Iowa Democrats could have simply transferred a predetermined sum of
Bitcoin to signal which candidate received their precinct’s delegates.
Had they done so, the blockchain’s public ledger would have conveyed the
necessary information in a transparent, easily verified way. And
because the DNC would just be sending Bitcoin to itself, the process
wouldn’t have cost it much of anything.
For example, the Dems could have agreed that a win for X in a precinct would entail sending Y mBTC (.001 of a Bitcoin).
Say:
Biden 1 mBTC
Buttigieg 2 mBTC
Klobuchar 3 mBTC
Sanders 4 mBTC
Warren 5 mBTC
And so forth. (And Bloomberg can buy his own Bitcoin.)
This year, the Dems are also promising to report raw vote counts from the first and second alignment rounds. Nobody seems to care, perhaps due to the delegate reporting snafu, but they could report those numbers in the same fashion by adding satoshi (millionths of a Bitcoin) to the candidate’s assigned mBTC.
In the United States, about 3.5 million people work as software developers, some 30,000 in Iowa alone. Not all code in Solidity or other blockchain languages but this stuff is far from esoteric at this point.
To paraphrase F. A. Heyk according to his famous essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society: “Those who claim the right to run society are not nearly as knowledgeable or as skilled as they presume.”
The world is a big, scary, complex place, too complex for any one of us to grasp, let alone control. That is why nobody should presume to be able to control it and all of the candidates in both parties deserve the caucus results initially reported.
