[hackerspaces] A call to all hackerspaces

[Yves Quemener]

About using bluetooth voting : you introduce a bias in the selection of
voters. People who do not own a bluetoth device vs people who own 3 or
more. Also, people who didn't want to be traced will probably have left
their device at home, they may be less than happy to be barred from voting.

About bitcoin : one of the criticism of bitcoin has been that its initial
seeding is totally unfair. It only depends on the processing power
available to the user. On bitcoin it still managed to spread tokens over a
large number of individuals and bootstarted the economy but in a very
biased way. Distributing voting tokens this way would only result in
GalaxySII owners getting 10 times the amount of vote token that a HTC1
owner will get. And if warned sufficiently early, your local hackerspace
would probably be able to make a custom device, come there and take half
the vote tokens.


On 10/19/2011 04:28 AM, R. Mark Adams, PhD wrote:
> 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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>>>
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>>
> 
> 
>