[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 210, Issue 62

[Daniel Carrera]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:32 PM <culitif at tuta.io> wrote:

>
> > *That's really interesting. I'm not into crypto at all (bewildered by
> it really) so I had no idea that Bitcoin was disliked like that. What are
> the issues with Bitcoin from the point of view of the crypto community?
> What did they do?*
>
> I'm not too into it either, but there's a couple of different divisions.
> First of all Bitcoin is like the first generation of the blockchain
> technologies and has a lot of downsides and technical limitations. Some of
> which are manifesting as massive usage of energy (some estimates put that
> 10% of all electricity is now used to mine Bitcoin).
>

Well, but this isn't about Bitcoin specifically and it's not clear why that
would create animosity. But I do list proof-of-work as one of my annoyances
with crypto. I can't believe anyone thought it would make a good payment
system. It is not merely that it is inefficient --- the core problem is
that it is *intended* to be inefficient and its core features depend on
that inefficiency. What were they thinking? Well, I guess they weren't
thinking. Bitcoin was made by people who know a lot about algorithms but
little about economics. Modern day gold bugs.

I remember the original proof-of-work paper. Did you know it was initially
about email? This is from back in the day when spam filters were much worse
than they are today, so I actually had a lot more spam in the 2000's than
today. So anyway, the idea was that you'd have to solve the hash in order
to send an email, to prove that you had put a minimal amount of effort into
sending it (like 1s of work). It was designed so you'd need a different
hash for each recipient, so the goal was to put a price on sending an
email, analogous to buying a stamp.



> Then there's also the community of cryptography academics who, besides
> being mad about "crypto" now referring to crypto currencies instead of
> their field, also have a lot of technical critiques of it being a really
> inefficient system that didn't even leverage the cutting edge systems that
> were available when it was created.
>

That still doesn't seem like an example of cryptocurrency advocates feeling
animosity toward Bitcoin. Cryptography academics probably have very little
overlap with cryptocurrency advocates.


> Regardless, I appreciate your work and advocacy. Although I can't say I
> fully agree that IRV isn't better than FPTP, I would certainly like to
> someday contribute to an effort to get a Condorcet method in widespread use
> in the US.
>

Well, let me put it this way. What exactly does IRV do better than FPTP?
Ok, it lets you list minor parties, but it doesn't elect them and it might
possibly exacerbate a 2-party system.

My view is a little bit biased because I am Canadian. Before Justin Trudeau
was elected one of his campaign promises was to reform Canada's electoral
system. So he got elected. They convened a group of experts and so on who
testified, presented information, etc. The experts basically said that a PR
system would be great. Trudeau realized that a more fair (i.e. PR) system
would take away power from his party (the Liberal party) since his party
benefits enormously from the crappiness of FPTP. They are constantly
winning majorities in parliament with a minority of voters, and he realized
that PR would end his party's unearned dominance. So he decided to ignore
the experts and push for IRV. Because IRV would *not* make Canada's
parliament more proportional and in fact, based on the most recent
elections, it would actually exacerbate the inequity and the unearned
advantage for the Liberal party. Since he is obviously motivated to pick a
system that would entrench his party even more, that's what he pushed for.
There was a lot of pushback, and so he decided that campaign promises
didn't matter and decided to just forget about the whole thing. His
reasons? "Because Canadians wanted reform before because they were not
happy with their government; but now they are happy with the government, so
now reform is not needed". I wish I was joking, but that's only a very
slight paraphrase from what he said. I swear I hope the man steps on a lego.

So... the whole IRV thing hits a little close to home for me. But I don't
think that that should count against me very much. I think that this is
just a real world example of why IRV is *not* better.

Cheers,
-- 
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
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