Vote Market

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 08:28 AM 4/20/04 +1000, Tim Benham wrote:
>
>I'm glad someone liked it. The voting thread seemed mainly about
achieving
>19th century ideals with 21st century technology. But it seemed to me
as
>coercively non-libertarian to forcibly prevent people from verifiably
>revealing their vote as it is to do the opposite. Sometimes you don't
want to
>be anonymous.

The 19th century ideals spell out a threat model.  Which you can then
design procedures & gizmos to resist.

A different model is interesting because it instructs in how attacks
& resistance work.

BTW, its been argued that if you paid people to vote you'd
increase participation.  Participation is a good thing in some,
but not all, opinions on democracy.  You could pay folks
for merely voting (eg a govt might do this) or you could pay
folks by issue (which receipts make practical for proponents
of some issue) which you suggest.

>My plan was to let people sell
>their vote before the election. I'll leave designing a scheme by which
this
>can be done anonymously online to the lists crypto-mavens.

You could create a prototype market by using absentee voters
and certification that the paper vote was dropped into a mailbox
by a human attendant.  There are legal obstacles.

but there are shares that trade at nonzero
>prices which pay no dividends, return no capital, and have control
locked up.
>I've never been able to work this out.

The owners obviously 1. trust the controllers for some (possibly finite)
amount of time
2. expect to be able to sell shares to others in the future.

The difference between this and Ponzi schemes is left to the reader..
but as long
as there's no coercion, fraud, or pollution, then "whatever"...