In the first part I walked you throught the opening of the Democracy 4 All Conference where Mr. Quirze Salomó , CEO of the Blockchain Centre of Catalonia - CBCat) and Lluís Juncà, Managing Director for Innovation, Social Economy, and Entrepreneurship at Generalitat de Catalunya spoke about the motivation behind the set-up of this event, and the Government of Catalunya’s Blockchain interest and strategy.

Here’s the link to the first part:

https://mirror.xyz/ostanescu.eth/itToDfTgurk3sl7tETV7I0NdwAqEHq9f1JlEEucUXyo

In the second part I will cover Mr. David Chaum’s key-note speech: Blockchain: On the mission to save democracy.

The first keynote speech of the event was given by Mr. David Chaum, the CEO of Elixxir.io and inventor of digital cash (eCash). 

He is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, known for his early work on privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols and his later work on electronic voting.

His keynote covered the topic of electronic voting and his work in the field.

He founded I.A.C.R. (International Association for Cryptologic Research).

Back in 1979, he published an article on electronic voting.

In 2009 and 2011, Mr. Chaum and his team run the city elections for Takoma Park, Maryland. These were the first publicly verifiable elections. The ballots were filled in with a yellow pen which caused a secret code to develop. With this code, you could later check if the vote was actually recorded as cast, but you could not show how you voted. 

Further reading: https://chaum.com/takoma-park-maryland/.

But this was booth voting. 

Mr. Chaum believes that it’s important for democracy to transition to what he has called, sample voting. If you want democracy to scale with the size and complexity of modern society, there is a way to do it, and that’s called sample voting.

Further reading: https://chaum.com/random-sample-voting/ 

This was actually tried out at the World Forum for Democracy and worked perfectly. The sample voting idea was also demonstrated in a different way, and that’s called the 7th Estate, by Mr. Chaum.

The Grassroots Democracy booklet explains the motivation for such a system, and how it works. It also points out that there is the only effective way to show that a majority of the population is in favor of a certain proposition. The booklet contains all the information about the technology.

The 7th Estate method was tested recently (a few months back) in Austin, Texas. They were able to incentivize the voters ( they could win prizes), but not depending on how they voted (provable not manipulable).

One of the key aspects is the decoy ballots. 

Further reading: https://chaum.com/7th-estate/ 

Voting outside the booth is necessary for the growth of democracy. This means that you need to have a way to prevent vote selling and corruption ( forcing people to vote a certain way) and combinations of both. 

This was solved by Mr. Chaum and his team with the Votexx Project. This was presented a couple of months ago in Austria at the E-Vote-ID conference (https://e-vote-id.org/ ). The solution was tested in lab conditions and worked. This solution allows remote voting. 

Further reading: https://chaum.com/votexx/

Althought some of the terms and the concepts that Mr. Chaum refered to I can’t fully grasp, the idea that we are a few steps closer to offering the world a safe solution for voting outside the booths, represents in our view a great achievement.

We also encourage you to deep dive in Mr. Chaum’s work and interact with the concepts he propose. Here are a few resources:

Mr. David Chaum’s Twitter

Mr. David Chaum’s work overview 👇

https://chaum.com/

Delphine Boghos created a visual summary of the key-note speech.

In tomorrow’s post, I will summarize the first panel - Blockchain Powered Democracy: from DAO to Self Sovereignty with Alessandro Pericò - CEO & Founder Āut Protocol , Sebastian Rodriguez - Product Manager at Polygon ID, Grace Rachmany - Founder at Voice of Humanity and moderated by Adam Christopher.

🔔 If you would like to be notified when a new article is out of the oven, then Subscribe via the button below.

And if you find the information useful, you could collect this article and use it for future reference. Don’t be shy to share it with a friend!

In the first part I walked you throught the opening of the Democracy 4 All Conference where Mr. Quirze Salomó , CEO of the Blockchain Centre of Catalonia - CBCat) and Lluís Juncà, Managing Director for Innovation, Social Economy, and Entrepreneurship at Generalitat de Catalunya spoke about the motivation behind the set-up of this event, and the Government of Catalunya’s Blockchain interest and strategy.

Here’s the link to the first part:

https://mirror.xyz/ostanescu.eth/itToDfTgurk3sl7tETV7I0NdwAqEHq9f1JlEEucUXyo

In the second part I will cover Mr. David Chaum’s key-note speech: Blockchain: On the mission to save democracy.

The first keynote speech of the event was given by Mr. David Chaum, the CEO of Elixxir.io and inventor of digital cash (eCash). 

He is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, known for his early work on privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols and his later work on electronic voting.

His keynote covered the topic of electronic voting and his work in the field.

He founded I.A.C.R. (International Association for Cryptologic Research).

Back in 1979, he published an article on electronic voting.

In 2009 and 2011, Mr. Chaum and his team run the city elections for Takoma Park, Maryland. These were the first publicly verifiable elections. The ballots were filled in with a yellow pen which caused a secret code to develop. With this code, you could later check if the vote was actually recorded as cast, but you could not show how you voted. 

Further reading: https://chaum.com/takoma-park-maryland/.

But this was booth voting. 

Mr. Chaum believes that it’s important for democracy to transition to what he has called, sample voting. If you want democracy to scale with the size and complexity of modern society, there is a way to do it, and that’s called sample voting.

Further reading: https://chaum.com/random-sample-voting/ 

This was actually tried out at the World Forum for Democracy and worked perfectly. The sample voting idea was also demonstrated in a different way, and that’s called the 7th Estate, by Mr. Chaum.

The Grassroots Democracy booklet explains the motivation for such a system, and how it works. It also points out that there is the only effective way to show that a majority of the population is in favor of a certain proposition. The booklet contains all the information about the technology.

The 7th Estate method was tested recently (a few months back) in Austin, Texas. They were able to incentivize the voters ( they could win prizes), but not depending on how they voted (provable not manipulable).

One of the key aspects is the decoy ballots. 

Further reading: https://chaum.com/7th-estate/ 

Voting outside the booth is necessary for the growth of democracy. This means that you need to have a way to prevent vote selling and corruption ( forcing people to vote a certain way) and combinations of both. 

This was solved by Mr. Chaum and his team with the Votexx Project. This was presented a couple of months ago in Austria at the E-Vote-ID conference (https://e-vote-id.org/ ). The solution was tested in lab conditions and worked. This solution allows remote voting. 

Further reading: https://chaum.com/votexx/

Althought some of the terms and the concepts that Mr. Chaum refered to I can’t fully grasp, the idea that we are a few steps closer to offering the world a safe solution for voting outside the booths, represents in our view a great achievement.

We also encourage you to deep dive in Mr. Chaum’s work and interact with the concepts he propose. Here are a few resources:

Mr. David Chaum’s Twitter

Mr. David Chaum’s work overview 👇

https://chaum.com/

Delphine Boghos created a visual summary of the key-note speech.

In tomorrow’s post, I will summarize the first panel - Blockchain Powered Democracy: from DAO to Self Sovereignty with Alessandro Pericò - CEO & Founder Āut Protocol , Sebastian Rodriguez - Product Manager at Polygon ID, Grace Rachmany - Founder at Voice of Humanity and moderated by Adam Christopher.

🔔 If you would like to be notified when a new article is out of the oven, then Subscribe via the button below.

And if you find the information useful, you could collect this article and use it for future reference. Don’t be shy to share it with a friend!