Republic
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1. What Is Republic
At a Glance: Foundational goals — three pillars: Rights, Agency, Sustainability
Republic — Jomhoor in Persian — literally means “the public.” Not citizens who vote every few years and watch from the sidelines until the next election, but people who participate daily in the decisions that shape their lives. Republic is not a title. Not an institution. Not a building to be inaugurated. Republic is a verb: people governing together.
Iran’s political history is full of moments when the people were the republic without knowing it — from the local councils of the Constitutional Revolution to the spontaneous neighborhood committees in the first months after the 1979 Revolution. And it is equally full of moments when the name republic existed but the thing itself did not — from the “Islamic Republic” to every electoral promise that led to nothing but further concentration of power.
Our question is not whether a republic is better than a monarchy. Our question is: what are the structural gaps in the architecture of republic — that is, in people’s practical capacity for self-governance — and how do we fill them?
2. The Structural Gaps
Every time a people has tried to build collective governance from scratch, they have faced a set of structural problems. These problems are neither uniquely Iranian nor accidental — they are inherent to every collective endeavor. But in Iran, each one carries an additional heavy layer of history and repression.
Gap One: The Identity Problem
In any political system, the first question is: who has the right to participate? In conventional democracies, the answer is simple: a registered citizen. But we neither have a state to register us nor do we want one — because that same state is also the instrument of our repression. On the other hand, if anyone can enter the decision-making process without proving their identity, the system is defenseless against manipulation, vote-flooding, and organized infiltration.
Current gap is this: to participate, you must be known — but being known means being vulnerable. An Iranian activist — whether inside Iran or in the diaspora — cannot entrust their name to any public registry. Being identified means threats to family, closed doors of return, becoming a target.
Our answer is Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography. The concept is straightforward: prove a claim without revealing information. I prove “I am Iranian” without saying “who I am.” I prove “I am a member of this group” without anyone knowing which member. I vote, and any observer can verify the vote was valid — but no one can link it back to me.
Every Iranian generates a cryptographic key pair (a wallet) using ZKP of their current ID. This key pair is their digital civic identity. Ownership of this key means ownership of identity, of personal data, of the right to participate, and of financial instruments. No central authority issues this key, and no central authority can revoke it.
Gap Two: The Trust Problem
At a Glance: Citizen Groups — ethical charter, security, and founding guide
Suppose the identity problem is solved. Now the second problem: how do strangers trust each other? Iran’s political history is saturated with experiences of betrayal, infiltration, and organizational collapse. Every new group that forms carries the shadow of suspicion — and rightly so.
The gap is this: traditional organizations solve trust through hierarchical structures — so-and-so is the leader, therefore trustworthy. But hierarchy itself becomes the next problem.
Our answer is twofold: human and technical. The human dimension is that trust is only built in small groups: 3 people, 5 people, 7 people — individuals who know each other, have shaken hands, join a live and private session together. The technical dimension is multi-signature wallets (Multi-Sig): a digital vault that requires multiple signatures to unlock. When a group’s funds can only be moved with three out of five signatures, no single person can run off with the money, and no single person can hold the group hostage. Trust shifts from individual ethics to structural design: not because people are inherently good, but because the system does not permit abuse.
These small groups are the foundational units of the republic’s architecture. Each group has both a collective digital identity and is registered on the network — not for permission, but to be found and heard.
Gap Three: The Decision Problem
At a Glance: Tools for expressing collective will — Polis, Agora, and voting methods
Trust is established. Identity is secured. Now the most important question: how do we decide?
The dominant model of political decision-making is binary: “yes or no” — referenda, simple majority, choosing between two options. This model reduces complex issues to a false dichotomy. Minorities are ignored. Real common ground is lost beneath the noise of disagreement. Worst of all: when you only have two choices, media campaigns and opinion engineering become easy — exactly what happened in the referendum of 1979, and is reportedly happening right now.
The gap is this: traditional tools for collective decision-making are either too simple (yes/no votes) or too slow (endless councils). None were designed for a large, dispersed, and anonymous population.
Our answer combines two tools. First: deliberation — structured dialogue for understanding, not for winning. The instrument is Agora Polis: a platform where anyone writes their opinion, agrees or disagrees with others’ statements, and an algorithm maps the real clusters of consensus and disagreement. The result is not a binary — it is a map. You see where people genuinely agree, what remains ambiguous, and where the real fault lines lie. Enabling among other things, systemts rewarding constructive ideas.
Then: decision — anonymous, verifiable voting with Rarimo. The issues that emerged from deliberation — issues that people have actually thought about and discussed — go to anonymous vote. Each voter proves they are a verified member of the network without revealing their identity. The result is publicly auditable. Fraud becomes mathematically impossible.
The combination of deliberation and ZKP voting gives the referendum a new meaning: not “yes or no” to a question framed by those in power, but questions that the people themselves have extracted from genuine dialogue, and rank in a meaningful way.
Gap Four: The Money Problem
Every social movement — and every political structure — needs money. And money, always and everywhere, has been an instrument of power concentration. Whoever holds the wallet decides. Whoever controls the budget steers the movement. The lobbying, the splits, the countless corruptions in the history of Iran’s opposition all have their roots here.
The gap is this: if money is owned by a central person or institution, even the best democracy will eventually submit to whoever controls the bank account.
Our answer is Decentralized Finance (DeFi) — not in the sense of crypto speculation, but in its precise meaning: finance without a central intermediary. Each citizen group has its own multi-signature wallet. All transactions are recorded on-chain — anyone can see what amount went where and when. Shared funds activate only when a defined threshold of groups votes in favor. Participatory budgeting means members themselves determine priorities and spending.
And alongside this, a marketplace: labor and services exchanged among Iranians with verified group digital identities, paid in cryptocurrency — independent of a banking system strangled by both sanctions and the regime.
Gap Five: The Scale Problem
At a Glance: Embracing dispersion — network architecture
Five people in a room can have direct democracy. How about five thousand? Five million? And those scattered across dozens of countries, with different time zones, languages, and legal jurisdictions?
The gap is this: every political structure that has grown large has slid toward centralization — unless its architecture is built so that scaling pushes power down, not up.
Our answer is subsidiarity. Every decision is made at the lowest possible level. A local group makes its own local decisions. Issues that extend beyond a single city are deliberated at the regional level. National issues — those that truly involve everyone — pass through national Polis deliberation and national anonymous voting on Agora.
The coordinating body is neither a party nor a government. It is technical infrastructure: a root certificate authority for verifying the authenticity of groups, a message relayer, and a guide for democratic processes. A servant of the network, not its owner — just as the postal carrier does not own the letters.
3. What the System Does
We have identified the gaps and the tools to fill them. Now the more important question: when this architecture stands, what does it actually do? Digital direct democracy is not merely an online version of a ballot box — it is a fundamentally new form of politics that makes previously impossible things possible.
Function One: Continuous National Dialogue
In the traditional model, “national dialogue” means a handful of politicians negotiate in a room and announce the result to the people. In our model, national dialogue means millions of people simultaneously thinking about an issue, recording their views, and having the real map of consensus and disagreement visible to all.
This dialogue does not wait for a regime to fall. It starts now. Any issue that concerns Iranians — from the shape of a future government to the question of national minorities, from economics to the environment — can enter Polis today. Clusters form. Common ground is discovered. And when the collective reaches sufficient maturity, the result goes to anonymous vote.
The sovereignty of the people’s questions over the politicians’ answers — this is our foundational principle. It is not the pre-made answers of elites that govern the people; it is the questions that have risen from the people themselves that determine the direction of politics.
Function Two: Organic Coalition Building
Traditional political coalitions are built from the top: a few leaders sit around a table and sign an agreement. These coalitions are fragile — because when the leaders disagree, the coalition collapses.
In our model, coalition forms from the bottom. Citizen groups from the same city connect — not because of a command from above, but because of shared concerns. Groups from the same province form a regional Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. Cross-provincial coalitions emerge. Every connection is voluntary and revisable at any moment. No group holds superiority over another.
Polis plays a vital role here: when two groups from two cities enter the same Polis space, they discover they agree on 80% of issues and diverge on only 20%. That discovery itself is the foundation of coalition — not a leaders’ agreement.
Function Three: Power Constrained by Design
In traditional systems, checks on power come after a government is established — separation of powers, free press, periodic elections. In our model, power constraints are embedded in the architecture itself. Money cannot be spent without multi-signature approval. A decision cannot reach a vote without prior deliberation. No representative holds a mandate without ZKP vote, and any representative can be recalled by ZKP vote at any time. All transactions are public and auditable.
This means people do not need to wait for corruption and then complain. The structure does not permit corruption — not because of human virtue but because of cryptographic mathematics and smart contract rules.
Function Four: The Economics of Struggle
Struggle has costs. Whoever has not funded the cost of struggle is not a participant — they are a spectator. The economics of struggle — optimal use of time, money, human resources, and information — takes practical shape through decentralized financial tools.
Each citizen and citizen group is also an independent economic unit: a wallet for all sort of transactions, the ability to receive direct financial support from backers, the ability to offer services in a marketplace. Shared city-level and regional funds with collective activation thresholds — meaning funds activate only when enough groups agree — enable financing larger projects. The movement’s economy belongs to neither one person nor one organization. It belongs to the network.
But there is a deeper question: where does the money come from? Scattered donations and the goodwill of diaspora alone do not build a sustainable economic architecture. If republic is merely a consumer of others’ currency — dollars, euros, even bitcoin — it will always depend on markets and policies over which it has no control.
Our proposal is this: if this system — ZKP identity, citizen groups with multi-sig wallets, deliberation, anonymous voting, and a marketplace — is effectively adopted by the Iranian community, it has the potential to give rise to an independent, state-free currency.
The logic is this: what is currency but collective agreement on value? When hundreds of thousands of Iranians have verified identities in a unified network, exchange labor and services in a shared marketplace, invest in common funds, and make economic decisions through collective voting — the conditions for a currency’s birth exist. Not a currency minted from above, but one that rises from the base of the network — backed not by gold or state force, but by the real economic activity of millions of people in a transparent networked economy.
This is the origin point of political economy — an economy that gives birth to politics from within itself, rather than an economy subordinate to power politics. A currency that diaspora Iranians empower through their labor, their exchange, and their trust — and that the world trusts based on the volume and credibility of this network. Just as Bitcoin derived its value not from a central bank but from the trust of its user network, the Republic currency would derive its value from the real economic agency of the Iranian community.
This means Iranians do not need to wait for a new government to print a new national currency. They can — if the republic’s architecture grows sufficiently — begin building their own economy today. Not as a dream, but as the natural consequence of a network in which real work is done, real services are exchanged, and real financial decisions are made collectively.
Function Five: Rebuilding the Public Sphere
Repression does not only target bodies — it devastates the public sphere. Public trust, the possibility of free dialogue, the feeling of agency — these must be rebuilt before any government is replaced.
Digital direct democracy creates a new public sphere: a space where anyone can express their opinion without fear of being identified. A space where disagreement does not lead to schism but to a map of consensus. A space where the voice of the silent majority is heard — not only the voice of the loud minority.
When people experience that their vote was counted, their opinion was read, and the decision made genuinely reflected their will — belief in the possibility of democratic politics returns. And that belief itself is a weapon of struggle.
Function Six: The Roadmap for Tomorrow’s Iran
National dialogue in this model is not just about “what do we do now” — it is also about “what should tomorrow’s Iran look like.” The fundamental difference is this: the roadmap is written neither by a single party nor by a congress of elites — it emerges from the deliberation and voting of all the people who have participated in the republic’s architecture.
Issues such as the distribution of power, the rights of minorities, the economic framework, the relationship between religion and state — none are predetermined and unless issues cross the red line of fundamental human rights, everything is in the hands of the republic. We design the rules of the game — we do not predetermine its winner.
4. What Kind of Politics Is This
What has been described is neither a classical republic nor anarchism. Digital direct democratic politics is a new form of political order whose possibilities have only recently become available — and Iranians, for reasons unique to their situation, need it more than most nations.
In this politics:
- The individual owns their identity, not the state
- The small group is the foundational unit, not the party
- Decisions emerge from dialogue, not from decree
- Money is held by the collective, not by an individual
- The coordinating body is a servant, not a commander
- Participation is safe, not heroic — because the system is built so that security is the default
- Scalability runs from bottom to top — every new group strengthens the network, not burdens it
This politics is not about waiting. Not waiting for a regime to fall. Not waiting for elites to agree. It is being built today: with every citizen key that is generated, with every three-person group that opens a shared wallet, with every opinion written in Polis.
Republic is not a building. Republic is the act of people governing together — without a leader, without a center, and without fear.