☠️ Decentralized Autonomous Politicians ☠️
Politicians and Web 3.0 - The collab no one asked for and how it could change everything.
As we all know, Trump dropped a surprise degen mint link on the whole world a little more than a week ago. In less than a day, he sold out 45k NFTs on Polygon for $99 each and they proceeded to fucking pump. Twitter and every major media outlet fell directly into the meme trap and couldn’t shut up about it (myself included). The absurdity of these cards was obviously designed to provoke a reaction and they did just that. Love him or hate him - the haters failed to realize that publicity is the key component to increasing an NFTs value, as it creates bullish price action and then further publicity ♻️.
Given the utility of these cards (micro % chances to hang out with Trump + IRL events) - it was clear that there would be a supply squeeze due to the raw number of loyal Trump supporters out there. Another important factor is that his loyal supporters did not mint the collectible with the intention to flip it and paper hand a .2 eth profit - a large portion of the supply sold was never going to be listed on an exchange (relative to other NFT drops). However, this supply squeeze would have been much less likely a couple of years ago. The major difference is mostly due to the decrease in the technical expertise needed to mint the Trump NFTs. Users were able to buy the Trump cards with just an email address and a credit card, making the process much simpler.
This created an interesting dynamic because some crypto native users that ignore polygon actually got beat by average retail folks who never touched NFTs before. A large portion of NFT traders had no idea how to bridge the correct assets in order to buy the Trump Cards, and even then, some bridges take a considerable amount of time, especially when congested. Of course, other alternatives exist to bridges but they ALL require more expertise than just inputting an email and credit card.
This is the first time in my memory, “normies” had any edge over crypto natives in NFTs. A large portion of NFT traders will never want to associate a credit card or an email address with their crypto wallets. Given the slight technical knowledge needed for wallet setup, polygon/exchange use, bridges, time delays, and gas fees… it’s clear that minting via credit card and email is a viable path of low resistance for mass adoption.
The advantage I’m describing was VERY subtle in the Trump card mint because of the fashion of the announcement (surprise degen link) and the slow 12+ hour mint out. It really wasn’t apparent until towards the very end of the mint as velocity increased once the sell out was inevitable.
Since mint, they’ve traded ~7,500+ ETH in volume, hit a high of ~.82 ETH (mint cost ~0.079 ETH) with a few rares selling for crazy prices including one at ~$44,000.
It’s always nice to see a good old-fashioned pump like the bull days, but there is a MUCH bigger story here
Many more politicians will launch similar digital collectibles in this election cycle. One of the main reasons more politicians will launch similar digital collectibles is because they are already asking for donations, and the small incremental cost of a digital trading card is insignificant compared to the potential benefits of the added publicity
You can donate to any politician with just a credit card and an email, which was also the minimum needed to mint the Trump cards - you can see how easy it would be for all of these politicians to just throw in a digital collectible with a bs utility with every donation.
(Ignore the Hatch Act for now - as some politicians do anyway. 🤣)
At this point, you may or may not be persuaded about the incoming flood of digital collectibles from politicians that are about to congest the blockchain. It may seem harmless, but this is a new paradigm for publicly available information. For example, some may choose to identify with a political party publicly on their Instagram profile but it’s 100% up to them. With political NFTs, you are potentially providing way more valuable and additional information as having the politicians NFT in your wallet shows your willing to fork over cash to support them. Yes, just having a Trump NFT in your wallet doesn’t necessarily mean you support him, unfortunately, speculative NFT trading is a pretty tough idea for most of the public to understand, and with collection sizes like 45k, considering the number of active NFT trading wallets, it will be difficult for traders to avoid being grouped into a specific profile based on the NFTs in their wallet.
However, this is just the beginning - getting public blockchains involved with politics will change everything. I’m going to present 3 different scenarios detailing where I think all this shit is headed. As expected, they get progressively more dystopian ?
Scenario #1: The Early Days (Real Time)
Essentially exactly what Trump did
Simple digital trading cards with a massive supply and a bs IRL utility that will appeal to hardcore supporters
Easy way to get publicity, appeal to crypto voters, and get some cash
Helps to organize supporters, develop community, and snag valuable email and IP info of paying donors.
Scenario #2: Battleground (coming soon - 2024?)
This is the scenario where the bias of public blockchains having any anonymity gets shattered. Similar to when Edward Snowden exposed the mass data collection operation by the NSA on the American public, the same is coming for blockchains. However, instead of a whistle blower it will be some fancy blockchain/social media data aggregation firm - and it’s all constitutional (this time) as the data is all in the public domain.
Data the mass public will volunteer happily:
Full name
Email address and provider
Credit card #, credit card provider (to the website, which will sell info)
Crypto wallet public key
perhaps a phone number
Data that (can) will be gathered from the blockchain:
Some/all of the data points below can be avoided with some minimal levels of sophistication - but the path to mass adoption does not involve any sophistication.
Wallet address
Current crypto and NFT holdings ($$$)
Prior NFT and crypto trading in that wallet
Profit/loss made on all trades
Tracing the wallet back to the funding source (1st transaction) could potentially reveal:
your main/feeder wallet
what CEX you used
your level of trading activity
if you used a bridge or credit card to fund the wallet
if you ever used a mixer or anonymous protocol
any and all smart contract interactions
if the wallet was funded by someone else
date wallet was created/ date feeder wallet was created
all the other wallets you ever interacted with
ENS or crypto domains (many people use their name, twitter handle, or business name)
your twitter profile @ (found either by a PFP + NFT in wallet match or a widely used protocol like NFT inspect that users opt in for),
Any public social media profile that you EVER mentioned owning a specific NFT on (can back trace with time stamps from blockchain even if the asset sold)
your IP address (most likely collected by minting website or wallet providers)
likely showing valuable clues to your exact location
Data that (can) will be gathered from the NFTs in your linked wallets:
What other communities your in
likely showing valuable info information about your personality, interest, and NOW what politician/political party you potentially support.
I want to emphasize it will not just show “support” but it will show who is actively donating “cash” in real time.
Your discord user name
Dozens of ways to find/link this info but I’ll leave that for future newsletters.
Once you have someone’s discord username, you can easily stumble across a discord profile or thousands of messages that the user likely never thought would be linked to all the other information above or seen by masses.
Once your there, if that NFT community has a telegram or WhatsApp group - it would most likely take a few minutes to link a username for each chat platform - likely revealing more data.
All the profit and loss linked to all your NFT trading, airdrops, staking rewards, etc (IRS is going to need a lot more than the 87k new hires)
A lot more shit but you get the point.
Public blockchains are very public… - I would bet there are some government agencies or fancy blockchain analytics company collecting all of this info right now.
If you don’t understand the widespread dystopian implications of the points above, I present 5 quick hypotheticals for some thought provocation.
“Citizen X just sent 500 ETH back to Y centralized exchange” - Agent #1, “is that citizen X who’s also on a payment plan for the capital gain tax they evaded last year?” - Agent #2 “Yes it is, contacting...” - Agent #1
“Citizen X minted 500 Trump NFTs and is tweeting about flying to D.C next January….”
“ Citizen X sent 500 ETH to the Tornado cash contract in 2020, at the time he was tweeting about buying NFTs with an IP address in San Diego, he also joined X discord 1 month before the transaction and was talking about moving to the Bahamas.”
“Citizen X owns 500 Trump NFTs but signed up to attend a Democratic convention next month” - Agent #1 “Is that citizen X who was also saying crazy shit on Facebook ?” -Agent #2
The inevitable big government x fancy blockchain data company collab ?
*Citizen X owns 500 Trump NFTs*
“OK, let’s airdrop him the “10 reasons to NOT vote for Trump trading cards” every single day until the election and send him graphic NFT videos of gun violence”.
The possibilities are endless, especially when considering all the potential “collabs” between public block explorers, data aggregation firms, phone data, IP addresses, Starbucks NFTs, smart cars, consumer spending trackers, email, DNA, government agencies, banks, surveillance/public video cameras, voluntarily doxed social medial profiles, machine learning and AI.
Scenario #3 The Decentralized Autonomous Politician
It's no secret that politics have become increasingly divisive in recent election cycles. There are a number of political issues that have caused a deep divide among the American public, such as COVID vaccines, abortion, and gun laws, and it seems unlikely that either party will be willing to compromise. This puts politicians in a difficult position, as they must navigate these highly contentious issues.
On one hand, politicians can choose to legislate based on their personal views with some tweaked to align more with their respective political party for the highest probability to win the election. On the other hand, politicians can choose to put aside their personal beliefs and advocate on behalf of whatever stance the majority of their supporters/constituents want, likely giving them a higher probability of winning the election. The second option will appeal to more people as it’s essentially crowd sourced from the decision makers (voters) and will lead to less personal attacks and political backlash.
Although he’s not a politician yet, Elon’s decision making tactics for major platform changes on Twitter are a good example of this. It’s subtle, but Elon is able to deflect almost all personal attacks and suspected political bias out of some twitter decisions by letting the public vote.
The Elon Pattern - tweet about his intention regarding a controversial twitter decision, Elon than faces widespread backlash from the opposing political side, as Elon wants to avoid looking like a dictator and/or pissing off half the USA, he resolves to a public vote.
However, their is one major issue with the above approach that risks defeating the whole purpose of these polls - How do you know 1 vote = 1 person ? Out of the 30m+ totaled votes from the 2 main polls (Trump and Musk retiring) - how many were bots ?
The Trump pole was decided by a slim 4% margin - ONLY 603,418 votes were the difference between Trump getting reinstated or staying banned. As you can see by the tight margin and gravity of the decision, bots really have the power to have an unfair influence on the Elon/twitter.
Elon is aware of this. Hence, why he considers the bot problem at twitter one of the most important issues to focus on…..
Twitter blue (8$/mo paid subscription) is the fix to the bot problem. Yea, you could hypothetically make bot accounts and pay 8$ a month per account but the amount of bots needed to make a difference and the financial disincentive drastically out weights the benefit for most bad actors. Using the narrow Trump poll as an example, if a bad actor wanted to bot the poll to flip the vote, it would cost $4,827,346 a month. Not to mention with some pretty basic additional analytics it would be easy to flag and track it back to the bad actor (credit card/IP data that twitter can see), + length of the accounts life, historical tweeting activity….
Hypothetically, if Elon flipped the switch and only let twitter blue users vote in polls and decided to conduct polls on every major twitter policy decision - Twitter starts to look identical to a DAO.
Twitter handle = unique identifier/wallet address
Elon’s Polls = DAO proposals
Twitter Blue = Governance token
Twitter = Permissionless protocol
“I will abide by the results of this poll” = shotty smart contract
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But does the 51%+ really know what’s best ? Taking a lesson from crypto DAOs, the answer is “no” most of the time. Most people will fall victim to short term incentives and vote for anything with immediate monetary gain at the sacrifice of the protocols longevity for whatever selfish reasons. This is NOT a new concept by any means - this was the same motivation behind the creation of the Electoral College in the 1700s (founding fathers didn’t trust the majority to be informed). A more recent example demonstrating this idea is the creation of the Ape Coin council, in the sense that a DAO or governing body elevates a smaller group of people for additional influence or power.
five candidates have won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College
Does it make sense to give a stronger weight to qualified professionals or to voters that are incentivized to protect the protocols (governments) longer term sustainability ? Yes, it makes a lot of sense I think but this is where some level of centralization has to be introduced for choosing and also because your selecting a group to have a greater influence compared to the average voter. Elon is facing a similar issue right now with his search for a replacement CEO. With how Twitter is currently organized I don't see a straight forward path for those types of decisions .However, Trump could hypothetically do this relatively easily. Imagine if he airdropped 1 governance token per NFT to every holder or unique wallet. Then instead of Trump taking a hard stance on a complicated issue (or choosing a Vice President for ex)- he can simply hold a vote.
For example, imagine if Trump conducted a poll to determine who he should pick as Vice President for 2024 - he would experience at least the four benefits below:
Represents the majority of his supporters (more likely for maximum votes from base = higher % chance of winning election)
Supporters will feel like their voice is heard (more likely for passionate support)
Media/politicians can’t personally attack Trump, as his personality is removed from the decision. It would be more of an attack on the majority of his supporters. (usually backfires as it unites the base and splits supporters of attacker - “deplorables” for ex)
The people who own the most NFTs (the largest $upporters) would have more pull in the vote.
Of course this is not a perfect example, some critical elements are missing that could potentially fuck it all up. For example, Trump could potentially just disregard the entire vote (need a smart contract for that), only a very tiny portion of Trump supporters actually own the NFTs (45k supply, but ~50m voters), not everyone may see the vote, and many more issues.
Depending on the specific governance token distribution, it will most likely allow the rich “whales” to dictate the elected officials decisions and policy (more NFTs = more gov tokens). Arguably this is already how a large portion of politics work in the US but it would probably be a little to transparent for the masses to stomach.
Decentralized Autonomous Politician (beta)
Imagine a human that never made any political views public at any point in their life with the typical polished qualifications of a senator or whatever. Now this politician decides to have a digital collectible trading card NFT mint with an unlimited supply. Because this is an official election, we need a little help from the government to make it work in theory. Instead of using a metamask or any other wallet that can just be created with a chrome profile, you need something that would solve the “double wallet” issue (users creating more than 1 wallet, getting more votes), one possible way to do this is linking a new type of wallet with someone’s social security card number or driver license number (…CBDCs?)
Next you would need some type of oath/commitment that the politician would act in a manner consistent with the majority vote 100% of the time with no exception. Or even better, an on chain smart contract controlling all of the politician's asset with a mechanism similar to POS slashing. If the politician voted against the vote majority this would burn or distribute the entire politicians net worth to voters.
Which do you think would be more effective: pledging to follow the results of this poll (I will abide…), or implementing a smart contract that would evenly distribute Elon's net worth among voters if he does not align with the majority vote within 30 days?"
Next you would need to correct the 51% “issue” described above, I don’t have a good solution for this one and neither does any DAO that I know of. This is where a certain level of subjectivity/centralization must be introduced by picking something similar to a council or deciding who’s vote should be weighted more than others.
If you don’t think this is a important issue - just imagine the proposal “Should we make the next stimulus check $100k?”
-it would pass with a majority vote easily and inflation would quickly sky rocket…
One loose solution I started thinking about was a randomization element with other elected politicians. For example, having something like an oversight board that controlled ~33% of the total votes consisting of actors most likely to have the longer term interest of the country at heart that were constantly cycled on a random basis, hopefully not allowing for any one dominant political stance or party to have a statistically significant impact on the majority of overall votes.
Wait up: Can a decentralized politician actually have any chance of winning an election? We’ll IF the majority of the country understood the idea of it and played into it… I would think he/she could win easily as it would appeal broadly to potentially both parties with the common interest of improving Democracy. Might take a while though….
Hopefully, with the above paragraphs in mind you can see that a decentralized autonomous politician is not that far fetched ?
However, a politicians job is not just sitting around and voting on stuff all day. They have to give a lot of speeches, meet with other leaders, and maintain diplomatic relationships and whole host of other non sense. Many issues exist with the framework above - you would have a very high frequency of votes which would probably result in poor compliance and uninformed voting. You also couldn’t bring every major issue to a vote. For example, “Should we go to war with X ?” , obviously tons of political issues are secret and time sensitive, often being made with the knowledge of classified information which is classified for a reason… a lot is still TBD.
A Decentralized Autonomous Politician is very similar to how Elon is making a few of the biggest decisions at Twitter (in theory). With politics and web 3.0 on a crash course after the Trump NFT drop, it will only be a matter of time before politicians follow Elon’s lead and look to represent their constituents better using blockchain data or at least crowd sourced votes.
Do you think in 1000 years we’re going to trust individual humans to advocate on behalf of millions of people ?
Be careful what data you reveal to the blockchain.
At what point does a decentralized governance model become the only way to prevent a revolution as media and big tech become more powerful with their ability to manipulate the extremes of every view point they have, creating a high probability for tribalism and violence.
Have a good week,
zk SHARK
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All the views expressed above are just the personal opinion of zk shark.
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