Blockchain for the Democrazy

The word Blockchain has become too familiar, too quickly in the last couple of months, thanks to the new found gold - Bitcoin. 

The current generation of media and internet has made it possible for news of success and opportunities to reach the masses across continents at a speed that was only dreamed of. 

A lot of people living in most of the booming economies are looking for ways to: invest their savings, bet on their luck (or) trying to avoid taxes. Their desires are acting as the guiding path for some of the latest technologies and advancements. 

"For the last 6 to 8 years, the hype was all about 'startups'. Investing, if not working for one. Now it's Blockchain."

It isn't just a co-incidence that one of the early use-case of the Blockchain technology has been about enabling anonymous financial transactions. There are large chunks of people wanting to be anonymous for various illegal and greedy reasons. The 'Raise of Bitcoins and it's hard-fork cousins' is a spectacle that will be talked about for the years to come. 

The pace at which programmers and the like are trying to innovate in this space is extraordinary indeed. Just have a look at the website's of over 1500+ different crypto-currencies being traded today. The top 20 with the highest market cap, each have a quirky new innovation to boast about. 

For example, look at Smart Document handling, Bank Remittances handling, Smart Disk Sharing and Account Transaction logging, etc., - ideas all based on Blockchain, Tangle and other decentralized technologies. 

Apart from anonymity, I think one of the biggest and important characteristics provided by these systems is: if a transaction takes place once completely, it has nowhere to hide. Although the recipients and the data are usually hidden, the fact that the transaction happened between two addresses of the network can be made open for the public. 

One of the big use-case / application I can think of keeping in mind this very characteristic would be for -  handling the public voting systems in a large democracy like India. 

Tracking financial and administrative activities of citizens is a much sought after affair by many governments today. Governments try to be as Law-Friendly as possible, but not everyone likes to be intruded by someone else's nose. So is the case in India as well.

There is certainly a need and interest in the concerned youth and their immediate elderly generation to have confidence in the 'Electoral System' - which should ideally, make sure that the winning political leader / political party was the real choice by the fellow citizens of the country and not faulty electronic machines that can be hacked. 

Most of the countries already have a National ID card which can provide eligibility for an individual to receive Financial and other subsidies, benefits and services from various bodies of the State. (Example: Aadhar card in India, Social Security card in USA etc.,). 

Brief Idea of How the "Electoral Voting Technology" might be implemented using Blockchain:

1) Each citizen has a unique Aadhar card that can act as a public key for creating a secret private key for the particular citizen to keep hold of. The public key can also be used to create a network address for that person. 

2) The Person / Party contesting in the election will have a network address of their own. 

3) Each citizen will be provided (minted / mined / staked) 1 crypto-currency like coin say "Vote Coin", to their network address once, per every election. 

4) On the voting day, Citizens can then "Vote" for their favorite contestant by sending their "Vote Coin" to the respective contestant's network address.   

5) This process can be made electronic - made available via apps, websites and more. 

The nodes running this blockchain network should be widely spread and should be made available for users to download onto their own computers (just like wallets of the crypto-currencies). 

The most important aspect here is, even though the apps / websites might be hacked, the blockchain itself (which holds the transactions), cannot be hacked.  

The citizens will then have the ability to check and verify (may be a secondary voting coin with an offline paper wallet might be used) to make sure the vote they cast, has been done without any third party interference (if voting app / website is hacked). Also, the general public will have full view of all the transactions in this Blockchain.

Ofcourse, this concept can be developed further to apply for various day to day use-cases like - Transparent ticketing, Online lottery, Student Test Results handling, University seat reservations etc., etc., the possibilities are endless. 

These applications can also be deemed as fully legal use of Blockchain and might be backed by lot of governments worldwide. Infact, Dubai has already started it's path along these lines.. 

Whatever innovative application you create with this revolutionary tech, it's bound for a bright future ahead! 

If you do implement any of these ideas and find your success, do let me know about your ICO. I'll definitely invest! :)

As a last note, I request you to link to this original article no matter where (or) how you intend to use the ideas discussed here. Be it your thesis paper, news paper (or) company you'll create.. 

Cheers and Best of Luck!
~Raghavendra Bsrg

*Images linked: 1, 2.