[EM] A secure distributed election scheme based on Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work protocol

[Mike Frank]

Hello, not to interrupt any ongoing discussions, but I just realized that
the underlying protocol used in the Bitcoin system could serve as the basis
for a secure distributed election system.  (It would not be democratic in
the sense of "1 person, 1 vote," but it would be democratic in the sense of
"1 CPU, 1 vote.")

I don't believe that any electronic voting system of any kind has been
previously developed that avoids the need to trust a centralized authority
of some sort to securely store ballot information without alteration while
preserving anonymity of voters.  (I tried developing such a system for a
while, but never could find a way to avoid having to trust *somebody* at
some point.)  So, this is potentially revolutionary.

The idea is this: You want candidate X to win, you extend the longest public
proof-of-work chain with a new signed block including candidate X's name and
your own proof-of-work.  Every node in the the network always works on
extending the longest chain, because that is the one considered to represent
the greatest consensus (of the largest number of CPUs).  When the time is
up, anyone can count the votes in the longest chain and determine who one.

As Satoshi's original Bitcoin paper showed, it becomes exponentially
improbable that any attacker controlling less than 50% of the total CPU
power could manufacture a verifiable chain that is longer than the longest
one that is produced collaboratively by the P2P network.

-Mike

P.S.  Here is the article that inspired this thought:
http://paulbohm.com/bitcoin-decentralization/
-- 
Full name:       Michael Patrick Frank
Email addr.:     michael.patrick.frank at gmail.com (pers. email)
Snail mail:      820 Hillcrest Ave., Quincy, FL,  32351-1618
Phone/voicemail: (413) 842-6670 (main number, uses Google Voice)
Webpage URL:     http://www.facebook.com/M.P.Frank (pers. profile)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20110617/762b3c04/attachment-0003.htm>