Researcher profile

Ehud Shapiro

Ehud Shapiro contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

10 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Constitutional Governance in Metric Spaces

Computational social choice and algorithmic decision theory offer rich aggregation theory but no comprehensive process for egalitarian self-governance: aggregation, deliberation, amendment, and consensus are each considered in isolation, with key metric-space aggregators being NP-hard. Here, we propose constitutional governance in metric spaces, integrating these stages into a coherent polynomial-time protocol for constitutional governance. The constitution assigns, per amendable component including itself, a metric space, aggregation rule, and supermajority threshold. Amendments proceed by members voting with their ideal elements, followed by members submitting public proposals carrying supermajority public support under the revealed votes. Public proposals can be sourced from deliberation among members, vote aggregation, or AI mediation. The constitutional rule adopts a supported proposal with positive maximal score, if there is one, else retains the status quo. With Constitutional Consensus, a community can run the constitutional governance protocol on members' personal computing devices (e.g., smartphones), achieving digital sovereignty. We focus on the utility of the generalised median, prove that at majority threshold no misreport weakly dominates sincere voting, and study the compromise gap between best peak and unconstrained optimum. We instantiate the framework to seven canonical settings -- electing officers, setting rates, allocating budgets, ranking priorities, selecting boards, drafting bylaws, and amending the constitution. By unifying metric-space aggregation, reality-aware social choice, supermajority amendment, constitutional consensus, deliberative coalition formation, and AI mediation, this work delivers a comprehensive solution to the constitutional governance of digital communities and organisations.

preprint2025arXiv

Grassroots Platforms with Atomic Transactions: Social Networks, Cryptocurrencies, and Democratic Federations

Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms. Whereas global platforms can have only a single instance, grassroots platforms can have multiple instances that emerge and operate independently of each other and of any global resource except the network, and can interoperate and coalesce into ever-larger instances once interconnected. Key grassroots platforms include grassroots social networks, grassroots cryptocurrencies, and grassroots democratic federations. Previously, grassroots platforms were defined formally and proven grassroots using unary distributed transition systems, in which each transition is carried out by a single agent. However, grassroots platforms cater for a more abstract specification using transactions carried out atomically by multiple agents, something that cannot be expressed by unary transition systems. As a result, their original specifications and proofs were unnecessarily cumbersome and opaque. We enhance the notion of a distributed transition system to include atomic transactions and revisit the notion of grassroots platforms within this new foundation; present crisp specifications of key grassroots platforms using atomic transactions: befriending and defriending for grassroots social networks, coin swaps for grassroots cryptocurrencies, and communities forming, joining, and leaving a federation for grassroots democratic federations; prove a general theorem that a platform specified by atomic transactions that are so-called interactive is grassroots; show that the atomic transactions used to specify all three platforms are interactive; and conclude that the platforms thus specified are indeed grassroots. We thus provide a crisp mathematical foundation for grassroots platforms and a solid and clear starting point from which their implementation can commence.

preprint2025arXiv

Morpheus Consensus: Excelling on trails and autobahns

Recent research in consensus has often focussed on protocols for State-Machine-Replication (SMR) that can handle high throughputs. Such state-of-the-art protocols (generally DAG-based) induce undue overhead when the needed throughput is low, or else exhibit unnecessarily-poor latency and communication complexity during periods of low throughput. Here we present Morpheus Consensus, which naturally morphs from a quiescent low-throughput leaderless blockchain protocol to a high-throughput leader-based DAG protocol and back, excelling in latency and complexity in both settings. During high-throughout, Morpheus pars with state-of-the-art DAG-based protocols, including Autobahn. During low-throughput, Morpheus exhibits competitive complexity and lower latency than standard protocols such as PBFT and Tendermint, which in turn do not perform well during high-throughput. The key idea of Morpheus is that as long as blocks do not conflict (due to Byzantine behaviour, network delays, or high-throughput simultaneous production) it produces a forkless blockchain, promptly finalizing each block upon arrival. It assigns a leader only if one is needed to resolve conflicts, in a manner and with performance not unlike Autobahn.

preprint2022arXiv

Fault-Tolerant Distributed-Ledger Implementation of Digital Social Contracts

A companion paper defined the notion of digital social contracts, presented a design for a social-contracts programming language, and demonstrated its potential utility via example social contracts. The envisioned setup consists of people with genuine identifiers, which are unique and singular cryptographic key pairs, that operate software agents thus identified on their mobile device. The abstract model of digital social contracts consists of a transition system specifying concurrent, non-deterministic asynchronous agents that operate on a shared ledger by performing digital speech acts, which are cryptographically-signed sequentially-indexed digital actions. Here, we address the distributed-ledger implementation of digital social contracts in the presence of faulty agents: we present a design of a fault-tolerant distributed-ledger transition system and show that it implements the abstract shared-ledger model of digital social contracts, and discuss its resilience to faulty agents. The result is a novel ledger architecture that is distributed with a blockchain-per-person (as opposed to centralized with one blockchain for all), partially-ordered (as opposed to totally-ordered), locally-replicated (as opposed to globally-replicated), asynchronous (as opposed to globally-synchronized), peer-to-peer with each agent being both an actor and a validator (as opposed to having dedicated miners, validators, and clients), environmentally-friendly (as opposed to the environmentally-harmful Proof-of-Work), self-sufficient (as opposed to the energy-hogging Proof-of-Work or capital-hogging Proof-of-Stake) and egalitarian (as opposed to the plutocratic Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake).

preprint2022arXiv

Foundations for Grassroots Democratic Metaverse

While the physical lives of many of us are in democracies (one person, one vote - e.g., the EU and the US), our digital lives are mostly in autocracies (one person, all votes - e.g., Facebook). Cryptocurrencies promise liberation but stop short, at plutocracy (one coin, one vote). What would it take for us to live our digital lives in a digital democracy? This paper offers a vision, a theoretical framework, and an architecture for a grassroots network of autonomous, people-owned, people-operated, and people-governed digital communities, namely a grassroots democratic metaverse. It also charts a roadmap towards realizing it, and identifies unexplored territory for further research.

preprint2022arXiv

Proportional Ranking in Primary Elections: A Case Study

Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary elections may not be the most suitable, especially if some form of proportional ranking is desired. In this paper, we compare different algorithmic methods for holding primaries (i.e., different aggregation methods for voters' ballots), by evaluating the degree of proportional ranking that is achieved by each of them using real-world data. In particular, we compare six different algorithms by analyzing real-world data from a recent primary election conducted by the Israeli Democratit party. Technically, we analyze unique voter data and evaluate the proportionality achieved by means of cluster analysis, aiming at pinpointing the representation that is granted to different voter groups under each of the algorithmic methods considered. Our finding suggest that, contrary to the most-prominent primaries algorithm used (i.e., Approval), other methods such as Sequential Proportional Approval or Phragmen can bring about better proportional ranking and thus may be better suited for primary elections in practice.

preprint2022arXiv

Sybil-Resilient Coin Minting

We describe a distributed coin minting protocol that mints one coin per time unit for each member in a digital community. The protocol assumes that community members use a trust-graph to determine the genuineness of digital identities, and that doing so bounds the number of sybils (fake or duplicate identities) in the community, but does not completely eliminate them. The main goal of the protocol is to be resilient to the sybils that penetrate the community, in the sense that, in the long run, only genuine identities mint coins. The protocol accepts that sybils penetrate the community from time to time (by gaining enough trust within the trust-graph), yet assumes that every sybil is eventually exposed. Since coins minted by a sybil will most probably circulate by the time it is exposed, the protocol puts the responsibility for introducing a sybil onto its trusting neighbours and confiscates subsequent coins minted by them, until the coins minted by that sybil are accounted for. In particular, the protocol confiscates two coins for each coin minted by the sybil: one to recover what was wrongly minted and one as a fine for introducing the sybil in the first place. We argue that this approach constitutes a mechanism to deter the introduction of sybils into the community and to incentivize sybil hunting (using part of the confiscated money as a reward).

preprint2020arXiv

Digital Social Contracts: A Foundation for an Egalitarian and Just Digital Society

Almost two centuries ago Pierre-Joseph Proudhon proposed social contracts -- voluntary agreements among free people -- as a foundation from which an egalitarian and just society can emerge. A \emph{digital social contract} is the novel incarnation of this concept for the digital age: a voluntary agreement between people that is specified, undertaken, and fulfilled in the digital realm. It embodies the notion of "code-is-law" in its purest form, in that a digital social contract is in fact a program -- code in a social contracts programming language, which specifies the digital actions parties to the social contract may take; and the parties to the contract are entrusted, equally, with the task of ensuring that each party abides by the contract. Parties to a social contract are identified via their public keys, and the one and only type of action a party to a digital social contract may take is a "digital speech act" -- signing an utterance with her private key and sending it to the other parties to the contract. Here, we present a formal definition of a digital social contract as agents that communicate asynchronously via crypto-speech acts, where the output of each agent is the input of all the other agents. We outline an abstract design for a social contracts programming language and show, via programming examples, that key application areas, including social community; simple sharing-economy applications; egalitarian currency networks; and democratic community governance, can all be expressed elegantly and efficiently as digital social contracts.

preprint2020arXiv

Egalitarian and Just Digital Currency Networks

Cryptocurrencies are a digital medium of exchange with decentralized control that renders the community operating the cryptocurrency its sovereign. Leading cryptocurrencies use proof-of-work or proof-of-stake to reach consensus, thus are inherently plutocratic. This plutocracy is reflected not only in control over execution, but also in the distribution of new wealth, giving rise to ``rich get richer'' phenomena. Here, we explore the possibility of an alternative digital currency that is egalitarian in control and just in the distribution of created wealth. Such currencies can form and grow in grassroots and sybil-resilient way. A single currency community can achieve distributive justice by egalitarian coin minting, whereby each member mints one coin at every time step. Egalitarian minting results, in the limit, in the dilution of any inherited assets and in each member having an equal share of the minted currency, adjusted by the relative productivity of the members. Our main theorem shows that a currency network, where agents can be members of more than one currency community, can achieve distributive justice globally across the network by joint egalitarian minting, whereby each agent mints one coin in only one community at each timestep. Specifically, we show that a sufficiently large intersection between two communities -- relative to the gap in their productivity -- will cause the exchange rates between their currencies to converge to 1:1, resulting in global distributive justice.

preprint2018arXiv

Foundations of e-Democracy

The Internet revolution of democracy, which will transform earthly representative democracies by employing the communication and collaboration capabilities of the Internet, has yet to come. Here, we enlist the wisdom of our forefathers to lead the way. By consulting the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, we distill core values of democracy and derive from them requirements for the foundations of e-democracy. Building these foundations can usher the urgently-needed revolution of democracy. (To appear in Communications of the ACM)