https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691212

Write your contract in a programming language with…

The best estimate for bitcoin is 94 kWh per transaction. Working here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is-still-unsustainable

Ideally mined by large numbers of slaves in developing countries.

Yes, and there's also even less wasteful options like connection time (which favours IOT devices... oh the malware we'd see, if all that counted was the number of devices). It's not a…

That seems to be cherry picking data to make the problem sound as bad as possible. It's like saying that cars are terrible because the…

Somewhat amusingly there are "primitive tribes" who do much the same thing, sometimes literally – The Pyramids and St Paul's Cathedral, for example, but also the various "burn the giant straw…

You'd probably have to tease that out. To…

You say "fundamental problem", they say "feature".
Seriously though, there are proposals. Alex's piece linked to this article about one proposal.

Money quote:

Cryptocurrencies are inefficient by design. Their decentralized nature demands a way to establish trust between strangers on the internet, and for technical reasons the best answer we seem to have developed so far is to back blockchains up with enormous amounts of electricity and computing power.

Nope.

From a Motherboard/Vice article yesterday Ethereum transactions are estimated to take 45 kilowatt-hours of electricity per transaction, VISA is estimated at 0.00651 kWh per transaction.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3zn9a/ethereum-mining-transaction-electricity-consumption-bitcoin

It was more about doing it on election day as being an advocacy for the party you voted for, which is verboten…

For comparison though I wonder if there does seem to be a shortcoming in existing electoral law around this.

Last election I recall the publicity around people…

Yes, I have to wonder whether the human race has created a boon here, or a remarkable new way to chew…

I'd suspect that one reason the trial of online voting at last years council elections didn't happen is this unfulfillable requirement in the spec:
1.24 The online voting system must not…

There are multiple instances of exchanges being robbed where people didn't lose bitcoin, If the theft was small enough to be covered they can continue. Same…

I suppose it's a similar thing with voting. (Sign of the audience: I also zeroed in on those few words before I scrolled down and saw so much talking about it.)

I can accept how blockchains…

and re: lingers comment. I hadn't thought of it in those terms. Providing…

I'm happy to believe that, and it's nice for the banks, but it doesn't translate into risks for depositors: If Westpac is robbed or…

As noted above, my fault there.

Which is what blind citizens face under our current physical voting arrangements where they must rely on someone elese to mark their form. At least they…

If we're making a system that lets a voter go along to a polling station, get given a ballot paper, and validates that they're the first to vote, then one could do that with a blockchain. The problem with it (in common with many such solutions) would…

The answer is that I put it in the wrong place and by the time I realised there were links out and comments posted and it was too late :-)

But I am thinking about a rearrangement…

The trouble with everything article I read about…

Great intro, I'd actually just finished reading this, which is a great summary of ethereum. Personally, I'm looking forward when the internet and the information on it is literally owned by everyone.

Hmmm. I'm unclear on this, having heard Nat Torkington explain at our last Orcon IRL event that Blockchain wasn't a starter for electronic voting because it involves a public ledger and is therefore not private.