Not in general, but in many cases that is a necessary goal (because, if votes were to be cast only in special voting places, such systems have few advantages over the existing paper-backed e-voting systems, and several disadvantages).


That is what the TSE always says: "if people trust ATM machines and home banking, why shouldn't they trust DRE machines"?

The point, of course, is that people do not trust those technologies, they trust the entities that manage them (the banks).  Customers believe that their bank is committed to preventing fraud and prosecuting hackers.  They believe that the bank itself will take good care of their passwords and will not tamper with their accounts to steal their money (since it has plenty of fully legal ways of doing the latter  )

In an election, on the other hand, one cannot blindly trust the entity that runs the system.  The stakes are so big that, if insider fraud is possible, it will almost certainly happen.

More generally, people trust technology that they do not understand (from cars to smartphones), in the physical sense of not blowing up, because the experience of many people have proved them to be physically safe.  Such "empirical"' certification does not exist for e-voting systems. 

Someone just posted in another thread that Newegg is giving 30% discount on orders above 500$ paid in bitcoin.  Not confirmed but not denied either.

A good free-market capitalist should buy all their stock with bitcoin and then sell it on eBay with a 25% markup. 

Unless their plain (non-discounted) price already is 35% over the rest of the market, of course. 

PS. Another thing that election system designers often fail to notice is that the mere suspicion that votes could be leaked is enough to coerce voters.  For example: a mafia boss spreads the rumor that he has an agent inside the system who can obtain that information, and anyone in his domain who did not vote for XYZ may get a surprise visitor carrying a baseball bat.  Even of the rumor is totally false, a voter who thinks that it could be true will probably vote XYZ, just in case.  To prevent such things, the system must be such that every voter can dismiss such rumors and trust that his vote will not be revealed.  Any system that is built on top of a cryptocoin protocol is already way too complicated for that.

Yet another often overlooked fact is that open source is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure that the system has no exploitable bugs or backdoors.  The basic difficulty there is that the binary that is actually running in the equipment may not correspond to the published and verified source; and there is no secure way to check for that risk in practice.  (That is also a fundamental problem of the Trezor and other hardware wallets, by the way.  It seems that the Trezor fans too have trouble grasping this detail.)

Thanks for the thought, but indeed I am profoundly uninterested on any vote-from-home proposal.  That is like a water-powered car or a gamma-ray fly killer: a bad idea in itself, independently of the technical details.  I will not waste time reading such proposals.

What many "puppies" fail to realize is that the only purpose of an election is to convince the losers that they do not have enough support.   Note the emphasis on "losers".  It does not matter if the election convinces the majority, the media, the election committee, the UN observers, a jury, a platoon of academics, or a gang of zit-faced geniuses.  If the losers think that they have been robbed, they will not accept the result and may resort to violence or other non-democratic means.  Elections were invented precisely as a smart, efficient and painless alternative to those more primitive means of settling political disputes.

Complicated crypto-based systems generally fail on this count.  The losers cannot be expected to trust a system that requires a PhD in computer science to analyze.  Especially if they ask a honest cryptographer and learn that the fundamental tools of public-key cryptography -- SHA, ECC, RSA, etc -- have never been proved to be secure, theoretically or empirically. 

On the other hand, everybody can understand paper-backed e-voting, enough to trust it.  In Venezuela, for example, at least twice the opposition tried to start a civil war and depose the government by force by claiming that elections had been rigged.  Fortunately their voting machines had paper backing, the recounts confirmed the result, and convinced the opposition that they were indeed the minority.  No matter what one thinks of their government, most people in Venezuela would rather have them in power than a civil war.

Since I have been involved with this issue, at every election I get calls from minority parties and candidates who are sure that they have been robbed by the system and want to know what they could do about it.  Unfortunately, with a purely digital system, the answer is nothing.  Even in cases when the evidence of fraud was fairly strong, appeals were flatly dismissed because the entity that judges such matters (TSE) is the same entity that buys the equipment and manages it.   Twice in the past Congress determined the use of paper backup, but twice TSE reversed the decison -- once by lying to the party leaders and suppressing public debate, the second time by having paper backup declared inconstitutional.  Whereas the German Suprme Court ruled that purely electronic (DRE) voting is inconstitutional, because the citizen has the right to understand how his vote is counted.

My impression from the charts is that, since May/20, most traders would push the price down, but a few traders keep it up by a series of isolated buying spurts.  These could be fund owners trying to lift the price to the 500--600$ level and keep it there.   

Funds (all of them not just GABI) need to convince their clients that bitcoin price will go up faster than other investments.  But they would need some pretty good arguments to overcome the bad impression that clients will get from looking at a daily or weekly price chart.  (They need also to keep from clients the fact that the price is still sustained by the demand of Chinese daytraders.)

Keeping the price stable would help.  It may also make the SEC slightly more inclined to approve COIN.

But I suspect that the May/20 mini-bubble and the subsequent relative stability will bot be enough to impress clients and the SEC.  On the other hand, those buying spurts should add up to a lot more than they could earn from fees. 

Fund owners can profit a lot more when the price drops, because they can sell the coins at a higher price before the client liquidates at the lower price.  So perhaps they have pumped the price to the current range to play that trick, and will let it drop back to the 400$ range or lower once they have sold enough shares.

That service must sell the coins as soon as they get them.  In the context of the discussion, it is just one way in which miners can sell coins to pay their utility bills.

Mining being a free market, it should be the case that the supply (miners) expands and ajusts until the activity is about as profitable as any other business.  In that case one would expect miners to make only 10-20% over costs.

(However, since the difficulty and price change rather quickly,  the mining market may far from equilibrium, in either way.)

The set of miners and the set of people who believe in bitcoin-to-the-moon may overlap to some extent, but do not have to.  A person can be skeptical of bitcoin but engage in large-scale mining (or day-trading) if he thinks that it is lucrative.  Bythe same token, there seem to be many bitcoiners who day-trade altcoins even though they think that all altcoins will die.

The huge cost of a large-scale mining operation is not proof of long-term faith in bitcoin.  The investors must know that all that equipment will be junk within a year anyway.  They are betting that that BTC price & total hashrate wll be within certain ranges for the next year or so, so that mining will yield more (in dollar terms) than their investment, within that time frame.  Otherwise they should have either kept their dollars or used them to buy bitcoins on the market, depending on their long-term outlook.

I would like to know who is paying for those discounts.  The merchant, because he likes bitcoins?  Bitpay, to attract new customers?

One sad fact about bitcoin is that there is practically no reliable data on the bitcoin economy.  The few numbers that we have (such as the transaction statistics from the blockchain, and the trade volume at the exchanges) are hard to interpret because they may include large fraction of "fake" traffic, and/or miss a large fraction of the real traffic.   For example, we do not know how much Bitpay and Coinbase are processing per day, and what kinds of good/services dominate.  We do not know how many bitcoin owners there are, and how the bitcoins are distributed among them.

Is this a dialogue from some theater play of the 1960s?

I see that 1 EUR was worth ~1.30 USD a year ago, 1.38 USD six months ago, and is back to 1.30 USD now. 

What stone is that, pumice? 

Anyone can create a new genesis block and start mining the resulting blockchain, like Satoshi did in 2009.  Whether that blockchain will attract any fans is another question.

But any miner that now mines the Satoshi2009 blockchain could easily switch to the Fonzie2014 blockchain if he wanted to.

What a twisted mind those bitcoiners have...  

I merely attached the year to emphasize that it is the blockchain that Satoshi started in 2009.  The bitcoin protocol could be restarted tomorrow by Satoshi with a new genesis block, and then Satoshi2014 could be a natural name for the resulting blockchain, which would be independent of the Satoshi2009 blockchain.  (And I would not be surprised if some altcoins aren't just that, the bitcoin protocol with a "radical fork" of the blockchain.)

No, it is YOUNG.  


I am skeptical about both, which means I am skeptical about the future of the network itself.


As a bitcoin fan, you obviously want to stick as many applications as possible into the Satoshi2009 blockchain, in order to get more support for it.  But there are other blockchains in existence, and the bitcoin network's hashing power could be harnessed for other protocols and applications if offered suitable rewards.

The bitcoin network currently costs 1.5 million USD per day.  That cost is now paid invisibly by the bitcoin holders, as you know.  

Yes, the bitcoin network has been working for 5 years now.  Like many other systems out there.  

(But er, wasn't there a hard fork some time ago?)

The maximum number of trasactions per day the bitcoin network has handled so far is a bit  over 100'000.  In Brazilian national elections, more than 100'000'000 votes are cast on a single day.  The US elections must be at least twice as big.  It is yet to be seen whether the bitcoin network and the Satoshi2009 blockchain can scale by x1000 without running into obstacles that have not been noticed yet.

A blockchain voting protocol would require access to the internet from all voting locations.  The current paper-backed e-voting systems do not even require power, and can collect votes autonomously in the middle of the Amazon jungle.  And so on.

(The bitcoin market cap is billions of dollars, but since bitcoins have no intrinsic value, the actual value managed is open to questioning.  If, for some private reason, all owners of Apple stock were forced to put it for sale on the open market, at the same time, all the stock it would probably be bought by  other people for close to its market cap.  If the same thing happened to bitcoin, its market price would probably plummet to single digits.  But this is just a side remark.)

The bitcoin protocol and network are experimental.  The goal of the Wright Bros'  Filer 1 model was to show that heavier-than-air flight was possible, and it was quite successful at that. But it was not meant to be THE transport vehicle of the future, not even a commercial product or the basis for any commercial enterprise.  The Bitcoin Protocol and the Satoshi2009 blockchain were created in the same spirit: as an experiment to prove that a distributed e-payment system without central authority was viable.  And they succesfully achieved that goal.  But the bitcoin protocol still has many limitations that, in my opinion, will ultimately prevent its use as a mainstream e-payment method, and I am almost sure that it will be superseded by some better system before it gets to that point.  Moreover, even if the bitcoin protocol itself thrives, nothing guarantees that it will retain the Satoshi2009 blockchain.

Unfortunately, the unexpected  demand for bitcoins, first by drug dealers and then by Chinese amateur speculators, pushed the bitcoin price 100-fold, in spite of it being just an experiment.  That price increase attracted financial businessmen who are now trying to convince the public that bitcoin (not any other cryptocoin) will be THE e-payment system of the future -- not just a working prototype of it --  and then sell it as a fabulous long-term investment.  I imagine those same people in the 1910's trying to sell Wright Flier 1 planes to the people for 10'000 dollars each, claiming that they (and not any other plane model) would soon be worth millions once the world would recognize their usefulness and exchanged all their horses for them.  Or selling shares of intercontinental airline companies whose fleets consisted of Flyer 1's.


I have looked into some systems that try to use public-key crytography techniques to achieve paperless secure e-voting.  Some of them are meant to let people vote from home over the internet, or depend on voters owning some gizmo that they have to  trust.  I stop reading those proposals right there, because those people obviously have not realized that voter coercion is a real and unsolvable problem in that setting.

Others are meant to prevent fraud in the adding of the votes.  This is a non-problem, because that part can be quite satisfactorily secured by just posting the site totals on the internet.  (In fact, the guy next to my office got crowdfunding to bulld a system that will make it easier to do that after the upcoming Brazilian election.)

The hard problem in paperless e-voting is capturing the vote in such a way that the voter can verify that the vote was correctly captured, but cannot prove to anyone else that he voted in a certain way.

There may be ways of doing that with sophisticated public crypto techniques, but as far as I know there is no solution that is guaranteed to work even with malicious system administrators and malicious hardware.   One of many obstacles is that the system does not know beforehand how many people will vote, so one could discover how each person voted by capturing all incoming data and simulating the end of the election after each vote.  

Even if there is a robust solution, I do not see why a complicated system based on a single shared blockchain, that only a few experts think is safe, would be better than the fully distributed, trustless paper-backed e-voting technology that has been proved secure in many real elections all over the world, and that everybody can understand and trust.
 
It is not a matter of being colosed-minded, rather of not being a naive tech-worshipper.

Sorry, I have not followed DOGE at all.  I respect it, though, as a the fun-poker of choice for use against ardent bitcoiners.  

My dog has learned to run after the stick, but not yet to bring it back.  But it is too young, hopefully it will learn in due time. 

About the newegg 30% discount for bitcoin purchases:  bitcoiners who are agile disciples of free-market capitalism should of course rush to buy all their stock and re-sell it on eBay at 5% discount.   

Unless newegg's normal (non-discounted) price is 35% over market, of course. 

I don't think they say that they would purchase that.  They were aiming for that target; but, if it works like SMBIT, they will buy only if and when clients buy their shares.

("Share" is not a good word in this case since it could mean "an IOU for a certain amount of BTC held by the fund on behalf of a client" or "equity in the company that manages the fund".  Is there another word for the first concept?)

Doesn't my question above imply tolerance, in principle, for non-orthodox question marks?

I know that everyone knows the facts, but it seems that they hate having them called by their proper name. 


If and when mining will be dominated by a cartel of a few large corporations (with substantial reserve harshrate that can be turned on when needed to starve competitors), I bet that they will find ways to impose any changes to the protocol that would maximize their revenue -- no matter what the users and holders will think of them.

Dear thread readers, considering that the image above has undeniable humorous value, and, mainly, that the comma depicted in it differs from a qustion mark chiefly by the absence of a relatively small dot, should we forgive, for once, its use in this thread?