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??? You absolutely do not want consensus anywhere near an election. Consensus is not about agreeing on the total balance of transactions, it's about agreeing

??? You absolutely do not want consensus anywhere near an election. Consensus is not about agreeing on the total balance of transactions, it's about agreeing on individual transactions. It implies that multiple people know what your vote was which is absolutely not what you want.

sebmellen 6y ago
This is not true if the voting apparatus is separate from the identity of the voter. There are two ways to accomplish this, and the USPS is proposing that they ship voters a sort of "private key", which is fully anonymous, which has no connection to their identity. This key is used once, with the right to cast one vote. In such a system, the whole blockchain will know what each public key voted for. The difference is that there is no connection between this public key and the vote of an individual. This would allow for a massively snd openly auditable system, without sacrificing privacy or convenience. I am not a proponent of this, as I think that in the near and mid-term futures, there are too many technical problems to be worked out. If, however, we end up giving every citizen digital ID cards as Estonia has done, and using those as secure hardware used for voting, we could distribute the voting process. Essentially, there would be no more vote-counting. There would only be vote casting and the election results would be apparent to everyone, immediately. Consensus is absolutely necessary for such a system.
- jlokier 6y ago
  I look forward to the national outrage in year 2075 when it is discovered that 90% of "voting citizens" were tokens stored in the basement of the White House, and nobody noticed for 50 years.
squeaky-clean 6y ago
You don't know my bitcoin wallet address unless I share it with you, and you wouldn't know my voting ID unless I shared it with you.
- curryst 6y ago
  SSNs are probably the closest existing parallel. How many people in the US of voting age haven't had their SSN leaked yet? Obviously SSN is abused in the things it is used for (I.e. identification), but I don't see any indication voter IDs wouldn't be abused the same way.
  - squeaky-clean 6y ago
    SSN is a (mostly) permanent number you use for many many things. A voter ID would be unique with every upcoming vote. Election specific public key would probably be a more correct term. Abuse of it would definitely be bad, but it would be more difficult as you'd have to repeat the identity theft every election, rather than knowing someone's lifetime secret number.
jlokier 6y ago
I agree, when consensus is the per-transaction kind used in, say, Bitcoin. However, a Zero-Knowledge Proof-based consensus (https://zkproof.org https://zkproof.org) can produce agreement on a combined result without revealing the individual inputs. It's not easy, and you still have to prove the protocol has been followed, that is that everyone voted even though you don't know what they voted for. But it's a type of consensus which you do want.

sebmellen 6y ago

This is not true if the voting apparatus is separate from the identity of the voter. There are two ways to accomplish this, and the USPS is proposing that they ship voters a sort of "private key", which is fully anonymous, which has no connection to their identity. This key is used once, with the right to cast one vote. In such a system, the whole blockchain will know what each public key voted for. The difference is that there is no connection between this public key and the vote of an individual. This would allow for a massively snd openly auditable system, without sacrificing privacy or convenience. I am not a proponent of this, as I think that in the near and mid-term futures, there are too many technical problems to be worked out. If, however, we end up giving every citizen digital ID cards as Estonia has done, and using those as secure hardware used for voting, we could distribute the voting process. Essentially, there would be no more vote-counting. There would only be vote casting and the election results would be apparent to everyone, immediately. Consensus is absolutely necessary for such a system.

jlokier 6y ago
I look forward to the national outrage in year 2075 when it is discovered that 90% of "voting citizens" were tokens stored in the basement of the White House, and nobody noticed for 50 years.

squeaky-clean 6y ago

You don't know my bitcoin wallet address unless I share it with you, and you wouldn't know my voting ID unless I shared it with you.

curryst 6y ago
SSNs are probably the closest existing parallel. How many people in the US of voting age haven't had their SSN leaked yet? Obviously SSN is abused in the things it is used for (I.e. identification), but I don't see any indication voter IDs wouldn't be abused the same way.
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  SSN is a (mostly) permanent number you use for many many things. A voter ID would be unique with every upcoming vote. Election specific public key would probably be a more correct term. Abuse of it would definitely be bad, but it would be more difficult as you'd have to repeat the identity theft every election, rather than knowing someone's lifetime secret number.

jlokier 6y ago

I agree, when consensus is the per-transaction kind used in, say, Bitcoin. However, a Zero-Knowledge Proof-based consensus (https://zkproof.org https://zkproof.org) can produce agreement on a combined result without revealing the individual inputs. It's not easy, and you still have to prove the protocol has been followed, that is that everyone voted even though you don't know what they voted for. But it's a type of consensus which you do want.