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Alternatively, give everyone an assymmetric encryption key associated with you identity. To prove your identity, you sign a challenge with your private key, and the other party verifies it using your public key (which could itself be signed your government).

Although, for that to fully work,you would need international cooperation on a standard for that protocol.



Nah. Just have people generate their own keys. Then distribute a token to everyone, like registering to vote or NYC ID. Finally, have an official mixer like tornado cash that only works with these tokens. Ring signatures baby !

Now you distribute UBI, allow voting etc. And it is all pseudonymous.

That’s what we are building out at Intercoin.org/applications btw :)


Ring signatures -based mixers for voting seems like a bad idea... how do you solve vote selling?


If you want to go all the way, you can make a system where you can’t prove how you voted. But you can check using ZKP that your vote was counted in the final result. https://medium.com/edge-elections/what-is-a-zero-knowledge-p...

But out of curiosity, what exactly do you imagine happens in vote selling? Someone pays off each individual in half the population to vote a certain way? How do they do this at scale and how do you know it isn’t more cost—effective to just influence them?

Most people who voted for Biden instead of Bernie ahead of Super Tuesday made up their minds on the way to the polls. Biden wouldn’t have even won if nearly all the other participants wouldn’t have dropped out and endorsed him. He was losing badly to Bernie (and Pete) but as soon as he managed to prove electability in one state, all the other candidates fell on their sword. It’s like in a poker tournament where the chip leader loses to some guy who isn’t even 2nd or 3rd because everyone else stands up and gives him their chips.

And also, there are trade offs the other way. There are tons of failure modes in voting non electronically. I write about them here:

https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting/


>allow voting

Voting should always have a paper trail. And there's also the problem of allowing the technologically illiterate/aversive to vote.


What good is the paper trail? Does it prove to the voter that the electronic machine recorded the vote as intended? If so, how?

A sister comment just asked what we would do about selling votes. Well, if you can use the piece of paper to prove how you voted, I guess you “can sell your votes”


Sounds interesting but can you elaborate on the social benefits, challenges and potential downfalls of such an approach?



Many countries have something close to that, actually. I've seen this used for various eGovernmnet-type services, although the UX isn't really different from any 2FA-authenticated service. But it allows you to perform some official legal acts online (filing taxes,...).




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