> You also (almost always) try to preserve anonymity in a democracy.
You most definitely do not. When you turn up to vote, you get asked for id.
EDIT: your actual vote is anonymous, yes. But your participation in the voting is not anonymous. Blockchain allows for anonymous participation, so to say.
> Blockchain allows for anonymous participation, so to say.
No, different agents are voting. Democracy could be totally anonymous, in principle- get a secret key, generate a valid public one-time key, and your vote is verifiably valid but nobody has any idea who voted, much less who they voted for. If everyone is registered, you don't even have any useful information about who could have voted. Even in reality, your identity is discarded as soon as possible.
Blockchains are inherently public. Validators are NOT anonymously participating- they may be owned anonymously, but the owner isn't the one with the actual right to vote.
It's not just a semantic difference. In a real election, your ballot comes in a voter envelope. The ballot is anonymous inside the envelope, and the envelope is opened blind, but kept until the election is over. If they get two envelopes from the same person, they know it was a fraudulent vote. Once those envelopes are thrown out, there is nothing tying you to an election at all.
On the blockchain you effectively never throw out the voter envelope. Your vote -and what you voted for- can both be tied back to you via ownership of the voting agent. There is zero inherent protection of that relationship. All protection is done externally and the system does not do anything more than making sure it's not actively impossible to conceal your identity.
The vote is public, yes, but the participation is anonymous. I can easily set up two different miners, both controlled by me, but with different addresses. There is not generally an easy way of looking up agent ownership.
And while participation could in theory be anonymous for democracies, as you've described, I'm not aware of any country that actually does that?
It's not very anonymous in the US. You're required by law to identify yourself if possible*. Your party affiliation, registered mailing address, and registered phone number are all publicly visible. Someone knows your votes too, and they try to keep it secret, but I have little faith in that.
* In all 50 states AFAIK you can register with no ID and no home address, but it's illegal to lie.
IDK democracy is the best way to ensure prosperity and wealth. It's basically the idea that the 51% can rob the 49%. Preservation of wealth arguably can be better preserved if taking from the 49% results in their violent frustration of those efforts, and enabling that may require some constitutional republic, benevolent dictatorship/monarchy, or ancap kind of situation.
I'd always rather the greater than 50% coalition have control than the less than 50% coalition. Just look at it from a numbers standpoint. If the vote is to "kill the other team" giving which group power does the least harm? The Majority.
And just because that vote can happen isn't a mark against the system. The three other forms of government you mentioned are all equally capable of that atrocity.
51% killing the 49% in iteration is 1% killing the 99%.
>The three other forms of government you mentioned are all equally capable of that atrocity.
If you ignore the psychological disadvantage of the killers having a monopoly on 'legitimate' violence. For instance, in some anarchistic type scenario there is at least the upper hand that everyone understands the aggression of others is not granted some philisophical legitimacy over their own, and people frustrating these efforts will know their defensive efforts are not philisophically disadvantaged. Moral is an important component of self defense. It is easier to push many people in the cattle car if they think a legitimate 'authority' of the government has spoken.