So if your blockchain says some random Twitter user painted the Mona Lisa, then what?
That wouldn't happen. All writes will be verified. We'll just correct that It's in the blockchain, so it must be trueWill there be a first machine which prints out paper ballots, counted by a second machine at the end of the day? Or will the voter-facing machine write directly to the blockchain?
Paper trail Direct to blockchainThe main reason some elections use the two step process is that the paper ballots can be re-counted. A blockchain cannot detect whether the counting machine modified the numbers prior to signing the count.
What happens if an audit shows that a machine wrote a vote count to the blockchain which did not match the actual paper ballots?
Electoral staff will correct that Won't happen. If banks can make secure ATMs, Governments can make secure counting machinesHow can you guarantee that the voting machine does not modify the data before signing it and writing it to the blockchain?
Blockchains are secure because of cryptography If banks can make secure ATMs, governments can make secure voting machinesHow can you guarantee that the votes are not tampered with on the voter's device, in the network, or the back end servers?
Blockchains are secure because of cryptography If banks can make secure websites and apps, governments can tooWhat do you do when a malicious party uploads hate speech, child porn, terrorist propaganda or other illegal materials to the database?
(That literally happened to the Bitcoin blockchain, and also to Ethereum.)
Delete It Leave It There Won't happen. Only nice people will be allowed to write to the blockchainThis means that you and anyone else using your database will be violating the law (if such content is uploaded).
No, I don't want that Yes, that's fineBlockchains require many expensive computers, which burn a huge amount of energy playing Number Wang, to decide who gets to write to the database. Blockchains are deliberately expensive to run, by design. Also, buzzword consultants charge high fees.
I'm willing to pay moreThere's a law in mathematics that says you can't have truly distributed databases, without central orchestration.
Satoshi (the inventor of blockchains) found a loophole. It's possible by deliberately wasting electricity, spent powering entire warehouses full of computers playing Number Wang.
This results in unconscionably large emissions. For example Bitcoin now uses as much electricity as a whole country[1][2][3],
Other types of blockchains have been proposed. These are largely vaporware.
What about Chia? What about Ethereum?Ethereum has finally swapped to a Proof-of-Stake model that means the supposedly decentralised and uncensorable system will become even more centralised than it already was with even more regulatory censorship than it already had. So you lose a lot of the unique value propositions of blockchains.
I don't care. I still want a blockchain!Chia uses Proof-of-Storage to swap egregious electricity usage for egregious e-waste.
Screw the environment. I want a blockchain!"Append-only" means you can only add new rows to the spreadsheet, without deleting or modifying previous rows.
A Hash-based Merkle Tree uses fingerprints of data to provide an easy way to check that the whole history of data entries matches what you expect.
Yes I want thatGit is a popular tool for managing code. It also happens to be a cryptographically secure append-only hash-based Merkle Tree database.
It's designed to allow multiple people to modify files at the same time. It has a distributed, auditable history of all changes made to the data. Most developers already know how to use it, and there's a large ecosystem of tools and hosting systems for it.
If you want, you can use cryptographic signatures to verify writes to the files.
Yes NoIs this fundamentally different to the hundreds which already exist?
It's for a different demographic or use case The codebase is substantially differentFor example, censorship-proof domain ownership and DNS, or a way to donate to WikiLeaks?
Yes, I'm trying to defy governments or laws No I'm law-abiding