If we want it to be secure anyway...

Oh God, I'm _really_ hoping you're being sarcastic.

You've read about the dozens on dozens of compromised exchanges?

You heard about the DAO hack?

You realize that the majority of bitcoin is mined by like a dozen people in China?

Maybe someday we'll get our act together, but right now blockchains are a recipe for FUD and centralization.

(I say this as someone who thinks bitcoin is cool. For instance, the traditional financial system makes it unnecessarily hard to send money overseas, a need bitcoin can fill well. But secure? No.)

tolerable growing pains

all of those things improve the resilience of the implementations

exactly as the original white paper suggested

I'm not sure how the centralization improves the resilience of the implementations. Mining pool centralization is definitely a big downside for security on the blockchain. A lot of research is being done in cryptocurrencies looking for ways to discourage this type of centralization.

centralization doesn't, that wasn't a claim I was making or considering

mining pool centralization has ebbs and flows. I'm not concerned about bitcoin's TODAY for example, but maybe tomorrow and at times in the past. There are a lot of blockchains people don't put under much scrutiny, where it turns out there is massive centralization. But this isn't an inherent problem, Satoshi was 100% of Bitcoin's network for a long time.

Is anyone working on/does it make sense to have blockchain based voting for elections?

It's been looked at (my advisor in grad school was working on it) and it keeps running up against the problem of scaling -- 100 million transactions (800 million if you want to scale up to India) on a single day is going to be hard from a realization standpoint, even if it's theoretically doable.

There's also the interesting psychological side to it: while a blockchain system is in a theoretical sense more transparent than anything else, from a popular standpoint it's incredibly opaque compared to a county registrar counting two different stacks of paper ballots.

We can just use cryptography and forego the blockchain for much more scalable verifiable elections:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

https://vote.heliosvoting.org/

Yes, Dash (DashPay) has been up and voting on stuff for a couple years. Because I own 1,000 of the things I get to vote on stuff like sending devs to conferences and different ad campaigns to run, then the winning bids get paid out of the block reward. If we vote no the Dash just gets destroyed and inflation is slightly reduced.

I like the idea. There's some funding waiting for that innovation

There are several voting systems built on top of Ethereum.

Especially if done using a ZKP like ZCash supposedly does. That would be great.

I would suggest that BTC in particular, because it's pseudo-anonymous, has some industry and government forces propelling it which zcash will not share the same benefit of.