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Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

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Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#51

Post by drcode »

wpietri wrote: post #22

For a period as a child, I was thrown in among the happy-clappy sort of evangelical Christian [1] whose answer to every problem was, "Jesus can help you with that!" No money? Pray to Jesus. Sick? Pray to Jesus. Husband beating you? Pray to Jesus. Not sure if Jesus is real or just Santa Claus for adults? Pray to Jesus! This was an awful experience, but I learned a valuable lesson. When a group of people have exactly o…

To be fair, in the 1800s some people started saying the answer to everything is "science" and in the 1900s others said the answer to everything is "mass production" and in those cases the people were right and we all live far better lives because of it.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#52

Post by solatic »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

I feel like the extreme decentralization people just ignore human nature which history has revealed time and time again. The wild west no existing power structure idea is great until some entity inevitably comes along and controls it and its not so decentralized anymore. Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. That all changes when you get a single bad a…

You need to remember that Bitcoin wasn't designed with modern mining clusters in mind. Once upon a time you could actually get Bitcoin mining with a laptop, of course that's ancient history now, but Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client.

You are correct that history hasn't been very favorable to the notion of finding stability in anarchy. And true anarchies are indeed unstable. With that said... history isn't too favorable to the global empires either. Caesar, Attila, Xerxes... none of them managed to unite the globe under a single flag. Today, global control is pretty decentralized (at least if you're not a conspiracy theorist).

I think your original premise is flawed. The problem isn't so much that Bitcoin tried to enforce decentralized governance, but that its fundamental assumption was flawed, which was that no entity could take over the majority of computational power. Can we create a blockchain which limits the influence of any one source, to ensure that the distributed computation of the blockchain stays democratic?

I'd imagine there might be a way with memory-hard hashing, the kind used to prevent an attacker from throwing too much processing power at a table of scrypt hashes and getting the original passwords, but this is already deeply out of my depth...

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#53

Post by drcode »

lkrubner wrote: post #49

If people really want to see distributed tech, then shouldn't there be a world wide push for RINA, instead of the Internet? Many of the problems we struggle against are issues with IP/TCP or IP/UDP. If we could get rid of the Internet, and switch the world to RINA, then some of these arguments would disappear, as they would be assumed by the world wide communications infrastructure. http://www.martingeddes.com/think-…

This is pretty much exactly what the ethereum project is attempting to do- They are developing their own communications protocol (whisper) their own publishing platform (swarm) their own domain name registrar, etc etc.

Yes, at a low level these systems still use TCP/IP, but only in a greatly diminished form and in a manner that allows it to be easily replaced by another low level networking layer.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#54

Post by maxerickson »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #47
maxerickson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there really any successes beyond Bitcoin? (which I would call a qualified success, I think it is handy for a small group of people more than it is really having any impact on society)

How do you measure impact on society?

If you are just holding up a small claim of success to make your grand claim seem less silly the specifics of it don't matter a lot.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#55

Post by estrabd »

zilchers wrote: post #33

Ya, this is kind of silly. I'll actually say - before this election I was all about a Blockchain / electronic voting system. After Russia and Wikileaks and everything, no way. The paper based, locally run elections are incredibly secure, and protect against systematic attacks (which in an electronic world could even mean phishing, or something more mundane than actual hacks). I'm a huge fan of bitcoin, but I'm still…

Regardless of who you think was behind the leaks, what makes you think that the blockchain and crypto-currencies in general are not compromised somehow? Based on the BTC mania of 2014, I am not entirely convinced it's not all part of some sort of globalist psy-op. It easily fits into the narrative.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#56

Post by heliumcraft »

phippsbrad wrote: post #19

Sorry, but this sounds like just another silicon valley startup, living in their own little bubble, thinking that their special code can "change the world". Imagine a log of transactions (a blockchain) confirming that Clinton got 1.5 million popular votes. That has ZERO effect on the Electoral College selecting Trump. So why even bring the election up? This guy might as well say that "a blockchain could stop the Patr…

I'm not saying it would affect the electoral college or electing some politician that I do or do not like. Some problems are entirely due to human nature, have been with us for a long time and will likely stay with us for a long time regarless of technology.

However It would certainly be nice to vote online yet anonymously, confident that I can see in a public secure ledger that my voted was counted as a intended and that no cheating or voting manipulation (on the ledger level) took place.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#57

Post by kens »

The article discusses foreign actors interfering with the election and proposes blockchain as the solution? That's just crazy - with blockchain a state actor just needs 51% of the mining power and they could pwn the election.

There's nothing stopping a state actor for getting 51% of the mining power, and it's plausible that's already the case. If you were a government, wouldn't it be worth spending a few million to build up mining capability just in case you need to exert control? (And if you use that mining capability today through pools, it could almost pay for itself.) If you ever need control, just flip a switch to exit the pool and mine independently to take control of the network. In other words, 80% of the current mining could be done by the NSA and nobody would know until it's too late. (I haven't seen anyone else propose this attack, so am I missing a flaw in it?)

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#58

Post by rubidium »

drcode wrote: post #51
wpietri wrote: post #22

For a period as a child, I was thrown in among the happy-clappy sort of evangelical Christian [1] whose answer to every problem was, "Jesus can help you with that!" No money? Pray to Jesus. Sick? Pray to Jesus. Husband beating you? Pray to Jesus. Not sure if Jesus is real or just Santa Claus for adults? Pray to Jesus! This was an awful experience, but I learned a valuable lesson. When a group of people have exactly o…

To be fair, in the 1800s some people started saying the answer to everything is "science" and in the 1900s others said the answer to everything is "mass production" and in those cases the people were right and we all live far better lives because of it.

And the people who claimed such things were also the ones who in 1900 said there would be no more multi-national wars.

Will blockchain be a big deal? Maybe. Will it disrupt civilization as we know it. No.

Re: Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

#59

Post by bandrami »

clarkmoody wrote: post #36
bandrami wrote: post #27

Yeah, yeah, the neoliberal global order is falling apart and we all applaud. The fact that over the past 20 years it saw the largest reduction in global poverty and inequality in world history? Doesn't matter: it made middle class tech-savy people in industrialized countries feel slightly constrained, so we're cheering as it burns.

Yeah, but the 20 years before that also saw the largest reduction in global poverty in history. And the 20 before that. Not sure what's burning though.

Not remotely true. Mid-70s to mid-90s saw a huge increase in global poverty. Mid-50s to mid-70s did too. The last really sustained decrease in poverty before that was the 1890s and 1900s.
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