Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed but underrated among informed
This article reminds me of every other article I&#x27;ve seen about blockchain voting. None of them start with a threat model. None of them talk about what&#x27;s broken with voting. Mostly they just dive into technology, relying on the reader&#x27;s imagination to address these points.<p>Here are some simple questions:<p>1. What are you trying to protect in a vote?<p>2. Why can&#x27;t an SQL database with whatever levels of cryptographic assurance you&#x27;d like to add do the job?<p>3. What does a blockchain add to (2) that no other technology does, regardless of cost?<p>These questions are never answered, and indeed they are not answered here either. Instead, these articles lead with technology and rarely get around to what matters.<p>Often there&#x27;s something like this included in the article:<p>&gt; Blockchains are a technology which is all about providing guarantees about process integrity. If a process is run on a blockchain, the process is guaranteed to run according to some pre-agreed code and provide the correct output. No one can prevent the execution, no one can tamper with the execution, and no one can censor and block any users&#x27; inputs from being processed.<p>No. A block chain is a timestamping mechanism. Within certain very narrow boundaries, it makes certain guarantees about the relative ordering of events. A tamper-resistant log file? Yes. A solution to voting? Does that involve relative event ordering? If so, is that the <i>central</i> problem?<p>Electronic cash systems like Bitcoin will work work just fine without a blockchain, provided they can solve the double spending problem. Bitcoin solved it with a system for ordering transactions based on proof-of-work. There are other solutions, but all suffer from censorship pressures in ways that Bitcoin does not.