Anyone here into cryptosystems? Electronic voting? I would be interested in a solution to the following problems or some variants.
Consider a distributed system like the Fediverse where each server is owned by an independent party. Some servers are more trustworthy than others.
On a less trustworthy server S, someone makes a post. This post can be upvoted by people on any server. S aggregates the votes and sends only the number of votes to other servers.
The other servers can of course ask for a complete list of voters, and then verify the vote count. But this results in a lot of data exchange.
Without asking for a complete list of voters, how can other servers check if the count reported by S is correct? It would be sufficient to know that it is correct with high probability (as opposed to knowing for certain).
It’s really too bad, because blockchain technology is actually really interesting, except it’s been bastardized by the crypto bros to make it seem like they came up with the most interesting technology ever created.
In this case, blockchain would be really interesting, but the amount of effort it would take to implement it versus the payoff of… More authentic voting of imaginary internet points… Doesn’t really seem like it makes sense to me
Blockchain is not very interesting. It is the classic case of a solution in search of a problem.