7 ms·

Any justification or argumentation below the "NO" would be very welcome. I did download the article though, if that was the takeaway behind the website idea.

wmccullough 9y ago
I'll give one. It comes with the disclaimer that every time I've brought this up, I've been told I don't "get" blockchain. I want a national voting system with distributed ledgers in every state, and to add to that, every state has a copy of every other states voting records by virtue of having to validate the transactions. There's obviously lots of particulars around this, such as what to do with absentee ballots that are mailed in. This is a hypothetical use, at least in my mind. Another one, more for the finance industry. A few years back, I paid my rent with a moneygram. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the rental office telling me that moneygram rejected the payment and that I needed to call moneygram. Upon calling them, they said that they had record of me buying the moneygram (or whatever the hell it actually is), but that their system didn't have a record and there wasn't much they could do beyond give me a refund. How in the actual hell does a payments company have a problem like that? As a developer, I'm left to wonder if this was caused by some errant production release that wiped records, or a developer who ran a script from a well-known runbook that wiped out critical data (read: Amazon S3), or maybe even fraud somewhere in the pipeline. Why don't they have this data distributed and backed up in offline systems? If the government is willing to throw the book at financial fraud crimes (Unless you are Jamie Dimon), then there aught to be some kind of mandate that we have a verified ledger of electronic financial activities. The even scarier thing, to me, is that I thought they would have been doing that already... Those are a few potential uses from my perspective.
- shawabawa3 9y ago
  Voting comes up a lot as a use for blockchain, but I've never been convinced that a regular public database wouldn't be better - generally the government has to be trusted in some way, and gets to say who can and can't vote, so blockchain's main benefits (trustless+permissionless) aren't needed. Payments is definitely something blockchain can do better in some cases
  - scott_s 9y ago
    Verifiability by an individual voter - given their receipt (hash) they would be able to verify that their vote (transaction) was in the chain that produced the final tally. I am in general a blockchain skeptic - I think in most cases, there’s just enough trust to just use a centralized database - but voting seems like a good usecase for blockchain, as it provides voters with a receipt and it’s designed for auditing provenance.
    - shawabawa3 9y ago
      It would be just as easy to verify in a public database
      - scott_s 9y ago
        I don't think verifiability is the same. Yes, assuming the public database has some unique ID per vote, one could go in and verify their own vote was in the tally, and we could also verify that the final tally is the sum of everything in the public database. But what about someone who claims their vote was eliminated after voting occurred? There's no way to verify that either way. That kind of tampering, though, would not be possible using a blockchain, where the chain is constructed as the vote happens.
        MaxBarraclough 9y ago
        Part of the point of voting machinery is to make it impossible for the government to see which way a specific person voted. (Excepting a totally unanimous vote, I suppose.) But I figure we could tag each vote with a unique hash that's generated by, and known only to, the voter. Then, when all votes are cast, the database can be made public, including the hashes. Then each voter can check that their vote has been registered correctly, without the government knowing who voted what way. This wouldn't be good enough, though. We want to make it impossible to confirm to anyone else which way you voted, even if you want to, in order to prevent vote-selling. > But what about someone who claims their vote was eliminated after voting occurred? There's no way to verify that either way. You mean someone who cast a vote but then doesn't see it turn up on the public voting database? I imagine we could solve that with crypto. In my model: when you vote, you are given a cryptographically-signed proof-of-vote that is tied to your unique hash. > would not be possible using a blockchain Unless I'm missing something (which is entirely possible), I've shown that blockchain isn't the only solution.
- Asdfbla 9y ago
  Electronic voting is hard enough as it is, I sure hope people wait a long time before trying to use a fairly fragile system such as distributed ledgers for it. There are so many more subtle issues that could emerge and threaten the legitimacy of the election process (which is just as dangerous as actually manipulating the election). Despite being so simple, the paper ballot is quite hard to improve upon without making mistakes. Moreover, a democracy should probably have the requirement that the voting process is transparent and understandable for all citizens. The first attempts at electronic voting (if at all) should probably be made in countries like Estonia where all citizens have e-ID cards with cryptographic key pairs you can use for some oldschool cryptographic voting schemes.

wmccullough 9y ago

I'll give one. It comes with the disclaimer that every time I've brought this up, I've been told I don't "get" blockchain. I want a national voting system with distributed ledgers in every state, and to add to that, every state has a copy of every other states voting records by virtue of having to validate the transactions. There's obviously lots of particulars around this, such as what to do with absentee ballots that are mailed in. This is a hypothetical use, at least in my mind. Another one, more for the finance industry. A few years back, I paid my rent with a moneygram. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the rental office telling me that moneygram rejected the payment and that I needed to call moneygram. Upon calling them, they said that they had record of me buying the moneygram (or whatever the hell it actually is), but that their system didn't have a record and there wasn't much they could do beyond give me a refund. How in the actual hell does a payments company have a problem like that? As a developer, I'm left to wonder if this was caused by some errant production release that wiped records, or a developer who ran a script from a well-known runbook that wiped out critical data (read: Amazon S3), or maybe even fraud somewhere in the pipeline. Why don't they have this data distributed and backed up in offline systems? If the government is willing to throw the book at financial fraud crimes (Unless you are Jamie Dimon), then there aught to be some kind of mandate that we have a verified ledger of electronic financial activities. The even scarier thing, to me, is that I thought they would have been doing that already... Those are a few potential uses from my perspective.

shawabawa3 9y ago
Voting comes up a lot as a use for blockchain, but I've never been convinced that a regular public database wouldn't be better - generally the government has to be trusted in some way, and gets to say who can and can't vote, so blockchain's main benefits (trustless+permissionless) aren't needed. Payments is definitely something blockchain can do better in some cases
- scott_s 9y ago
  Verifiability by an individual voter - given their receipt (hash) they would be able to verify that their vote (transaction) was in the chain that produced the final tally. I am in general a blockchain skeptic - I think in most cases, there’s just enough trust to just use a centralized database - but voting seems like a good usecase for blockchain, as it provides voters with a receipt and it’s designed for auditing provenance.
  - shawabawa3 9y ago
    It would be just as easy to verify in a public database
    - scott_s 9y ago
      I don't think verifiability is the same. Yes, assuming the public database has some unique ID per vote, one could go in and verify their own vote was in the tally, and we could also verify that the final tally is the sum of everything in the public database. But what about someone who claims their vote was eliminated after voting occurred? There's no way to verify that either way. That kind of tampering, though, would not be possible using a blockchain, where the chain is constructed as the vote happens.
      - MaxBarraclough 9y ago
        Part of the point of voting machinery is to make it impossible for the government to see which way a specific person voted. (Excepting a totally unanimous vote, I suppose.) But I figure we could tag each vote with a unique hash that's generated by, and known only to, the voter. Then, when all votes are cast, the database can be made public, including the hashes. Then each voter can check that their vote has been registered correctly, without the government knowing who voted what way. This wouldn't be good enough, though. We want to make it impossible to confirm to anyone else which way you voted, even if you want to, in order to prevent vote-selling. > But what about someone who claims their vote was eliminated after voting occurred? There's no way to verify that either way. You mean someone who cast a vote but then doesn't see it turn up on the public voting database? I imagine we could solve that with crypto. In my model: when you vote, you are given a cryptographically-signed proof-of-vote that is tied to your unique hash. > would not be possible using a blockchain Unless I'm missing something (which is entirely possible), I've shown that blockchain isn't the only solution.
Asdfbla 9y ago
Electronic voting is hard enough as it is, I sure hope people wait a long time before trying to use a fairly fragile system such as distributed ledgers for it. There are so many more subtle issues that could emerge and threaten the legitimacy of the election process (which is just as dangerous as actually manipulating the election). Despite being so simple, the paper ballot is quite hard to improve upon without making mistakes. Moreover, a democracy should probably have the requirement that the voting process is transparent and understandable for all citizens. The first attempts at electronic voting (if at all) should probably be made in countries like Estonia where all citizens have e-ID cards with cryptographic key pairs you can use for some oldschool cryptographic voting schemes.