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

<passage>:
These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less 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. 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. All three are based on the decentralised system of authentication that was originally developed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The details of this mechanism are fiendishly difficult to understand, but its essence – and the innovation that so excites fans of networked democracy – is that it proves the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions computationally, instead of relying on the authority of any government or banking institution. Everything rests on the blockchain, a permanent, transparent record of every exchange of Bitcoin ever made, an identical copy of which is held locally by every machine participating in the network. The blockchain maintains and reconciles all account balances, and is the sole arbiter in the event of a discrepancy or dispute. Whenever a new transaction appears on the Bitcoin network, all of its nodes perform an elaborate series of calculations aimed at validating it, and a majority of them must agree its legitimacy before it can be added to the shared record. This peer-to-peer process of distributed consensus can be applied beyond cryptocurrency to other situations that require some kind of procedure for the collective construction of truth. 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. To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error. Why dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. 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. If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion. Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins. They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.

<question>:
Which of the following most closely fits the theme of this article?

<options>:
A Blockchains as a democratic tool do not currently work
B Blockchains could be a democratic tool if used properly
C None of the options fit as the theme
D Blockchains are the future of democracy

<answer>:

B