "outside" purposes - all of this can be amended and accounted for in preventing fraudulence, either in real-time, or very close to it.

Which brings us back to the 9 popular types of consensus, which include PoET (Proof of Elapsed Time), PoA (Proof of Authority), Proof of Capacity, Proof of Activity, Proof of Burn, DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake), Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Proof of Importance, and DAGs (Direct Acyclic Graphs).

Out of these, Proof of Authority, Proof of Activity and one that is not often mentioned, Proof of Provenance (Ownership), are the most critical in developing blockchain voting systems that can stand the test of time.

Authority confirms that a viable and certified 3rd party actually validates the voting process, while activity proves that the respective actions have actually occurred according to their proper protocol, and provenance establishes that you or someone else, as a citizen with real voting rights, actually is responsible for the votes casted.

This is what a presiding framework for the design of said system would look like, in terms of adaptive governance.

We are still very early in applying blockchain solutions to sweeping civic reform, but this development is happening very quickly, as necessitated by the bizarre political economy landscape we find ourselves in at present.