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

[culitif at tuta.io]

Hey Daniel,

Regarding actual critiques of the Bitcoin protocol, besides the proof-of-work protocol you pointed out, most of the concerns have to do with scalability. Solutions to this problem usually rely on a tradeoff between security and increased speed (like increasing the block sizes) and are often not long term solutions. Bitcoin has already had nearly 100 hard forks mostly related to issues like this. There's more long-term solutions like the Lightning Network happening (which allows transactions outside of the blockchain), but those have major issues with adoption. There's also many concerns about the centralization of it. Centralization is a major problem amongst most blockchain protocols and to date there's no foolproof solution most people agree on. The proof-of-work protocol is susceptible to centralization of the miners (as seen when a single coal mine in China flooded and the hash rate plunged 35%) and also rely on a small number of nodes. In general, most crypto enthusiasts agree that proof-of-work is fundamentally flawed and few newer protocols rely on PoW. 

Your points are well-taken. I suppose my view of the issue changes when talking about the national vs local level. I agree that IRV as a compromise that doesn't challenge the predominant power structure is a major problem. I suppose most of my support for it just comes from a commitment to breaking down the monopoly of legitimacy that FPTP seems to have with most Americans

-culi

Jan 28, 2022, 9:03 PM by dcarrera at gmail.com:

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> On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:32 PM <> culitif at tuta.io> > wrote:
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>> > >> 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?
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>> 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).
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> 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.
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> 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.
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>> 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.
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> 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.
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>> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Cheers,
> -- 
> Dr. Daniel Carrera
> Postdoctoral Research Associate
> Iowa State University
>

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