Posted on 06/09/2016 2:36:31 PM PDT by ganeemead
"The bitcoin protocol has had everything thrown at it, including the kitchen sink, and it has never been “hacked”. Insecure bitcoin exchanges have been hacked.Using blockchain technology for voting will, for all intents and purposes, be unhackable, as long as the code is open sourced.
It will certainly be better than what we have now.
Plus, the blockchain ledger is inspectable by all, so everyone can see what is going on.
If this technology can protect money, it can protect voting."
Thanks, this starts to sound like the answer we need. In my view, Hillary has no legitimate path to victory in November but we need to ensure that she also has no illegitimate path. If we go into this coming election with our present voting systems, we could be looking at a civil war.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/06/technology/security/bitcoin-bitstamp-hacked/index.html
This is what I remember seeing. What is the difference if the network handling bitcoin votes is hacked or overwhelmed by DOS attacks on election day (in GOP areas)?
So now you have an infinite number of unique IDs anybody can get a hold of and put in the chain without verifying they’re a US citizen who is eligible to vote and hasn’t already voted? At some point there has to be central control, and central control is hackable.
In order to use a system for voting somebody HAS TO be able to assign the private keys. Otherwise there’s no way to verify that the possessor of said key is an American citizen with voting rights.
Your system has a central control. Which means it’s hackable. Anybody could generate many public keys which get many bitcoins and thus can make many ghost votes.
I am not going to try to explain the blockchain technology to you. Nor do I know how they propose doing this.
My point is that the technology is there, it is safer than any other technology out there now. And, I am guessing it will be better than the crap systems they use now.
Of course, there are a lot of 60+ year old people here on FR who are terrified of technology, and who will never trust anything younger then themselves. Which is hilarious based on the “never trust anyone over 30” cries of their youth.
That was not the block chain that was hacked. It was the secure server that housed the bitcoins. It is a big difference. Most people store bitcoin in an off-line, “cold storage.”
I am not going to spend my time explaining how bitcoin works or how the block chain works. There are plenty of primers online to explain it better than I.
It is ok to think Bitcoin is silly. I understand the skepticism. The Blockchain is a different thing altogether. Its strength is in the public-ness of it. If someone tried to falsify or hack an id, it would not be confirmed by the system because it would be out of order. And it would be out of order everywhere on the network.
It would not track that “Joe Smith” voted for Trump. It would track that “Joe Smith” voted from his assigned IP address, at what time, and that his voting was written to the network and confirmed. Anyone pretending to be Joe Smith later that day would be rejected.
In my town they just cross a line through the name. They don’t ‘know’ me, per se. They just check my name off the list. Not really sure how safe that is?
The technology isn’t there. Because it can’t be. As I said previously in the thread: the biggest security hole is ALWAYS legitimate use. There absolutely positively HAS TO BE some layer of control to make sure the system allows all proper US citizens to vote and ONLY proper US citizen to vote. And the minute you have that layer of control you have a system that can be gamed and or hacked. And we haven’t gotten into the counting system which in the end also has to have some level of centralization, and therefore vulnerability to gaming or hacking.
I’m 46 and a software QA engineer. I’m paid pretty well to do exactly this, look at the design of a system and point out its flaws. And any and all voting systems have variations of the same flaw. Much like how any OS that allows you to install software will allow you to install malware, any voting system that allows voting will allow fraudulent voting. It’s the unavoidable security hole. You might make the system BETTER (although in this case I don’t think you will, centralized data causes single failure points, so instead of having to hack a bunch of voting machines they only need to hack 1, or maybe 1 per congressional district) but any idea that you can make it truly secure and immune to fraud is panacea thinking and flawed.
No, or not really. The person has to generate their own private key, it can't be done any other way securely. But after that the user has to prove they are a voter. So they appear in person with a public key to register as a voter. Or more likely they will send their proof online along with their public key. Then the government will allow that person to vote.
So in theory there could be a central authority that could be hacked. But in a manual implementation that is not possible. There is a public key registration process where you prove you are a citizen. That could be completely manual and unhackable (although still flawed since the humans could be bribed).
Illegitimate use can never be prevented whether completely manual or completely automated or something in-between. But the credentials can be controlled in a blockchain system. The user generates their own credential, whether illegal alien or citizen. The next step is they register to vote. That is a process where they turn in the public key and their proof that they are a citizen. The government official looks at the proof and adds the public key into the database of voters.
Can the database be hacked and new public keys added? Maybe, but the addition of those keys is in a block chain and such fraud would be easy to detect. Can illegal aliens present fake citizenship credentials? Possible, but only to the extent they can today.
The beauty of the block chain once the registration step is done is that it cannot be hacked.
So now you’re using the same ol’ voter registration system that’s been getting abused forever and there’s already tons of ways to game the system. A manual implementation is one of the easiest ones to fool, just start making fake IDs. Welfare frauds beat this system every day.
The registration process is relatively unchanged. In MA that is the point where you have prove you are eligible.
Sorry but I’ve already told you how to beat every aspect of your system. There are examples happening right now that show this idea is simply unsecure and worthless. Every script kiddie and welfare fraud knows how to get around this.
On the voting day (no early voting is needed) there is a transaction to get the right to vote. There is a second transaction to vote. The transactions are recorded permanently and unforgeable. There are still some ways that the system can fail, but those failures are mainly distributed since the block chain processing is distributed. For example someone's PC could be hacked and the malware votes for the person using the person's private key. But that will happen less and less as the protection the use of private keys gets better.
There is still the registration problem that we both acknowledge, but "script kiddies" are not going to be able to fraudulently register. Welfare frauds might be able to register multiple times or whatever, but that's no different from today.
Early voting will still be necessary. And the system is still completely open to gaming and hacking.
Look it’s very simple, there’s two ways to go about it:
either you aren’t verifying the users, in which case the system is just begging for vote fraud
Or you are verifying, in which case the vote fraud will all happen there
All this blockchain BS is just a voting version of Segway, throwing too much technology at a problem to not actually solve any of it.
In contrast all of the internals of the block chain software and the block chain itself is completely public. It can easily be audit and vote fraud can be investigated. We can agree that tech is never a silver bullet but some tech is clearly superior than other tech.
Fewer hacking points than voting machines. Once you screw with the voter rolls/ linkage MILLIONS of votes can be changed.
The block chain itself is besides the point. The whole design is flawed to the point of uselessness. I’ve explained it multiple times, you refuse to acknowledged the painfully obvious flaws. It’s a terrible system, much much worse than what we have today. The block chain system will allow 1 hacker to dictate the ENTIRE national election. Sorry you can’t see that.
The block chain system will allow 1 hacker
Not true. The block chain is a distributed transaction ledger. You are given permission to vote once with a transaction if you passed the registration. When you vote you sign a voting transaction with your private key. No private key, no vote. The ledger cannot be faked, hacked, destroyed, and is relatively immune to denial of service.
The nicest part is all permission granting and all votes are recorded forever in a ledger that cannot be faked in any way. Any fraud in the voting will be detectable by anyone (registration fraud being a separate issue, not solved by this tech).
Repeating yourself doesn’t make you right, it just makes you redundant. There’s still the burning question you’ve avoided asking over and over and over which shows your whole is completely flawed and thoroughly unworkable:
How will you establish that the person is who they say they are
And who they say they are is a valid voter in the election
Until you can solve those problems everything else about the system is complete junk and utterly worthless. A total non-starter.
That's the same problem we have now. Democrat precincts have padded voter rolls. College students can say they unregistered in their home and register a second time on campus. Illegals can present various documents. For example (Illinois): A person may also demonstrate sufficient proof of identity by submission of a photo identification issued by a college or university accompanied by either a copy of the applicant's contract or lease for a residence or any postmarked mail delivered to the applicant at his or her current residence address.
I never claimed that problem was solved and acknowledged it from the very start. After that in the current systems we have presentation of ID on some states or nothing at all in others. Then voting on hackable machines or error-prone paper. Those voting day problems are solvable. Registration does no have easy solutions.
And it’s the biggest problem, and until you fix that everything else is just jerking off.
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