Perpetual growth? Politics wont scale

This is my opinion on the nature of political blockchains. Note, not all proof of stake chains are what I call "political blockchains". My point here is that in my opinion the political blockchain model cant scale. I would like to be proven wrong by the Steem community, by the EOS community, and any other community which follows this model of governing. My post is going to go into some details as to why they wont scale.


The problem is low quality information = low quality decisions

One easy attack on any political blockchain is disinformation. Governments around the world will have no problem generating disinformation by co-opting known thought leaders. If a thought leader has a name, a location, well some government somewhere in the world can reach them. How can we know what the thought leaders are saying is what they really think and feel when there could be an environment of harsh consequences if the wrong things are said?  So we find that relying on thought leaders probably doesn't make sense and in literature this relates to the "Key Player Problem". The Key Play Problem is part of the topic of social network analysis which shows that communication can be disrupted rather easily when you can map the players and their connectivity.

My argument for why political blockchains will not scale is because there is no means of effective communication between decision makers.  Prominent people in the Steem community and others have highlighted the problem of bribery in blockchain networks. When identity is included and votes are public then both bribery and coerced voting become more probable because the adversary to the network will be able to check and see how their subjects voted. If the subjects of the adversary did not vote in the right way on the right subjects (if your vote is not for sale) then you pay whatever tax that adversary deems appropriate.

There are partial solutions to this problem but none are ideal. Many in the community want a network and a society which is completely transparent. They want a society where votes and finances can be open for the entire world to see. The unfortunate problem is this same transparency offered by the blockchain is the vulnerability which allows corruption processes to take over. If your transactions are public your transactions could very well be bid on and auctioned and of course these transactions wouldn't be in the public. In other words the public blockchains have to sacrifice authenticity of communication and security in exchange for the maximum transparency.

On Steem every transaction, every communication, is not only stored (as it is on Facebook and other places), but it cannot be deleted, it cannot be forgotten, it's stored forever and for no good reason in my opinion. Yes there are some benefits to this level of openness in the sense that it can help root out certain attacks, certain kinds of unsophisticated criminal activity, certain kinds of unsophisticated corruption, but the problem is that highly organized criminals have no problem at all defeating the appearance of transparency that Steem and similar public blockchains offer. At the same time you have the problem now of how do you determine if delegate X voted a certain way or made a certain comment in public because they got paid or because they actually think it?

There is a way around this and it involves the ability to communicate off channel. Off channel communication is not recorded on chain. A person who can communicate off channel and off the record can record their actual thoughts and feelings in a manner which is locked, private, and perhaps gets released only under very specific circumstances. This would be the sort of automated deadman switch solution to the problem where a group of your peers have bits and pieces of your truth which they can only unlock if a certain chain of events triggers the mechanism for it. The problem right now is we don't have this level of sophistication in the Steem protocol or as far as I know in the EOS protocol where for example something does happen mysteriously to a delegate or if the delegate is arrested in some charges that their voting power goes to selected peers who promise to vote on their behalf their truth.

It would appear most systems of voting where a vote can be attributed to a voter is vulnerable. Coercion resistance and deadman switch functions can be added but this raises the level of complexity that the voter would have to accept. The common person is not going to want to deal with that and for this reason it's not going to scale. If only 50 or 100 sophisticated delegates are allowed to vote well this is a level of centralization which makes those 50 or 100 the targets of foreign influence. If those 50 to 100 remain anonymous then as long as their anonymity is protected then they can vote but then you lose the level of transparency which many think is necessary.

Tauchain can solve part of the problem by promising to scale discussion. Scaling discussions can at least allow a community to speak in one voice which is extremely valuable and can bring us to a consensus. The problems still exist though that disinformation can corrupt entire discussions and trolls can disrupt communications to such a point that meaningful discussion becomes hard even if it can scale. Also if a discussion does scale but off false information then this might not necessarily lead to good conclusions. How do we check facts? How do we filter out obvious disinfo?

So not only can we not rely on "thought leadership" but we also have the problem of not knowing which information sources we can trust. Lots of information sources willing to give us lies useful to their agenda or partial truths but it's very hard to turn that information into something actionable. A voter requires high quality information to make high quality decisions, and good sources of information provide information which is actionable. If you learn this news you now have a critical piece of information which can help you improve your decision is an example of actionable, or if you can easily check the information yourself.

So I can see a problem Tau can face is that we will not know which facts to follow. Ideology, politics, religion, all can twist or reject facts which do not fit their narrative. How do we arrive at an official set of facts that everyone in the community can agree on? I think as the community gets bigger it gets harder and I'm not sure how to scale it. This is why I say Tau may solve part of the problem but other problems will remain to be solved in order for Tau to both scale and also remain useful in the long term. Fact checking is going to in my opinion be critical and also a means of removing bias of all sorts, ;political, religious, ideological, from interpretation of the facts.

This is just an opinion piece and it's not the gospel truth. I do not want people to take my opinions as predictions or as truth. It's my interpretations of the facts as I currently understand them and I reserve the right ot update my interpretation at any time whether or not I choose to share it publicly. I do not think politics can scale and as political tribalism becomes more prominent in political blockchains I think the problems will emerge which will make some of what I said in this post obvious. I hope to be proven wrong because I have a stake in the communities mentioned.


References

Borgatti, S. P. The Key Player Problem.