Visions of Blockchain Magazine Visions of Blockchain Pillar Unepisode | Page 52

VoB: Hi Daniel. I’m really pleased to be here The original idea of democracy was a direct
with you, and to have another chance to talk
to you again here in Vilnius, at the Unconfe-
rence.
I was really impressed by your talk about li-
quid democracy, and we can go deeper into
that in a few minutes.
For me, I think it was in the top three talks
of the week, and a really interesting point of
view about how technological innovation can
concretely change things, not only by disrup-
ting business models. We have discussed
some concern from a philosophical perspec-
tive, and it’s really rare to hear people who
are thinking so deeply about innovation and
how to change the daily life for everyone in a
positive way. Firstly, can you quickly introduce
yourself to our listeners? democracy that the Greeks invented. They
had actual direct input in the decisions that
the state made and, as our communities
grew larger and larger, we had to make com-
promises on the definition of democracy. We
were simply unable to make direct decisions
for hundreds of thousands, or millions, of
people. So, we introduced this concept of
representation where we only voted occasio-
nally, usually every four years, to decide who
will represent us in the next period. That was
our only say in the democratic process and,
from that point, the representative takes over
and he makes the decisions for us. This was
not the original idea of democracy.
Not at all.
We deviated from the original idea because
of scalability issues and, right now, technology
Daniel: My name is Daniel Roka, I’m a mathe- allows us to actually go back and do the real
matician and a software developer. democracy.
I’m very interested in decentralization tech-
nologies and its link to democracy. I think it’s
the peak of decentralization because it’s ba-
sically a decentralization of power, and that’s
probably one of the most important things.
Since around three years, I’ve been working
slowly on decentralization technologies, ar-
chitecture and development.
VoB: So, can we discuss liquid democracy,
and can you explain to our auditors what it
is?
So, when I talk about liquid
democracy, it has to be explained
to people that it is the democra-
cy that we should have, and that
this kind of representation was
just temporarily necessary be-
cause we didn’t have the right
tools to implement a proper
democracy.
In my opinion, we now have the tools for
implementing a proper democracy.
Daniel: Basically, liquid democracy is a new
kind of democracy that’s aided by informa-
tion technology.
When I say new, it’s a bit misleading becau-
se, it’s not really changing how democracy
works.
In a sense, it’s a very old system.
Changing to a liquid democracy
is not a revolutionary thing,
it’s basically just letting tech-
nology aid us in making a better
democracy.
That is my stance on the issue.