Can you see the blockchain being used to register votes in general elections?

[MWD64]

Although growing your own food can be thought of as decentralized food production.

People get arrested for that all the time. And for feeding homeless people. Politicians are to blame. The government is to blame. No more "fair" method of voting will fix that.

To be clear: I'm not saying I like voter fraud. I'm saying that trying to fix voting is still believing in an immoral, murderous system. And a majority still believing in it is what keeps it going. It's the "man behind the curtain" in Wizard of Oz, if the man behind the curtain was backed by goons with guns.

MWD

[notbatman]

Will every soldier have a Bitcoin wallet?

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

Although growing your own food can be thought of as decentralized food production.

People get arrested for that all the time. And for feeding homeless people. Politicians are to blame. The government is to blame. No more "fair" method of voting will fix that.

To be clear: I'm not saying I like voter fraud. I'm saying that trying to fix voting is still believing in an immoral, murderous system. And a majority still believing in it is what keeps it going. It's the "man behind the curtain" in Wizard of Oz, if the man behind the curtain was backed by goons with guns.

MWD

I hear what you are saying. The matrix kinda summed up this thought process well. Most people do not want to awaken from the system. Most do not want to pull back the curtain to reveal the wizard, it would explode their head.

I like everyone else was born into this system of slavery. The money, the roads, the laws, the bullets, the politicians, the mcdonalds were already here when I became conscious. But what we the people need to realize is this is our system, not theirs. They built it and have the guns, but we have the numbers.

If we don't like something we change it. Walking into a store and buying a nugget is awesome. Or if you are in Oregon, growing a 14ft tall cannabis plant in your yard is awesome. Do you think the political elite wanted that?  

It has to happen from voting.  We cannot dismantle society because a group of people have corrupted it. We simply need to throw those fuckers to the curb. And I agree, I hate the choice between the lesser of two evils. That is no choice. But a real leader. That is something that would be grand.

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

Will every soldier have a Bitcoin wallet?

Whats that have to do with the price of potatoes?

[S4VV4S]

Do you trust regulations?

No.

I can probably write such an app if I had something to gain from it, but I don't.
I don't trust poly-tics!

I started to reply here about using the blockchain for useful, non-government "voting" type things. But split it off, here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=518753

Convince me that this is for the good of mankind then you have a developer by your side.
If you can't convince me then don't bother contacting me.

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

I branched off onto a tangent here about making congress obsolete.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=518886.msg5738385#msg5738385

[b¡tco¡n]

There could be merit to this idea, BUT a major stumbling block is who is going to do the mining? Miners need to be paid for their hardware and electricity bills, so the coin needs to have value. Where will it get the value from. Speculation? If not then the voting coin needs to become a mainstream coin.

Unless you expect people to charitably mine a coin that isn't worth anything in the name of democracy. Or maybe the government could do all the mining.  

What I'm talking about is a possible replacement for the current voting machines. There is no need for a coin to have value. There is no speculation. Who cares about energy costs any more then the cost to light the rooms that you do the voting in. If votecoin technology was used in the poll booth the blockchain would be a short lived entity. You get 1 coin which equals one vote. You spend it in the wallet of the person you wish to succeed. The voting can be scalable to multiple precincts all of which connect to known registered nodes. Anyone can see the number of votes per precinct in real time and it can still be done anonymously; or atleast as anonymous as voting with a ballet. I just don't buy it that you can't do this less anonymous then the current system.

Also I see no real difference between running a votecoin as a proof of stake with premine or proof of work.

You might want to look into the bitcoin protocol and some of the tutorials about double spending, why we need a block chain and why we have proof of work, and also the statistics about the energy used by the network (I worked it out to be 3 nuke power stations for BTC alone ... a tad bit more than a light bulb).

If there is a premine PoS, or the goverment appointed polling stations doing the mining, then there is an easy 51% attack possible to rig the results of the election. No one would trust it, and so the original idea to have a voting system you can trust is flawed.

If the mining is done anonymously by citizens then they need a reward. Running a basic rig is like running a fridge - doesn't use much power at any time but when you get billed for the electricity at the end of the quarter you may be in for a shock. Also the graphics cards etc. To get the hashing power you need to avoid 51% you need serious miners who will in turn want serious ROI to point their rig away from DOGE or LTC and towards your VOTECOIN. So they need to get paid somehow.

--> A better option may be to reuse the existing and well mined BTC network with transaction fees costs that come from the government and thus ultimately the voter. Then the government fund the technology but cannot manipulate it and it may cost less than the existing voting system requiring lots of manual counting.

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

There could be merit to this idea, BUT a major stumbling block is who is going to do the mining? Miners need to be paid for their hardware and electricity bills, so the coin needs to have value. Where will it get the value from. Speculation? If not then the voting coin needs to become a mainstream coin.

Unless you expect people to charitably mine a coin that isn't worth anything in the name of democracy. Or maybe the government could do all the mining.  

What I'm talking about is a possible replacement for the current voting machines. There is no need for a coin to have value. There is no speculation. Who cares about energy costs any more then the cost to light the rooms that you do the voting in. If votecoin technology was used in the poll booth the blockchain would be a short lived entity. You get 1 coin which equals one vote. You spend it in the wallet of the person you wish to succeed. The voting can be scalable to multiple precincts all of which connect to known registered nodes. Anyone can see the number of votes per precinct in real time and it can still be done anonymously; or atleast as anonymous as voting with a ballet. I just don't buy it that you can't do this less anonymous then the current system.

Also I see no real difference between running a votecoin as a proof of stake with premine or proof of work.

You might want to look into the bitcoin protocol and some of the tutorials about double spending, why we need a block chain and why we have proof of work, and also the statistics about the energy used by the network (I worked it out to be 3 nuke power stations for BTC alone ... a tad bit more than a light bulb).

If there is a premine PoS, or the goverment appointed polling stations doing the mining, then there is an easy 51% attack possible to rig the results of the election. No one would trust it, and so the original idea to have a voting system you can trust is flawed.

If the mining is done anonymously by citizens then they need a reward. Running a basic rig is like running a fridge - doesn't use much power at any time but when you get billed for the electricity at the end of the quarter you may be in for a shock. Also the graphics cards etc. To get the hashing power you need to avoid 51% you need serious miners who will in turn want serious ROI to point their rig away from DOGE or LTC and towards your VOTECOIN. So they need to get paid somehow.

--> A better option may be to reuse the existing and well mined BTC network with transaction fees costs that come from the government and thus ultimately the voter. Then the government fund the technology but cannot manipulate it and it may cost less than the existing voting system requiring lots of manual counting.

So what you are saying is that if i have 100 polling sites running this software; These sites are all running the same proof of stake coin software; All nodes are know and registered and only known and registered nodes  can connect, effectively making this a private network, someone can still hack me with a 51% attack? I also wont have some kind of record of the attack?

If I am running this software for 1 day only at my 100 polling stations, and people arrive and I give them a votecoin to spend on my network, I don't care about the value of the coins as the instance is for only that 1 day. Proof of stake seems like it would solve your power issues.

[QuestionAuthority]

What happens when someone hacks into MtGox and steals all the votes. lol

[b¡tco¡n]

There could be merit to this idea, BUT a major stumbling block is who is going to do the mining? Miners need to be paid for their hardware and electricity bills, so the coin needs to have value. Where will it get the value from. Speculation? If not then the voting coin needs to become a mainstream coin.

Unless you expect people to charitably mine a coin that isn't worth anything in the name of democracy. Or maybe the government could do all the mining.  

What I'm talking about is a possible replacement for the current voting machines. There is no need for a coin to have value. There is no speculation. Who cares about energy costs any more then the cost to light the rooms that you do the voting in. If votecoin technology was used in the poll booth the blockchain would be a short lived entity. You get 1 coin which equals one vote. You spend it in the wallet of the person you wish to succeed. The voting can be scalable to multiple precincts all of which connect to known registered nodes. Anyone can see the number of votes per precinct in real time and it can still be done anonymously; or atleast as anonymous as voting with a ballet. I just don't buy it that you can't do this less anonymous then the current system.

Also I see no real difference between running a votecoin as a proof of stake with premine or proof of work.

You might want to look into the bitcoin protocol and some of the tutorials about double spending, why we need a block chain and why we have proof of work, and also the statistics about the energy used by the network (I worked it out to be 3 nuke power stations for BTC alone ... a tad bit more than a light bulb).

If there is a premine PoS, or the goverment appointed polling stations doing the mining, then there is an easy 51% attack possible to rig the results of the election. No one would trust it, and so the original idea to have a voting system you can trust is flawed.

If the mining is done anonymously by citizens then they need a reward. Running a basic rig is like running a fridge - doesn't use much power at any time but when you get billed for the electricity at the end of the quarter you may be in for a shock. Also the graphics cards etc. To get the hashing power you need to avoid 51% you need serious miners who will in turn want serious ROI to point their rig away from DOGE or LTC and towards your VOTECOIN. So they need to get paid somehow.

--> A better option may be to reuse the existing and well mined BTC network with transaction fees costs that come from the government and thus ultimately the voter. Then the government fund the technology but cannot manipulate it and it may cost less than the existing voting system requiring lots of manual counting.

So what you are saying is that if i have 100 polling sites running this software; These sites are all running the same proof of stake coin software; All nodes are know and registered and only known and registered nodes  can connect, effectively making this a private network, someone can still hack me with a 51% attack? I also wont have some kind of record of the attack?

If I am running this software for 1 day only at my 100 polling stations, and people arrive and I give them a votecoin to spend on my network, I don't care about the value of the coins as the instance is for only that 1 day. Proof of stake seems like it would solve your power issues.

Oh right I didn't realise it was a private network.

In that case all you need is a server running PHP and a MySQL database. No need for blockchains or any crypto technology.

The PHP could be open sourced so people can verify that it is not doing anything untoward.

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

What happens when someone hacks into MtGox and steals all the votes. lol

Any votecoin trader worth his salt knows not to put votecoins into MTGox. 

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

There could be merit to this idea, BUT a major stumbling block is who is going to do the mining? Miners need to be paid for their hardware and electricity bills, so the coin needs to have value. Where will it get the value from. Speculation? If not then the voting coin needs to become a mainstream coin.

Unless you expect people to charitably mine a coin that isn't worth anything in the name of democracy. Or maybe the government could do all the mining.  

What I'm talking about is a possible replacement for the current voting machines. There is no need for a coin to have value. There is no speculation. Who cares about energy costs any more then the cost to light the rooms that you do the voting in. If votecoin technology was used in the poll booth the blockchain would be a short lived entity. You get 1 coin which equals one vote. You spend it in the wallet of the person you wish to succeed. The voting can be scalable to multiple precincts all of which connect to known registered nodes. Anyone can see the number of votes per precinct in real time and it can still be done anonymously; or atleast as anonymous as voting with a ballet. I just don't buy it that you can't do this less anonymous then the current system.

Also I see no real difference between running a votecoin as a proof of stake with premine or proof of work.

You might want to look into the bitcoin protocol and some of the tutorials about double spending, why we need a block chain and why we have proof of work, and also the statistics about the energy used by the network (I worked it out to be 3 nuke power stations for BTC alone ... a tad bit more than a light bulb).

If there is a premine PoS, or the goverment appointed polling stations doing the mining, then there is an easy 51% attack possible to rig the results of the election. No one would trust it, and so the original idea to have a voting system you can trust is flawed.

If the mining is done anonymously by citizens then they need a reward. Running a basic rig is like running a fridge - doesn't use much power at any time but when you get billed for the electricity at the end of the quarter you may be in for a shock. Also the graphics cards etc. To get the hashing power you need to avoid 51% you need serious miners who will in turn want serious ROI to point their rig away from DOGE or LTC and towards your VOTECOIN. So they need to get paid somehow.

--> A better option may be to reuse the existing and well mined BTC network with transaction fees costs that come from the government and thus ultimately the voter. Then the government fund the technology but cannot manipulate it and it may cost less than the existing voting system requiring lots of manual counting.

So what you are saying is that if i have 100 polling sites running this software; These sites are all running the same proof of stake coin software; All nodes are know and registered and only known and registered nodes  can connect, effectively making this a private network, someone can still hack me with a 51% attack? I also wont have some kind of record of the attack?

If I am running this software for 1 day only at my 100 polling stations, and people arrive and I give them a votecoin to spend on my network, I don't care about the value of the coins as the instance is for only that 1 day. Proof of stake seems like it would solve your power issues.

Oh right I didn't realise it was a private network.

In that case all you need is a server running PHP and a MySQL database. No need for blockchains or any crypto technology.

The PHP could be open sourced so people can verify that it is not doing anything untoward.

So a server running PHP and a MySQL database is more secure then a blockchain? Ie: blockchain is easier to hack?

[phillipsjk]

Oh right I didn't realise it was a private network.

In that case all you need is a server running PHP and a MySQL database. No need for blockchains or any crypto technology.

The PHP could be open sourced so people can verify that it is not doing anything untoward.

Making the software open source does not help. You need some way to prove that the vote counting server does the right thing.

For voting you don't need a Proof-of-work, Proof-of-stake, or a block-chain.

• Every voter centrally registers with their private key.
• Every candidate publishes their public key.
• Some kind of blind signatures are done, signing votes over to candidates.
• Every voter (or possibly just every political party/interested parties) verifies that the resulting transaction appears to be valid.

Step 3 is the part.

[Swordsoffreedom]

Yes there was a voting project that tried to do this cannot recall its name now though

[JohnnyBTCSeed]

Oh right I didn't realise it was a private network.

In that case all you need is a server running PHP and a MySQL database. No need for blockchains or any crypto technology.

The PHP could be open sourced so people can verify that it is not doing anything untoward.

Making the software open source does not help. You need some way to prove that the vote counting server does the right thing.

For voting you don't need a Proof-of-work, Proof-of-stake, or a block-chain.

• Every voter centrally registers with their private key.
• Every candidate publishes their public key.
• Some kind of blind signatures are done, signing votes over to candidates.
• Every voter (or possibly just every political party/interested parties) verifies that the resulting transaction appears to be valid.

Step 3 is the part.

"Every voter (or possibly just every political party/interested parties) verifies that the resulting transaction appears to be valid."
Thats why I thought you had to use a blockchain because of the double spend issue. Or the ease at which a block explorer can verify info.

"Some kind of blind signatures are done, signing votes over to candidates."
please elaborate

[phillipsjk]

"Every voter (or possibly just every political party/interested parties) verifies that the resulting transaction appears to be valid."
Thats why I thought you had to use a blockchain because of the double spend issue. Or the ease at which a block explorer can verify info.

"Some kind of blind signatures are done, signing votes over to candidates."
please elaborate

With Bitcoin, every (full) node on the network verifies that all of the transactions it sees are valid (ie: follow certain rules). Vote verifiers would check that the number of voters appears to be correct; that the number of votes is correct, and that all the signatures are valid. Since only one (or group of transactions) are needed on voting day, the block-chain concept does not apply.

See post in the CoinJoin thread I linked to earlier. I don't understand how blind signatures would work with shared outputs, but gmaxwell thinks it is possible. It appears his mitigations involve keeping everybody's output separate. For voting, you would also need some way to prevent the vote server from recording everybody's vote before blinding is complete.

[Lauda]

What happens when someone hacks into MtGox and steals all the votes. lol

You can't hack a blockchain, but you can hack MtGox.

[Elwar]

If people like this concept and want to help beta test it, send me a PM. I will be opening up Beta testing on using the blockchain for voting in about a week.

I already have the voting working, I just want people to go through the process to find any bugs in the interface so I can open up a professional, useful site in about a month (have been working on the site for the past year, working on the concept for much longer).

I will be using the test chain as opposed to the blockchain for beta testing (though it currently works using the blockchain, I need to add some code for the test blockchain).

[xb0x]

This can be used ofcourse which will require a new program to go on & can be used to stop fraud somewhere but believe me
Government won't let you do this, otherwise how corruption will go on?

[Parliament]

Can bitcoin technology be used to end election fraud globally?

No, absolutely not.

In any form of voting, and individual cannot have ANY means of proving which way they voted. Why? Because allowing voters to prove how they voted opens the market to vote-selling.

Voting must be done in such a way that: I, as an individual, cannot prove to any other party how I voted. It doesn't matter if the system is pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin -- I can still show someone my private keys / sign a message / whatever.

There is also no way, mathematically, to 1) verify that each individual is authorized to vote and votes only once, while 2) not allowing that individual to prove which way they voted. You need to trust a third party for that.