 Our next question comes from Paul. Paul asks, theoretically, how could an open, decentralized blockchain be used to verify votes in an election? At the Defqon convention, they have an election machine hacking village where they have proven time and time again how insecure the electronic voting machines are and how nobody seems to be doing anything about it. I hear vague ideas floating around about using an open, decentralized blockchain, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, to verify votes in an election, but I'm having a hard time understanding how exactly that would work. If we had the power to improve how voting can be more secure, or at least give voters the ability to verify if their vote counted, theoretically, how could that work? This topic comes up again and again, and I'm glad Paul asked it in a more nuanced way, because this is an interesting set of different problems. The first thing to do when discussing voting, I think, is identify what is the primary problem we are solving, and what the primary problem we are solving depends very much on your political leanings and affiliation. For example, in some circles, the big problem is voter registration fraud or voting fraud, which, according to most statistics, is vanishingly rare. So the idea that dead people are voting or dead people are being registered or that more people are voting than should be voting isn't really a problem in most countries, but again, that depends on the country you're looking at. While there may be voter registration fraud, that's not the same as voting fraud. Just because someone managed to register themselves as Donald Duck doesn't mean they can go to the polling place and actually vote as Donald Duck and then have their vote counted. The other aspect of this problem is voter apathy, which is a very big problem. Most developed democracies have very, very low percentages of voter participation, either through artificial barriers to voting, various place there to diminish the power of the vote, closed polling stations, long lines, no holiday on election day, etc., etc. Or because of apathy, because voters see that the result doesn't really matter because of gerrymandering, nonrepresentational voting systems, or the fact that both parties in an electoral system that is binary in its choice really represent the same basic pro-war corporate interests. And there's very little variation between them, or what I like to call the choice between blue Goldman Sachs and red to Goldman Sachs. The bottom line is that actual hacking of voting machines is a problem, and it's happening more and more because we're relying on unreliable technology as shown by DEF CON instead of reliable and traditional technology. And most often, this is because of a rush to achieve convenience and speed in counting, as if speed in counting is more important than accuracy in counting. Turns out, the most reliable technology you can use for voting that has been shown again and again and again to have high degrees of reliability is pencil and paper ballots, physical marks on physical paper ballots. Most of the election voting machines suffer from a lack of auditability, and you can't really tell if somebody did vote or didn't vote, because they're just digits, binary digits in a hard drive. So can we fix that with blockchains? Yes, theoretically you could. You could do some kind of proof of existence for every vote cast that is anonymous, but simply records that a vote was cast and which way it was cast in such a way that the audit trail is recorded and cannot be overwritten. I think that the technology isn't anywhere near mature to do that, and there are much easier, much cheaper ways to do that, and no real political will to spend money on doing something like that. When the easier choices, which are to mark paper audit trails on paper tape, for example, are just as effective, if not more effective, low tech, able to be used in a very, very decentralized fashion, offline capable, and able to be used in rural areas without telecommunication capabilities and things like that, or mobile polling stations. And therefore, why go to such high tech solutions? I'm a big skeptic about the applicability of blockchains to voting. I don't think the real problems have to do with recording the vote as much as issues of identity and voter apathy. But certainly there might be some applications in the future. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe, like, and share. All my work is shared for free. So if you want to support it, join me on Patreon.