Gregory Magarshak is founder and CEO of Intercoin. Since 2011 he has constructed a decentralized social networking platform that has reached 7 mill
Gregory Magarshak is founder and CEO of Intercoin. Since 2011 he has constructed a decentralized social networking platform that has reached 7 million customers thus far, and is engaged on instruments to assist deliver energy again into the fingers of individuals and native communities.
For each expertise we use at this time, there was a time it was laughably insufficient as a substitute for what got here earlier than. For many years, chess engines had been a mere curiosity, however now a sensible cellphone can beat any grandmaster. The identical is now true of voting expertise.
As we glance again on the latest failures of apps to safe our elections, from failing in Iowa to a couple days later leaking millions of voter records in Israel, we’re reminded that expertise, particularly within the fingers of smaller contractors, will be fallible, and result in massive data leaks.
See additionally: CoinDesk’s Post-Trust Election Coverage
Many individuals say we don’t want tech to safe our elections, that paper ballots have been adequate for hundreds of years. However is that basically true? George W Bush gained in 2000 not as a result of he acquired extra delegates in the long run, however as a result of the recount of paper ballots took so lengthy that the Supreme Courtroom needed to step in and decide. The Iraq Conflict could have by no means occurred if we didn’t use paper ballots. The latest coronavirus epidemic additionally raises well being issues about shared voting amenities versus utilizing private touchscreen gadgets.
Crypto and “Byzantine Consensus” was speculated to lastly safe our elections. However up to now dominant blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum haven’t been scalable sufficient to deal with tens of millions of individuals paying, or voting, suddenly.
For each expertise we use at this time, there was a time it was laughably insufficient as a substitute for what got here earlier than.
However a brand new technology of open supply innovation and protocols like Intercoin, MaidSAFE and Holochain, is exhibiting construct provably safe, scalable infrastructure that may deal with voting and economies at scale.
These new protocols aren’t based mostly round a monolithic blockchain and wouldn’t have a central bottleneck similar to a “miner” or a “mining pool.” As an alternative, every entity (a coin, a file, or group exercise) is secured by a small subset of the entire community, known as a “shard” or a “part.”
A lot of this expertise is just not new. In reality it predates bitcoin. BitTorrent and different peer-to-peer file sharing programs are based mostly on a method known as Kademlia, developed in 2004. These sorts of sharded networks can scale indefinitely, their embarrassingly parallel structure supporting a virtually limitless variety of simultaneous transactions. The networks aren’t simply peer-to-peer, but additionally have the flexibility to combination outcomes, for voting and different neighborhood purposes. And all of that is finished with out “layer 2” options, that are nearly at all times centralized “cop-outs” from an in any other case trustless infrastructure.
Central Vulnerability
Conventional networks are susceptible as a result of belief is concentrated in a single place – whether or not cash, knowledge or votes. This makes it economically engaging for each exterior and inner actors to attempt to subvert the ensures we’ve got come to depend on. Dillinger didn’t waste his time robbing piggy banks. Manufacturers gained’t purchase private knowledge from random websites with 20 customers.
A bitcoin pockets accommodates endlessly divisible balances (known as “UTXOs” in bitcoin parlance). Due to this endless division, every full node should maintain all the historical past of each transaction, simply in case a few of these balances could have come from faux transactions.
An ethereum pockets accommodates token balances saved inside a sensible contract on an ethereum community. As increasingly more cash is exchanged for this token, its whole provide turns into very precious and the sensible contract turns into a pretty goal for malicious actors. For this reason it has been so arduous to shard ethereum. If, for instance, every sensible contract was secured solely by just a few nodes, then in some unspecified time in the future it may develop into economically engaging to assault this consensus, both to vary some balances or simply forestall additional progress and kill the token. Both method, it’s a unhealthy end result for the community.
Intercoin wallets, however, maintain cash, each price little or no and watched by a small, successfully random group of nodes. Paying precise change is achieved by cash of denominations of 1/2, 1/four and so forth down, and interacting with “change bots” – accounts that trade a coin for an equal quantity of change. Cash on the MaidSAFE community (known as “safecoins”) work equally.
The bottom line is, there’s a pure restrict on how a lot particular person cash are price. There aren’t any UTXOs or Token Contracts price $50 Million. To assault the consensus, an attacker must infiltrate and subvert most or the entire nodes in a single specific shard (known as a “part” in MaidSAFE), however all they’d take over is one small coin. To achieve any important quantity of worth, they’d must assault a proportional quantity of…