[hackerspaces] A call to all hackerspaces

[R. Mark Adams, PhD]

That was what I had in mind- the advantage of an open system is that
the underlying technologies are both open and (possibly) used widely
enough to detect potential problems.  I don't know how to prevent
extras from being generated and spent by the distributors, other than
providing an audit infrastructure that lets you monitor the total
number issued and check against how many are actually "spent."

How hard would it be to quickly re-purpose the bitcoin stuff to give
it a test at scale?  If you can use a simple website for taking the
tokens and registering the vote, it could be used from a smartphone,
tablet or laptop or anything in between.  In fact, you could encode
the tokens as a barcode or q-code in hardcopy and have people check a
box or something similar for scanninng in post-hoc - for people who
don't have access to an electronics device.

Of course, all the points about going with something completely analog
are totally valid, too, but I like the idea of digital voting, and am
very curious to see if cryptography can make it workable...

Thanks!
-Mark

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Jesse Sanford <jessesanford at gmail.com> wrote:
> I like this. Using bitcoin as an example would make it easy to control
> the distribution of tokens within the economy at any time as well.
>
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 3:49 PM, mike iannacone
> <mike.iannacone at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 3:30 PM, R. Mark Adams, PhD
>> <rmadams at epotential.com> wrote:
>>> What about leveraging the work that has gone into cryptographic cash? It
>>> seems like that is a way to ensure that any givetoken, once issued, can be
>>> used only once...
>>
>> and doing it that way should also be independently auditable, assuming
>> that each ballot-option gets its own account where the coins are
>> spent, and that coins cannot be forged.  (and both of these seem very
>> reasonable to assume.)
>>
>> The only remaining problem then would be generating and distributing
>> the tokens, and ensuring that whoever is generating them is not making
>> extra for themselves.  But those problems are probably inherent to all
>> other systems as well, and probably solvable by making sure that
>> process is very transparent.
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-- 
| R. Mark Adams, Ph.D.       |   "Information is light.      |
| Computational Biologist    |    Information in itself,     |
| http://www.epotential.com  |    about anything, is light." |
| rmadams at epotential.com     |       - Tom Stoppard          |