Effects of Expanding the Vote

Required Secondary Powers. By virtue of there being online voting, it's presumable that the problem of large scale tampering has been solved.

Kind of the same way why people don't complain when there's faster-than-light communication or travel in a sci-fi setting given neither are possible given our level of technology and science. If it's required for the universe and story to work and is not itself the subject of focus, it's often acceptable. It's presumed that there is a solution but the solution is not stated due to conservation of detail.

edited 2nd Nov '12 6:53:36 PM by peasant

Sorry if this is a derail, but has anyone here used bitcoin? It's an online currency that basically works by having all its users back up a ledger or "blockchain" that uses a complicated cryptographic scheme to make it extremely difficult to alter and pass off as the real thing. Millions of dollars have been exchanged with it. Bitcoins have been stolen, through fraud or by stealing people's "passwords", but no one has succeeded in breaking the system itself.

I wonder if something similar could be set up or voting? Just give everyone a private key anonymously, and let anyone who wants to donate their computation power to back up the blockchain. Keep a database of the private keys that have been assigned and only accept votes with their digital signatures. The voting record would be decentralized, so there would be no central server to hack, and as an added bonus, anyone could do their own recount by examining the blockchain.

That probably didn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you use bitcoin you can see how such a system works.

Problem is, theoretical physics are the orange to computer security's apple.

We could in theory prove faster than light velocities exist as a natural law. That is infallible if we prove that. Computer security by nature is a human construct not natural law and thus will never be infallible.

Trust me, hackers are a lot smarter than you seem to give credit. Many can reverse engineer the very software itself to find the vulnerabilities. Many of those are in the employ of multinational corporations or governments (intelligence agencies, criminal bureaus and militaries most frequently).

Yet. It's only a matter of time til it is.

When, and how much do you want to bet?

I don't claim to understand the system fully, but there's some pretty serious cryptography going on. In order to "break" the system, you'd probably have to find a fundamental mathematical flaw in current hashing algorithms, in which case the network could switch to a new algorithm. Other attacks have been discussed, and its been shown how the network can survive pretty much any of them.

I'm not underestimating hackers. I'm simply pointing out that given the focus and direction of the work being proposed, hackers are a non-issue.

^ They're never a non-issue. You can minimize their threat but you'll neither eliminate it nor render it a non-issue.

You can say that voter fraud is never a non-issue with paper ballots, too. That doesn't mean it has to be relevant to the story.

I'm curious what your background in computer security is, and whether or not you speak from experience.

I'm CompTIA Security+ certified. Passed the certification exam with like 93%.

Then maybe you know more about this than me. It still seems like a pretty tall order to claim that reasonable security is impossible to the point that writing about it in fiction strains credibility.

Give me a reasonable time frame, and I will bet money that bitcoin will not be compromised in that time.

3 years. (It took less time than that to crack WPA-2 encryption. And that is still one of the gold standards of wireless security. Granted, the first crack was done in a laboratory.)

edited 2nd Nov '12 9:04:16 PM by MajorTom

Bitcoin has been in around since 3 January 2009, so It's already been 3 years. Granted, it wasn't a worthwhile target for all that time.

By the way, if I'm not mistaken, its hashing is based on SHA-2, which according to wikipedia has been used since 2001.

I suppose you meant three years from now. Ok, let's wait and see.

edited 2nd Nov '12 9:27:27 PM by Topazan

Three years from now. It took 5 years after launch to crack WPA-2 encryption despite the attempts taking nearly 2 years.

(And all this conveniently ignores the fact that getting the "password" to a bitcoin does constitute a security breach/crack in the system. It might not be cracking the hashing algorithm but it does mean security is compromised.)

If that's your standard for security then you're right that nothing's safe. A lock has to open for someone with the key, otherwise it defeats the purpose.

As long as you keep your 'private key' (the proper term for what I earlier referred to as a password) safe, bitcoins can not be stolen. This is the responsibility of the user.

Going back to voting, this would indeed be a possible vulnerability in a hypothetical voting system. However, stealing one key would let you steal one vote, not commit the kind of fraud you mentioned earlier. The risk could be further reduced by introducing multiple factor authentication. Thus, you might need to not only steal someone's private key, but also their cell phone, OTP generator, email address, and whatever else, and also prevent them from reporting it before the election is called. This would get you ONE vote.

edited 2nd Nov '12 9:46:09 PM by Topazan

^ And that kind of level of confidentiality ruins your availability. Meaning that many secondary requirements is going to disenfranchise a ton of people all for the sake of stopping a few hackers.

It doesn't need to disenfranchise anyone. You could give the option to vote the traditional way instead of voting online. The extra security measures could be optional as well, but highly recommended to people who don't know much about IT security.

Maybe we should start a thread about this in the On Topic Forum.

Done.

edited 2nd Nov '12 10:20:23 PM by Topazan

Okay, I see there's a bit of a misconception of how cryptology works soI'll say this:

• We already have cryptographically strong methods to ensure the identify of individuals
• Physical breaches of servers is the same thing as stealing ballot boxes, unless we're worried about the latter, it doesn't make sense to be worried about the former
• Wireless security has been a constant long running joke in the cryptology community because it's being made by (very smart) engineers who never ever studied cryptology, that's why it keeps failing

The problem of online voting is the ability to keep the ballot secret (because most of the cryptographic methods of ensuring the identity and integrity of a vote will also blow away the secrecy of it) and the ability to verify a person's intention to make that vote (ie. no gun held to the person's head).

If you want further explanation I have to go into math... not incredibly complex math, but it requires knowledge of math and programming. Man-in-the-middle, as Tom describes, only works if you're sending data plaintext, which would be incredibly idiotic to do for something so important. I'd like to point out that we basically have extensive corporate systems for VPN infrastructure that would be done in very easily if the issues that Tom describes actually existed. These are known problems with known solutions.

As for bitcoin, the integrity of the cryptographic system isn't in question because no significant body apparently is willing to attack it. I supposed millions of dollars pales to attacking normal banking and credit systems which nets you billions of dollars (just my guess at least). The economics however is totally retarded and a complete scam with a significant portion of the money going toward early-entry individuals.

But, the discussion between Tom and Topazan brings about excellent points. What if the system wasn't designed well? What if they didn't use cryptologists to make a proper system? What if they purposely weakened the system to rig votes?

Explain. I hate to derail your thread even further, but you can't expect something written in that inflammatory of a tone to go unchallenged.

Yes, early adopters have an advantage. That doesn't make it a scam. The earlier you invest, the more of a risk you take that it won't pan out. Any current or future success of bitcoin comes from the people who use or invest in it.

1. There's no reason a voter's identifying information has to be traceable back to their real world identity. With bitcoin, you only need a private key to spend coins and an address to send it to.

"The gun to the head" scenario also applied to paper absentee ballots. As was pointed out, it's a very inefficient way to rig an election, to say the least. There could be a mechanism in place to dispute a vote made under duress as well.

Can't see how that would be much different, from a narrative point of view, than the older types of voter fraud that exist.

I only have limited voter fraud done by the Democrats and Republicans but nothing that significant. They've far worse problems with voter apathy and voter fatigue. Or actually the problem would be big money ruining everything with power-interest groups. My take, and I wanted to see if anybody agreed, was that it makes money more powerful because you could run power interest groups.

I agree, gun to the head is much too inefficient to make much of a difference.

I said that it would be difficult to ensure vote integrity without compromising the secret ballot but not entirely impossible. Just remember that bitcoin takes a ridiculous amount of expensive infrastructure to run on to work properly. You can't do the same without "pricing" out basically 70% of the population from online voting.

@ bitcoin

It's not a slight advantage for early-adopters. It's actually an amazing advantage if you look at the exponentially increasingly difficult rate at which you get bitcoins for later joiners. There's several issues:

Who is going to pay for the computational capacity and what about ecological waste? The claim is that companies like Google would do it, but sorry to burst that guy's bubble but Google's massive computational capacity is used for SEARCHING not bitcoins. Why would anybody spend billions a year to get millions a year? That makes zero sense.

The scheme works so long as botnets don't control over 50% of the system but it's actually really quirky when you think about it. If bitcoins don't offer enough reward for risking botnets on it, then botnets won't even bother with the system and it's safe and it works. But that also means very few people are using it. On the other hand, if many people use it and it becomes a significant international currency, then the Russian mob does want to use their botnets on it and then it could potentially ruin the system unless government steps in to provide additional computational capacity. Then it's this ridiculous arms race in which producing the bitcoins you need to run your economy costs more than the bitcoins you get and there is a demented deflation rate going on that would ruin the economy.

The system is deflationary. As the number of bitcoins in existence increases, the generation of bitcoins slows. This is a naturally deflationary system. It's bad. Like super baaaaad. You know why we switched off gold? Because of this.

Hoarding is a problem. Because it's like gold. Also bad.

Inability for governments to perform necessary fiscal or monetary policy. I know libertarians don't care but I care about the poor and middle class. Government needs the ability to step in and do what's necessary to fix market errors and to create fair opportunities for everyone. Bitcoin provides nothing at all even if it worked exactly as stated and makes everything worse.

I like to emphasize the last point. Even if bitcoin works exactly as stated, had no ulterior motives and was perfect in every way cryptographically, it's the same kind of currency that ruined global economies over a century ago. Only nutjob Austrian economists think gold is good.

edited 3rd Nov '12 12:26:35 AM by breadloaf

Do you complain about the early investors in successful corporations becoming rich? The payout is only as large as bitcoin's success, and that success is largely thanks to the investors.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're talking about with computation power and ecological waste. You mean the mining process? If that ceases to be profitable, competition and the difficulty will decrease until it is. Ecological waste is trivial compared to almost any industry out there.

The bitcoin network already has a tremendous amount of power against a 51% attack, and it's growing all the time.

So, let me get this straight, you're worried that bitcoin is going to ruin the economy when it replaces the dollar? That the government is going to one day pass a law declaring that bitcoin will be the one and only legal tender in the land? You're more optimistic about bitcoin's future than I am.

I'm sure you know that your views on economics are HIGHLY debatable at best, but that's a whole nother can of worms. Suffice to say that your fears of bitcoin don't make sense unless it somehow replaces existing currency systems.

EDIT:

Why not? The government and community-minded individuals could run the infrastructure. It doesn't cost anything to use bitcoin.

edited 3rd Nov '12 12:55:28 AM by Topazan

It's the same issue of voter ID laws, it'd be a perfect to attack people on their right to vote by limiting their ability to vote. If the poverty rate increases into the future (the story takes place around 50 years from now), it's just going to be a worse problem. A driver licence costs, what, a hundred bucks or less? If they can't afford that, I'm not sure how they can afford the computers and other electronics.

Then again, given what is going on now, it'd probably happen.

@ bitcoin

This isn't a corporation, this is a currency. It's not a business venture, it's trying to build a medium of trade. You're basically asking me if I would be pissed if the people who ran the Canadian mint got to have 10% of the entire country's wealth. Yeah, I'd be pissed. They don't DO anything.

My views are not highly debatable at all. Go do a poll on economists on how many think gold standard is real awesome and wouldn't cause more problems than we have today.

I'm saying the bitcoin damages the economy no matter what portion controls it. Here let me ask you this, since you seem to be a hard advocate. What is the advantage of bitcoin?

edited 3rd Nov '12 1:04:54 AM by breadloaf

So they'd vote the traditional way? Or use a computer belonging to their friends, workplaces, libraries, or charitable organizations?

The same principles apply. Without early adopters taking on a proportionally bigger risk, it would not and will not succeed as a currency. The money that early investors make comes from later investors, who gain the benefit of less risk and a more robust infrastructure from the early investors.

How much wealth do the people who run the Canadian mint (ie the government and the central bank) control? I would have assumed pretty much as much as they want.

What do you have to be pissed about? It's not your money.

You're not only arguing against gold standard, but also the commodities market, real estate, and antiques. All of these are "deflationary".

What do you have against saving, or 'hoarding' as you call it? And please explain how bitcoin, or any of these things, damages the economy.

Easy, secure, anonymous, low transaction-fee online payments.

edited 3rd Nov '12 11:01:08 AM by Topazan

Voter ID laws have a very large suppression effect on the poor. Requiring something as simple as a driver licence in Canada was estimated to reduce voting rates in native reserves by as much as half. It's a fairly good tactic for those backed by power-interest groups to put in this type of legislation. It usually favours more extreme positions, and typically more right-wing ones (religious, fiscally conservative, supply-side economists are all groups that usually benefit).

But, the idea of online voting was to reduce voter fatigue when you expand the vote to many more issues. Could you vote the traditional way on three times as much topics? It seems to actually be lending more power to the rich with the way you've described the situation.

---

Currencies don't normally reward early adopters because it's not the point. The people in charge of the Canadian mint receive a salary, they don't get to take from the bucket of money they're minting.

Bitcoin isn't easy, it requires computer knowledge and computer hardware. Cash is far far easier.

Cash is anonymous, bitcoin can be traced via IP address and all transactions are public. So cash is more anonymous than bitcoin. If you wanted anonymous electronic version, we can develop a government backed e-cash, why use bitcoin? There are already several mathematical implementations that exist for e-cash, none are in use because nobody wants to bother setting it up because there isn't enough incentive to do so.

Zero transaction fee for cash. What sorts of online transactions have high fees associated with it? I have not come across any that had consumer-side fees at all. The government can place limits on credit card merchant fees if it wished (it's actually being discussed right now) but that doesn't seem to be a significant problem as of right now.

You seem to want me to go through macroeconomics 101 so...

Bitcoin is basically gold, and you seem to have ignored many of the problems of gold so basically it's that price shocks are incredibly wild, governments have limited ability to engage in monetary policy (and as a result, have limited ability to engage in fiscal policy) leading to problems with the inability to reduce wealth divides, unemployment and inflation/deflation shocks. You're also incredibly limited ability to keep interest rates within reason.

Hoarding causes deflation to occur which limits money supply and thus the ability to expand the economy. We've typically, since the mercantile times, relied on providing loans and interest rates based on fiat currency, in order to efficiently make use of otherwise idle resources. Bitcoin's deflationary nature implies that hoarding is your best strategy which means purposefully (since bitcoin represents resources) putting resources into an idle state and damaging your long-term economic growth.

Instead you want a system which encourages people to invest their money or spend it. We're not talking about "saving" cash. Saving rate is different. That money is still invested by your bank. But with bitcoin's limited money supply, it makes it incredibly strange. If you loan out bitcoins at an interest rate, plus the deflationary nature of it, you become insanely rich in no time and without inflationary means or expansionist monetary policy, you create mass poverty and a gigantic wealth divide. That usually results in incredibly inefficient use of resources leading to damaged long-term economic growth. Free markets work because a lot of decision makers allow bad decision makers to be flushed out quickly. A deflationary economy naturally leads to less decision makers allow bad decision makers to last longer and have more lasting damaging effects.

Without the ability to manage monetary or fiscal policy, the government has no control over interest rates. Market shifts can be wild, currency value can shift dramatically and most strangely, currency has different value in different places despite being the same bitcoin.

You can have spot trading, which by itself is not a problem, but implies that significant wealth goes into the hands of money-pushers rather than people actually producing products. It's what I like to call "smoke and mirrors" GDP growth, in that, the GDP produced by money-pushers isn't actually anything (ie. not larger houses, or more cars or what have you), it's just a greater portion of the pie handed over to them of a shrinking physical pie of goods. If all you have is a commodities market, it's fine, because people are judging the utility of a good and the transportation cost. If goods change price based on a local communities inability to have enough bitcoin to conduct their trade, the price shifts can be incredibly damaging.

edited 3rd Nov '12 1:39:00 PM by breadloaf

Ok, granted, that wouldn't be practical. However, my point about the poor being able to use borrowed or even state-provided electronics stands.

Yes, but what about the government? What about the central bank?

I'm assuming that in Canada money is created the same way it is in the States, which is to say it's loaned into existence by the central banks. The banks make a ton of money through this system. The mint doesn't actually play a big part in creating money. It just creates cash, which is a tiny fraction of the total amount of money in the system.

This is a red herring though. True or false: Bitcoin needs investors and adopters to be successful. True or false: If you want people do something, it helps to give them an incentive.

Cash isn't online.

Why not use bitcoin? Why use a government backed e-cash? I know some libertarians have an annoying tendency to assume everything in the private sector is good, and everything in the public sector is bad, but the reverse is at least as fallacious.

Besides, you sound like an educated person, so even if you're lucky enough to live in a country where the government genuinely has only your best interest at heart, you know that's not the case for everyone at every time. Take wikileaks. There's been a major effort to block funding to them, but they're still able to receive bitcoin. If you're not a fan of wikileaks, just imagine a more noble cause in another time and place that may have powerful interests against it.

The credit infrastructure costs money to run. Any money saved by government limits would have to come from somewhere. Bitcoin is good for very small transactions, such as donations, virtual goods, and advertising exchanges.

Yes, it's important that we understand each other's point of view so we can address it. If you came across someone declaring that the sky is green with no explanation, what argument could you offer but "No, it isn't."?

One problem that jumps out to me is that you're conflating money and resources. Money is not resources, and idle money does not mean idle resources. Second, again, if what you were saying was true it would also apply to art and antiques. Would you support a ban on buying those things? Finally, you're not taking into account the possibility of competition between multiple currencies.

I like to discuss economics by reducing it to its simplest form. So, let's go back to a small village in old Arcadia. Today, Matt the miller is meeting up with Carl the cobbler for a drink. Carl notices that Matt's shoes are in an awful state and offers to replace them.

"Sorry, Carl." Matt says, "But I'm saving my money. We have so many bakers these days, I can't keep up, so next month I'm going to hire Ellen the engineer to build me one of those 'wind' mills. Once that's done, I'll be able to sell much more flour, and I'll definitely want to buy some shoes then."

"Alright, Matt." replies Carl "In that case I'll get an early start on Pete the poulterer's boots instead."

Ok, so to my simple economically illiterate mind this sounds fine. Matt gets his windmill, Ellen gets paid to build it, the bakers get cheap flour, and Pete gets his boots sooner than he expected. So, please explain to me why it's essential that Matt gets new shoes today instead of a windmill next month?

I just can't see how the money in Matt's pocket could possibly hurt anyone.

edited 3rd Nov '12 8:50:03 PM by Topazan

Actually, I've noticed recently that a lot of libraries have had their internet access curtailed and the construction of libraries themselves has been curtailed heavily. Also, it seems that DM Vs in America are notorious for long waits which are most painful to the poor who have the least free time. I think given what you've described, we might expect a significantly low online voter participation, and due to voter fatigue likely low turnouts for anything but the important elections (president, senate and house).

---

The credit infrastructure takes far less money than does bitcoin. There's no mining and no computation to occur. Most of the cost that exists today is due to supporting physical locations (such as on-site transaction machines that are safe and secure). Online transactions, as a part of the credit infrastructure is not costly.

I would argue that bartering currencies are far superior to bitcoin, cost much less to maintain and support local economies far better and more efficiently. They also encourage the spending of money, which is to reduce idling resources.

As money is a representation of resources, if it is not invested it is resources idled. It has to be true that money not used represents goods/services not being rendered. Otherwise money represents nothing.

Your argument is mostly based on Austrian school of economics which is to state something simple and then have zero connection to the argument at hand. Explain to me what anything you said has to do with bitcoin? I feel it's very much like Austrian school going "comparative advantage for trade" and then conclude that all banks should be private.

It is not equal statements between stating everything in private is good and everything in public is good. I'm making a specific statement. Money in the hands of the government is good because it gives them power over monetary and fiscal policy. The central bank doesn't loan out money to banks, that is not how it works. In order to put cash into the system they buy up bonds, and in order to reduce cash in the system, they issue bonds. That is the primary method of changing the amount of money in the system. Banks can create secondary cash through loans, which are restricted through the government and only licenced banks in Canada may exist. The type of loan, the amount of money, the reserve-asset ratio and everything are all carefully managed in order to restrict what banks put out, which is yes 90% of the cash out there, but the country prints money in order to balance out the effect of the interest rates that banks charge in order to spur job opportunities and economic growth.

That the rich have disproportionate control of wealth in our society is a problem which bitcoins magnify. Let me ask you, who would make more money, a poor guy who can't afford a computer and receives no bitcoin whatsoever, or a large corporation that can run a server farm or the Russian mob with a botnet to do mining using other people's hardware? It is a system that doesn't reward skill or anything for money and makes our current problems worse.