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Commerce with software goods, or even exchange for digital traditional currencies, suffers from exactly the same problem as physical goods: there is no possible

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!
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  It is impossible for all but maybe 10 humans in the entire world to make sure a machine implements the algorithm it purports to implement. It is impossible for all but the best programmers + mathematicians to verify that the algorithms that they purport to implement achieve the safety/security goals they hope to achieve.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    And yet, with crypto, it is possible for people to verify that the code matches exactly what was written, and it was publicly audited by multiple companies and battle-tested with billions of dollars in value. UniSwap is a great example. No one ever worries that a UniSwap instance will do something nefarious. That's how the decentralized software SHOULD be. We don't need everyone to verify, but just allow ANY AUDITORS IN THE WORLD to do it.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      This is trust in a middleman - the auditors. There is noting trustless about this system. For money, that's probably good enough - it's no less trustworthy than a bank. But it's FAR from enough assurance for national voting.
      - EGreg 2y ago
        No. The auditors aren't actually handling your transactions. You can have N auditors sign off on code. And there's also battle-testing it in practice. Comparing that to literal middlemen -- telephone switchboard operators, banks, etc. -- is a category error
        tsimionescu 2y ago
        No, but you don't know if your transactions are actually safe, or even more so an election, if you don't trust these auditors. The people writing the code, running the servers, etc - you also need to trust them, and they are actually the ones handling your transactions or votes, the exact middlemen. And again, in any fully electronic system, you need to take into account the whole system, not just one part of it. Maybe Bitcoin or Ethereum or whichever blockchain you like is indeed perfectly safe and very trust-worthy. But if I'm connecting to it to vote from a Windows PC that I last updated 5 years ago, then I'm still extremely likely to lose my private key to my money or have my vote cast for whoever Microsoft or the writers of all the malware I'm running likes best. There is no way to make electronic voting safe. There will never be any way to make electronic voting safe. Any country doing it is playing with fire. Blockchain does nothing at all to change this one iota.

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!

tsimionescu 2y ago
It is impossible for all but maybe 10 humans in the entire world to make sure a machine implements the algorithm it purports to implement. It is impossible for all but the best programmers + mathematicians to verify that the algorithms that they purport to implement achieve the safety/security goals they hope to achieve.
- EGreg 2y ago
  And yet, with crypto, it is possible for people to verify that the code matches exactly what was written, and it was publicly audited by multiple companies and battle-tested with billions of dollars in value. UniSwap is a great example. No one ever worries that a UniSwap instance will do something nefarious. That's how the decentralized software SHOULD be. We don't need everyone to verify, but just allow ANY AUDITORS IN THE WORLD to do it.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    This is trust in a middleman - the auditors. There is noting trustless about this system. For money, that's probably good enough - it's no less trustworthy than a bank. But it's FAR from enough assurance for national voting.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      No. The auditors aren't actually handling your transactions. You can have N auditors sign off on code. And there's also battle-testing it in practice. Comparing that to literal middlemen -- telephone switchboard operators, banks, etc. -- is a category error
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        No, but you don't know if your transactions are actually safe, or even more so an election, if you don't trust these auditors. The people writing the code, running the servers, etc - you also need to trust them, and they are actually the ones handling your transactions or votes, the exact middlemen. And again, in any fully electronic system, you need to take into account the whole system, not just one part of it. Maybe Bitcoin or Ethereum or whichever blockchain you like is indeed perfectly safe and very trust-worthy. But if I'm connecting to it to vote from a Windows PC that I last updated 5 years ago, then I'm still extremely likely to lose my private key to my money or have my vote cast for whoever Microsoft or the writers of all the malware I'm running likes best. There is no way to make electronic voting safe. There will never be any way to make electronic voting safe. Any country doing it is playing with fire. Blockchain does nothing at all to change this one iota.