Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

submitted by Rimu edited

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

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Avatar rglullis

Like monero.

Either you are conflating two different applications of cryptography or you know something that I don't. And as someone with a pretty good grasp of blockchain applications, I'd love to hear if you have something novel.

Perhaps you mean something like Zero-Knowledge Proofs to verify who voted in an AP object without having to reveal it? This would *probably* work, but then you have to have all those nasty blockchain-y things like validator nodes and expensive proof generators... If we go that route we might as well go all the way and just use a fully p2p system.

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intensely_human

Not sure if you’re missing this or deliberately ignoring it, but I don’t know how monero does it. That’s why I’m just saying “in the same way they do it”.

The application I am thinking of is:

  • Verify that someone has legitimately
  • Used voting power they possess
  • To assign value to a particular account
  • Without revealing the identity of the “someone”
  • In a way that can’t be faked

In monero, the “voting power” is the ability to transfer funds to a particular payment address.

In lemmy, the “funds” are votes and the “payment address” is a comment or post.

You could actually implement such a content voting system *using* monero, if everyone were willing to put in a couple cents’ worth of monetary value. You’d just generate a pair of payment address for each vote target, one for upvotes and one for downvotes.

You’d have to use another layer of software for generating all these payment addresses, and that software would have to be trusted as well, but basically for any possible combination of voter/voteDirection/voteTarget you’d generate a payment address. As soon as funds appear in that payment address, the vote has been cast.

That’s just a hack knowing nothing about how monero actually accomplishes that. That’s using monero as an engineering black box, without knowing how it works.

I would not have asserted that there is no way to make such a payment system, based on the same instinct people are basing the judgment that such a voting system cannot be made. But I’d be wrong, because monero exists and works, and so this tells me the same problem can be solved in voting.

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Avatar rglullis

Ok, so your idea is to actually do the blockchain stuff and get people to pay to comment. There are messengers that work like this (status, I think) but they are a horrible idea. They will be slow and will never scale to more than a few hundred messages per minute, not to mention that it will actually require people to pay for *every* message.

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