My dog has learned to run after the stick, but not yet to bring it back. But it is too young, hopefully it will learn in due time.
No, that dog is OLD.
No, it is YOUNG.
Jorge, I get it that you are dubious of the long term prospects of bitcoin as a currency or a store of value. I disagree with your assessment, but even I realize that the future of that enterprise is still not certain.
I am skeptical about both, which means I am skeptical about the future of the network itself.
HOWEVER, one thing that is NOT experimental or yet to be determined is blockchain technology. The bitcoin network is a Distributed Autonomous Corporation that manages billions of dollars of value, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in a distributed, trust-less manner. It has been working flawlessly in this capacity for over 5 years now.
As a bitcoin fan, you obviously want to stick as many applications as possible into the Satoshi2009 blockchain, in order to get more support for it. But there are other blockchains in existence, and the bitcoin network's hashing power could be harnessed for other protocols and applications if offered suitable rewards.
The bitcoin network currently costs 1.5 million USD per day. That cost is now paid invisibly by the bitcoin holders, as you know.
Yes, the bitcoin network has been working for 5 years now. Like many other systems out there.
(But er, wasn't there a hard fork some time ago?)
The maximum number of trasactions per day the bitcoin network has handled so far is a bit over 100'000. In Brazilian national elections, more than 100'000'000 votes are cast on a single day. The US elections must be at least twice as big. It is yet to be seen whether the bitcoin network and the Satoshi2009 blockchain can scale by x1000 without running into obstacles that have not been noticed yet.
A blockchain voting protocol would require access to the internet from all voting locations. The current paper-backed e-voting systems do not even require power, and can collect votes autonomously in the middle of the Amazon jungle. And so on.
(The bitcoin
market cap is billions of dollars, but since bitcoins have no intrinsic value, the actual value managed is open to questioning. If, for some private reason, all owners of Apple stock were forced to put it for sale on the open market, at the same time, all the stock it would probably be bought by other people for close to its market cap. If the same thing happened to bitcoin, its market price would probably plummet to single digits. But this is just a side remark.)
The bitcoin protocol and network
are experimental. The goal of the Wright Bros' Filer 1 model was to show that heavier-than-air flight was possible, and it was quite successful at that. But it was not meant to be THE transport vehicle of the future, not even a commercial product or the basis for any commercial enterprise. The Bitcoin Protocol and the Satoshi2009 blockchain were created in the same spirit: as an experiment to prove that a distributed e-payment system without central authority was viable. And they succesfully achieved that goal. But the bitcoin protocol still has many limitations that, in my opinion, will ultimately prevent its use as a mainstream e-payment method, and I am almost sure that it will be superseded by some better system before it gets to that point. Moreover, even if the bitcoin protocol itself thrives, nothing guarantees that it will retain the Satoshi2009 blockchain.
Unfortunately, the unexpected demand for bitcoins, first by drug dealers and then by Chinese amateur speculators, pushed the bitcoin price 100-fold, in spite of it being just an experiment. That price increase attracted financial businessmen who are now trying to convince the public that bitcoin (not any other cryptocoin) will be THE e-payment system of the future -- not just a working prototype of it -- and then sell it as a fabulous long-term investment. I imagine those same people in the 1910's trying to sell Wright Flier 1 planes to the people for 10'000 dollars each, claiming that they (and not any other plane model) would soon be worth millions once the world would recognize their usefulness and exchanged all their horses for them. Or selling shares of intercontinental airline companies whose fleets consisted of Flyer 1's.
That being said, how do you just dismiss out-of-hand the possibility that this same technology might not be leveraged to create a distributed, trust-less voting system? [ it seems ] that you are more interested in maintaining the status quo than in exploring real solutions to the problem of guaranteeing free and fair elections. What is being done now is not working all that well in many places. I find it impossible to believe that you are really that close-minded.
I have looked into some systems that try to use public-key crytography techniques to achieve paperless secure e-voting. Some of them are meant to let people vote from home over the internet, or depend on voters owning some gizmo that they have to trust. I stop reading those proposals right there, because those people obviously have not realized that voter coercion is a real and unsolvable problem in that setting.
Others are meant to prevent fraud in the adding of the votes. This is a non-problem, because that part can be quite satisfactorily secured by just posting the site totals on the internet. (In fact, the guy next to my office got crowdfunding to bulld a system that will make it easier to do that after the upcoming Brazilian election.)
The hard problem in paperless e-voting is capturing the vote in such a way that the voter can verify that the vote was correctly captured, but cannot prove to anyone else that he voted in a certain way.
There may be ways of doing that with sophisticated public crypto techniques, but as far as I know there is no solution that is guaranteed to work even with malicious system administrators and malicious hardware. One of many obstacles is that the system does not know beforehand how many people will vote, so one could discover how each person voted by capturing all incoming data and simulating the end of the election after each vote.
Even if there is a robust solution, I do not see why a complicated system based on a single shared blockchain, that only a few experts
think is safe, would be better than the fully distributed, trustless paper-backed e-voting technology that has been proved secure in many real elections all over the world, and that everybody can understand and trust.
It is not a matter of being colosed-minded, rather of not being a naive tech-worshipper.
Poll
