-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 (was Re: [dgc.chat] Re: [e-gold-list] Re: Thanks to Ragnar/Planetgold and Stefan/TGC) At 12:53 PM +0200 on 8/10/02, Arik Schenkler wrote:
Internet voting, IMHO, will bring true democracy rather than a representatives democracy.
Well, that's just plain wrong. Go look up discussions on google about cryptographic protocols for internet voting. It just ain't possible without the most strict, obscene, biometric, draconian, "is a person", non-anonymous methods you ever saw. Lions, tigers, and precious bodily fluids, boys and girls. The point to democracy, in the industrial/agricultural political sense, is one man, one vote. One *anonymous* vote. On the net, paradoxically, that is completely impossible. Votes can be sold. If you fix it so that you can't sell votes without forgoing your identity -- and thus your freedom -- and physically showing up somewhere to vote, or at least proving that you have a device that identifies you as a voter in the most immediate terms possible, you can sell your vote, anonymously, on the net, for whatever the market will bear, and *that* person can *re*sell your vote, and so on, just like it was voting rights to a share of stock. That bit of cryptographic mobiosity is probably down at the semantic level of consistency versus completeness. Somewhere, Goedel and Russell are laughing. The net result, of course, of any kind of truly anonymous internet voting, is anarchocapitalism, where people sell their voting control over assets, including political "assets", over and over in secondary markets, on a continuing basis, in real-time. No political small-d democrat (or small-r republican, or small-l libertarian, whatever) I've ever heard of would call that a "true" democracy. That particular prospect has anarchocapitalists, and crypto-anarchists, out at the bar, buying both Herr Professor Goedel and Lord Russell a beer or two... Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPVWANsPxH8jf3ohaEQLSXwCg7ohcz+ZCxGsX86HQSXFJHK3OOD8AoJAW 8doH9VU+LyGdpZ4x6zmz74Bv =G4Fp -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'