Ask HN: What are some creative uses of the Bitcoin protocol?
Besides payments, what are some new and creative uses for the Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) protocol?
2. Eternal love messages: http://aterna.org/love/ Embeds messages on the florincoin blockchain and the message is stored as long as there is at least one peer on the network (Bitcoin doesn't support such long messages).
2b. Encoded messages in the Bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo... - these are hex encoded messages. Florincoin above allows to store data itself in the blockchain.
3. Autonomous Corporations: http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/ Futuristic stuff that's possible with the blockchain technology - creating 'corporations' that no one owns or profits from but are fully self-sufficient.
Here's how I would design it. Please correct any flaws:
Make a wallet with a tiny amount of bitcoin for each voter and distribute the wallets.
Each candidate gets an empty wallet. Publish the public address of those wallets.
Voters send their coins to their chosen candidate's wallet. The candidate with the most bitcoins (only counting txns from the distributed voting wallets) wins.
Voters could potentially use a mixing service or coinjoin to preserve anonymity?
Keep in mind, I'm talking about pennies or less worth of bitcoin so there's no financial element to any of this. Just taking advantage of the bitcoin platform.
As a bonus, there's a permanent, unalterable public record of the votes.