Why I Trust Cryptocurrencies More Than This Election
I'll take the wild ride over controlled demolition any day
Without a doubt, cryptocurrencies have been the ‘wild west’ of tech, markets and their nexus, FinTech over the last few years. Predators and opportunities abound. Law is lagging as some lawmakers struggle to understand the fast-moving industry, and others struggle just to be aware of it beyond years-out-of-date headlines that were wrong when they were written.
These days, however, the entire industry is gaining a maturity and respect based on consistency of innovation (if not price), emergence of self-imposed standards and market movements that are starting to resemble predictable patterns.
In contrast, election innovation is hurtling downward, gamified by ill-conceived and badly-implemented regulation and product selections to leverage an ominous doubt in its credibility. Some comparisons:
Transparency
The crazy part about most cryptocurrencies is the blockchain is open for all to see, yet it’s secure. Everyone can download their copy of the entire Bitcoin ledger and verify each transaction from the beginning. Its openness is the exact mechanism of how it is so secure: manipulation would fail to be accepted by enough invested parties to allow it to proceed. The rules are written into the code, and can’t be changed on a whim by any powerful individual, be they a judge, hacker or Presidential operative. The rules are executed by the code, absolutely faithfully, to a fault: God help you if you lose your wallet recovery keys, no one else can or will.
In contrast, we were told our elections would be transparent: that equal numbers of invested parties from both sides would be watching ballot counting, that Dominion machines would make it possible to post the entire body of ballot scan images to the web so we could all verify them, that one eligible person, one vote was the rule we would assiduously follow, and that valid means of contesting results and whistleblowers would be respected.
All of that failed: observers of one party were summarily ejected from multiple counting locations during critical counting runs, Secretaries of State have obstructed access to critical vote tally and ballot data requiring time-consuming FOIA requests, statistical improbabilities emerged in the count totals and timestamps, and result contests have been refused judicial evidentiary hearings while whistleblowers receive death threats, leading to a quagmire of uncertainty in which it appears a steamroller is getting us to the outcome desired by the elites.
Bitcoin takes it.
Source Code
Due to cryptocurrencies’ immutability of their ledgers, firm rules and deep encryption, the source code of most cryptocurrencies live publicly on Github, open for anyone to examine. This reveals an important innovation that Cryptoworld has embraced: open source development.
Open Source is a mindset that asserts my code innovation will always be better if everyone can see and understand it. Some will criticize, others will contribute fixes, others will take it and go new and better places with it. Some will prepare hacks, others will fix those vulnerabilities. Proprietary code is so yestercentury, and only results in going live on critical systems with code that hasn’t been thoroughly vetted and tested.
When that happens on a system of high stakes and interest, such as an election result, suddenly you have a very deep pool of doubters, hackers and profiteers who will use any emergent weakness to exploit for their own ends.
With proprietary coding on voting machines, you have multiple vulnerability vectors:
Untested, unvetted code can be hacked and/or misused skewing results
Nefarious actors within vote machine companies can insert innocuous-but-suspiciously-timed ‘updates’ that could skew results. Code audits deterred by claiming proprietary protections
Users of the machines who have either been coached to execute incorrectly, or who make use of the discretions built into the system to skew the results
Crypto for the win. It’s plain to see.
Self-Interest
The key innovation that is making Crypto a success is the fact that it respects humans’ innate interest in what will improve their personal wealth. If Bitcoin were not a store of value that could be traded, no one would be interested in maintaining the blockchain network which is essential for its existence. So it appeals to self-interest by producing a personal profit. Everyone involved in Crypto is looking to find a way to make it work for them. This motivates buying, trading, innovating, hacking, patching, perfecting and thinking of new ideas among a growing population of individuals who find value in contributing hours to learning, using and disseminating these ideas. The self-interest is key to all of it, accepted by all and welcomed. People cross language, racial and cultural barriers to collaborate with people they barely know, without prompting or diversity drives. Traders make good neighbors it seems.
Elections, in contrast, are supposedly run by ‘civil servants’ and ‘volunteers’ who only think of the benefit of the community. Voters are increasingly afforded wide latitudes in the interests of coaxing more of them into the voting booth, with diminishing safeguards to protect against lawless votes being cast. After all, innocent until proven guilty, right? And if we circumscribe the laws carefully around any means of detecting lawless votes, there’s no proof! So voila! We have supposedly created an entire system in which over a hundred million people select our increasingly powerful rulers in which the only expression of self-interest in use is one eligible voter casting their one valid vote. Right? Nothing else going on behind the scenes, behind the curtain?
The old Reganite adage ‘Trust but Verify’ comes to mind: we need to grant voting rights openly and clearly; but also respect the immutable principle of self-interest, and believe that every expression of that self-interest, legal or illegal, that we make possible to happen will indeed happen. We must actively create systems of detection and assiduously guard against every incorrect vote or vote count.
3rd to Crypto.
Trustless
The ironic term ‘trustless transaction’ is what makes Crypto solutions so innovative. Compare ‘trustless’ to ‘trusted’ in the financial sphere. When you walk into a bank and open an account, you have to identify yourself with government documents. This makes you a ‘trusted’ individual, capable of handling Fiat currency (defined as trusted and executed by the government) and with the assumption your documents are genuine and trustworthy, and provided by a trustworthy government, this is a relatively safe assumption. At that point you are handed a checkbook and debit card, and your use of those is also implicitly trusted by other banks and individuals, with broad assumptions being made that if some misidentification and fraud were to occur, you could be identified and remuneration paid.
Going by the rates of fraud, this system of ‘trusted transactions’ creates massive risks. One report asserts financial fraud cost the world $5 Trillion in 2019.
In contrast, Crypto execution of trades is absolute. The code is bullet-proof, the encryption is deep and the transaction will occur exactly as you have determined it should. No one can pretend to own your Crypto or have less Crypto in their wallet than they represent. No one can create Cryptocurrency tokens for themselves without following the rules. The only question remaining is if you picked the right transaction—and due to self-interest, that decision is up to you. This makes it ‘trustless’. With few exceptions, nothing is required to create an account or a wallet, or to send currency beyond holding the encryption key for your wallet. The only government documents required are required by government at the edges of interaction with Fiat currencies, to prevent the type of fraud that occurs within Fiat currencies. Once you’re in the Crypto sphere, you trade blindly with full confidence that you are buying exactly what you requested to buy, at or near (depending on time to execute and moving markets) the price you were quoted.
Elections represent an even greater risk of fraud than Fiat currency transactions: governed by fewer and more mutable rules, infrequently tested, almost never contested, even more rarely overturned. Once again, the government says ‘trust us’ and often fails to deliver on its promises: diligent signature matching is discarded for a push to ‘count every vote’. But ‘trust us’, this is a valid result. Oh, you want to look at the details? Dig into the data? No, just trust us. We’ll fight your FOIA. After all, we’re disinterested civil servants who only run valid elections, self-defined as any election we run. Trust us, our job description includes managing a flawless election, and we looked and found no ‘widespread’ fraud. We looked twice. Just trust us. Stop asking questions.
Yeah no, I’m going for ‘trustless’ over ‘trust us’.
Despite the reputation of cryptocurrency markets and technology being a risky investment that could disappear tomorrow, the key advantage they have over other market sectors and public concerns is the lack of political investment in it. Sure, there are dollar hawks that see it as a hedge against inflation, there are politically-driven projects that seek to use the blockchain for carbon trading (for example), but the entire space is driven principally by sound economics: supply and demand, democratic access to markets, meritorious goods and services rewarded over the long term.
Elections are risky investments: don’t stash your emotional coin into systems designed for opacity, for manipulation, run by narrative-driven political machines. Our best hopes lie in the direction of our government being kept weak enough to keep enough of our freedoms for us to innovate our way out of the problems it has created and perpetuated.