Hacker News Reader

Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

> West Virginia is the last place you want as your laboratory for voting technology.

Blockchain's shining strength is transparency, so if done somewhat properly, a corrupt government could be the perfect test ground.

View on HN

> When asked about why a redacted audit or report from the auditors wasn’t released, Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney, who co-authored the white paper, gave multiple reasons. First, he pointed to a nondisclosure agreement with the auditors. Then, he stated that there was no way to share any more information about the audit without revealing proprietary information about the system. But one would expect a redacted report or even an abstract of the report for transparency’s sake, given the stakes of introducing a new system to our already rickety voting process. Depending on the secrecy of its system architecture is such a poor security mechanism that researchers have even coined a term for it: security by obscurity.

A private blockchain hosted only by a trusted party has absolutely zero purpose, even in theory. This whole experiment is a scam.

This is the same principle behind Nebula Genomics, and it’s surprising more people aren’t calling bullshit on it.

In the context of nascent tech like this, most people just don't know the right questions to ask, unfortunately.

Perhaps in the near future we will be treated to a layman's explanation of the prevalent (and corrupt) usage of federated blockchains, 'exposed' in a Netflix doc. :)

I love your comment because I can't tell whether it's serious or an extremely well played HN parody.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com