Re:Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices
by Animats on Saturday December 06, 2014 @02:37PM
(#8709941)
He's right. Read that article. Distributed trust is hard. The problem isn't trust, though; it's easy identity creation.
Any voting system will fail if someone can cheaply and easily create new voting identities. Email spam, web spam, and social networking spam all suffer from that problem - email addresses, web sites, and social networking accounts are cheap and easy to create. Bitcoin beats this by giving voting power to whomever spends the most on mining hardware. That works, but at high cost and only because there's a big financial reward for being a big miner.
How to limit fake online identity creation? Facebook tried "real names", which semi-worked until they ran into the gay agenda. Google tries to make you tie your whole life into one account, and they can tell if your account doesn't have enough of your life tied in. The credit industry tries to do this by chasing down people who don't pay up, and is reasonably successful, but at high cost.
ID by phone number has been tried, as "phone verification". That created a small industry in phony phone numbers. (http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf) ID by postal address was tried, but there are too many mailbox services.
Any voting system will fail if someone can cheaply and easily create new voting identities. Email spam, web spam, and social networking spam all suffer from that problem - email addresses, web sites, and social networking accounts are cheap and easy to create. Bitcoin beats this by giving voting power to whomever spends the most on mining hardware. That works, but at high cost and only because there's a big financial reward for being a big miner.
How to limit fake online identity creation? Facebook tried "real names", which semi-worked until they ran into the gay agenda. Google tries to make you tie your whole life into one account, and they can tell if your account doesn't have enough of your life tied in. The credit industry tries to do this by chasing down people who don't pay up, and is reasonably successful, but at high cost.
ID by phone number has been tried, as "phone verification". That created a small industry in phony phone numbers. (http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf) ID by postal address was tried, but there are too many mailbox services.
There's no really good solution to this known.