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Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

Voting is a solved problem. I’m not saying that the idea of using bitcoin technology to solve problems beside monetary systems is a bad idea (in fact, I think it’s a very interesting concept), but really, democracies around the world already have established and efficient voting systems that work well enough.

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Yes, but you need a trusted authority.

But I probably didn't explain it well enough. I didn't mean that you would vote which politicians will rule, you would vote on concrete decisions state such make. Nowadays, you vote politicians and they make decisions, and with blockchain network, you would directly vote for such decisions, making the politicians an unnecessary layer. ;-)

I hire politicians for the exact reason that I cannot possibly become informed and make intelligent decisions on all of the issues that affect me.

And you expect them to be able to?

I expect them and their staffs to do it, yes. Some do it better than others.

You could solve that problem by reading your politician's blog (and donating of course) then voting the way they recommend on each issue.

Fair enough, but isn't it just a matter of granularity at that point? How many things do I want to be voting on every day? 1 thing? 10 things? 100?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

(Admittedly over a decade old now)

I think the point is that our current voting systems require a measure of trust, where a blockchain based system could be trustless.

This is the key point where the public blockchain seems to be of use for voting: transparency, which we have zero of in current machine systems.

If what you're saying is true, then I'd like to know why Instant Runoff Voting seems so superior to binary voting schemes (like "democratic" or "republican" with the occasional "green" candidate acting usually as "democratic spoiler") and yet hasn't been widely implemented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

I would argue that money is also a solved problem.

It's extremely easy to debate whether voting is a solved problem or whether it works well enough.

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