Naval Ravikant on Blockchain Voting
Founder & Executive chairman of AngelList and partner of MetaStable Capital on the implications of Blockchain for elections
The following is an excerpt from Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast with Naval. (Starting @ 59:10).
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Will we get so far as to have a government run on a blockchain? — I don’t know. Maybe in my children’s children’s lifetime, but that’s a long ways out. But along the way, I think we are going to see some of the fundamental functions of government are more efficiently done using a blockchain.
For example, Blockchain based voting systems would be essentially as cheating proof as you can create a system. You could audit exactly that everybody got to vote, everybody who voted was entitled to vote, was registered to vote, but, you don’t get to see what their actual vote is. And it’s done in a cryptographically secure way such that there is:
— no Deibold
— no corporation at the center that holds the voting machines,
— no republicans or democrats sitting there and counting the votes and throwing out the third party vote, or things like that…
that is an example of a piece of infrastructure of government that is probably better done through a blockchain than through a government itself…now of course governments don’t want to give up power so that’s going to be a struggle in the process, but I think we are going to see blockchains remake parts of government and eventually, maybe 100’s of years from now, you could actually see them replace a lot of government.
My guess is that what will happen — government is always the final adopter of any technology solution, they are never the first adopter, they’re the last adopter; just take a look at the DMV and the post office if you have any doubt about that.
…The way it’s more likely to work is that small private organizations that do have internal elections, but are worried about cheating, are worried about some very opposing groups on each side, you would see them adopt a blockchain based solution first.
And it’s probably brand new private organizations that are just starting up that (are saying “hey” — and of course, the infrastructure will need to exist, we’re still in that infrastructure development phase), 5 years from now, if you’re starting a group that needs to have an election, say you’re electing a college president on campus and there’s the left wing and right wing on campus who are really opposed to each other, nobody trusts each other — some clever student is going to say, well, I’m just going to use this off the shelf blockchain based voting mechanism that this ‘not a defunct’ company built, you know, with their ICO money, and it’s open source, anybody can audit it, it’s running on the ethereum blockchain so it’s completely cryptographically secure, any student can vote, you log in with your student ID using your private key so it can’t be faked, we can show which students voted, and each student can audit their vote and make sure that their vote was counted using zero knowledge proofs, but, your vote doesn’t actually get revealed so your vote was completely private. And then, you can know without a shadow of a doubt that these were the exact vote outcomes. That seems like a much better solution. So Icould see small private organizations adopting it, and then it grows and grows and grows and grows until one day all the voters look at each other and say,
‘why are we using this antique system for the big one, when for all the little ones we’re using this better system?’
It’s sort of like how when the iphone first came out, corporate america was all using blackberry’s and continued to use blackberry’s for a while…until finally the CEO who had an iphone at home and blackberry at work, and the CFO who had an iphone at home and a blackberry at work went to the IT person and said,
‘what the heck are you doing? It’s time to get with the modern world! I don’t care what you think about the security; I don’t care what you think about your apps and your provisioning and all this stuff that you use to defend your job, just switch over to the iphone already, I don’t care how it happens.’
So that same kind of technology adoption cycle needs to happen with blockchains.
