The future of democracy is blockchain tech which helps us have fairer and cheaper elections.
According to research by the New York Times, in the US it takes on average between 20–110 minutes to vote, disregarding transportation time. In other words, if we take the voter turnout of the US election at 158m, and the median hourly salary in the US as $15.35, the nation’s opportunity cost of voting was between $808.4m — $4.446bn.
While voting is necessary, and indeed indispensable for the development of a healthy democracy, what isn’t needed is this outsized cost for making our voices be heard. Billions of dollars of economic progress that could’ve been used for the development of the nation are wasted, and it’s worth mentioning this is a conservative number that doesn’t take into account the full cost of the inefficiency.
It is time to bring democracy into the 21st century with blockchain and do away with the antiquated governance protocols designed out of necessity in centuries prior. Blockchain ledger technology is a means by which we can transparently log information and instantly know the results of elections.
Hence, what we could do to vote in the comfort of our own homes, as well as be able to vote for policies directly, instead of a collection of unrelated policies via a politician proxy, is to organize the electorate as a DAO. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are blockchain organizations wherein their governance protocols are entirely digital.
The DAO structure has many benefits, such as being close to impossible to be meddled with, and it would be low cost, the billion dollars lost on a single election would be enough to get the system running and operational virtually forever. It also has the ability to widen the electorate to everyone who doesn’t have the ability to spare several hours of their day to go to stand in line to vote, and could instead vote from their phones.
The future is here, and it is up to us to implement the policies that will change our lives for the better!
