The Bitcoin Foundation today announced to test its upcoming on-blockchain voting system on crowdfunding platform Swarm.
As stated in the organization’s latest blog, the aim of this project is to bring “greater transparency not the voting process”, where every vote is recorded under a secure, cryptographic hash. The foundation however ignored to elaborate the insights of this project — explaining how different it is from the other decentralized voting platforms like BitCongress.
Though a theoretically astound concept, the Bitcoin Foundation’s voting system project still has taken a long route to implementation. BitCongress, as we mentioned above, already provides a range of blockchain-based features, one of that is creating elections or legislations or candidates. The Bitcoin Foundation’s Executive Director Patrick Murck however described their on-blockchain voting system project as an “important new avenue of innovation”, while adding nothing about the previous works done on the same concept.
Or is there definitely something innovative?
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The Bitcoin Foundation meanwhile invited its members to participate in the project’s beta stage. It however also warned them of a ‘not-so-seamless’ experience. Murck, in his additional comments, humbly also supported the prediction.
“While we may not have the smoothest experience in this experimental launch,” he stated, “it’s important for us to push the boundaries and spark innovation — even if things get a little messy sometimes.”
In case the technical issues intensify during the votes, the Bitcoin Foundation will switch back to use Helio, its previous voting system.
The Digital Democracy in Past
The political lobbies have openly supported the blockchain-based voting idea in past. Last year, a Danish political party voted through Bitcoin blockchain in an internal election. In their perception, the blockchain removed the need of trust for them. In the same year, an avid Bitcoin supporting Republican Andrew Hemingway also proposed to integrated blockchain technology into New Hampshire’s voting system.
