Permissionless-consensus-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are the prevailing paradigm for participant-governed digital organisations. As participants have verified resources but no trusted identities, this ecosystem is necessarily plutocratic (one coin -- one vote). Here we offer, for the first time, a democratic (one person -- one vote) paradigm for the governance of digital communities and organisations, based on permissioned consensus and egalitarian decision processes. In line with Lamport's vision of consensus as a self-governing parliament, in the democratic paradigm a constitution specifies both a decision making protocol as well as a consensus protocol, combined to let participants amend the constitution through constitutionally-valid decisions that are ratified by consensus. To meaningfully instantiate this paradigm we integrate the disciplines of distributed computing and computational social choice, with the goal of providing a practical and efficient smartphone-based solution for the democratic self-governance of grassroots sovereign digital communities and organisations. The resulting Constitutional Consensus protocol employs (1) state-of-the-art Sybil-resilient democratic decision processes for amending the set of participants, supermajority threshold, and timeout; and (2) a novel Byzantine-fault tolerant consensus protocol that is DAG-based (following Cordial Miners) thus eschewing reliable broadcast, with dual-mode operation (following Morpheus) that is quiescent when idle, has spontaneous leaders for isolated transactions, and formal round-robin leadership during high throughput.

翻译：基于无许可共识的去中心化自治组织（DAOs）是目前参与者治理数字组织的主流范式。由于参与者仅拥有可验证资源而缺乏可信身份，该生态系统必然形成财阀统治模式（一币一票）。本文首次提出基于许可共识与平等决策流程的数字社区及组织民主治理范式（一人一票）。遵循Lamport将共识视为自治议会的愿景，在民主范式中，宪法既规定决策协议也规定共识协议，二者结合使参与者能够通过经共识批准的合宪决策来修订宪法。为实现该范式的有效实例化，我们整合分布式计算与计算社会选择两个学科领域，旨在为基层主权数字社区和组织的民主自治提供实用高效的智能手机解决方案。所构建的宪法共识协议包含：（1）采用最先进的抗女巫攻击民主决策流程，用于修订参与者集合、绝对多数阈值和超时参数；（2）提出基于有向无环图的新型拜占庭容错共识协议（继承Cordial Miners架构），从而避免可靠广播需求，并采用双模式运行机制（继承Morpheus设计），在空闲时保持静默，对独立交易产生自发领导者，在高吞吐量期间实施正式轮询领导机制。