A lot of electronic voting proposals fail to ensure a secret ballot - which means you *cannot* prove how you voted, whether you want to or not. If votes are published in the blockchain it's hard to see how this would be achieved; although there are cryptographic proposals for voting systems that would let you make sure your vote (and every vote) has been counted without being able to prove which way any individual voted.
So for elections I don't think blockchain voting is really going to fly. It would wo
Only a true slashdotter would decry the use of a global ledger for voting.
It also points to the usual propeller-head, hyper-caffeinated style of skimming a subject and "understanding" it. If you had bothered, you'd know that you can sign a message using your private key that proves indeed, that you did something on the blockchain, whether its voting or whatever.
But hey, lets not let those pesky technical details get in the way of some mouth-breathing millenial having their "moment of snark" about Bitcoin.
At which point this solution degenerates into the same solutions that already exist, with the same problems. Take voter ID cards. Lots of people don't like them because they say it disenfranchises people who would have problems acquiring them, like the poor. A digital signature is going to have the same arguments.
But, I agree: that's not the point of the block chain, its ancillary. But involving the blockchain adds about as much towards solving the real problems with voting as saying "Hey! What if wrote d
Ballot stuffing is a problem though. Just yesterday it was reported that for a nearby local election, one lady sent in 24 absentee ballots. The recipient of those votes won the election by 14 votes. She coordinated others who worked for the campaign, and all were charged. It's difficult to know just how rampant this problem is and how many get away with it.
One-vote-per-person is a fundamental trait of elections. To the extent practicable, we should attempt to ensure people can't vote multiple times.
Both countries, well known for their low levels of corruption, would never use these to suppress undesirable voter blocks! Never would they allow them to become a barrier to voting for anyone without a permanent address.
Both countries, well known for their low levels of corruption, would never use these to suppress undesirable voter blocks! Never would they allow them to become a barrier to voting for anyone without a permanent address.
Given that in some countries' election systems, your permanent address is absolutely essential to knowing where and in which elections you need to vote, a lack of one being a barrier to voting is not necessarily a complaint--equally so, the idea of a place using a voting system that may not be strongly tied to place of residence should not be automatically discounted precisely because it allows you to more easily deal with those who may not have a legally-recognized permanent address and is a reasonable way
Ideally a system should be able to prove, to you, that your vote was counted but should not allow you to prove to me that you voted a particular way (lest I offer you money to vote a certain way).
This, and it is a very subtle yet important point, but does have some interesting solutions.
The best I have seen turns every ballot into a series of random tokens. You would reveal the one corresponding to your vote, and write it down.
Later the codes could all be published, and you could check your ballot number vs the code.
The whole system worked by using a couple of special parties that generate the ballots and codes and pre-commit them ahead of time. This way if a person claimed his vote was not correct, his claimed code could be checked against valid codes afterwards.
Additionally anybody could take an extra ballot to be marked invalid and expose all of its codes. These could be checked against the list as a random sampling to validate the list.
From what little I know about the theory of such things, this results in a problem with selling votes - the classic example being that union bosses could then under threat of injury verify that union members voted according to union lines.
Ideally a system should be able to prove, to you, that your vote was counted but should not allow you to prove to me that you voted a particular way (lest I offer you money to vote a certain way).
Instead, people are just offered money by the winning candidate: seniors get their handouts, so do public sector unions, the poor, home owners, etc., all paid for by tax payers.
Frankly, people getting $5 for a vote one way or another would be a big improvement, because at least it's transparent and it isn't paid fo
There are solutions if you trust the election body.
The most obvious one would be a system where the candidate positions are presented to you in a random order. You get a receipt that says "you voted for presidential candidate #3" and you can verify that against what's shown on screen. You can also verify later that your vote for candidate #3 was counted, but only you (and the election organizers) know which candidate that really was.
Making that work with a public block chain is harder, but there's probably
But hey, lets not let those pesky technical details get in the way of some mouth-breathing millenial having their "moment of snark" about Bitcoin.
Why do all the most ardent comments supporting bitcoin sound like the author has a rearden metal butt plug up their arse, connected to alternating current?
If you had bothered, you'd know that you can sign a message using your private key that proves indeed, that you did something on the blockchain, whether its voting or whatever.
Right. But how do you do that while ensuring a secret ballot? In other words so you *cannot* prove, whether you want to or not, who you voted for?
There are suggested protocols for having a verifiable yet secret ballot, but they are not completely straightforward. Unless the secret ballot part is sorted out properly, recording al
Check out the case of Dr. Laura Pressley vs Travis County. 2 of the 3 legal requirements were not met in tabulation. Blockchain in addition to the 3 requirements would be another way to verify that votes cast equals votes counted. There was some questionable counting going on in addition to the other things. All of you nay sayers dismiss this. How is having an accurate count in addition to the other safeguards a bad thing? Because tinfoil hat. Sweet argument.
http://www.pressleyforaustin.c... [pressleyforaustin.com]
Having an accurate count that *shows how everybody voted* is not how elections are done. You vote in secret, and nobody else can find out for sure how you voted, not even if you want to show it to them. If all votes are recorded publicly then there is no longer a secret ballot. That's unrelated to having an accurate count of votes, which is obviously important.
You can use blockchain to authenticate that a vote was cast without recording what that vote was. Nobody has to know that you voted for Obama's 3rd term.
It is a very easy problem to solve. You just don't want it solved or you don't understand blockchain technology or you want to introduce misconceptions about it to people that do not understand it. You logging into the voting machine is recorded when you vote. Information about who you voted for is not recorded. There is a distributed record so you don't have believe on faith that the 1 person with the 1 list is being honest.
You logging into the voting machine is recorded when you vote. Information about who you voted for is not recorded.
And how can you be certain that when the votes are counted, your vote is being included? Having something recorded on the blockchain (or any other public record) doesn't help at all with that; you still have to trust the people counting the votes to count them fairly. Or if the votes are counted by machine, you have to trust those who built and operate the machine. If somebody queries the to
By itself a count of votes is meaningless. When compared against other data is when it becomes valuable and can help detect discrepancy. The method I stated would work because at voter registration an identifier similar to your bitcoin address would be issued to the voter and would be required among other verifications to login to vote. This would create two copies of the same record. One at creation retained at the county clerk's office (100% of registered) and one when cast( % of people who vote). 100
There are 6 slots of candidates. A dutch auction is used to fill the slots.
Then FOX, CNN, etc roll a six-sided dice in secret and report the winner. This repeats for 3 months or until all media conglomerates agree on the next President.
It's a better system because it doesn't require lying, thus opening up the talent pool to people who aren't career politicians.
At least Bitcoin has a valid tech angle. I'm more befuddled by the sheer number of comments the articles get the constant Uber coverage gets. When you get right down to it though, it's just some form of taxi service (precisely what form being open to debate, hence much of the comment volume) with an App, a backend DB, a vastly over inflated market cap, and a lot of legal problems. Other than the App and use of a DB, in which there's nothing particularly original, it's hardly "News for Nerds".
My favorite use of Bitcoin is wasting energy. That's really all what it's good for.
"But that how it gets its value, by proofing you did work." Yeah, imagine the fed had to waste $10 worth of energy for every $10 bill printed. Ridiculous. And you haven't created anything worth that amount of energy, except for heat of course. There's an unlimited number of other bitcoin clones, shit like doge coin. Goes to show they have no intrinsic value.
Yeah, imagine the fed had to waste $10 worth of energy for every $10 bill printed. Ridiculous. And you haven't created anything worth that amount of energy, except for heat of course.
And yet, if that were the case, each dollar would be worth a lot more. Not because the dollar would have some inherent value, but because government wouldn't be pooping out dollars as a source of income.
Yeah, imagine the fed had to waste $10 worth of energy for every $10 bill printed. Ridiculous. And you haven't created anything worth that amount of energy, except for heat of course.
And yet, if that were the case, each dollar would be worth a lot more. Not because the dollar would have some inherent value, but because government wouldn't be pooping out dollars as a source of income.
You're going to have to explain how that works, because dollars only equals money where dollars are traded for other currency, goods or services. The government doesn't define the worth of currency, the market does. It's why there are fluctuations in currency values to begin with. Then there's the inflation and deflation problems that contribute to fluctuations in value. So again, what does a physical dollar have to do with how much the dollar is worth? You may use complex sentences and big words.
The government doesn't define the worth of currency, the market does. It's why there are fluctuations in currency values to begin with.
Nope, they both do. The law of supply and demand. The government controls the supply, the market controls the demand. If there were a widely believed rumor that the US government were about to print one quadrillion dollars, the value of the dollar would drop to almost nothing in an instant.
"But that how it gets its value, by proofing you did work."
Bitcoin, like any other currency, gets its value by people willing to offer goods and services in exchange for it. Proof of work is simply used to decide who's version of transaction history is believed, should there be a conflict.
Goes to show they have no intrinsic value.
Nothing has intrinsic economic value. Economic value is just an abstraction over how useful people find things, directly or indirectly. That's not an inherent quality of a thing
Currently its takes 3 business days (T+3) to transfer stock from the seller to the buyer in US markets. Implementing a blockchain solution would make the process same day settlement, and provide a layer of transparency that does not currently exist.
Its like that for everybody, your broker will show your current positions instantaneously after a trade, the actual transfer of shares from one broker to another takes 3 b days
While I am not really learned in the ways of the blockchain and its possible uses (nefarious and otherwise), this sounds like a plausible idea. Anyone have details? Aren't blockchains several gigabytes each? We'd need to centralize it all over again, I'd think.....
First option not on the list: revoking self-signed SSL certificates. Normally, it's hard to revoke a self-signed cert, because a potential attacker can just fail to send the user the revocation. But put the revocation on the blockchain, and timestamp the original cert, and it all gets a lot better [github.com].
Second: Time-release encryption. You can build a public key such that the private key can be computed from any future set of blockchain hashes. PDF paper [iacr.org]. That makes it actually time-release, instead of a lot of schemes that release in response to a certain amount of work being done.
My favorite alternative use of blockchain is to use it to block these stupid polls that are still being injected into the middle of the page as if it is a real story. And don't ask me how you obnoxious whippersnappers! Get off mah lawn!
Different contexts require a different means of verifying the validity. Admittedly, the first context which came to my mind was Bitcoin and the recent story of some large banks creating a joint block chain. Reading the comments on this poll, however, reveals that others were thinking on how to validate results of anonymous voting,
Ample proof, I'd say, that even among a seriously geek community like this, we're talking about a largely irrelevant technology. Were this survey deployed in the real world, the results would be even more clear.
Imogen Heap has been promoting this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ge... [forbes.com]
But yeah: machine readable copyright conditions and licencing, persistent and easily referenced in the blockchain; near costless licencing; straightforward artist-controlled publishing and rights management. Drool.
I always block chain letters (Score:4, Funny)
Now get off my micro lawn, you meddling tweens!
Voting - how to ensure a secret ballot? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Only a true slashdotter would decry the use of a global ledger for voting.
It also points to the usual propeller-head, hyper-caffeinated style of skimming a subject and "understanding" it. If you had bothered, you'd know that you can sign a message using your private key that proves indeed, that you did something on the blockchain, whether its voting or whatever.
But hey, lets not let those pesky technical details get in the way of some mouth-breathing millenial having their "moment of snark" about Bitcoin.
Re: Voting - how to ensure a secret ballot? (Score:2)
But, I agree: that's not the point of the block chain, its ancillary. But involving the blockchain adds about as much towards solving the real problems with voting as saying "Hey! What if wrote d
Re: (Score:3)
Ballot stuffing is a problem though. Just yesterday it was reported that for a nearby local election, one lady sent in 24 absentee ballots. The recipient of those votes won the election by 14 votes. She coordinated others who worked for the campaign, and all were charged. It's difficult to know just how rampant this problem is and how many get away with it.
One-vote-per-person is a fundamental trait of elections. To the extent practicable, we should attempt to ensure people can't vote multiple times.
Re: Voting - how to ensure a secret ballot? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Both countries, well known for their low levels of corruption, would never use these to suppress undesirable voter blocks! Never would they allow them to become a barrier to voting for anyone without a permanent address.
Given that in some countries' election systems, your permanent address is absolutely essential to knowing where and in which elections you need to vote, a lack of one being a barrier to voting is not necessarily a complaint--equally so, the idea of a place using a voting system that may not be strongly tied to place of residence should not be automatically discounted precisely because it allows you to more easily deal with those who may not have a legally-recognized permanent address and is a reasonable way
Re: (Score:2)
You are missing the point.
Ideally a system should be able to prove, to you, that your vote was counted but should not allow you to prove to me that you voted a particular way (lest I offer you money to vote a certain way).
Re:Voting - how to ensure a secret ballot? (Score:5, Interesting)
This, and it is a very subtle yet important point, but does have some interesting solutions.
The best I have seen turns every ballot into a series of random tokens. You would reveal the one corresponding to your vote, and write it down.
Later the codes could all be published, and you could check your ballot number vs the code.
The whole system worked by using a couple of special parties that generate the ballots and codes and pre-commit them ahead of time. This way if a person claimed his vote was not correct, his claimed code could be checked against valid codes afterwards.
Additionally anybody could take an extra ballot to be marked invalid and expose all of its codes. These could be checked against the list as a random sampling to validate the list.
(looked it up.... I am thinking of "Scantegrity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
Re: (Score:1)
From what little I know about the theory of such things, this results in a problem with selling votes - the classic example being that union bosses could then under threat of injury verify that union members voted according to union lines.
Re: (Score:2)
Instead, people are just offered money by the winning candidate: seniors get their handouts, so do public sector unions, the poor, home owners, etc., all paid for by tax payers.
Frankly, people getting $5 for a vote one way or another would be a big improvement, because at least it's transparent and it isn't paid fo
Re: (Score:2)
There are solutions if you trust the election body.
The most obvious one would be a system where the candidate positions are presented to you in a random order. You get a receipt that says "you voted for presidential candidate #3" and you can verify that against what's shown on screen. You can also verify later that your vote for candidate #3 was counted, but only you (and the election organizers) know which candidate that really was.
Making that work with a public block chain is harder, but there's probably
Re: (Score:2)
But hey, lets not let those pesky technical details get in the way of some mouth-breathing millenial having their "moment of snark" about Bitcoin.
Why do all the most ardent comments supporting bitcoin sound like the author has a rearden metal butt plug up their arse, connected to alternating current?
Re: (Score:1)
Right. But how do you do that while ensuring a secret ballot? In other words so you *cannot* prove, whether you want to or not, who you voted for?
There are suggested protocols for having a verifiable yet secret ballot, but they are not completely straightforward. Unless the secret ballot part is sorted out properly, recording al
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Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Could you elaborate on how that would work exactly? It's not an easy problem to solve.
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Re: (Score:1)
And how can you be certain that when the votes are counted, your vote is being included? Having something recorded on the blockchain (or any other public record) doesn't help at all with that; you still have to trust the people counting the votes to count them fairly. Or if the votes are counted by machine, you have to trust those who built and operate the machine. If somebody queries the to
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
My voting system is simple:
There are 6 slots of candidates. A dutch auction is used to fill the slots.
Then FOX, CNN, etc roll a six-sided dice in secret and report the winner. This repeats for 3 months or until all media conglomerates agree on the next President.
It's a better system because it doesn't require lying, thus opening up the talent pool to people who aren't career politicians.
I was enjoying the respite (Score:5, Interesting)
But I guess we're back to getting multiple Bitcoin stories every day on Slashdot...
Re: (Score:2)
Other: (Score:3)
Immobilizing chain-gang prisoners.
Wasting energy (Score:1)
My favorite use of Bitcoin is wasting energy. That's really all what it's good for.
"But that how it gets its value, by proofing you did work." Yeah, imagine the fed had to waste $10 worth of energy for every $10 bill printed. Ridiculous. And you haven't created anything worth that amount of energy, except for heat of course. There's an unlimited number of other bitcoin clones, shit like doge coin. Goes to show they have no intrinsic value.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you think the incentives are for miners to mine blocks? Now go troll somewhere else.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, imagine the fed had to waste $10 worth of energy for every $10 bill printed. Ridiculous. And you haven't created anything worth that amount of energy, except for heat of course.
And yet, if that were the case, each dollar would be worth a lot more. Not because the dollar would have some inherent value, but because government wouldn't be pooping out dollars as a source of income.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, imagine the fed had to waste $10 worth of energy for every $10 bill printed. Ridiculous. And you haven't created anything worth that amount of energy, except for heat of course.
And yet, if that were the case, each dollar would be worth a lot more. Not because the dollar would have some inherent value, but because government wouldn't be pooping out dollars as a source of income.
You're going to have to explain how that works, because dollars only equals money where dollars are traded for other currency, goods or services. The government doesn't define the worth of currency, the market does. It's why there are fluctuations in currency values to begin with. Then there's the inflation and deflation problems that contribute to fluctuations in value. So again, what does a physical dollar have to do with how much the dollar is worth? You may use complex sentences and big words.
Re: (Score:2)
The government doesn't define the worth of currency, the market does. It's why there are fluctuations in currency values to begin with.
Nope, they both do. The law of supply and demand. The government controls the supply, the market controls the demand. If there were a widely believed rumor that the US government were about to print one quadrillion dollars, the value of the dollar would drop to almost nothing in an instant.
Re: (Score:2)
Bitcoin, like any other currency, gets its value by people willing to offer goods and services in exchange for it. Proof of work is simply used to decide who's version of transaction history is believed, should there be a conflict.
Nothing has intrinsic economic value. Economic value is just an abstraction over how useful people find things, directly or indirectly. That's not an inherent quality of a thing
Re: (Score:2)
NOT! is a double-negative, so you are saying Blockchain is Bitcoin?
Providing Books of Record for Stock Ownership (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
DNS replacement? (Score:2)
Anything and everything (Score:1)
Take a look at Ethereum's turing complete smart contracts.
Certificate revocation and time-release encryption (Score:3)
First option not on the list: revoking self-signed SSL certificates. Normally, it's hard to revoke a self-signed cert, because a potential attacker can just fail to send the user the revocation. But put the revocation on the blockchain, and timestamp the original cert, and it all gets a lot better [github.com].
Second: Time-release encryption. You can build a public key such that the private key can be computed from any future set of blockchain hashes. PDF paper [iacr.org]. That makes it actually time-release, instead of a lot of schemes that release in response to a certain amount of work being done.
Blocking polls (Score:2, Insightful)
My favorite alternative use of blockchain is to use it to block these stupid polls that are still being injected into the middle of the page as if it is a real story. And don't ask me how you obnoxious whippersnappers! Get off mah lawn!
Chess (Score:2)
Someone should write a chess program that communicates its moves to the other players via the blockchain.
As these things always develop, before long there will be a feature to read and send email from this chess program, also via the blockchain.
Then this should gradually evolve into an IP over blockchain standard. Then everything can use the blockchain.
Context? (Score:2)
Different contexts require a different means of verifying the validity. Admittedly, the first context which came to my mind was Bitcoin and the recent story of some large banks creating a joint block chain. Reading the comments on this poll, however, reveals that others were thinking on how to validate results of anonymous voting,
59% say "huh?" (Score:2)
Fix the copyright system (Score:2)
Missing option (Score:2)
As ransom for Cowboyneal's gruesome punishments.