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It’s all using cryptography. Cryptographic signatures are heavily used in these networks. People sign the transactions using elliptic-curve cryptography (or th

by EGreg 2y ago

It’s all using cryptography. Cryptographic signatures are heavily used in these networks. People sign the transactions using elliptic-curve cryptography (or they are moving to some quantum-resistant thing). Then a blockchain or other decentralized network stores the transactions while a programming language is used to make sure that everyone and every node is following the rules. Being able to finally trust the code instead of a middleman has the potential to be extremely useful despite your insistence that it cannot possibly have any uses because you personally don’t like it. Because trust is costly, and being able to reduce the attack surface enables much larger coordination and larger value to be managed collectively, with far less corruption.

tsimionescu 2y ago
There is no way to do commerce with physical goods without trusting either (a) your trading partner, (b) a middleman, or (c) your government. Crypto only solves the postmen of trading crypto without trust. Everything else still needs a trusted middleman. And for things like voting, it is hundreds of times easier to verify if a paper ballot election is rigged than it is to verify if a crypto based election is rigged.
- EGreg 2y ago
  That’s wrong First of all, there are many more applications than commerce with physical goods. There’s global payments for services, recurring subscription models, gated access to content, contests, voting, governance, UBI, and much more. Check out https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications for a more comprehensive list. I wrote this article in 2020 after multiple voting debacles in Iowa etc. Paper ballots and hand counting is what lost Al Gore the election for instance and George W Bush got elected, leading to a lot of wars and destruction. With all those paper butterly ballots and other things, it was actually NOT easier at all. People had to recount throughkut multiple days until the Supreme Court simply stopped them: https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ And now a large proportion of the country believes the 2020 election was rigged due to mail-in ballots arriving and being counted in the middle of the night. Go tell them they’re wrong. You may think they’re crazy but cryptographic signatures and valid IDs could have made it FAR more secure. Unlinkability is the only thing that is hard, for that we could have given everyone a token and used a zero-knowledge proof mixer. In fact, that is what Google now does with its “privacy sandbox”. But you have to trust Google :-)
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > cryptographic signatures and valid IDs could have made it FAR more secure No it wouldn’t, it would make attacks at scale easier. The gold standard is physical ballots with electronic scanning.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      Seems completely the opposite. With paper ballots around the world there are already attacks at scale. Take the latest national election in the USA. Republicans claim that Democrats shipped in fake mail-in ballots or harvested them from old people, and said “trust us”. Democrats claim that Republicans closed polling stations and disenfranchised many voters at scale in districts that historically voted Democratic. Witness all the rigged elections around the world, some strongmen getting 99% of the vote at scale. What good are the paper ballots in, say, Belarus if Lukashenko says he won? Is an average person going to be able to somehow know what happened in their own pollung station after they left, let alone across the entire country? Having mutually distrusting parties have access to each other’s work is the very thing that enforces byzantine consensus but it can be checked and verified on-chain as each party signs off on the result, so anyone can check that 1) they looked at it and 2) they were satisfied. That’s far far better than hearing someone say “it went fine” about paper ballot recounts. Furthermore, everyone being able to make sure their vote was counted by eg checking Merkle Proof is far more secure. None of the above failure modes would be an issue if everyone who wanted to, could vote from their computer, scanned the QR code with their phone to verify their choice, and signed with their private cryptographic keys derived from their IDs.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Republicans claim that Democrats shipped in fake mail-in ballots or harvested them from old people, and said “trust us”. Democrats claim that Republicans closed polling stations Claims won’t change with a tech fix. The point is there still isn’t evidence of wide-scale disruption. Electronic-only voting changes that from a verifiable problem to an inherently-unverifiable one. You only know the code voted, not the person. > What good are the paper ballots in, say, Belarus if Lukashenko says he won? Crypto ballots wouldn’t change this. If anything, I expect crypto voting to soon feature in authoritarians’ elections.

by EGreg 2y ago

tsimionescu 2y ago

There is no way to do commerce with physical goods without trusting either (a) your trading partner, (b) a middleman, or (c) your government. Crypto only solves the postmen of trading crypto without trust. Everything else still needs a trusted middleman. And for things like voting, it is hundreds of times easier to verify if a paper ballot election is rigged than it is to verify if a crypto based election is rigged.

EGreg 2y ago
That’s wrong First of all, there are many more applications than commerce with physical goods. There’s global payments for services, recurring subscription models, gated access to content, contests, voting, governance, UBI, and much more. Check out https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications for a more comprehensive list. I wrote this article in 2020 after multiple voting debacles in Iowa etc. Paper ballots and hand counting is what lost Al Gore the election for instance and George W Bush got elected, leading to a lot of wars and destruction. With all those paper butterly ballots and other things, it was actually NOT easier at all. People had to recount throughkut multiple days until the Supreme Court simply stopped them: https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/ And now a large proportion of the country believes the 2020 election was rigged due to mail-in ballots arriving and being counted in the middle of the night. Go tell them they’re wrong. You may think they’re crazy but cryptographic signatures and valid IDs could have made it FAR more secure. Unlinkability is the only thing that is hard, for that we could have given everyone a token and used a zero-knowledge proof mixer. In fact, that is what Google now does with its “privacy sandbox”. But you have to trust Google :-)
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > cryptographic signatures and valid IDs could have made it FAR more secure No it wouldn’t, it would make attacks at scale easier. The gold standard is physical ballots with electronic scanning.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Seems completely the opposite. With paper ballots around the world there are already attacks at scale. Take the latest national election in the USA. Republicans claim that Democrats shipped in fake mail-in ballots or harvested them from old people, and said “trust us”. Democrats claim that Republicans closed polling stations and disenfranchised many voters at scale in districts that historically voted Democratic. Witness all the rigged elections around the world, some strongmen getting 99% of the vote at scale. What good are the paper ballots in, say, Belarus if Lukashenko says he won? Is an average person going to be able to somehow know what happened in their own pollung station after they left, let alone across the entire country? Having mutually distrusting parties have access to each other’s work is the very thing that enforces byzantine consensus but it can be checked and verified on-chain as each party signs off on the result, so anyone can check that 1) they looked at it and 2) they were satisfied. That’s far far better than hearing someone say “it went fine” about paper ballot recounts. Furthermore, everyone being able to make sure their vote was counted by eg checking Merkle Proof is far more secure. None of the above failure modes would be an issue if everyone who wanted to, could vote from their computer, scanned the QR code with their phone to verify their choice, and signed with their private cryptographic keys derived from their IDs.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Republicans claim that Democrats shipped in fake mail-in ballots or harvested them from old people, and said “trust us”. Democrats claim that Republicans closed polling stations Claims won’t change with a tech fix. The point is there still isn’t evidence of wide-scale disruption. Electronic-only voting changes that from a verifiable problem to an inherently-unverifiable one. You only know the code voted, not the person. > What good are the paper ballots in, say, Belarus if Lukashenko says he won? Crypto ballots wouldn’t change this. If anything, I expect crypto voting to soon feature in authoritarians’ elections.