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Introduction

What is Ergo Nation?

ErgoNation is a community-driven project for decentralized identity (ΣID) verification. ΣIDs allow people to build reputation by engaging and contributing to the Ergo ecosystem. Users and projects of the ErgoNation are encouraged to protect the anonymity of participants, and strive for the ideals of a decentralized crypto ecosystem.

Why?

"One person, one vote." This is easy to achieve using centralized, non-anonymous mechanisms such as nation states distributing IDs. However, this is hard to achieve in an anonymous, decentralized manner. Therefore, the majority of crypto projects use tokens for governance, which conceptually resemble stock shares and corporate governance; all these follow the credo "more investment, more voting power." ErgoNation tries to bring the concept "one person, one vote" in an anonymous and decentralized way to the Ergo community. Projects can then use the on-chain ΣID data to create an electoral list.

How?

Participants start by creating a fresh Ergo wallet and fund it using the ErgoMixer. This preserves the participant’s anonymity. Once a month, participants are given an opportunity to complete an identity verification event. The events are designed to prove that the participating ΣIDs are not bots or multi-accounts. In practice, they have to complete a short game to get a verification code. That code is a small user-specific amount of ERG that is sent to a predefined address. The event start time, verification codes, and end are all announced on-chain, which makes the history verifiable and unchangeable.

Ideals

ErgoNation is a community where people are encouraged to not make any compromises on crypto ideals, decentralization and anonymity. There is no token, no treasury and no centralized team. That means the project relies completely on voluntary independent contributors, who can propose to add their work for the community. This also means that people are free to contribute work that inspires them, instead of being driven by commercial pressures of growth and profits.