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That’s wrong First of all, there are many more applications than commerce with physical goods. There’s global payments for services, recurring subscription mod

by 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.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      Yes you massively mitigate both systemic problems with a tech fix. People in rural areas whose polling station closed thanks to Republicans, and who can’t drive 30 miles to the next one wanted to use the mail-in ballots. And Democrats were very happy to allow it. But then Republicans pointed out all the ways the mailing system and ballot harvesting was very unreliable. And both sides have a point. Taken to the extreme, both disenfranchisement and physical mail suck for voting. In contrast, people could have an option to vote from their computer and use their phone to scan the QR code and confirm their vote and sign it. They can then verify their vote was included correctly! I have explained at length how crypto would make it a lot more verifiable and reliable. Everyone would be able to check: 1) their own vote was counted in their district 2) their own district was counted in the total 3) the number of votes and turnout in each district, matching the number of signed checkins 4) mutually distrusting parties in each district saw each ballot being cast (or a random sample) and were satisfied that the electronic record matches whatever receipt was generated None of these can be directly verified by nearly anyone participating in a paper election.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > people could have an option to vote from their computer and use their phone to scan the QR code and confirm their vote and sign it. They can then verify their vote was included correctly! Besides destroying the secret ballot, you can do this now! You look at the paper and the electronic count. If you’ve been a poll worker or observer, you know there are hundreds more checks a well-designed system has. > Everyone would be able to check Few people would be able to check any of this. (Fewer than can observe a poll today.) And it’s much easier to invent a “hack” that makes people distrust an electronic ledger than a paper one folks can audit ex post facto [1]. There is no similar audit capability for a blockchain. Did the person actually vote that way? Or was their phone hacked? Short of re-polling everyone, you cannot know. Remotely coordinating a poll attack on paper ballots where every precinct has its own system is impossible. Crypto voting is a textbook tragedy of trying to solve a social problem with a band-aid of technology. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_presidential_ballot_audit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_preside...
tsimionescu 2y ago
Commerce with software goods, or even exchange for digital traditional currencies, suffers from exactly the same problem as physical goods: there is no possible way to use the block chain to guarantee that a payment on the block chain will result in a good or service being provided outside the block chain. You can try to build more things onto the block chain itself, but that quickly becomes un scalable. And for elections: if you think for a second that a crypto voting machine wouldn't have been cast doubt on by the people who brought you "Hugo Chavez stole the election through Dominion voting machines", then I have no idea on what planet you live. On a separate topic, the USA is almost uniquely bad in the world, at least for rich democratic countries, in having such problems carrying out elections. In my own, incomparably poorer, country, with a 50% rural population, we just don't have these problems. You have a 90% physical voting system: you come to the polling station, they check your ID in an electronic system to make sure you meet the voting age and haven't voted before in this election, they give you a stamp and a ballot, you stamp the ballot in a private booth, typically in a local school. You fold the ballot, and put it in a big urn. At the end of the voting day, representatives of all parties and anyone else who registered as an observer opens the urn and they all count the votes. They report the counts higher up electronically, and safely store the physical ballots. Elections happen on a Sunday, from 8 AM to 8 PM, sometimes with local extensions where a polling station is still full at the close. Preliminary results from exit polls are announced immediately at 8PM by the media. The electoral officials announce the first official preliminary results by 22PM, and then throughout the night. By 12 PM the next day, the vote count and official final results are typically out. No "hanging chads", etc. There are plenty of other electoral issues (busing, paying for votes, strong local cliques where even representatives of different parties conspire to steal votes for a single party, bad education leading to people not knowing their rights or who to vote for, etc). But not procedural problems, and no machines that make it easy to hide systematic stealing.
- EGreg 2y ago
  At the end of the voting day, representatives of all parties and anyone else who registered as an observer opens the urn and they all count the votes. They report the counts higher up electronically, and safely store the physical ballots. What you describe is exactly what happens in byzantine-fault-tolerant networks, and much more. But because it is done by machines, the cost is brought down by orders of magnitude so now many groups can have decision making and votes about many things every day, rather than spending billions once every few years and manually counting. This technology is made available to all, as opposed to, say, trusting the operators of a StackExchange site to not rig the periodic elections for moderators and those who will run the site. And it allows the communities eg DAOs to collectively manage larger amounts of money without worrying some director will abscond with it. The REAL conflation has been by crypto-haters of decentralized protocols with centralized entities like FTX or Celsius. The only thing they have in common with crypto is that you can send crypto to the address they control. And then, they pinky promise they’ll take care of it. Crypto has been developed exactly to remove the need for such middlemen! While FTX fell, UniSwap and Aave Protocol didnt miss a beat. No one worries a UniSwap smart contract will rugpull then one day. Government regulation isnt needed when the code has been battle tested with billions of dollars. Just like government regulation of HTTP isnt needed even though it was needed for physical mail delivery. That’s the kind of building blocks we need for a future system — for voting too. Cheaper faster better. It is a bit like arguing email and the world wide web is worse than the gold standard of regular mail. Look at how much innovation it has unleashed once given the chance to build on top. Sure we had chain letters and scams and phishing etc. But we also enabled trillions of dollars in ecommerce and SaaS and much more!
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by EGreg 2y ago

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.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Yes you massively mitigate both systemic problems with a tech fix. People in rural areas whose polling station closed thanks to Republicans, and who can’t drive 30 miles to the next one wanted to use the mail-in ballots. And Democrats were very happy to allow it. But then Republicans pointed out all the ways the mailing system and ballot harvesting was very unreliable. And both sides have a point. Taken to the extreme, both disenfranchisement and physical mail suck for voting. In contrast, people could have an option to vote from their computer and use their phone to scan the QR code and confirm their vote and sign it. They can then verify their vote was included correctly! I have explained at length how crypto would make it a lot more verifiable and reliable. Everyone would be able to check: 1) their own vote was counted in their district 2) their own district was counted in the total 3) the number of votes and turnout in each district, matching the number of signed checkins 4) mutually distrusting parties in each district saw each ballot being cast (or a random sample) and were satisfied that the electronic record matches whatever receipt was generated None of these can be directly verified by nearly anyone participating in a paper election.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > people could have an option to vote from their computer and use their phone to scan the QR code and confirm their vote and sign it. They can then verify their vote was included correctly! Besides destroying the secret ballot, you can do this now! You look at the paper and the electronic count. If you’ve been a poll worker or observer, you know there are hundreds more checks a well-designed system has. > Everyone would be able to check Few people would be able to check any of this. (Fewer than can observe a poll today.) And it’s much easier to invent a “hack” that makes people distrust an electronic ledger than a paper one folks can audit ex post facto [1]. There is no similar audit capability for a blockchain. Did the person actually vote that way? Or was their phone hacked? Short of re-polling everyone, you cannot know. Remotely coordinating a poll attack on paper ballots where every precinct has its own system is impossible. Crypto voting is a textbook tragedy of trying to solve a social problem with a band-aid of technology. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_presidential_ballot_audit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_preside...

tsimionescu 2y ago

Commerce with software goods, or even exchange for digital traditional currencies, suffers from exactly the same problem as physical goods: there is no possible way to use the block chain to guarantee that a payment on the block chain will result in a good or service being provided outside the block chain. You can try to build more things onto the block chain itself, but that quickly becomes un scalable. And for elections: if you think for a second that a crypto voting machine wouldn't have been cast doubt on by the people who brought you "Hugo Chavez stole the election through Dominion voting machines", then I have no idea on what planet you live. On a separate topic, the USA is almost uniquely bad in the world, at least for rich democratic countries, in having such problems carrying out elections. In my own, incomparably poorer, country, with a 50% rural population, we just don't have these problems. You have a 90% physical voting system: you come to the polling station, they check your ID in an electronic system to make sure you meet the voting age and haven't voted before in this election, they give you a stamp and a ballot, you stamp the ballot in a private booth, typically in a local school. You fold the ballot, and put it in a big urn. At the end of the voting day, representatives of all parties and anyone else who registered as an observer opens the urn and they all count the votes. They report the counts higher up electronically, and safely store the physical ballots. Elections happen on a Sunday, from 8 AM to 8 PM, sometimes with local extensions where a polling station is still full at the close. Preliminary results from exit polls are announced immediately at 8PM by the media. The electoral officials announce the first official preliminary results by 22PM, and then throughout the night. By 12 PM the next day, the vote count and official final results are typically out. No "hanging chads", etc. There are plenty of other electoral issues (busing, paying for votes, strong local cliques where even representatives of different parties conspire to steal votes for a single party, bad education leading to people not knowing their rights or who to vote for, etc). But not procedural problems, and no machines that make it easy to hide systematic stealing.

EGreg 2y ago
At the end of the voting day, representatives of all parties and anyone else who registered as an observer opens the urn and they all count the votes. They report the counts higher up electronically, and safely store the physical ballots. What you describe is exactly what happens in byzantine-fault-tolerant networks, and much more. But because it is done by machines, the cost is brought down by orders of magnitude so now many groups can have decision making and votes about many things every day, rather than spending billions once every few years and manually counting. This technology is made available to all, as opposed to, say, trusting the operators of a StackExchange site to not rig the periodic elections for moderators and those who will run the site. And it allows the communities eg DAOs to collectively manage larger amounts of money without worrying some director will abscond with it. The REAL conflation has been by crypto-haters of decentralized protocols with centralized entities like FTX or Celsius. The only thing they have in common with crypto is that you can send crypto to the address they control. And then, they pinky promise they’ll take care of it. Crypto has been developed exactly to remove the need for such middlemen! While FTX fell, UniSwap and Aave Protocol didnt miss a beat. No one worries a UniSwap smart contract will rugpull then one day. Government regulation isnt needed when the code has been battle tested with billions of dollars. Just like government regulation of HTTP isnt needed even though it was needed for physical mail delivery. That’s the kind of building blocks we need for a future system — for voting too. Cheaper faster better. It is a bit like arguing email and the world wide web is worse than the gold standard of regular mail. Look at how much innovation it has unleashed once given the chance to build on top. Sure we had chain letters and scams and phishing etc. But we also enabled trillions of dollars in ecommerce and SaaS and much more!

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deleted 2y ago

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