Vote Au Pluriel

The blockchain offers a secure voting tool, the result of which is transparent and auditable by everyone. Neither the voting administrator nor other individuals may modify the vote a posteriori.

At least three elements are necessary to carry out a vote on a blockchain: a programmable asset, a protocol to make the vote live; and a cryptographic key called a token, a kind of digital electoral card, to guarantee the voter’s identity.

Above each bitcoin transaction is metadata that can represent a digital asset: this asset can be a vote, a financial asset, or a physical asset (an object) that would be recorded on a blockchain, which would provide proof of existence.

A vote is a critical transaction: it must be executed quickly by the network. To do this, transaction fees are added to remunerate miners which are securing the network.

They start by processing the transactions with the highest fees and then handle the subsequent operations in descending order. If the network is saturated when a vote is a cast, minors will tend to defer this vote to the next blocks. Therefore, the idea is to put transaction fees of about 10 euro cents (depending on the bitcoin price) to be more or less sure that the network will process the vote.

The voting administrator (which may be an association, or a company organizing an AGM with its shareholders, or even a state) places as many tokens as there are votes cast on a specific protocol. It transmits these tokens to all voters, who have access to an electronic wallet to hold the tokens.

Candidates have access to a digital ballot box.

A wallet, with a public address. When the voter issues his or her voting token, he or she transfers both the bitcoins that include transaction fees and the metadata that represents the vote. At the end of the vote, the winning candidate is the one who received the most chips.

To complete this process, a digital electoral map is necessary to ensure that whoever presents himself to his wallet is the owner of this wallet. One part of the key is public, the other private: you can draw a parallel in the traditional banking world with the RIB, which you can communicate to anyone, and the PIN code, which must not be shared.

The projects dedicated to voting on the blockchain are still in the experimental stage. One of them, Boule, estimates that a traditional vote costs about 5 dollars and that this cost could be divided by 2 or even 3 using the bitcoin block chine.

However, there are still some obstacles to be overcome if the vote on the blockade is to take place.

The cost of transactions: in the case of a vote of 1 million people, with transaction fees of 10 cents, the cost of organizing the vote would be 100,000 minimum…

The speed of transactions: today it is estimated at 7 transactions per second on the Bitcoin network. For example, it would take an average of 23 operations per second to get 1 million voters to vote within 12 hours.

Protection of the digital electoral map against malware attack, which could corrupt the vote. However, a parade is conceivable: not to store the cryptographic key on software but hardware, i. e. in a physical way, like the key proposed by the start-up Ledger.

We’ll see where this ends I guess over the course of the next few months/years…

These Technologies will have an effect on everybody.  It will affect politics and the economy, improve medicine and even influence culture.  Some are new at the moment and some are developing at the moment and will develop further through decades to come.  These Technologies all have the possibility of staying power. Technology now and developing for the future:

1. Medicine: Reversing Paralysis; remarkable progress has been made to restore freedom of movement, caused by spinal cord injuries, through using brain implants.  This technology will be available to all in 10 to 15 years time.
2. Photography: Spherical images made by Inexpensive Cameras; are opening a whole new world of taking pictures and sharing stories.  An ecological researcher needed a system to broadcast images continuously to collect data and devised a camera that can create 360-degree pictures.  This technology is available now for all to take their 360-degree selfies, etc.
3. Education: Computers are experimenting and figuring out how to perform things a programmer would be able to teach them.  This approach is known as, “Reinforcement Learning”, and is not done through programming in a conventional way, at all.  The computer is learning to perform certain tasks, etc. simply by practicing.  This technology will be freely available in 1 to 2 years time.
4. Economy: Self-Driving Trucks; Tractor-trailers without drivers might soon be passing you on the highway.  Many technical problems still exist, but it is claimed that self-driving trucks will be less costly as well as safer.  Availability will come in about 5 to 10 years time.  This is also the time in which the world can think about what this technology will mean for the millions of truck drivers that will lose their jobs.
5. Environment: Hot Solar Cells; converting sunlight into heat firstly and then turning it back into light-energy, focused in beams, can dramatically increase efficiency.  This smaller solar device, smaller than the usual solar panels, can absorb more energy and could create continuous, cheap power.  This will only become available within 10 to 15 years from now.

Most of these technologies are future technologies, still in the developing phases, but it is good to know about them.  It will give time to consider the influences, good or bad, that it might have on the world and its inhabitants.