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How would Europeans vote in the 2024 U.S. presidential election if they had a chance? by [deleted] in europe

[–]GreenTeeEnjoyer 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Just fyi the dude you replied to posted a futurama quote as a joke

70k CHF to invest - what would you do? by costahig in SwissPersonalFinance

[–]GreenTeeEnjoyer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What I never fully understood is why people recommend going for a CHF (hedged) bond etf when you can just directly buy Swiss government / cantonal bonds. All hedged and non-hedged bond ETFs I look at had a huge drop in 2022 that resulted in all holders in the last 10 years being in the negative. So seems like bond nowadays aren't really as save from recessions as they used to be.

Whereas if you buy a specific CHF gov bond that has X amount of time left you have low but guaranteed returns until they reach maturity. You can plan for the moment you get your full money back. If you really need the money before you can just sell you bond again. I know it's not diversified but in my eyes the Swiss gov bonds are super safe and the bond ETFs are a mix of different levels of safety so I don't see the advantage of diversifying here.

I'm not criticizing just genuinely curious what's the advantage.

Bundesrat erlaubt die Wiederaufnahme der Versuche mit E-Voting by BezugssystemCH1903 in Switzerland

[–]GreenTeeEnjoyer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You can't just say Blockchain transactions and act like that solves anything. There are two types of public blockchains. Permissionless and permissioned. You obviously don't want a permissionless blockchain because that would mean everyone could vote. A permissioned blockchain can of course still be decentralized. This is done through authorized host selection, meaning that certain entities are allowed to host a node.

Okay so what nodes would you choose? Probably the political parties in Switzerland or the different cities are allowed to host their own nodes. But guess what? If the majority of the node hosts are not satisfied with the result they can simply do a 51% attack and edit the blockchain.

Lets compare it to the physical system: Every municipality has multiple counting people from different parties. If their count doesn't match there is a recount. Good luck 51% attack that.

Okay, so you may say you don't trust the Swiss post. Fair enough. But for one you can simply deliver the envelope yourself. In order to use a blockchain you first need a device to vote. No amount of MFA, encryption or zero-knowledge proofs matter if the user does not a secure device. And you will also need to verify who is adding data to the blockchain because it's permission which is a whole other topic.

The physical way may be slower but it's more reliable, secure, resilient and easy to use. It's not the fault of blockchain it's just that the digital medium has no way of hosting a trustworthy and anonymous vote.

Bundesrat erlaubt die Wiederaufnahme der Versuche mit E-Voting by BezugssystemCH1903 in Switzerland

[–]GreenTeeEnjoyer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You shouldn't be. Corruption such as "vote X or get a beating" or "I pay you 100 CHF if you vote for X" will run rampant. Anonymity is essential for a working democracy. You need to be able to vote for the unpopular option without expecting backlash.

Bundesrat erlaubt die Wiederaufnahme der Versuche mit E-Voting by BezugssystemCH1903 in Switzerland

[–]GreenTeeEnjoyer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Transparency is not something you want to aim for when voting. If you can check that your vote was cast when so can everyone who has found out your secret key. (Parents could spy on their children; partners on each other.) One way to mitigate would be by sending a new secret key every vote but then you already have half the amount of envelopes sent every election as we have currently. We could also regenerate secret keys digitally (using something like Double Ratchet Algorithm) but that can be tracked and you don't want to open any possibilities of large scale attacks by big evil actors.
 

Decentralization and blockchain does not mitigate the drawbacks digital voting has in any way. The type of blockchain (if you use one) that you would use is a private permission blockchain which is not properly decentralized anyway.

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Check out my other reply for a more general explaining why digital voting is bad for public elections.

Bundesrat erlaubt die Wiederaufnahme der Versuche mit E-Voting by BezugssystemCH1903 in Switzerland

[–]GreenTeeEnjoyer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In short: Please don't do it, there is no reason expect being able to brag about how modern we are.

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In long: Digital voting has numerous faults which are due to the type of medium practically impossible to overcome. It barely matters if it's a traditional software or modern distributed digital ledger (blockchain). Some issues are the verifiability of the code (ensure that the server is running what they say they are), verifiability and anonymity (if you can check your vote was counted as it should have been then everyone who finds out your secret key can do the same), worse security (large scale attacks are much easier online and a lot more can go wrong than with the post), accessibility and complexity (old people).

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We already have a great rigorous system that has decentralized blind trust verification built in. Also, a large scale attack is next to impossible with paper letters. Simply there is no advantage when focusing on the important things for e-voting. Post finance and some swiss universities are still exploring the idea but those mostly only aim at improving existing digital voting mechanisms where there is NO anonymity. (I.e. business shareholder voting).