Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar.

The details on this vote have been extremely scarce. The use of the future tense to describe access is worrying.

"Blockchain Technology" has attracted scoundrels of every stripe. If Agora really cares about this as a test case, it needs to make the voting records public, and articles like this one need to make it clear how the reader can examine the results.

That said, I'm very skeptical about the utility of "Blockchain Technology" in voting. For one thing, what secures this block chain and makes fraud detectable?

In Bitcoin, the answer is crystal clear: Proof-of-Work coupled to an economic incentive. This system has well-known scope and limitations. We can reason, mathematically, about a multitude of attacks and outcomes.

Not so with the Agora system. And I'm afraid that journalists consistently refuse (or are not equipped) to ask the right questions - as in this article.

What I don't understand about this is that even if it is mathematically and technologically perfect (which I assume will be really hard) how can non-technical people understand something so complex.

I am a software developer and to be honest I don't fully understand bitcoin and blockchains.

Then my next question will be how can I trust something that I don't understand.

Maybe as a counter-argument someone will say how people uses online banking without fully understanding software, internet, etc. But I think is a completely different problem with different challenges.

Respectfully, the first mistake is the expectation of trust. I only have confidence in a system based on mutual distrust.

You're using the word "confidence" to mean the same thing the parent comment meant by "trust".

Regulatory bodies, an engaged community of experts to provide scrutiny and reach out to journalists when there are problems.

Like with cars, planes, and online banking, the key determinant is that nontechnical people have a _sufficient_ degree of trust in _someone_else_, who does have the appropriate expertise, to provide oversight.

I have no idea if Agora is good or not, or if blockchain-based voting is viable. I'm just saying that there are demonstrated cases (and certainly also other demonstrated failures) in which nontechnical people trust experts and trust organizations to provide a sufficient degree of oversight.

In a sense, you could say that a classroom, or a democracy, is like this too.

Voting is one area where people do not and definitely should not trust some “expert group” to authenticate their choices as a black box. The process needs to be simple enough to be easily reconstructed.

> Then my next question will be how can I trust something that I don't understand.

ive always found this mentality silly. do you understand aerodynamic principles? laws of electromagnetism? mendelian genetics? or information theory?

If I'm reading their whitepaper right, Agora appears to be a Bitcoin sidechain.

https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf

Charitably: Journalists don't know what questions to ask.

I was called a "paranoid sweaty kook" by a local paper for having the audacity to explain how our central count works. (TL;DR: It's very hard to protect voter privacy when using postal ballots.)

Election administration is hard, with many subtle, counter intuitive corner cases.

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I scanned Agora's website, papers, etc.

Two things bothered me.

First, they spend too much time saying what they're not, comparing themselves to other known bad electronic voting systems. Yayaya. We all know those systems suck. Tell us how Agora is awesome.

Second, none of these proposals start with first principles, starting assumptions. Tell us what forms of election administration, voting system, and ballots your system supports. For example, paper ballots cast at poll sites in the USA is predicated on the Australian Ballot, aka private voting and public counting. Scanning thru Agora's materials, I have no idea what type of elections it's appropriate for.

In Mexico death people vote. So I think your point is valid. How do we really certify that a vote is valid?

In Chicago, too: https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20161019/downtown/vote-rigge...

Even today: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chica...

I was heavily downvoted for expressing this exact concern regarding Keybase using Stellar (a centralized token system forked from Ripple) and the common traps that leaders buy into regarding blockchain-hype.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com