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I give you one shining example. Secure and untampered voting. Let's say you record voting based on SMS for American Idol show in MySQL database. Singer A got 1
by langitbiru 9y ago
I give you one shining example. Secure and untampered voting.
Let's say you record voting based on SMS for American Idol show in MySQL database. Singer A got 1000 votes, singer B got 700 votes. But singer B is more viral and popular in social media. You think if singer B goes to the next level, it will increase the rating of the show much more compared to singer A does. So you decide to bump up the singer B's voting number to 1100.
Blockchain can prevent this malicious behaviour.
- nstart 9y agoNot a good case for shared write access. Just shared read access. DB's come with their own logs. If one wanted to provide verification one only needs to provide logs that other people can read and maintain diffs/copies of
- Karunamon 9y agoYou can’t prove that logs haven’t been tampered with, though. The running system is a black box that could be doing anything to that file before making it available.
- lalaland1125 9y agoThis is quite simple. You simply have the running system constantly have the file or data be readable to the public. Now anyone can prove that the logs haven't been tampered with. Even better, you can just use a merkle tree data storage solution like Git to make that verification easy and fast. See Certificate Authority for a fully fleshed out solution in this nature. (I guess you could claim that merkle trees are blockchains, but in that case I would argue that the word "blockchain" is pretty meaningless. Just call them merkle trees.)
- Karunamon 9y agoBut it's turtles all the way down. How does the public know that they're getting the data and not a surrepetitiously modified version? At some point you're relying on the system to be truthful about its contents.
- nstart 9y agoHonestly you brought up really valid points. Thanks. That got me thinking a plenty :)
- village-idiot 9y agoIt also effectively hands your vote over in cleartext to the nation state. There's a damn good reason why Russia is looking into blockchain voting, and it's not for the purpose of protecting fair and free elections. Paper ballots work fine and have amazingly low error rates, leave it be.
- langitbiru 9y agoPaper ballots is overkill for American Idol voting, though. FYI, the voting in blockchain can be anonymised.
- village-idiot 9y agoMaybe for pointless votes like American Idol or Formula E fanboost that's fine, although it seems like massive overkill to me. You're still going to need to justify the energy bill/incentivize miners, and these systems have a central authority that could run a regular voting system anyways. The issue I have with electronic voting of any kind is that it's a huge and valuable target, it's pretty much guaranteed that multiple hostile nation states will want to poke holes into these systems. Introducing crypto doesn't do squat to prevent all sorts of nasty problems, including information leaks and stolen private keys. Given what we know about how most people handle basic passwords, I think paper is probably the most secure form of voting we've ever seen.
- langitbiru 9y agoFor us, American Idol is pointless. But for the singer who got robbed the championship, it's not. Yes, I admit the energy bill is part of the blockchain scalability issue. But blockchain is still in infancy. There is a room for improvement regarding the energy bill. The political voting is a complex beast so I am not going to comment on it yet. My main focus is for the voting process like American Idol, choosing moderators in forum.
- village-idiot 9y agoBlockchain is nowhere close to its infancy. It's a 10 year old technology.