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Comment by ithilglin909 | Hacker News Reader

The average reader here has a much better understanding of the shortcomings of technology than the general public -- particularly with regards to how much of what is perceived as being secure really isn’t at all.

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure"blockchains"/whatever the applications run on them isn't necessarily a perfectly secure solution either -- not that such a thing exists.

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Still probably 100x more secure the paper ballots counted by an easily corruptible social process, than a mathematical equation that is auditable by the entire world.

Maybe? In general, the advantage that paper ballots has is the primary threat is an unethical human. The potential for widespread tampering is low but the chances it happens at all is high. Compromising an application is (hopefully) difficult to do, but has huge implications. From what I know now, I prefer the former risk, but I’d be open to being convinced otherwise. I’m pretty skeptical of a global audit process of a mathematical equation working well in real life.

Firstly, "easily corruptible" just isn't currently true in most western countries. Also the question with blockchain is how you manage identidies and audit it while still having it be anonymous and really easy to use. It's not that you can't solve these problems but to my knowledge solving them requires tradeoffs that make the security situation much less of a simple win

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