Deviant · On-chain governance protocol
The classical apparatus — sortition, scrutiny, accountability — restored and improved as CashScript covenants on Bitcoin Cash. Each ancient office becomes a contract that cannot lie: no magistrate to bribe, no archon to forge the roll, no herald to miscount.
Movement is bidirectional and symmetric: the process that admits also demotes. Every privilege is contestable through the machinery that granted it. No tier is above the machinery.
Three independent gates, in order. Neither voting chamber is candidate-controlled — endorsers prove social existence; both voting chambers are sortitioned after. The candidate's allies act only in the auditable pre-gate.
The Athenian institutions rebuilt as CashScript covenants. Greek terms are the brand/display layer; code identifiers are unchanged. Each ancient office becomes a contract that cannot lie.
| Code | Brand (Greek) | In Athens | In Athenae | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CitizenToken | Pinakion | Bronze citizen ID ticket, slotted into the kleroterion | Per-member identity token that grants the vote. 1-byte rank in commitment. | ✓ |
| EndorsementCovenant | Dokimasia | Scrutiny/vetting before admission or office | On-chain pre-gate proving social existence via co-spent CitizenToken. | ✓ |
| ApplicationCovenant | Engraphe | Enrolment of a citizen onto the deme roll | The admission/demotion state machine (Phases A → E, bicameral + cap + fee + secret ballot). | ✓ |
| RegistryState | Katalogos | The official citizen roll | Member registry holding the adaptive threshold; co-spend-as-oracle for consumers. | ✓ |
| sortition idiom | Kleroterion | The allotment machine — selected the Boule by lot | Not a separate covenant — embedded inside ApplicationCovenant. Pins a future block height as entropy; the block hash deterministically selects jurors from the pool. Streaming replacement on no-show. | ✓ |
| BallotCovenant | Psephos | The voting pebble | Per-poll ballot issuance/consumption with commit-reveal for secret ballot. | ✓ |
| PollCovenant | Ekklesia | The citizen Assembly that convened the vote | Per-voter allowlisted poll. Sybil resistance in the upstream issuer. | ✓ |
| TallyState | Diapsephisis | The taking & counting of the vote | Trustless on-chain tally with readOnly() co-spend path. | ✓ |
| ComplaintCovenant | Euthynai | Mandatory accountability audit of every official | Rising-cost complaint counter with Elder escalation threshold. | ✓ |
| ElderFreezeAction | Graphe Paranomon | Suit against an unconstitutional decree — suspended it | Elder quorum freezes a founder action; routes to community vote. | ✓ |
| demotion outcome | Ostracism | Removal by community vote | Not a separate covenant — the same ApplicationCovenant machinery that admits produces the demotion outcome. Bidirectional symmetry: the process that grants also revokes. | ✓ |
| RemovalBondEscrow | — | — | Bond + fee routing for removals and the treasury. Phase G wiring. | 🔧 |
Confirmations, chamber strictness, pre-gate size, and fee all scale with member count. Bootstraps simply; hardens as it grows. The schedule is hard-coded in the contract — Layer A immutable.
At N=100, the schedule requires 1 endorsement + 1-of-2 in each chamber (50% filter). By N=1500+ it has ratcheted to full 15 endorsements + 15-of-29 in both chambers (52% filter — strictest where the network is most fragile; honest-majority where multi-dimensional defenses carry the load).
| Phase | N (members) | Pre-gate | Each chamber | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0–99 | — | Founder grants | Viral bootstrap |
| 1 | 100–199 | 1 | 1 of 2 · 50% | Bicameral opens |
| 2 | 200–299 | 2 | 2 of 3 · 67% | — |
| 3 | 300–399 | 3 | 3 of 5 · 60% | Elders open |
| 5 | 500–599 | 5 | 5 of 9 · 55% | — |
| 10 | 1000–1099 | 10 | 10 of 19 · 52% | — |
| 15 | 1500+ | 15 | 15 of 29 · 52% | Mature |
Elder emergence: 0 Elders → founder sole substitute; 1–4 → founder + all Elders unanimous; 5+ → founder + Elder 3/3; mature → Elder unanimous alone, founder confirmation optional.
The Founder is a bounded-trust role — seven procedural layers plus one economic. Each independently damage-limiting; the combination bounds a captured founder to one bounded-scope action before elevated demotion catches up.
Two orthogonal mechanisms composing multiplicatively. An attacker must defeat both to buy majority — they cannot forge identities cheaply and cannot stack votes per identity cheaply.
Math note An earlier version of this framing quoted "~870 bribes per identity, three orders of magnitude vs KYC." That was wrong — it conflated one-time capability cost with per-identity stochastic cost. The corrected claim is the 10–100× cost ratio combined with 100–1000× time horizon product, arising from the multiplicative composition above.
Any voting system has three attack surfaces. Athenae is the first to remove all three from trusted intermediaries — the first with cryptographic integration at every layer.
close(); covenant state is the result. No announcement layer. Wallets surface, never assert.
Chipnet-validated substrate; specified but not yet implemented in specific components; open questions where the mechanism requires further design.