Let’s face it folks – if you’ve gotta live in a country going through chaos, you might as well have a bit of fun on the way down. One of the few things that perks me up each morning is seeing headlines like “Trump Supporters Worried About Losing Their Federal Jobs” or “Republican Voters Worried They Might Not Get Their Social Security Checks”. Well folks, when Trump was promising chaos in the run-up to the election, this is what he was talking about. All these federal departments getting turned over and eviscerated is exactly what he said he’d do. Supposedly, this is what you all wanted!
If you’re a multi-millionaire and you voted for Trump, I get it. It seems like a really good idea. If you’re working class, or even crazier, dependent on government aid, and you voted for Trump, holy crap… you were swindled.
I hope eventually our country gets back on the track to being sane. It’s a shame that it’s much, much, much easier to tear down things than it is to create them. I look forward to the mid-terms and I hope the Democrats get their heads out of their asses, because we could really use the help. In the meantime, I’ll be drinking up all those delicious “Trump supporter tears” and not feeling bad at all.
Hoo boy. Our elections are inefficient enough already!
You want to use the blockchain for elections? I can only imagine how efficient that would be…
Just picture it—millions of Americans casting their votes, each one requiring the same energy as a Bitcoin transaction. Since each Bitcoin transaction guzzles about 707.6 kWh of electricity, we’d effectively turn Election Day into a national “let’s black out the power grid” festival. The 2020 U.S. election saw around 159 million votes cast. Multiply that by 707.6 kWh, and suddenly, securing democracy would consume more electricity than Argentina does in a year. Hope you weren’t planning on using your fridge that week.
And let’s not forget the environmental impact. Running a blockchain-based election would pump out millions of tonnes of carbon emissions, all to achieve the technological marvel of… waiting 40 minutes for your vote to get confirmed while some guy with an overclocked mining rig in Kazakhstan decides if democracy is worth the gas fees.
But hey, at least it’s immutable. No take-backsies. Not even if you typo your choice or accidentally vote for “Kanye West” when you meant “write-in candidate.” But that’s a small price to pay for the unparalleled convenience of a system that makes processing a single vote roughly as energy-efficient as powering your house for nearly a month.
Nothing screams cutting-edge innovation quite like requiring the entire country to participate in the world’s largest distributed computing experiment just to count some ballots. Maybe we could throw in some NFTs while we’re at it—“I voted” stickers are so last century.
Spoken exactly like someone who knows absolutely nothing about how blockchains work. Bitcoin is a popular one, but blockchains don’t need to be like this - what you’re spewing is hyperbole and ignorance. Votes aren’t tallied in the way you speak of either - they don’t immediately go into a ledger just because you selected a name, all voting systems have multiple safeguards already to allow multiple opportunities to select different candidates at each point in the step. The last step of registering your vote is when they get added.
Vitriol and ignorance, wonderful combination here.
So which blockchain would you model this on? If my picture is so flawed, paint a better one. If Bitcoin wouldn’t be used for the chain (and it wouldn’t due to the problems I mentioned above) what project and/or protocol do you feel would be a good fit for elections in the US?