Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration. We're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation. The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control. Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology. Let's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the "distributed autonomous organisations" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making. One of these is communal decision-making, at every level from household to nation. So by extension distributed consensus could be applied to the practice of democracy. Moreover, frameworks based on the blockchain promise to solve a number of long-standing democratic problems. They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian. When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. There's a fair degree of slippage between the way we'd be likely to interpret 'distributed consensus' in a political context, and what the same phrase actually denotes in its proper, technical context. As it turns out, here the word 'consensus' doesn't have anything to do with that sense of common purpose nurtured among a group of people over the course of long and difficult negotiations. Rather, it is technical jargon: it simply refers to the process by which all of the computers participating in the Bitcoin network eventually come to agree that a given transaction is valid. Instead of being a technically mediated process of agreement among peers and equals separated from one another in space and time, it's actually just a reconciliation of calculations being performed by distant machines. An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not. Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll. There's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform. Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.

<question>:
Who would benefit most from a distributed collective decision process?

<options>:
A The 40% of North Americans without smartphones
B Busy voters
C Silicon Valley
D Politicians

<answer>:

B