Anonymous Voting On Steem?
The idea of anonymous voting on Steem to mitigate the revenge downvoting problem was brought up by @tarazkp yesterday. It would be useless to implement that only at the interface level because it would be easy to explore the chain using already existing tools to discover which account voted on which post. Steem would need to be hardforked to implement private transactions using privacy techniques like ring signatures.
When push comes to shove voting is about value transfer. Without any privacy features implemented on Steem, anonymous voting could work by buying the votes from a voting bot with liquid funds - in bulk so as as to make the funds transferred and individual votes impossible to match. The bot would keep the funds until it got an encrypted message from a user containing the permalink of the post to be voted and the vote magnitude. Instead of using one's voting power, one would power down for the purposes of paying the bot in liquid funds. An UI could handle all that automatically.
Of course, it would be nice if the private memo keys of the voting bots never leaked. A bot owner could be bribed or blackmailed into giving up the private memo key or the keys could be revealed by accident. And if the identity of the bot owners were not known, it would be possible to release such a bot just to bait the anonymous voters.
Therefore, perhaps a multi-party solution with a protocol like Tor (The Onion Router) could be used to make tracing the origin of the votes even more difficult.
But there is a really trivial solution to vote anonymously. Just use an alt untraceable to you to downvote whoever you want. You can use the same account to earn by auto-curating. That requires by splitting up your stake between several accounts but I don't see any problem with that.
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Hi @markkujantunen
Shopping the votes sounds good, however that can also be tracked, and in many cases the bots announce who paid for that vote.
Now, to know if a vote was bought, you can search in detail among many transactions that are generated.
The other option that you suggest having other accounts is also feasible but it can also be traced,
No, it can't if the memo is sent to the bot encrypted and if payment is made for many votes in advance like I wrote in the article. That, of course, requires the creation of a bot willing to provide that service.
No, it can't unless you're foolish enough to transfer funds between your accounts on chain or create patterns of voting that give you away. Move the funds off-chain. Then use that account for downvoting posts by those likely to retaliate otherwise and earning on curation by auto-upvoting posts by a large number of accounts that have nothing in common. Using Steemauto, you can both upvote, downvote and claim rewards automatically. You can create a downvoting appatus that will automatically gain voting power over time. There is nothing the abusive asshole you're targeting can do but create another account for posting.
OK now I understand..
Most people will never be able to create a completely untraceable account as there are so many 3rd party gateways used including ips and the like. Eventually, everyone is discoverable by somebody.. Just maybe not discoverable by the average person searching a blockchain alone.
Irrelevant here, because some random dickhead who gets flagged by an anonymous alt account sure as hell is not going to get answers when he goes asking those third party services for IP addresses. The authorities could get answers but emails from @arsehole on Steem will only end up in a spam folder.
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