Can blockchain put an end to election fraud? Can it help us rebuild trust in distant institutions and companies that handle our data? How does blockchain actually work? Join us for this podcast on the inner workings and implications of blockchain for governance and society.
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The Guests
Dr. Grammateia (Matoula) Kotsialou and Dr. Luke Riley are postdoctoral research associates at King’s College London working on the applications of blockchain in voting and collective decision-making domains. As computer scientists with expertise in game theory and artificial intelligence, they are here to answer all of your questions about blockchain and its future in society. For more information about their work, check out the Volt Project.
Send us Your Questions for Part II
Send us your blockchain questions for our follow-up podcast with Matoula and Luke by May 31, 2018 at info@csgs.kcl.ac.uk, or drop us a line on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).
Skip Ahead
0:40 What is blockchain?
1:07 How does bitcoin work?
7:38 How does blockchain help us secure our transactions with others?
8:49 How vulnerable is blockchain to hacking?
9:54 What’s stopping blockchain from taking over the world right now?
11:50 Why did the stock price of bitcoin drop?
13:52 Is blockchain just an ideology or is it the next great disruptive technology of our time?
15:07 How does blockchain voting work?
18:58 Can blockchain prevent election hacking by third parties?
20:27 What security issues do modern electronic voting systems face?
24:38 How can technology help us improve democracy?
28:14 Can we use blockchain to build trust with companies that use our data?
31:29 Can I sell rights to my data on a blockchain social media account?
Full Transcript
Irena Schneider
Welcome back to the Governance Podcast at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London. My name is Irena Schneider, and I’m your host. Today I’m really pleased to welcome Matoula Kotsialou and Luke Riley, who are postdoctoral research associates here at King’s. Matoula and Luke are both computer scientists with expertise in game theory and artificial intelligence. They’re currently working on the volt project, which aims to explore applications of distributed ledger technologies, including blockchain in domains involving voting and collective decision making. Grammateia and Luke, it’s a pleasure to have you here.
Kotsialou / Riley
Hello. Hello.
Irena Schneider
So I want to talk about blockchain and voting. It’s a very complicated technology. So I want to start off by asking you what is blockchain?
Kotsialou / Riley
So, blockchain, I would say that it’s a new type of technology that keeps a secure and permanent record of data and where all this comes from It started all with Bitcoin, the first digital cryptocurrency.
Irena Schneider
Tell us more about Bitcoin. How does it work?
Kotsialou / Riley
Okay, so Bitcoin is a way to transfer value between individuals in a decentralised way without a centralised intermediary between because normally, where if you want to digitally transfer value, you’d have to go onto your online bank account. And then you’d have to enter someone’s details and you’d send money to them, but it’ll go through the bank. So the banks are in control of making sure that money goes to the person, but with Bitcoin there is nowhere else in the middle. It’s direct from peer to peer.
Irena Schneider
So in this peer to peer network, how do we know that the transactions are actually secure?
Kotsialou / Riley
Because now instead of the banks now another person can do the same job but the difference is that this person can be anyone of the network?
Irena Schneider
How do we know we can trust these people?
Kotsialou / Riley
Okay. So, the way that we validate the transactions is according to the protocol of Bitcoin that when you join the network, you agree to use.
Irena Schneider
Okay and where does this protocol come from? Is it from some centralised authority?
Kotsialou / Riley
So, all these say rules of the protocol they came from a person that is known as Satoshi Nakamoto. So, this person I published the white paper like what he was describing the Bitcoin peer to peer payment system. And for the first two or three years of after the publication, he or she disappeared.
So apart from Satoshi Nakamoto there is also a method in Bitcoin for anyone to propose changes to the programme. So in that way, it wasn’t just one person or many people acting as Satoshi Nakamoto, who could change the Bitcoin protocol. But anyone who joins the network could do. So therefore, it is a decentralised system.
Irena Schneider
So anyone can change the system, how is that secure?
Kotsialou / Riley
So actually everyone can propose changes for the system. And then these changes are being voted on by the main participants of the network. So it makes the whole system more democratic.
Irena Schneider
Who are the main participants of the network?
Kotsialou / Riley
Okay, the main participants of the Bitcoin network are, a group of people called the miners and anyone can take the role of a minor. A minor validates transactions from one individual to another.
Irena Schneider
So if I understand correctly, you’re describing a system where people are transacting, they’re sending each other Bitcoin and these transactions are validated by a group of individuals called miners. And I’m just curious, how does the transactional process work on the system?
Kotsialou / Riley
Okay, so um, there’ll be a group of unconfirmed transactions somewhere. And that’s sent around the network. And then these miners will take some transactions from this unconfirmed pool. And they will look to put these, the valid ones into a block and a block will contain other things, other related metadata and the valid transactions. And then the miner will try and solve a cryptographic puzzle to link this block to the previous one in the chain.
Irena Schneider
Okay, so that sounds really complicated. Right now I’m imagining literally, some blocks connected together by a chain. And there’s data inside each block. And the data are basically the transactions that you send. So you sending Bitcoin to somebody is a piece of data that gets locked inside a block. And then what happens with the encryption? And what is the cryptographic puzzle that the miner is solving.
Kotsialou / Riley
So I think this is a good way to visualise it like a chain of blocks. But what is exactly the chain? So imagine, initially the chain is empty, right. And then as Luke mentioned, they’d say that a miner confirms or validates the first block. So when the block is validated, then it’s being added in the chain. So then when the next miner has validated the second block, then in order for the second block to be added in the chain, then you need first to solve this cryptographic puzzle. And when this puzzle is solved, it automatically gives you a link that connects the second block to the first block. So then, so then when you add the second block in the chain, then you have, you know the blockchain with two blocks, then the third miner comes sorry, another new miner comes with a third block, and it does exactly the same process. So at the end, you will end up in a chain, with blogs, where in each blog, there is data where data are mostly transactions between peer to peer.
Irena Schneider
And what role does the encryption actually play here? So does this mean that people can’t access each other’s transactions or are the transactions completely private?
Kotsialou / Riley
So Bitcoin, all valid transactions have public knowledge, but you can have other blockchains that are either anonymized or say, encrypt data that are in these blocks. So it really depends on what blockchain you’re using?
Irena Schneider
So why is encryption important?
Kotsialou / Riley
So the cryptographic link between blocks is important for two reasons. Firstly, it will help keep the data in the same order for all the participants on the blockchain network. And secondly, it makes it significantly harder to go back into a previous block, chain some data, because if you went back into the previous block to change data, you would then have to change the cryptographic link to all future blocks.
Irena Schneider
But what does it mean to actually change data on the platform like, you know, as a user of Bitcoin, why would I have peace of mind using this technology and what is it trying to actually prevent?
Kotsialou / Riley
So an example is if I bought something online with Tesco, let’s say a TV, and I paid with Bitcoin. Tesco then does not want me to go back into a previous block where I paid them and change it. So actually, I didn’t pay, so that’s what this cryptographic link is trying to prevent.
Irena Schneider
Okay, so it makes the transactional information completely unchangeable. And it makes it harder for people to cheat on their transactions because their data is encrypted. Is that correct?
Kotsialou / Riley
Yeah, because to go back and change some books, the network, you usually have to have the majority control or close to majority control of the whole network at the same time, so it’s, this is a lot more secure than a centralised system, which might have one point of vulnerability that hackers can attack. But now with a big blockchain network, you’ll have to attack multiple points at the same time, which can be very difficult to do for a big blockchain network like Bitcoin.
Irena Schneider
So you mentioned before that you need a majority of participants on the platform to attack the system. Well, what if that actually happens? What if a bunch of them just gang up together and and hack the system.
Kotsialou / Riley
So the main participants of the network are the people that mine the most so the people that validate the most of the blocks and so these miners have no incentive to do something like that because it’s like they attack their own system. So these mean miners get rewards, they get the majority of the reward in Bitcoin. So by attacking the system with any kind of manipulation, and you know, they risk the price of bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.
Irena Schneider
Okay, so they lose out personally if they attack the system?
Kotsialou / Riley
Exactly.
Irena Schneider
Alright, so it seems like it’s a very secure system, a lot more secure than current banking systems, for instance. So why are we not all using Bitcoin all of a sudden, why is this still kind of a sort of struggle technology?
Kotsialou / Riley
It’s because of the technological maturity of the software associated with blockchain at the moment. Currently, you have to have quite good technical knowledge to be able to use it: So that for the majority of people, they can’t really be bothered really, or they don’t understand it. But this is becoming a bit more mainstream, some more companies are trying to put more user friendly software around the blockchain. So maybe in the future, it’’ll get more and more popular such as this December, you know, there’s lots of people buying Bitcoin. So maybe it’s already started.
So here also I would like to add one of actually I would say actually, the main problem of Bitcoin not being, you know, enlarged is like there is like scaling problems. So, currently, the more users that go into the system, the slower the transactions become. So there are many projects and companies at the moment that are trying to solve the scaling problem. And yeah, I think it will be necessary for something like that to happen before Bitcoin becomes the main payment system.
The point is, how many people used the internet in 1994, the internet existed, but the facilities around it were like very new or very raw. It took another few years before it was like more mainstream stuff, possibly in the same timeframe for blockchain.
Kotsialou / Riley
But is it a matter of the lack of maturity of the technology or do people have legitimate concerns about it, other than what you might have mentioned? So, recently, we’ve seen a drop in the stock price and Bitcoin people actually worried that that technology could let them down in some way, shape or form, is there, are there any vulnerabilities in the encryption process or in anything else in the way that it works?
Kotsialou / Riley
Well, the price is always extremely volatile for cryptocurrency. And this was…
Well, I think it has to do with the fact that it’s safe, quite new at the moment and it hasn’t matured. For example, I believe that there are many different types of investors. They are people that invest in Bitcoin, because they want to just get money out of it. But there are also people that invest in Bitcoin because they like this idea of decentralising the worldly digital currency. So the fact that it goes up and down, so okay, we’ve seen recently a big drop in the price, but I see it as maybe cleaning. And so maybe, yeah, the people that have remained are the people that they believe, I think in the ideology that bitcoin brings.
It also comes down to liquidity of the market which is more an economic thing. If there’s, if there’s not that many people buying and selling proportional to the world population, then if someone sells a lot, the price can drop really quickly, more quickly.
Irena Schneider
Do you think that Bitcoin is just an ideology? Or is it the next great disruptive technology of our time? Because in a way, if you’re actually taking away power from intermediaries, like financial institutions, which have traditionally overseen and enforced are transactions, and at the same time, you’re decentralising information amongst so many different people, it makes our lives a lot more difficult to hack, right.
Kotsialou / Riley
So, I would say it’s not all about the hacking, and it’s more difficult to hack but I would say that people have lost their trust and the faith in the central bodies. So I think societies have the need for something new. So something that you will be able to connect or transact immediately with the other person without having to trust someone in the middle.
Irena Schneider
Let’s talk a little bit more about how blockchain can be disruptive in other industries. So I wanted to discuss your project, in particular, at King’s College London. So you’re working on the volt project and exploring the applications of blockchain and voting. And I’m curious how that works. So let’s say I’m voting in an election, and I cast my vote and it goes inside a block, what’s the next step?
Kotsialou / Riley
Okay, so it depends on the architecture, there might be different properties that you want for your voting system. You might be happy for your vote to be public knowledge, which will be the case when you’re voting as a shareholder If you’re voting in a political election, you obviously want it encrypted, which is also possible. So it’s a bit too complex to go initially to nationwide elections. So our project is focusing on shareholder voting, and also online voting, but maybe for a political party leader. So small scale online voting.
Irena Schneider
And how does it actually work? So you have the decentralised network of people validating the votes coming into the system, is that correct?
Kotsialou / Riley
So in this case, there is another type of blockchain that is called permission. So in a permission blockchain, the difference is that the people that validate the block, the people that validate the data are one group or one person, so you don’t actually need a decentralised network that everyone can take part in the validation process.
So it’s not fully anonymous. So the participants of the network, they’re known in a permissioned blockchain. So one of the people we’re working with is ERS, electoral reform services, and they will have a blockchain note. And they will allow a few other people to be blockchain nodes that they know in real life. So in that way is permission. They’re not going to let someone from a random foreign country, join the network and try and disrupt their elections. That’s not gonna happen. And it’s similar for our other partner in the project, which is crowd cube for shareholder voting. The nodes of the blockchain network will be the main shareholders, no one not associated with the company.
Irena Schneider
Okay, interesting. So the government can still oversee the identification of everybody voting. in a national election, if it were to scale up to that level?
Kotsialou / Riley
Yes, you would, you would need a way to ID the people who are allowed to vote. So that could be one of the rules to make a valid transaction, you would have to have a pre approved ID, then and if you do an election, that would be I guess, from the government.
Irena Schneider
Traditionally, we used electronic or paper ballots to cast our votes in an election. Why is blockchain a better system for this?
Kotsialou / Riley
So I would say that blockchain adds an extra security and transparency in electronic voting. And I believe that in general electronic voting would increase participation in voting and also will help people with disabilities be a part of a voting process.
But also if there’s other people who are not in the country and cannot go to a polling booth, they could use their electronic blockchain enabled voting system to cast their vote.
Irena Schneider
I was wondering also about the implications for, you know, scandals about foreign governments attempting to hack elections. And we’re seeing this more and more. Is blockchain one of those things where people’s votes can just basically never be subject to question that it’s completely secure. It’s counted for and it can’t be hacked. Is this a solution to this hacking question?
Kotsialou / Riley
Well, hopefully it can be in the future. But if it was already, then it would already be implemented. So this is one of the reasons why we’re doing research on it. And why we’re focusing on smaller use cases at the moment. But yeah, but if we solve these problems for smaller use cases, hopefully eventually we’ll move towards having it in national elections. There’s people that already run national elections online like Estonia, Switzerland also do some smaller scale elections. But yeah, hopefully we’ll secure more blockchain.
Irena Schneider
What’s the experience of Estonia and Switzerland? Are they having completely secure elections? And it’s a good example to go by?
Kotsialou / Riley
Well, we recently would have the service. So I would say that, yeah, almost all of them they have security issues,
But they wouldn’t say some other people. They have security issues, but when independent academics have analysed them, and they think, well, they think or they’ve shown that they have security issues, even though there is a new one that is coming in Switzerland called ch vo. I don’t think they’ve found security issues yet but it isn’t active.
Irena Schneider
What kind of security issues are these?
Kotsialou / Riley
So for example, okay, a voting process, it’s actually a combination of many different processes. So for example, it’s submitting your vote, recording a date, and then keeping them somewhere secure, and then counting at the last part. So security issues or attacks can be in any of these different processes. So there are many different ways that you can change a vote by attacking a system online.
So one example is the state of Alaska could accept votes from email. But academics show that these PDF email votes can be intercepted and changed before they get to the Alaskan online voting system.
And you cannot even understand that it has been changed.
Yeah, I think there were other more technical issues found, because as far as I’m aware, the Estonian voting system is open source. So we’ll look through the code. And they noticed if they received a lot of votes at the same time, they could either be taken down, or some of those could be erased. I’d have to. I’m not 100% sure on that, but it’s available in the associated paper.
Irena Schneider
So, does blockchain remove these vulnerabilities or you can hack into a blockchain vote just as easily?
Kotsialou / Riley
So, given that when you send your vote but this process is secure, and then the blockchain technology at least can promise that the but then you they can keep secure get they can stored in a secure way your vote so for example, the transaction of me voting for you, it can stay secure, but then the process before it’s also an issue.
Getting the vote onto the blockchain. Yes, so if you ever hear about hacks for Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency these are hacks with a blockchain associate to cryptocurrency, the hacks for the website that allows you to get onto the blockchain. So it’s like hacking before you go onto the blockchain.
So as you can see there, there are many different processes that we need to think about before you enter the blockchain.
I guess we should also say, it is possible that votes could be changed if some person controls all of the blockchain network or a significant majority of the blockchain network. So those issues have to be fought through, but it’s still more secure than just having one one centralised person control the online voting system.
Irena Schneider
Okay, so basically, we should switch all over to blockchain because the benefits still outweigh the costs of it?
Kotsialou / Riley
Switching the online voting over to blockchain but we’re not in a position now to say all paper ballots should be online blockchain voting systems. It is not ready yet for that siwtch to occur.
Irena Schneider
So are you working on that process in the beginning where it’s vulnerable to hacking to try to secure it?
Kotsialou / Riley
So the work of the ers electoral reform services, is to allow their online system to have individual and universal verifiability. So an individual verifiability is that the user knows that when they cast a vote, that their vote has been recorded somewhere on the universal verifiability so that anyone can go and check the count is correct, according to the votes that have been recorded. And hopefully, the way that they can do that eventually when our project is finished, is not through the ers system. But directly you the user would connect directly to the blockchain itself because if you went through someone else’s systems access to the blockchain, you actually don’t know if you’re accessing the blockchain. You might be accessing someone’s fake version of the blockchain.
Irena Schneider
What can we achieve with a more secure electoral system? How can technology help us make democracy better?
Kotsialou / Riley
So that’s a very good question. Because given that we have a secure online voting system, I think we can open many new ways of creating more engaging types of democracy. So for example, there is the direct or liquid democracy. So what are these types of direct democracy is the voting process, but you can vote directly on a specific matter without voting for a representative. And liquid democracy is you can actually delegate your vote to someone that you trust, and then that person can vote on behalf of you as well. For example, I might have a friend that is more expert on a specific matter. So then you can just delegate your vote to your friend and your boss can vote on behalf of you.
So the difference to representative democracies, you would effectively delegate your vote to one person for five or four years or something like that. But in a liquid democracy you can delegate to different people for different topics, or the temporary delegations, you can take them back at any time and vote directly instead.
Yeah, and you know, you can, you can have many different forms of that, for example, if someone agrees to accept the votes of other people, you can have as a rule that them and their vote will not be private and it will be opened. You know, the people that delegate your vote, their vote to this person can actually see what this person votes for.
It’s all different rules that you could add to the system or take away the system. Exactly. It makes it more engaging for us. Sciences getting more involved.
More proportional representation of what the society wants.
Irena Schneider
But how does blockchain actually improve our ability to do these things? Can’t we do them all offline?
Kotsialou / Riley
As we mentioned, blockchain technology can keep a secure record of the data. So imagine that you have like a liquid democracy model. So all these delegations of votes can be stored securely, so that can make it more efficient for something quite good to happen.
Yes. So if you have complicated delegation rules that might be about delegation to the remote delegate to someone else, and someone else, someone else, and then even so if I ask the system who has my vote now? And it says, Fred, from Manchester, I could say well, why does this person have my vote? But if all that data is stored on the blockchain, then I can see that the rules have been accurately followed.
And you can see the whole chain.
Yeah, but if it was just a black box website that you don’t, you can’t see the chain at all, you just have to trust that website that the delegation chain has been correctly enforced.
So people will not trust if they cannot see. And you can say, okay, but technology is ready so we can do this thing. But it’s not only that, it’s not enough. It needs the technology to be ready. And then when the society is also ready to accept a new system, and the transparency and trust in general helps for people to believe that something that is complicated.
Irena Schneider
It looks like the main value proposition of blockchain technology in general is that it helps build trust in low trust situations, right. It helps us interact better with people that we don’t know very well and to make sure that they perform what they promise. Now trust is a really important issue in this day and age, particularly when we’re very vulnerable to data exploitation. Given the latest scandal with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, can we actually use blockchain to build trust with companies that use our data?
Kotsialou / Riley
Yes, I think that’s one of the use cases for blockchain in the future. So, even though some blockchains when you put data onto them, knowledge is all public. There is this all the architectures of blockchain, when you put your data on, you control the permissions on who can access that data. So you could say Facebook, you can access this picture or you can access this message or whatever. You can still technically have the situation when Facebook has the right to look at your data that they could copy it or so then you probably have to also have regulation and policy with the technology, but it is definitely technology feasible to retract permissions and give up permissions on your data which is on the blockchain.
Irena Schneider
So can we have a future social network that we log into just as we would log into Facebook, we have a user account and we have friends that we want to share information with. On the blockchain, can we basically make it secure such that our data that we share with friends is not capable of being accessed by a third party, and that we can actually sell our data ourselves without having somebody else sell it for us?
Kotsialou / Riley
Yeah, I think this definitely can happen. But you need the majority of the infrastructure around blockchain to be more developed. The scaling thing, for example, needs to be solved because we couldn’t have something like Facebook where there’s 3 billion users on the blockchain because that would just cause very big problems at the moment, but in the future, If you use this, this is definitely possible.
Irena Schneider
So would you need a giant army of validators in a giant network like that? Just looking at every piece of information that’s been posted?
Kotsialou / Riley
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you would need a lot of validators. If you wanted it to be decentralised and not similar to Facebook. They’re just one validator, exactly the same as Facebook now. So the use case of blockchain is totally decentralised. So you want as many people doing that as possible, but then maybe they’re earning a reward by doing it. So all the money that is related to your data that Facebook might take, now can be distributed for other networks for these validators, but also maybe distributed to you because you would have to, someone would have to pay you bits of cryptocurrency to allow your data to be accessible.
It’s actually you are in control of your data and you sell your data to whoever you want.
Irena Schneider
Yeah. So let’s say I’m on my blockchain Facebook account and I am posting certain information and different companies out there want to access my preferences so they can sell me products. I can actually make it so that people are going to have to pay me in Bitcoin to access some of my data. How likely do you think this is going to happen in the future?
Kotsialou / Riley
So I’m very optimistic about that. I can see in the future that a company would ask you to buy the right of seeing your post in Facebook for example. However what is happening at the moment and services like Google and Facebook are totally free. However, what they take from the users it’s extremely much more so the trade off at the moment it’s a bit unfair. And I see the data protection of users a very important use case of blockchain because you can have actual control over what you want to sell, for example, there might be specific periods that you might be interested in specific products. And you can allow specific companies to see your data because you can have targeted advertisements. But you want that thing. And then you can, you can take this right back to you.,
So I think it’s, it’s about power and control because at the moment, Google and Facebook have so much data on all of us, probably a lot more than a lot of governments do. So they have a significant amount of power to influence people, such as the Cambridge Analytica when they target people to vote for Trump. But now with a decentralised network, that power can start to come back to the individuals, which would be a good thing for society.
Irena Schneider
Fantastic, that’s all the time we have today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you both. Thank you so much for sitting down with us. And to all of our listeners. We hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. We’d like to give you an opportunity to engage with the topic further by sending your follow up questions to Matoula and Luke who are happy to respond and carry on the conversation and a follow up podcast on blockchain. If you’d like to ask them, ask them a question, you can tweet it to us, send us a message on Facebook or email it to us at info@csgskcl.ac.uk. Our handle on Twitter is @csgskcl. We look forward to seeing you again soon on the Governance Podcast.
