The anti-crypto thread

[BFG10K]

Great news, crypto's collapsing across the board: https://www.techpowerup.com/282380/...ions-in-less-than-24-hours-did-the-bubble-pop

Also China's banned crypto, though individuals can still have it: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinese-financial-payment-bodies-barred-122712260.html

The sooner this cancerous parasite is wiped out, the better.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Just to be clear, the issue here isn't the blockchain, it's the software on top to get the data in the blockchain. Blockchain does help you nothing if your input layer is full of security holes and that is where the xkcd comes in.

The issue is any form of digital voting is a BAD IDEA. In any shape or form what-so-ever. Blockchain or no blockchain.

That horse has been beaten to death a couple of times already.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Um

"Blockchain" is already used for voting. Specifically, any time a major public blockchain has to ratify an update (like an EIP), nodes/validators have to signal their preference. It's voting at its core. Go back to the DAO Hack of 2016 - documented quite well on this forum in the Ethereum mining thread! - to see what I mean.

 

[Dribble]

One of the key tenents of block chain is the transaction history is stored in every block and shared with everyone. Other than that making it slow and expensive to do transactions it goes against the whole modern programming ethos which is to assume everything is full of bugs and you need to update it all the time. But block chain the history - including all the bugs that will eventually be found, the encription on each block that will eventually be easy to break, and so on is stored by everyone and unchangeable. Basically if it breaks you can't fix it, and like the titanic - everyone thinks it's too secure to fail until it hits some russian hacker iceberg.

 

[DisarmedDespot]

It's hard to keep up with everything going on in the cryptoverse, especially when so much of the work is competitively redundant. However, if you do some digging, you can find projects making great strides (instead of getting distracted by crap like DOGE and SHIB). Polygon (and zk rollups in general) are bringing fast, cheap transactions to the Ethereum blockchain that will make it a significant publicly-available rival to private mercantile payment systems once onboarding becomes easier for members of the public.

The goal of most "serious" blockchain efforts wrt payment systems is that the end users would never really know that blockchain was involved at all.

Didn't polygon get hit with a massive smart contract exploit recently, or was that something else with a similar name?

Friend, such changes take decades. This is not tiktok to get a new thrill and dopmaine rush every 5 seconds. It's a long game. It's a core change to the financial system. And that is why you are still very much an early investor if you invest now.

I'm sorry, I forgot one of crypto's miracles (in addition to polymorphism whenever something goes wrong) is eternal youth.

How many years is it gonna take until people stop insisting crypto's young?

Just to be clear, the issue here isn't the blockchain, it's the software on top to get the data in the blockchain. Blockchain does help you nothing if your input layer is full of security holes and that is where the xkcd comes in.

"Blockchain" is already used for voting. Specifically, any time a major public blockchain has to ratify an update (like an EIP), nodes/validators have to signal their preference. It's voting at its core. Go back to the DAO Hack of 2016 - documented quite well on this forum in the Ethereum mining thread! - to see what I mean.

No, the issues are pretty fundamental. The MIT paper discussed in the link I posted goes over it, but blockchain solutions especially essentially don't allow for a secret ballot. Just because it could be used for voting doesn't mean it should be. It's like using a hammer to drive screws.

 

[bigboxes]

Looks like Sweden is looking to ban cryptocurrency mining.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/...-5c-paris-climate-goal-say-swedish-regulators

 

[DisarmedDespot]

No surprise here. I think most people in the cryptosphere understand that PoW really doesn't have a serious future. Sure, there's some bitcoin maximalists who insist it truly has infinite worth, but the sheer power draw for seven transactions a second is terrifying. Eth's GPU mining isn't a whole lot better, and there's reasons they're moving to PoS *checks notes* someday.

 

[njdevilsfan87]

No, the issues are pretty fundamental. The MIT paper discussed in the link I posted goes over it, but blockchain solutions especially essentially don't allow for a secret ballot. Just because it could be used for voting doesn't mean it should be. It's like using a hammer to drive screws.

Not all ballots need to be private. If you're voting for an upgrade of the network itself, nobody cares - at least not yet. Or take the hypothetical scenario of a private company utilizing tokens in place or alongside of stocks for voting token/shareholder voting purposes - again probably again not a big concern. And certainly not for those startups trying to build directly onto the blockchain right now, as public voting will be status quo for them.

Now moving into the political world, privacy is important. But as people continue to lose trust, we may one day find that people value security and indisputable results over privacy. Such a change would be decades away, as the first requirement for the change would be for the 20s through 40s population (the ones most familiar and/or backing of the technology) to assume political power. Such a change would also require a big mental shift of humanity in general, as the whole being respectful of other's opinions doesn't seem to work very right now in America. And that's assuming the technology doesn't evolve to somehow allow for private/trustless voting.

Denial-of-service attacks and malware will always pose a threat to any electronic voting system, but those can be mitigated and reversed - even with blockchain itself. Not that it would be cheap, but at least possible.

 

[DisarmedDespot]

Now moving into the political world, privacy is important. But as people continue to lose trust, we may one day find that people value security and indisputable results over privacy. Such a change would be decades away, as the first requirement for the change would be for the 20s through 40s population (the ones most familiar and/or backing of the technology) to assume political power. Such a change would also require a big mental shift of humanity in general, as the whole being respectful of other's opinions doesn't seem to work very right now in America. And that's assuming the technology doesn't evolve to somehow allow for private/trustless voting.

I'm not even sure where on earth to start as you yourself just said 'for blockchain to work for political votes, we must change human nature.'

 

[njdevilsfan87]

I'm not even sure where on earth to start as you yourself just said 'for blockchain to work for political votes, we must change human nature.'

Maybe a better word is accepted. Because the technology already works. Theoretically we could have digital person IDs tied to crypto keys, and a voting system setup through a FedCoin of some sort.

And as I alluded - such a change (at least on the political level) would be a generational one. Because not only are boomers not going to let go of status quo, but governments are always to last adopt new technologies - for good reasons. Voting will need to be battle tested in network upgrades, blockchain games, private businesses that use tokens to grant actual ownership and voting rights to a company (unlike stocks, which grant you nothing), and so on. And as that happens, so does the generational shift of power.

I personally don't really think we ever see blockchain based voting until humanity is at the brink of destruction (maybe via climate collapse, who knows). Because it's not like zoomers and millennials are immune to greed and corruption which requires... privacy. But there's many other places outside of the political arena where it can be used.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Didn't polygon get hit with a massive smart contract exploit recently, or was that something else with a similar name?

That was PolyDEX.

Introducing PolyDEX

We are excited to announce the launch of PolyDEX as a part of the Cryption Network. With this launch, we take a step further in solving the…

blog.cryption.network

Polygon (formerly MATIC):

What Is Polygon (Matic) and How Can It Save Ethereum?

Polygon, previously known as Matic Network, is a scalability solution for the Ethereum network that is back on track to saving the second-largest cryptocurrency.

academy.shrimpy.io

No, the issues are pretty fundamental. The MIT paper discussed in the link I posted goes over it, but blockchain solutions especially essentially don't allow for a secret ballot. Just because it could be used for voting doesn't mean it should be. It's like using a hammer to drive screws.

I think you are missing my point. People seem to imagine that electing public officials is somehow the only function where voting is necessary. Blockchains already feature voting as a major feature. Without it there can't be any adoption of new code on a public, decentralized blockchain. Voting on political matters is one of those "who cares?" kind of things.

If you really want a decentralized blockchain that can handle secret ballots, all you really have to do is look at stuff like XMR. I'm sure it could be achievable on more-public blockchains by obscuring the identity of whoever "voted" from a particular contract address, but again . . . who cares? And that xkcd guy is a reactionary nit so I don't bother with him anyway.

 

[beginner99]

How many years is it gonna take until people stop insisting crypto's young?

When old people know about it.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Maybe a better word is accepted. Because the technology already works. Theoretically we could have digital person IDs tied to crypto keys, and a voting system setup through a FedCoin of some sort.

For political votes, it does not work. On a fundamental level. In the end it all boils down to you can either have electronic voting or you can have a secret ballot. You cannot have both. Therein lies the rub, and that's before we get into the practical problems associated with e-voting at all.

If you happen to have a solution to that, there are several billion to be made.

 

[beginner99]

In the end it all boils down to you can either have electronic voting or you can have a secret ballot.

Not sure what you mean? I do not think this is true. Electronic voting can be done in secret and can have functions to mathematically proof the result is correct and wasn't tampered with without needing to reveal who voted what.

This is what I'm taking about:

Our online voting solutions for Government | Scytl

With Scytl's online voting technology, all online ballots are protected with end-to-end encryption and digital signatures. Access our website and find out more.

www.scytl.com

In essence your vote is verified and digitally signed on your device and then sent in encrypted form to the server. The server does not know from whom the vote is (theoretically it can use your IP address and fingerprinting techniques but let's assume the government isn't doing that and you can protect yourself by using a VPN and the voting page source code should be public => are they using fingerprinting techniques?).
Afterwards you can also audit that your vote was correctly taken into account. It is in fact much more transparent.

Of course as we know all software has bugs so I'm not saying it's a good idea but it will be coming and either I misunderstood you or I disagree with you. Its for sure possible to have a anonymous/secret e-voting system. It's simply very complex from cryptographic standpoint(and cryptography is very math-heavy).

I wager the current system (in my country) is much less transparent and much easier to cheat. We can vote by snail mail. since decades. It would be trivial to forge especially by a state actor. there are no water marks or anything. You only have to sign it by handwriting but nobody really compares that to anything You only need a copy of the needed papers and envelope and a some people fake-signing. You also have no way to check if you vote was counted or not.

And the counting isn't actually counted. They are counted by weighing. No joke. But these balances are super accurate so it's actually more accurate than hand-counting. Point is instead of faking votes you can just put "spies" into a position of vote counter where they can fake numbers easily.

There are pros and cons for both. It's just a bit naive to assume a paper ballot is securer. It is less accurate and not at all auditable really. You also need almost no technical knowledge/skill to cheat it. The difference is you need physical presence which of course is a pretty significant hurdle. the e-voting system can be hacked safely from afar but technically it is a lot harder to do so.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Not sure what you mean? I do not think this is true. Electronic voting can be done in secret and can have functions to mathematically proof the result is correct and wasn't tampered with without needing to reveal who voted what.

This is what I'm taking about:

Our online voting solutions for Government | Scytl

With Scytl's online voting technology, all online ballots are protected with end-to-end encryption and digital signatures. Access our website and find out more.

www.scytl.com

In essence your vote is verified and digitally signed on your device and then sent in encrypted form to the server. The server does not know from whom the vote is (theoretically it can use your IP address and fingerprinting techniques but let's assume the government isn't doing that and you can protect yourself by using a VPN and the voting page source code should be public => are they using fingerprinting techniques?).
Afterwards you can also audit that your vote was correctly taken into account. It is in fact much more transparent.

Of course as we know all software has bugs so I'm not saying it's a good idea but it will be coming and either I misunderstood you or I disagree with you. Its for sure possible to have a anonymous/secret e-voting system. It's simply very complex from cryptographic standpoint(and cryptography is very math-heavy).

All I can say is that some people (including a few professors at ITU, the Danish IT University) who are very much smarter then I am in this field, have looked at it and, I'm being diplomatic here, have found it completely unfeasible.

I wager the current system (in my country) is much less transparent and much easier to cheat. We can vote by snail mail. since decades. It would be trivial to forge especially by a state actor. there are no water marks or anything. You only have to sign it by handwriting but nobody really compares that to anything You only need a copy of the needed papers and envelope and a some people fake-signing. You also have no way to check if you vote was counted or not.

I don't know where you are, but here postal votes need to be verified before they're counted. You also cannot vote at home and drop your vote in an ordinary mailbox, but have to actually show up at an approved location to vote by mail. Where you can be **** sure it'll be verified you are who you claim to be. Votes are then transported by couriers (plural, because nobody is ever left alone with votes), not by ordinary mail.

And the counting isn't actually counted. They are counted by weighing. No joke. But these balances are super accurate so it's actually more accurate than hand-counting. Point is instead of faking votes you can just put "spies" into a position of vote counter where they can fake numbers easily.

Again, here you can be absolutely sure they're manually counted. Weighing is only done to verify the count.

Spies inserting votes? Quite apart from that spy quickly getting a whole angry voting team* on their back, each and every vote has to be accounted for. Even blank and defamed. The count has to match the number of votes given. Woe betide if it doesn't. Last time I was on counting duty we spent two whole hours tracking down one single missing vote. Which isn't a lot of fun when you have 4000+ votes.

*We use a mix of candidates, public employees and volunteers. Each of the three keeps the other two in check. Everyone has to agree the count is correct in the end.

There are pros and cons for both. It's just a bit naive to assume a paper ballot is securer. It is less accurate and not at all auditable really. You also need almost no technical knowledge/skill to cheat it. The difference is you need physical presence which of course is a pretty significant hurdle. the e-voting system can be hacked safely from afar but technically it is a lot harder to do so.

No. Just no. Paper ballots are far more simple and secure if done right. What's more, everyone and their dog is able to independently verify the result. You just need to count the votes yourself.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Regarding the voting thing it is irrelevant if it can be proven to be secure & safe.
It will never be adopted until an overwhelming majority of people & law makers agree it is safe & secure which will never happen. Crap I have read about crypto and I barely understand how “coins” are made, stored and sold. No possible way anyone outside obscure forums is ever going to understand block chain voting.

 

[DisarmedDespot]

I think you are missing my point. People seem to imagine that electing public officials is somehow the only function where voting is necessary. Blockchains already feature voting as a major feature. Without it there can't be any adoption of new code on a public, decentralized blockchain. Voting on political matters is one of those "who cares?" kind of things.

If you really want a decentralized blockchain that can handle secret ballots, all you really have to do is look at stuff like XMR. I'm sure it could be achievable on more-public blockchains by obscuring the identity of whoever "voted" from a particular contract address, but again . . . who cares? And that xkcd guy is a reactionary nit so I don't bother with him anyway.

What? Political voting is 'eh, who cares?' Blockchain voting for elections has been one of the things that's been harped on from the start. No one in the real world cares about blockchain voting on what protocols to adopt any more than they care about polls on slack for what to get for lunch.

 

[Rebel_L]

There are pros and cons for both. It's just a bit naive to assume a paper ballot is securer. It is less accurate and not at all auditable really. You also need almost no technical knowledge/skill to cheat it. The difference is you need physical presence which of course is a pretty significant hurdle. the e-voting system can be hacked safely from afar but technically it is a lot harder to do so.

I think even if your options are guaranteed small scale voter fraud that requires physical presence vs very small chance of large scale voter fraud by remote it would be foolish to go with the second option.

The first option is extremely unlikely to affect the overall results and can actually be investigated with in country resources whereas the second option could actually change the results and investigations are all but impossible if sponsored by foreign powers.

 

[DrMrLordX]

What? Political voting is 'eh, who cares?'

Yes. Seriously.

Blockchain voting for elections has been one of the things that's been harped on from the start.

By whom? You're one of the first people I've heard discuss it, and I've been following ETH and ERC20s (in particular) since 2016. There are plenty of people in the "real world" that care about accurate and fair voting for protocol changes, corporate governance, or any of the other styles of voting already happening on blockchains.

 

[beginner99]

No. Just no. Paper ballots are far more simple and secure if done right. What's more, everyone and their dog is able to independently verify the result. You just need to count the votes yourself.

Right, I want to see you counting 100k or even millions of votes. Yeah Denmark isn't huge but I guess in a country-wide vote the total submitted woulds will still be around 1 mio. It will take you half your live to count them. In theory you are right, in practice, not so much.

You also forget what I said before. That what you are counting contains fake votes or are missing votes thrown in the trash. You have no way to know. With cryptographic proofs you actually can know. And the most likley attack on electronic voting is to spoof one of the formal proofs so the vote can't be approved and must be repeated.

I think even if your options are guaranteed small scale voter fraud that requires physical presence vs very small chance of large scale voter fraud by remote it would be foolish to go with the second option.

The first option is extremely unlikely to affect the overall results and can actually be investigated with in country resources whereas the second option could actually change the results and investigations are all but impossible if sponsored by foreign powers.

A large scale voter fraud simply isn't possible because it becomes obvious. If normal particitpation ranges at 30% and then it's suddenly >40% I can assure you it will trigger alerts right an left. You also need to be careful not to submit 5000 votes from a town of 200. Large scale fraud is very difficult to do right because it will affect overall statistics. In fact in either system it's in my opinion only really possible to change outcome and not be detect if the outcome was very close to begin with.

Repeating from above, the most likley attack on electronic voting is to fool with the formal verification and not the actual votes so that the vote doesn't count and needs to be repeated until the result the attacker desires is achieved (or it's changed back to paper). Actually changing the outcome without getting detected will be extremely hard due to plain statistics.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Right, I want to see you counting 100k or even millions of votes. Yeah Denmark isn't huge but I guess in a country-wide vote the total submitted woulds will still be around 1 mio. It will take you half your live to count them. In theory you are right, in practice, not so much.

There is no need to count them all yourself. Unless you want to of course. That's why you have voting districts to divide things into something manageable. Where I live, we're about 4500 voters. With normal participation numbers (70-80%) and 15 people counting and sorting, it only takes 5-6 hours to tally up two elections (local municipal, and regional). If it's a parliamentary election, you're looking at a result in ~3 hours.

You just have to trust all the other districts to do likewise. Which they will. Some are a bit larger of course. All in all, for a full election you're looking at 4-4.5 million votes. We still have a result on election night, perhaps a bit into the night if all goes haywire.

There is also a fine count done the day after an election, to be absolutely sure of personal votes. Not that it usually changes much.

A large scale voter fraud simply isn't possible because it becomes obvious. If normal particitpation ranges at 30% and then it's suddenly >40% I can assure you it will trigger alerts right an left. You also need to be careful not to submit 5000 votes from a town of 200. Large scale fraud is very difficult to do right because it will affect overall statistics. In fact in either system it's in my opinion only really possible to change outcome and not be detect if the outcome was very close to begin with.

Repeating from above, the most likley attack on electronic voting is to fool with the formal verification and not the actual votes so that the vote doesn't count and needs to be repeated until the result the attacker desires is achieved (or it's changed back to paper). Actually changing the outcome without getting detected will be extremely hard due to plain statistics.

If you have a normal participation level of only 30-40%, there is something fundamentally wrong. Electronic voting isn't going to fix anything if people don't participate.

But you're right about not making things too obvious. Like that one time, someone got a 130% of the votes in a district. Apparently, they loved him so much they voted twice. Or something.

 

[Rebel_L]

A large scale voter fraud simply isn't possible because it becomes obvious. If normal particitpation ranges at 30% and then it's suddenly >40% I can assure you it will trigger alerts right an left. You also need to be careful not to submit 5000 votes from a town of 200. Large scale fraud is very difficult to do right because it will affect overall statistics. In fact in either system it's in my opinion only really possible to change outcome and not be detect if the outcome was very close to begin with.

Repeating from above, the most likley attack on electronic voting is to fool with the formal verification and not the actual votes so that the vote doesn't count and needs to be repeated until the result the attacker desires is achieved (or it's changed back to paper). Actually changing the outcome without getting detected will be extremely hard due to plain statistics.

From a brief look at voter turnout by country, participation ranges in the majority of first world countries fluctuate by significant amounts and it would certainly not be hard to influence many elections quitely bellow the radar, your not installing a puppet of your choosing from scratch but you can certainly have a large impact. Depending on the type of democracy you are dealing with you could potentially even sell seats to parties or to individuals if you set things up right.

Forgoing all that, just the ability to invalidate an entire election by say making voter turnout 200% would be absolutely huge. Think about what you could have done to the US as a country if you could convince everyone that the voting was being rigged. Set up the proper coinciding agitating events and I think you could have started a civil war.

For democracies, the voting system and trust in it is a cornerstone of the country. If you can mess with that in any sort of way on a large scale it would have huge consequences.

 

[DisarmedDespot]

By whom? You're one of the first people I've heard discuss it, and I've been following ETH and ERC20s (in particular) since 2016. There are plenty of people in the "real world" that care about accurate and fair voting for protocol changes, corporate governance, or any of the other styles of voting already happening on blockchains.

Really? I'm shocked you haven't heard of it. I've been following cryptos on-and-off since before the Mt Gox collapse. It's always been one of the go-to- use-cases for blockchain and there's a crapton of articles hyping it (and nowadays, it looks like just as many pointing out how bad an idea it is). I mean, that's why it's the punchline of the previously-posted xkcd. It might not've been as common with Eth specifically, I guess.

 

[DrMrLordX]

It might not've been as common with Eth specifically, I guess.

Possibly so. Most of the "serious" projects I've seen on the Ethereum blockchain have been more concerned with finance and corporate governance.

I think smart contracts could make private voting possible. You'd still have a record of a transaction from a specific Ethereum address to a contract address, but if any data tokens were passed to said contract address, the contents of that data need not be made public. And that's just Ethereum. There are other blockchains (lookin at you, XMR) where transaction histories are basically private. Personally I don't see it as a "killer app" for blockchain though. Yeah, existing voting machines do have some ugly vulnerabilities in them, but . . . I don't want to even consider how much KYC you'd have to go through to make political voting work on the blockchain.

At least with corporate governance (and similar), you only "vote" if you control an address that's in possession of some valued token specific to that chain/contract. See VEChain (which got its start as an ERC20 on Ethereum):

Governance Charter | VeChain Builders

Built on top of the VeChainThor public blockchain, the VeChain ecosystem provides the best resources to anyone who wants to solve real world economic problems and create value with the blockchain technology

www.vechain.org

 

[beginner99]

Forgoing all that, just the ability to invalidate an entire election by say making voter turnout 200% would be absolutely huge. Think about what you could have done to the US as a country if you could convince everyone that the voting was being rigged. Set up the proper coinciding agitating events and I think you could have started a civil war.

For democracies, the voting system and trust in it is a cornerstone of the country. If you can mess with that in any sort of way on a large scale it would have huge consequences.

Agree and with that it's probably why electronic voting is the wrong way, because you can formally correctly verify the vote and hence it will be much easier to determine fraud vs. paper ballots. And then yeah simply making the vote invalid in many cases is enough to cause mayhem.

Another case against e-voting is because it appease to "the weak and lazy". The ones to lazy to inform themselves about the candidates or issues at hand that will just do a in the moment click decision. These people would never bother to vote in person or even by mail. Too much effort already. Do we really want these types of emotional voters? They are the most easily influenced.

 

[nurturedhate]

Do we really want these types of emotional voters? They are the most easily influenced.

YES. You want everyone to vote. Purity tests, circular firing squads, etc... As a species we've been down this road, still going down it. It's never good.