Project Cicada (Decentralized Application and Distributed Direct Democracy Platform)

I have been following this project for a few months... it sounds very interesting, although I think Steemit is opening up new ideas too.

http://iamcicada.com/cicada-deep-dive/

Blockchain Breakthrough
The Cicada project ends longstanding weaknesses of distributed application platforms.
Solves the 51% percent problem
Ends Proof of Work energy waste
Ends the ASIC race
Ends the centralization of mining
Ends the debate over 2MB versus 8MB blocks

Human Unique Identifier
The foundation of the system is a pluggable, decentralized, people-controlled universal ID, called the HUID or Human Unique Identifier, that is unique to every person on the planet. Paradoxically, this ability to identify everyone is the key to restoring universal privacy.

Info Wallets
The platform allows for the creation of unlimited sub-ID tokens that grant role based access control to your personally identifying information (PII). Give a sub-ID to a website with only your email or name and revoke it when you no longer want them to have it. Websites no longer need to know everything about you. This will likely end widespread data breaches. Because if the data isn’t stored centrally, there’s nothing to steal.

New Proof of Work
Cicada allows for a brand new Proof of Work, called a Distributed Proof of Work (DPoW) that is incredibly energy and storage efficient, able to run on a cell phone without draining the battery or hogging memory and requiring no specialized ASICs. Miners are drafted randomly into pools to secure the network, meaning traditionally CPU/GPU/ASIC-slaying mining operations become only an occasional, barely noticeable spike as the network scales. A distributed hash table (DHT) of historical blockchain transactions eliminates storage issues, because miners are no longer required to keep a copy of the entire blockchain. That means it doesn’t matter how big the block size is, because nobody will have to store them all.

Delivers a Practical Universal Basic Income
The new DPoW has a beautiful side effect. Since everyone is eventually drafted to the network, that means everyone gets a consistent stream of coins. In other words, it delivers a practical universal basic income right now. The blockchain pays everyone to secure it. This is something society desperately needs to deal with the rise of automation. People no longer need to find a way to get coins to use the network. The coins come to the you. Barriers to entry are destroyed and cryptocurrencies can spread like wildfire.

Anonymous Voting with End-to-End Verifiability
Even with a universal ID system, Cicada delivers true anonymous voting via blind tokens and mixnets, all while delivering end-to-end verifiable voting. The latest American election exposed the deep cracks in the foundation of our democracy. But we can rebuild it, better than it was before. Together.

Gamifies Voting
The system rewards participation in the system by gameifying voting. It creates leaderboards, awards prizes and pays out cryptocoins for ongoing participation in the network. The more you participate, the better you do. At the same time, the system never allows rewards for particular votes, permanently eliminating corruption. We incentivize what we want and de-incentivize what we don’t.

Citizen Proposal and Filtration System
A citizen proposal system delivers a powerful framework for civilian legislation. It fixes the broken systems we have today, such as in California, where the only proposals to get through are watered down or bought and paid for by Big Money. Anyone can put forth a proposal to Cicada, but only useful proposals will ever make it to a national vote. Each proposal is routed randomly to a small group of people. If it doesn’t get enough votes, it dies. If it gets voted down it never goes anywhere. Only If the majority likes it, the proposal passes to the next stages: ever-increasing groups of more and more voters. Only the best ideas will ever make a national vote. Bad ideas idea die. Good ideas live. Simple. Nobody can buy their way to the top.

Expert Panels Legislation
Today’s politicians draft laws on things they don’t understand. A bunch of former lawyers know nothing about economics or technology issues, so why should we trust them to create laws that make any sense? Cicada allows us to call on expert panels. Parallel teams of experts draft legislation that gets fast-tracked to national vote. Let experts make policy, not lawyers.

...and there is so much more on the project web site.
Here is a link to the white paper: http://iamcicada.com/whitepaper/