TerrainNet | Devpost

Succinct Symbols for Social Symbiosis

Inspiration

There is currently a strong scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that this warming is mainly caused by human activities. This consensus is supported by various studies of scientists' opinions and by position statements of scientific organisations, many of which explicitly agree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis reports. Nearly all actively publishing climate scientists (97–98%) support the consensus on anthropogenic climate change. Despite this coherent consensus for climate change control and climate conservation there is lack of inaction towards climate change control because of the archaic and arcane decision making at the international government level callousness.

The UNFCCC secretariat (UN Climate Change) is the United Nations entity tasked with supporting the global response to the threat of climate change. UNFCCC stands for United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Convention has near universal membership (197 Parties) and is the parent treaty of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Election and appointment of members for positions on bodies under the Convention, Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement take place annually during the Climate Change Conferences. Regional groups and constituencies nominate candidates to these bodies. Parties are urged to meet the goal of gender balance on these bodies. Please find further details about the current election process in the following page in UNFCC website.

https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/bodies/election-and-membership

As we can see, this process is highly archaic and arcane. It does not address the asymmetries in the contributions from climate change causing countries and concerns of the countries suffering from climate change in a reflective and responsive manner. We need an architectural and algorithmic change in the election and voting process. This is why I am suggesting quadratic voting mechanism to address these asymmetries.

Quadratic voting is based upon market principles, where each voter is given a budget of vote credits that they have the personal decisions and delegation to spend in order to influence the outcome of a range of decisions. If a participant has a strong support for or against a specific decision, additional votes could be allocated to proportionally demonstrate the voter's support. A vote pricing rule determines the cost of additional votes, with each vote becoming increasingly more expensive. By increasing voter credit costs, this demonstrates an individual's support and interests toward the particular decision

Quadratic voting is a collective decision-making procedure where individuals allocate votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. By doing so, quadratic voting helps enable users to address issues of voting paradox and majority rule. Quadratic voting works by allowing users to "pay" for additional votes on a given matter to express their support for given issues more strongly, resulting in voting outcomes that are aligned with the highest willingness to pay outcome, rather than just the outcome preferred by the majority regardless of the intensity of individual preferences.

The payment for votes may be through either artificial or real currencies (e.g. with tokens distributed equally among voting members or with real money). Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the class of cardinal voting. It differs from cumulative voting by altering "the cost" and "the vote" relation from linear to quadratic.

What it does

TerrainNet is the combination of a decentralised web app for quadratic voting coupled with a cryptographic proof system to verify the quadratic voting system in a privacy preserving manner using zero knowledge proofs.

TerraiNet voting verifier smart contracts are generated using the privacy preserving proofs of climate change contingency situations. The vote verifier contracts strengthen the quadratic voting activity smart contracts.

How I built it

I have developed quadratic voting smart contracts using Ethereum Blockchain Protocol using Solidity language. The web application is connecting to the smart contracts through web3 javascript library. I have developed cryptographic primitives known as zero knowledge proofs to verify quadratic votes in a minimal anti collusion manner using a framework known as MACI.

Challenges I ran into

Customising quadratic voting verifiers for the climate change consensus. Configuring the common solidity smart contract version for voting and voting verifiers.