Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Would the bitcoin blockchain work for voting?
by
LoyceV
on 10/11/2020, 12:40:05 UTC
The common problem are :
1. Trade off between verifiability and privacy
I always wondered if Blackbytes might be a viable option to use for voting. I think it can be both private and verifiable. It's explained in Hiding entire content of on-chain transactions. I imagine each voter gets one coin to share, and each candidate has a wallet to accept votes. At the end of the election, the candidate with the biggest wallet wins.

This explains it shortly:
So if I understand correctly, the public block chain is just a "bag of hashes" which cannot be verified or anything by any node or miner.  It is just a block chain of "data".  These data only have meaning for the people receiving "banknote files", which allows them to check the validity of the whole "banknote".  The hashes are in fact nothing else but hashes of "signed transactions", like with bitcoin, except that only the *signature hash* goes on the public block chain, and the actual transaction data remain on the individual banknote file.  Is that the gist ?  In fact, you need, as you say, TWO signatures (or hashes of signatures): one is the transaction signature (including the new beneficiary) and the other is the "spend" signature of simply the previous output.  The first signature (spending signature) makes that you cannot do double spending any more (you have invalidated the file up to the point where you transmit it), and the second signature allows the receiver to have a valid "new address" that he can spend (and only he, because only he has the secret key that goes with it like on bitcoin).
I'm not sure though if the receiving wallet would be able to link the vote to the sender. If that's the case, it doesn't solve anything.