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by funklute
1373 days ago
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> You also (almost always) try to preserve anonymity in a democracy. You most definitely do not. When you turn up to vote, you get asked for id. EDIT: your actual vote is anonymous, yes. But your participation in the voting is not anonymous. Blockchain allows for anonymous participation, so to say. |
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No, different agents are voting. Democracy could be totally anonymous, in principle- get a secret key, generate a valid public one-time key, and your vote is verifiably valid but nobody has any idea who voted, much less who they voted for. If everyone is registered, you don't even have any useful information about who could have voted. Even in reality, your identity is discarded as soon as possible.
Blockchains are inherently public. Validators are NOT anonymously participating- they may be owned anonymously, but the owner isn't the one with the actual right to vote.
It's not just a semantic difference. In a real election, your ballot comes in a voter envelope. The ballot is anonymous inside the envelope, and the envelope is opened blind, but kept until the election is over. If they get two envelopes from the same person, they know it was a fraudulent vote. Once those envelopes are thrown out, there is nothing tying you to an election at all.
On the blockchain you effectively never throw out the voter envelope. Your vote -and what you voted for- can both be tied back to you via ownership of the voting agent. There is zero inherent protection of that relationship. All protection is done externally and the system does not do anything more than making sure it's not actively impossible to conceal your identity.