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

<passage>:
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. You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time. There's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform. Our democracies certainly do seem to be having a hard time reckoning with many profound crises, whether these involve the integration of refugees, the disappearance of work or the threats of climate change. Our existing ways of making collective decisions have conspicuously failed to help us develop policies equal to the scale of crisis. There really is a global 1 per cent, and they seem to be hell-bent on having themselves a new Gilded Age, even as the public services the rest of us depend on are stripped to the bone. Throw in the despair that sets in after many years of imposed austerity and it's no wonder that many people have had enough. What all of these more recent developments have in common is the sense among a wide swath of the electorate, in country after country, that the conventional practice of democracy has failed them. It no longer expresses the will of the people, if it ever did, and now serves only the needs of distant, shadowy, unspecified elites. And as is so often the case, there is a grain of truth to this. Some voters, either impervious to the lessons of history, or certain that whatever comes, they'll wind up on top, seek the clarity and vigour of a strong hand. They are perhaps encouraged by authoritarian leaders abroad, with their own internal reasons for disparaging the practice of democracy and much to gain by undermining confidence in it. Other voters have no particular time for the right, but feel betrayed by the parties they once trusted to advance their class interest. When they look around and see that someone other than them is indeed profiting from the status quo, they lose all patience with the idea that redress can be found in the ballot box. They're willing to see their own house burned down, if that's what it takes to stick it to the despised elites that are suddenly, heedlessly gentrifying their neighbourhoods and 'decanting' them from their homes. 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. Even if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. Voting blocks 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 But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others. 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.

<question>:
Why are worldwide democracies struggling?

<options>:
A They aren't struggling
B They are not perceived as representative
C They are poor
D There are many undemocratic candidates with the clarity and vigour of a strong hand

<answer>:

B