Hacker News Reader

Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

A huge issue with implementing this practically on a large scale is identity authentication. Without a modern, digital government, we can't hope to implement anything nearly this nice.

We need an Estonia-like PKI for the US. Taxes, forms, passports, voting... everything would be so much simpler.

(edit: besides teaching people how to use it, that is.)

View on HN

There are plenty of places to experiment with this system before you get to actual state government. Internal to corporations or organizations or voluntary associations, the latter of which especially have votes all the time (and/or might even more with a good infrastructure for it).

I can envision a lot of people in corporate middle management having a bit of a problem with the very idea of democratic decision making. An extremely large part of the allure of those positions is power and controlling which information filters up the management chain.

This is why it will never be implemented on any meaningful scale in any corporate environment. At least, not without the backing of a strong union.

There is plenty of room for "meaningless" democracy in corporate environment. Vote on lunchroom menu for example.

Good point and it is quite interesting.

I am wondering about the effect it might have on standards bodies. Is it even possible to implement it there?

Neighborhoods and municipalities would be another good target. You could use it to implement [libertarian municipalism][0] (which has nothing to do with US-style right-libertarianism).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism

To me the Id issue isn't the biggest hurdle at all. My government (Canada ) already has a way of verifying my information when I want to access my tax return or something like that. It mails me an access code to the address that they have on file for me and that plus the pass word i enter at account creation gives me access to the system

The Danish government has introduced a local version of this concept called NemID (i.e. Easy ID). It's essentially a universal online identity that government departments and businesses alike can implement. It's currently not used for public voting yet due to security concerns, but that's most likely a matter of time.

Not that it solves the whole problem, but imho there are some interesting discussions in the issue queues:

https://github.com/MrChrisJ/World-Citizenship

It would be difficult to maintain a MITM attack over more than a brief term, with proxy-holders discussing their votes and communicating with people in their social graph.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com