The State Should Serve Citizens: Criptocracia as a Tool for Democratic Empowerment
I firmly believe that the State should exist to serve citizens, not the other way around. For years, governments worldwide have grown exponentially, becoming bureaucratic monsters with thousands of tentacles used to surveil and control their citizens.
Bitcoin succeeded in separating money from the State, but this isn’t enough. We must continue working to create tools that allow citizens to reclaim territory currently monopolized by state power.
Democracy: Imperfect but Necessary
Democracy is not a perfect system and is currently under scrutiny. However, the difference in quality of life between people living in full democracies versus those under authoritarian regimes is staggering.
Introducing Criptocracia
This is why we created Criptocracia: a free and open tool that enables citizens to organize and exercise democracy without needing permission from the State. Through digitization and automation of democratic processes, we dramatically reduce costs, especially benefiting communities with limited resources.
What is Criptocracia?
Criptocracia is an experimental, trustless open-source electronic voting system. It implements blind RSA signatures to ensure vote secrecy and voter anonymity, while using the Nostr protocol for decentralized, encrypted message transport.
Technical Features
- Electoral Commission: Central authority that manages elections and maintains voter anonymity through blind signatures
- Nostr Protocol: Decentralized communication with detailed specifications of custom event types and NIP-59 Gift Wrap messaging
- Mobile Application: Voter client that implements blind RSA signatures to ensure vote secrecy and voter anonymity
A Possible Future
Imagine a scenario where communities, realizing that voting is so easy, secure, and cost-effective, decide not to elect traditional politicians. Instead, they could propose ideas directly and choose the ones that best serve them, further reducing costs by eliminating politician salaries—politicians who often fail to efficiently perform the duties they were elected for, not to mention the numerous corruption cases that plague the political scene.
A future without politicians may seem like a utopia today, but if we create the right tools, it could become a reality tomorrow.
Join the Experiment
You can download the app on Zapstore and create your own election by running your own EC (Electoral Commission). Everything is open source, work in progress, and 100% improvable. Only by creating, experimenting, and testing can we perfect what we do.
Links:
- Main GitHub: https://github.com/Cripto-cracia/criptocracia
- Mobile App: https://github.com/Cripto-cracia/criptocracia-app
- EC CLI: https://github.com/Cripto-cracia/eccli
The democracy of the future is in our hands. Let’s rebuild it together.