[Cryptography] Make it rain, baby girl.

[Robert Hettinga]

I cast bread on the waters, and the goldfish come… 

> On Nov 24, 2020, at 2:10 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com> wrote:\

> Near as I can make it out, the argument here is 'it could have happened so it must have happened’.

But none dare call it post hoc ergo propter hoc?

I wouldn’t deny reducing the above colloquy-on-the-way-to-a-beach-bar in question to predicate calculus may be, um, entertaining… 

> Soros isn't a life peer. He isn't even a UK citizen.

Lord Mark Malloch-Brown. Life peer. Soros partner. Strike one...

> All they keep doing is promising they will make a claim.

Yup. We’ll see. They tried to present a scad of depositions sworn on penalty of perjury to a judge. Who refused to see the evidence. They’re appealing. And doing a, cough, legislative hearing, where the actual constitutional responsibility lies. Are we having fun yet?

But meanwhile… 

> she has just been fired.


I prefer to think she’s been put on indefinite waivers. :-) 

Meh. She’s gotta criminal case. They’ve got a civil, probably a constitutional case. Criminal cases take forever. The constitution says not forever. This’ll sort itself out. Then we’ll see.

> The Civil Rights Act of 1965 makes it a crime to fail to count, tabulate, etc. any lawfully cast vote.

Funny you should say that.

See "criminal case", above. 

So, I spout Newsmax, and the constitution, not just legislation: Count every *legal* vote. Your cryptofeudal coreligionists spout MSNBC or CNN: Count every vote for progressives only. And, as a result, you and I, as usual for the past almost thirty years, seem to be, um, spouting, on each other. Fortunately I was born with some talent in that regard. My father won a third-grade contest where he pissed over the outhouse behind his one-room Wisconsin school. How about yours? Or did they teach you that at OxBridge instead?


Meanwhile, I bet we both agree that cryptography gives anonymity though you can sell your vote (where I come from that’s called ‘equity in bearer form’), and *political* voting requires both anonymity and the non-transferability of your vote to be legal. 

Certainly you can’t do that with a ‘blockchain’, whatever that means without proof of work. 

We’re proving that anything else, particularly the legitimacy, much less legality, of code owned by an entity domiciled practically next door to a certain Peer and his associated foundation, demonstrates that Turing machines, do, in fact, require a copy to function, proving as a result that the union of both electronic election and ‘intellectual property’ law, is, as the man said, an ass. SWIDT? Beating my subject-object agreement like a dead horse, er boss, er, something…

I seem to remember, almost exactly twenty years ago, when virtually the entire population of FC01 spent a morning session, through lunch, trying to re-do Bush v. Gore with crypto. In light of the contradiction above, the discussion of the cryptography’s application to political voting again here is utterly, um, nondispositive. Certainly not *financial* cryptography, which I was prompted to observe after hours of discussion and patiently waiting at the question microphone to get a word in edgewise.


Paradoxically, the canonical solution here is, in fact, Canada’s: ticking the box. A paper ballot, a pen, a box, a human counting the votes, supervised by a representative of each candidate. It scales. Any country can be counted in hours, there are few disputes, and the result is, in fact dispositive.

Anything else is Mummenschanz. Which is what any Rothbardian would call democracy anyway.

Nice to know you’re still on this side of the grass, Phill.

Cheers,
RAH