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My whole startup is built on blockchain, and I'm an Estonian e-Resident (Estonia allows their citizens to vote digitally), so I find blockchain voting fascinating. That said, there are some problems with it. This Tom Scott video explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs.

But this is a very cool idea: combining the USPS vote-by-mail infrastructure with a blockchain layer that sits on top, used mainly to provide anonymous provenance. We'll see if this ever gets implemented, but I think it's a great example of the non-hype uses for blockchains being explored.




Very nice video, though in the personally delivered sponsored message at the end he seems to be contradicting himself. Why would you still trust a password manager after seeing the video? And wouldn't it be incredibly stupid if an entire nation put their passwords in a vault controlled by some company in possibly another nation?


> Why would you still trust a password manager after seeing the video? And wouldn't it be incredibly stupid if an entire nation put their passwords in a vault controlled by some company in possibly another nation?

I think you should use a password manager, I do, and the people I know that don't keep forgetting their passwords, keep reusing them, and generally just practice horrible security.

As to which one, I would recommend an open source one like BitWarden, but they won't fund YouTube videos on important issues because they don't have the money.

I doubt Tom Scott would recommend that everyone in the world use this one password manager, and it won't happen from him endorsing it. And I think that integrity of elections are more important than the security of passwords, even though I guess they are somewhat intertwined. For important things multi factor auth should be used which won't be defeated by passwords only.


That's a good point.

I suppose it's poignant in a way — though we might wish to stop the tide, everything is digitizing. Voting will inevitably be swept up in this process, and it's not a matter of if we should do it or not, but how we do it best.

And for what it's worth, password managers are a very good idea (though probably not worth staking an election on). I would however recommend Bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com, which is open-source and well-audited.

In cryptography we trust (and we probably will for voting someday soon as well)!


Oh cool, not related to the article directly but I m off to Estonia and working on a blockchain (tezos) voting system and community if interested : www.electis.io


Interesting. For lower stakes voting, this could be a great implementation. I have good friends building a Tezos startup right now (Tezsure) - certainly an interesting chain!

We're on Stellar mainly because of block times. You can see a beta of our timestamping service (mainly built for scientists... launch coming soon) here: https://assembl.app/chronos




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