Data and security breaches are becoming increasingly common, highlighting the vulnerabilities of existing messaging and communications platforms. Devising computational tools and systems that better protect sensitive data against malicious attacks is therefore of utmost importance.

Researchers from several institutes worldwide recently developed Quarks, a new, decentralized messaging network based on blockchain technology. Their proposed system could overcome the limitations of most commonly used messaging platforms, allowing users to retain control over their personal data and other information they share online.

  • interolivary@beehaw.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    Well, not a regular blockchain: you don’t want individual votes to be public and easily linked to the person making the vote.

    Blockchains are possibly the worst way to implement voting at least in a “public” / governmental setting. You need to be able to do zero-knowledge votes, meaning that you want it to be impossible to look at a “vote transaction” and say who did the voting and who they voted for, but also know with (practically) absolute certainty that the vote was done by a valid voter and isn’t a duplicate, and then finally you want to be able to tally the votes per candidate even though you can’t look at an individual vote and say who it was for. So any sort of “classic” blockchain is almost the literal opposite of all that, with public transactions that are tied to public identities and where everyone can tell what happened. What you need is something that either allows or is based on zero knowledge proofs, but I honestly dunno if any current project can do this out of the box, haven’t kept up to date that much lately

      • tombuben@beehaw.org
        0·
        1 year ago

        If you need the person to walk somewhere, physically show a voter ID to someone to be let into a private area where they receive their private key in a machine for them to then vote remotely, wouldn’t it be easier just to remove the entire technology part of the equation and just make them put a piece of paper inside an envelope in that private area, so that they can then put that piece of paper into a public ballot box right after?

        Electronic voting is a bad idea in general, blockchain isn’t going to fix that.

          • tombuben@beehaw.org
            1·
            1 year ago

            But you don’t want that either. This opens up a way for people to demand others to prove they voted a certain way - I.e. abusive family could force all family members to vote the same. Paper ballots shouldn’t ever be identifiable back to anyone.