Liquid democracy & more Summary

Video

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Summary

This wide-ranging discussion centered on Griff Green’s work on liquid democracy and delegative voting models, particularly through the Giveth platform. Key concepts included using liquid democracy to enable scalable governance beyond the Dunbar number by allowing issue-specific delegation of votes. Novel approaches were proposed like incorporating ZK proofs for privacy and using gamification like lotteries/raffles to incentivize participation.

Green detailed the pairwise.vote app for Optimism’s retroactive funding round, which allowed delegation across different project categories with UX improvements. Potential avenues were explored for integrating with external data sources like oracles and blockchains through ZK proofs or validity proofs. Technical challenges were noted around privacy, scalability, and real-time voting visibility.

Other topics included streaming payments with selective disclosure, nonprofit stablecoin models like GLOW, tax-deductible retroactive tokendropping, and potential intersections with prediction markets and social media content curation. Throughout, an emphasis was placed on novel governance experiments going beyond the limitations of legacy democratic models.

Key Takeaways

• Liquid democracy with issue-specific delegation could scale governance beyond Dunbar numbers
• ZK proofs offer promising avenues for privacy-preserving liquid democracy implementations
• Gamification through lotteries/raffles can drive participation in funding public goods
• UX improvements and transaction subsidies are critical for mainstream adoption
• Integrating with external data sources like oracles remains an open challenge
• Governance experiments should explore prediction market and social signaling mechanisms
• Novel economic models are needed beyond direct donations for funding public goods

Speakers

• Griff Green (Giveth) - Founder focused on liquid democracy, delegative voting, incentive design
• Dan Finlay (MetaMask) - Co-founder with expertise in UX, key contributor
• Karl Floersch (Optimism) - Core developer working on delegation frameworks
• Other participants shared perspectives on liquid democracy, social dynamics, prediction markets