For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
Many have devoted a lot of thought about how to make digital election systems. So far, no one has figured out a better alternative than paper ballots.
Blockchain doesn’t bring any closer to a solution.
A Blockchain is part of a solution but not the whole solution. A Blockchain is for all intents and purposes a digital paper trail, something that high can be audited and cannot be modified later.
The problem is how do you use that system with a sceptical public that doesn’t understand or trust it. A technical enough person night understands it, but to the vast majority of people it may as well be “trust me, bro”. It’s a lot easier to trust a physicial piece of paper.
Not to mention that an important part of voting is anonymity, which a Blockchain doesn’t really give you. How do you validate that a vote on the chain is legitimate without some kind of trail back to an actual human?
The only thing you need to emulate blockchain voting is just a list of all votes everybody can download. Then people can verify that their own votes have been counted, and that the total count matches the election results. You don’t need a blockchain to do this.
The reason why this is rarely done is because the vote is no longer secret. If you can verify your own vote, you open up the possibility for vote buying/blackmailing, which prevents a fair election. Blockchain does nothing to solve this.
Another reason why paper ballot is still used is that it’s robust against large scale attacks (if done correctly). With digital voting (including blockchain based), if someone finds a loophole, they can probably pull off a large scale attack.
One such attack on a blockchain based voting system could be that the government issues millions of voting tokens just for themselves. Blockchain allows this. You need to rely on the government to distribute the voting tokens either way, because they’re the only ones who knows who are eligible to vote.
So I don’t think blockchain brings any closer to a solution. You still need to rely on a central authority, there are potential for large scale attacks, and votes can be bought.