Constitutional Consensus for Democratic Governance
Idit Keidar, Andrew Lewis-Pye, Ehud Shapiro, Nimrod Talmon
TL;DR
Constitutional Consensus tackles the problem of democratic digital governance without trusted identities by combining Sybil-resilient one-person-one-vote decision processes with a DAG-based Byzantine fault tolerant consensus that supports self-governing constitutional amendments. The approach introduces a single epoch protocol built on a blocklace DAG, plus an amendment mechanism that lets participants democratically change the constitution while preserving safety and liveness after the Global Stabilization Time GST. It further extends to multi epoch operation, enabling grassroots, independent instances to bootstrap and federate without external authorities or global ledgers. The work provides formal correctness arguments and outlines practical smartphone friendly implementations, highlighting real-world applicability for grassroots sovereign digital communities.
Abstract
Permissionless-consensus-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are the prevailing paradigm for participant-governed digital organisations. As participants have verified resources but no trusted identities, this ecosystem is necessarily plutocratic (one coin -- one vote). Here we offer, for the first time, a democratic (one person -- one vote) paradigm for the governance of digital communities and organisations, based on permissioned consensus and egalitarian decision processes. In line with Lamport's vision of consensus as a self-governing parliament, in the democratic paradigm a constitution specifies both a decision making protocol as well as a consensus protocol, combined to let participants amend the constitution through constitutionally-valid decisions that are ratified by consensus. To meaningfully instantiate this paradigm we integrate the disciplines of distributed computing and computational social choice, with the goal of providing a practical and efficient smartphone-based solution for the democratic self-governance of grassroots sovereign digital communities and organisations. The resulting Constitutional Consensus protocol employs (1) state-of-the-art Sybil-resilient democratic decision processes for amending the set of participants, supermajority threshold, and timeout; and (2) a novel Byzantine-fault tolerant consensus protocol that is DAG-based (following Cordial Miners) thus eschewing reliable broadcast, with dual-mode operation (following Morpheus) that is quiescent when idle, has spontaneous leaders for isolated transactions, and formal round-robin leadership during high throughput.