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> That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All

> That begs the question, presuming that voting on a decentralized platform is good. A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood. > Decentralized governance and decentralized UBI in general. Governance on decentralized platform can typically be approached via a few ways: - weighting votes by compute power - weighting votes by volume of ownership (eg of a coin) - weighting votes by number of identities/wallets The first two only serve the rich (the people that can afford GPU farms or equity), and will lead to an oligarchy. The last doesn't work because one person can create infinite accounts (eg public/private key pairs.) The last, however, can work if one person can only ever be linked to one account. > “Privacy for the normal people!” Oh, I can’t imagine that starting a firestorm (and for good reason). You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this. You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment.

kstrauser 3y ago
> A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood. That seems to be an extraordinary claim, and I'm skeptical that 1) it's true, and 2) that's all that's missing. In short, I've voted for many things in many contexts in the existing world. I don't think I've ever bumped into a problem with voting that any form of a decentralized platform would have improved. > You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this. It's just the first example I thought of. I'm sure that 8 billion people could crowdsource all source of other edge cases. > You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment. I wasn't the one making the proposal. The onus is on the proposer to explain how they're going to deal with the edge cases and convince the rest of us that this is a real, thought-through idea.
- xvector 3y ago
  > That seems to be an extraordinary claim, and I'm skeptical that 1) it's true, and 2) that's all that's missing. Are you aware of how decentralized computers work? Every computation can be verified by every participant. It's objectively true that such a platform would be less prone to being rigged.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    And completely horrible for anyone who values anonymous voting. For instance, under no circumstances, ever, do I want it to be possible for guys with machine guys to show up at my door and "help" me verify that I voted "for the right person". Any proposal that would make that possible is a human rights disaster and can be dismissed.
    - xvector 3y ago
      What makes you think voting would be non-anonymous? Of course it could be anonymous. Your understanding of cryptography as it related to decentralized systems seems to be limited, and you're reaching wildly misinformed conclusions. You have a strong opinion about decentralized systems being bad and haven't bothered to actually learn the area before making statements like this. Monero is an example of an anonymous decentralized system. There are plenty of anonymous decentralized systems and nothing precludes a system with proof of personhood also being anonymous.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        I understand very well how all this works. I just think it’s a bad idea. You can’t have vote verification and anonymity at the same time. Either your vote goes into the anonymous, aggregated pool of all votes, or it’s possible for you to look yours up afterward to make sure it was recorded directly. That latter option has fire real-world consequences, and any system that allows someone (and especially the people looking over their shoulder) to see their choices is dead on arrival. The ability to verify votes after casting them isn’t just unneeded: it’s completely unwanted. It’s the sort of thing that gets people killed, and that’s not hyperbole.

kstrauser 3y ago

> A decentralized platform is verifiable and less prone to being rigged. All that's missing is proof of personhood. That seems to be an extraordinary claim, and I'm skeptical that 1) it's true, and 2) that's all that's missing. In short, I've voted for many things in many contexts in the existing world. I don't think I've ever bumped into a problem with voting that any form of a decentralized platform would have improved. > You are picking a really tiny edge case and saying the entire system can't work because of this. It's just the first example I thought of. I'm sure that 8 billion people could crowdsource all source of other edge cases. > You aren't considering the possibility that the edge case can be adequately resolved with enough thought and investment. I wasn't the one making the proposal. The onus is on the proposer to explain how they're going to deal with the edge cases and convince the rest of us that this is a real, thought-through idea.

xvector 3y ago
> That seems to be an extraordinary claim, and I'm skeptical that 1) it's true, and 2) that's all that's missing. Are you aware of how decentralized computers work? Every computation can be verified by every participant. It's objectively true that such a platform would be less prone to being rigged.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  And completely horrible for anyone who values anonymous voting. For instance, under no circumstances, ever, do I want it to be possible for guys with machine guys to show up at my door and "help" me verify that I voted "for the right person". Any proposal that would make that possible is a human rights disaster and can be dismissed.
  - xvector 3y ago
    What makes you think voting would be non-anonymous? Of course it could be anonymous. Your understanding of cryptography as it related to decentralized systems seems to be limited, and you're reaching wildly misinformed conclusions. You have a strong opinion about decentralized systems being bad and haven't bothered to actually learn the area before making statements like this. Monero is an example of an anonymous decentralized system. There are plenty of anonymous decentralized systems and nothing precludes a system with proof of personhood also being anonymous.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      I understand very well how all this works. I just think it’s a bad idea. You can’t have vote verification and anonymity at the same time. Either your vote goes into the anonymous, aggregated pool of all votes, or it’s possible for you to look yours up afterward to make sure it was recorded directly. That latter option has fire real-world consequences, and any system that allows someone (and especially the people looking over their shoulder) to see their choices is dead on arrival. The ability to verify votes after casting them isn’t just unneeded: it’s completely unwanted. It’s the sort of thing that gets people killed, and that’s not hyperbole.