Published on: 2018-03-12T09:32:55+00:00
In an email conversation between Tim and JOSE FEMENIAS CAÑUELO, the potential use of blockchain in electronic voting is discussed. Tim mentions that homomorphic commitments and zero-knowledge proofs have been used in e-voting for a while, and a bulletin board is needed to store ballots. While blockchain can be useful in some cases, it may not be necessary in all situations. Tim suggests reading literature on e-voting, including a paper on blockchains and e-voting.JOSE proposes a simple implementation for e-voting using Bulletproof Confidential Transactions. In this implementation, each citizen is issued a coin representing a vote, and voters send their coins to their preferred party. Tim does not point out any specific issues with JOSE's proposal but suggests discussing such topics elsewhere.However, there are concerns regarding the power of The Party, a miner-strong group that controls the government of a whole country. The Party could censor transactions that do not give them non-zero amounts of coins. If The Party has control over miners or is composed of miners, they can censor transactions based on certain heuristics. This prevents mixing, and other parties may end up voting based on controlled hash power. Proof-of-stake can mitigate this, but no solution currently exists. A multi-asset international blockchain with confidential assets can help prevent centralization, but trust in miners is limited to the fees paid to them. Miners charge as much as they can for the hashrate, leading to potentially high charges for vote transfers if detected by miners. The possibility of uncensorability using a two-step commitment is mentioned, but if the vote is valuable enough, a miner might choose to forgo its fee instead of confirming the second commitment. It may be more effective to focus on libertarian solutions on top of blockchains rather than forcing democratic ideals onto them.ZmnSCPxj responds to a question about the use of Bulletproof Confidential Transactions in an election. He explains that MimbleWimble operates under the assumption that the sender needs to reveal some secrets to the receiver, allowing the receiver to know if it received 0 or 1 coin from that sender. ZmnSCPxj believes that if voters send vote-coins directly to "The Party," then "The Party" can identify the votes of specific voters and potentially take action against them. However, aggregators/mixers can be used to obscure the source of coins. Additionally, sending directly from the transaction of the Voting Authority to another transaction to the selected party would enable members of The Party who secretly control the Voting Authority records to determine which voters received which outputs of the Voting Authority.Jose Femenias Canuelo initiates the discussion by sharing his thoughts on the use of Bulletproof Confidential Transactions in an election. He suggests that the Voting Authority should send a coin (representing one vote) to each citizen above 18. Each voter would then send their coin to their preferred party as part of a Bulletproof Confidential Transaction, along with 0 coins to other parties to disguise their vote. This method ensures that each party will accumulate votes equal to the number of coins received. However, there may be missing features required in Bulletproof to fully support this use case. It is crucial to consider these features before implementing this simplistic approach.Overall, the use of Bulletproof Confidential Transactions in electronic voting can hide the amount transferred while still allowing for auditability. The proposed implementation involves issuing a coin to each eligible citizen, who then sends it to their preferred party. However, certain challenges and potential issues need to be addressed before adopting this approach.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T22:47:39.545897+00:00