“The Martian Republic” envisions a governance model for Mars that leverages the principles of direct participatory democracy through advanced blockchain technology. Centered around an online non-custodial wallet, it introduces a suite of integrated online tools designed to facilitate civic tasks and transparent decision-making processes among the early Martian settlers. The system’s backbone, characterized as “Republic As Software,” allows the codebase to act as the Constitution—adaptable and reflective of the people’s will. This innovative approach to governance combines secure, cryptographically protected voting mechanisms with public forums and registries, ensuring every citizen’s active and equal participation in shaping their society. By integrating technologies like Marscoin for transactions and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized data storage, The Martian Republic sets the groundwork for a self-sustaining, transparent, and dynamically evolving governance system on Mars.
This model proposes a radical departure from traditional governance structures by embedding the principles of transparency, equality, and direct democracy into the very fabric of Martian society. Through tools like the Martian Citizen registry and the Martian Congress voting system, it addresses the challenges of establishing a fair and functional society in the extraterrestrial environment. The Martian Republic’s reliance on blockchain technology ensures a tamper-proof, audit-friendly foundation for civic engagement, allowing Mars settlers to notarize actions, discuss proposals, and vote in a secure and private manner. As the Martian community grows, this governance platform aims to consensually develop and adapt, promising a future where technology empowers democracy in the vastness of space.
See excerpts below:
Abstract
The Martian Republic is a suite of online tools built around an online non-custodial wallet, allowing the early Martian settlement to offer all necessary civic tasks in building a direct participatory democratic society. This new form of blockchain-based “Republic As Software” achieves a high level of transparency in direct and immediate consent of and by the governed. Each participant is an active member utilizing censor-resistant public forums and casting cryptographically secured and end-to-end auditable votes. The very codebase on which this Republic runs becomes its Constitution and remains a reflection of the will of the people. Each individual directly interacts with society leveraging the advantages of trust-less ledger technology for notarized on-chain actions. The client-server open-source second-layer caching solution provides a scalable architecture. To this end, the project ties together a secure proof-of-work blockchain (Marscoin) and a modern distributed data storage system (Interplanetary File System or IPFS). We propose this coordinated tool-set approach, that links a wallet, a dynamic public voter registry, a public forum, and a coinshuffle-based secure ballot issuance, to derive a unified public consensus. We present this combination of an initial set of tools, the Martian Republic, as a unique governance platform to which other organizational features can be added dynamically over time and which, being software itself, is allowed to consensually develop as society evolves.
Introduction
Congress…the supreme legislative body of a nation and especially of a republic
Martian Congress: An on-chain, transparent, end-to-end auditable governance system
utilizing a non-custodial wallet, public voter registry and a coinshuffle-based encrypted
ballot distribution system to ensure fair voting on public proposals by secret ballot.
A purely on-chain, cryptographically secure voting process would allow each citizen to partic-
ipate directly in the formation of a Republic in which matters of the public (“res publica”) are
decided by a congress consisting of the very public itself, without the need for intermediaries.
Since the invention of the internet many trust- and authority based systems have been made
superfluous as their information arbitrage advantage ceased to exist. Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention
of a distributed trustless ledger system, Bitcoin, took this innovation into the realm of economics,
politics and law. The Martian Republic is an implementation on top of these innovative technolo-
gies and a chance for citizens to “represent themselves”, to express the sovereign will directly and
tamper-proof through open public discourse, procedure and vote.
Utilizing a blockchain to timestamp proposals and identify the members of the public is part
of the solution, but benefits are lost if reliance on unmanageable databases or staked tokens make
voting via smart contracts vulnerable to Sybil attacks.5 The Martian Republic’s Congress module
attempts to overcome such limitations and seeks a transparent and simple as possible solution which
allows all participants to easily audit and verify the validity of their vote. By utilizing an
open source model in which the code itself becomes the Constitution, we opt for a server/client
architecture in which the initial participants curate via transparent rules a public voter registry. Any
member of this assembly of citizens can then initiate proposals, submit code changes (‘amendments’)
or suggest alternative configuration settings (‘statutes’, ‘regulations’) etc.
These proposals are stored in a decentralized fashion using IPFS and are thus available in an
– ideally – planet-wide operating public mesh network. Additionally, each proposal is hashed and
notarized on the blockchain for added censor resistance. A citizen’s ability to suggest code changes
to the codebase of the Martian Republic itself is the most direct expression of public intent. Such a
‘pull-request’ once voted into law becomes part of the very mathematical rules that dictate the fabric
of the governing system. Software replaces law-making as far as the realm of software extends and
can replace ambiguous human language with the mathematical precision of programming languages.
As the server restarts in regular intervals, the system is capable of inheriting voted-upon changes.
As the code is open source, any dissenting faction can – in theory – suggest changes at any time or
break off and start its own entirely new offspring elsewhere motivating the assembly to carefully
discuss and include all viewpoints.
Each proposal launches “ballot-shuffle” server sessions in which participants request private bal-
lots for a particular vote. The ballot-shuffle is built on the “coin-shuffle protocol”6 which obfuscates
transactions of many participants on the blockchain and prevents third parties from tracing votes
back to individual citizens. The ballot-shuffle makes it easy to authenticate participants (one-vote-
per-citizen, all shuffle participants appear in the voter registry, with one single vote irrespective of
individual net worth). At the same time it ensures private and fair votes without any participant’s
(nor the server’s) knowledge of an individual’s vote. Various proposal run times and percentages of citizens required to participate before a bill passes, are variables, that the public itself agrees
upon. The Republic thus becomes a living software structure in which all members of the public are
similarly citizen, assembly of congress, and representatives of their Republic – fulfilling an ideal that
has been elusive since antiquity due to the missing link of cryptography and modern networking
technology.
Remember that industries are dynamic and can change due to technological advancements, economic shifts, and societal changes. They play a fundamental role in shaping economies and societies by providing the goods and services that people rely on.