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Discussion on: Designing A Voting System For 1 Billion on the Blockchain (Part 2) - How To Keep A Secret

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theoutlander profile image
Nick Karnik

Because you don't want a central entity to control this because you cannot trust a single entity here. Bitcoin demonstrates potential for the same reason. Blockchain adds the smarts to validate an activity and ensure that it cannot be tampered with. A traditional database approach can be tampered with.

Please listen to the Blockchain Podcast by Software Engineering Daily for some interesting episodes detailing some of this stuff.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

You only need git (aka a Merkel tree) for that.
The rest, the "Blockchain" part is there for ideological reasons instead of following the best practice of choosing the simplest thing that works.

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vitalcog profile image
Chad Windham

But in this case you do trust the entity. And the idea that a blockchain magically makes corruption not happen is a bit silly. You can't replace trust with tech. Blockchain is a HIGHLY specialized tool. And like all highly specialized tools, it's use cases are actually few and far between. I personally think @Jean-Michel Fayard's response is 100% spot on. People keep wanting to come up with ways to use blockchain, simply for the sake of using blockchain. I'm not saying blockchain is useless, I'm saying it is highly specialized and hard to find the right niche to apply it to. There is a LOT of hype around blockchain right now. Doesn't mean it is actually as "world changing" as people make it out. It is in fact just couple fairly old technologies creatively wrapped together in a creative way...