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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

Is there any technical/security benefit at all to private blockchains? Or even more generously, lightly-mined public blockchains? It seems that in either of those scenarios, you lose the decentralized validation and consensus brought about by a bunch of people incentivized to compete with one another to burn electricity.

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To push this further, I was working on a research paper with Ron Rivest, Neha Narula (head of MIT's decentralized currency initiative), and Sunoo Park (a wonderful applied cryptographer) on whether blockchains in general could be helpful in casting and tallying.

We're skeptical.

See: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

But if everyone used a public blockchain, with proof of work + user-level signatures for each vote cast, wouldn't it be far more auditable than any current system? Ignoring implementation details, reaching a point where anyone could have a way to audit that their vote was counted (correctly) seems very useful. Using this sort of model, it theoretically wouldn't matter who completes the proof of work as long as the results are audited.

You don't need blockchain to enable voters to verify "that their vote has been counted correctly". Several cryptographic voting schemes already provide this feature (for example, Civitas and Floating Receipts).

> Is there any technical/security benefit at all to private blockchains?

It really depends on what you want out of your blockchain.

For example, the backend of git is essentially a blockchain. It's extremely useful, even for a solo developer.

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