sorry, I was still writing my correction when that came in.
I regret making an insult out of the possibility of a mistake.
All of your remarks this morning were addressed to David Jefferson's blog, not the NAS paper, right?
I attributed the quotes to him because that's the person who was marked as the author of the page you linked to. The text I responded to was from your quote and your quote contained a copy-paste from pages 103 - 105 of the NAS article.
David Jefferson used full paragraph quotes from the NAS document while in no way marking it as a quote. Such as "The use of blockchains in an election scenario would do little to
address the major security requirements of voting, such as voter
verifiability. The security contributions offered by blockchains are
better obtained by other means. In the particular case of Internet
voting, blockchain methods do not redress the security issues associated
with Internet voting."
To people who are focused on authority following back links wrapped in other links might seem a worthwhile endeavor, but I engage with arguments. The only link I agree has a place in a useful debate is a link to hard data. If you had posted the link alone I would have probably ignored it, and wisely so because a person who cannot make his own arguments in the first place will likely not be able to respond in a coherent way.
I was just pointing out that puts people like Josh Benaloh, Senior
Cryptographer at Microsoft Research and Ronald Rivest (NAS/NAE), at
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in that ignorant or corrupt bucket.
Whoever wrote the NAS article carefully couched their claims to mislead by giving the impression of a problem without claiming there is a problem. For instance:
This article was written in 2018, Monero was launched in 2014. An expert in cryptography could not possibly have missed that, and when I say "expert" I mean an expert. I'm not talking about the position they may have been given or the degrees they have been assigned.
So there is again a dichotomy, the author in 2018 either knows damn well that ballot secrecy and anonymity can be statistically guaranteed by the a blockchain system designed to have that feature, in which case this is misleading (intellectually corrupt) or they didn't know that in which case they are ignorant.
A truly ignorant writer would have made more mistakes, some of the mistakes would directly contradict reality instead of deception by omission. See also:
https://doi.org/10.17226/25120 In particular, if malware on a voter’s device alters a vote before it ever reaches a blockchain, the immutability of the blockchain fails to provide the desired integrity, and the voter may never know of the alteration.
What a strategic word "may", yes they may never check; but a properly designed system would allow them to check.
That is not to say that 3RU7AL is incorrect about demonstrably false statements:
https://doi.org/10.17226/25120. While it is true that blockchains offer observability and immutability, in a centralized election scenario, observability and immutability may be achieved more simply by other means.
This is equivocation or it is false. Equivocation if the "observability and immutability" referred to in the later part of the sentence is different from the observability and immutability that a properly designed voting blockchain system offers. False if they mean the same thing.
Now you seem to believe that what you've quoted qualifies as "people who don't immediately agree" with the system I described, but if I ran into one of these guys in a coffee shop they would almost certainly claim that they were not thinking about the system I described.
If after giving the description I have in this thread they still made these allusions, then my dichotomy would hold. If they were a Senior Cryptographer at Microsoft I would ask how they conned that job, well no I would maneuver them into displaying their ignorance to be sure and then I would not ask because I don't like to embarrass people without cause.
There is no claimed authority that I will ever place above a sound argument. I know too much history to have faith in social norms and what you find so compelling about the a job title is a social norm. You call it arrogance, and so would the priest trying to sacrifice young children. I will endure being called arrogant for the sake of reason.
