But wait, if the project includes blockchain, how can it possibly fail, since, as you said above, it automatically make a system secure, right? As opposed to other technologies that have been around for decades (say what your bank account is stored in) that are somehow "insecure"?

True: in the proper context (e.g. with thousands of servers like Bitcoin has), and with good governance, a blockchain architecture can be made to be secure.

Also true: you can make any software system secure with good governance and careful testing.

The only difference is that using the blockchain architecture adds unnecessary layers of software that make the system more complicated (which makes it inherently less secure), and adds unnecessary costs (thousands of servers), and still involves a risk of a network overthrow, which could even happen to Bitcoin from a nation-state like China.


It's just one of the many use cases there but I've found this for that specific and many others did actually used it.

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Maybe actually read the content of the link before you cite it? Here you go:

"Voatz recently has come under fire for their application security. A team of MIT researchers published a paper that outlined numerous issues, specifically highlighting their vulnerability to third party attacks. The paper specifically advised the Department of Homeland Security to abandon the use of the app in high-stakes elections. Since then, West Virginia has paused use of the app while Utah county will continue to do so because of its popularity"

This is exactly my problem with people who think just saying the word, "blockchain" will magically make a system more secure. While it's technically possible to make a secure blockchain system, it is harder to make it secure with blockchain than without it.

And using a decentralized architecture for a centralized problem like voting (viz. votes must necessarily be connected to a real human identity not an anonymous public key), is really (sorry), pretty dumb .

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Every new technology architecture that comes along in the IT world always has "case studies" that document increased customer value, reduced costs, and other benefits. Tools sellers like Microsoft and Amazon love these things, and you will see all of the technology architectures have these studies to show proven customer benefit from the architecture.

They don't have anything like that for blockchain. Nobody does. That's because IT projects are all done by known entities who are by definition centralized in their governance, so using an architecture that makes the system slower, more expensive and more complicated makes no sense.

Blockchain's only unique benefit is that it thwarts government subpoenas into transactions. That's it. That's all it does that other architectures don't do. And to solve that specific problem a very complicated and expensive and less secure architecture was invented to solve the problem.

But if you don't have that problem, then you are just wasting your time using the architecture and probably making your project less secure.

Thousands of "manager types" have probably instructed their engineers to "create xyz using blockchain" because it was the hottest buzzword for a while. This was driven mostly by the market cap of BTC and nothing else.

But when engineers go to actually implement a blockchain system, they learn the actual reality here, which is that buzzwords don't solve problems (but they sure can create a whole bunch you otherwise never would have had).

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Yep, I did. See the above comment about that experiment. Hint: it was a failed one.



You should really understand the technology you are talking about before commenting on it . The time it takes to verify a Bitcoin transaction is not some variable in the program that determines how long they want to make a user wait. That time is spent doing calculations that are slow on purpose based on the architecture.


Obviously, you don't need to be anonymous in blockchain voting system no explaination needed.
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If you aren't anonymous, then what use is blockchain? If you just want to keep a database of every known person's vote, why not... just keep a database of every known person's vote?