They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

Re:They think they are above the law: the firms who own Amer... by nameless912 on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @11:44AM (#19729709)

Herein lies the rub with blockchain systems. If they're public, they're attackable, and if they're private, they're slower, more power hungry, and less flexible than a plain old database. It's not a dumb question, but blockchain doesn't provide good answers :)

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Re:They think they are above the law: the firms who own Amer... by leereeves on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @11:48AM (#19729751)

I'm no fan of the blockchain, but this may be in the middle ground where blockchain makes sense: multiple independent trusted-but-not-completely parties verifying each other's actions.

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Re:They think they are above the law: the firms who own Amer... by nameless912 on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @11:53AM (#19729798)

I still don't buy that blockchain is better than any of the other solutions that we've come up with for this problem, since (like with, for example, byzantine consensus) 50%+1 of actors being misbehaved breaks any security guarantee.

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Re:They think they are above the law: the firms who own Amer... by munk-a on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @06:29PM (#19733622)

Democracies already have some reliance on trusted authorities, so why not just leverage those and assign the trust of the voting system to those established trusted authorities?

Also, blockchains are fun - they are not a magical salve.

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Re:They think they are above the law: the firms who own Amer... by stale2002 on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @02:59PM (#19731708)

Blockchain in this context just means that everyone signs cryptographic messages, in a public database.

That's it.

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