Bitcoin Magazine, which has featured Follow My Vote before, is actually a contributor on Nasdaq.com and is responsible for the article entitled “Four Ways the Blockchain Will Make the World a Better Place”

Here is what was written about us on Nasdaq.com:

“The blockchain is also being leveraged by startups that aim to improve the democratic process of regional and national elections. Election fraud is a common occurrence in developing countries, but as we have witnessed in the latest U.S. presidential elections, even the most developed countries can struggle to deliver a fair and democratic election process.

Voter registration and vote counting are two areas in which the distributed ledger technology can provide solutions. The blockchain can be used to digitally record all eligible voters and can be used to publicly record every single vote during elections. A startup that is tackling this area is Virginia-based Follow My Vote. Follow My Vote has developed an open-source digital voting platform for governments built on top of the distributed ledger technology with the aim to make elections more transparent and democratic.”

The article goes on to mention the following companies who are also making the world a better place with blockchain technology:

AID:Tech is currently working on digital identities for refugees.

Bitland & ChromaWay are separate companies both working on recording land ownership.

And BitGive tracks financial donations with blockchain.

The status of Follow My Vote

The article focuses on the application of our blockchain voting software for governments, and while it is true that our software could completely revolutionize government elections, we are not actively working with any governments to provide voting services at this time. Contact us if you represent a government, and wish to learn more about blockchain voting.

The truth is, our blockchain voting software has applications in numerous industries. To learn more, explore our use cases under the “Our Technology” tab.

Since our completion of the stake weighted voting software for BitShares, we are open to new contracts and business relationships.  We build open source end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting software.

Source: Nasdaq.com

Read this post on Steemit: steemit.com/@followmyvote

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post Nasdaq.com Features Follow My Vote & How Blockchain Will Make the World a Better Place appeared first on Follow My Vote.

2017 will be a big year for blockchain. In this blog post, we cover the top areas of the blockchain industry and what we can expect for blockchain in 2017.

There are 7 Banks that want to go live with blockchain in 2017.

A recent CoinDesk article reveals that 7 major European banks are partnering on a new blockchain-based trade finance platform called the Digital Trade Chain (DTC).

They have a tentative plan to launch in Q3-Q4 of 2017.

Those backing the platform’s development are looking to establish a secure place to manage open account trade transactions for both domestic and international commerce. DTC utilizes a permissioned ledger, with authorized parties allowed to submit transactions on the platform.

Open account trade transactions involve products being shipped before the actual payment is due, meaning that trust among the transaction’s parties is imperative. With DTC, those plugged into the system will be able to track the progression of those transactions, from initiation to settlement.

Thus far, the banks involved – KBC, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Société Générale and UniCredit – have signed a memorandum of understanding that lays out the basic groundwork for future development. That said, the banks are looking to launch DTC sometime in 2017, with an eye to building support in markets like France, Germany and the UK.

Conferences involving blockchain in 2017

A conference that caught our eye recently is the MIT Technology Review Conference: The Business of Blockchain.

The event will be held at the MIT Media Lab on April 18, 2017. The purpose of the one-day conference is “to explore the opportunities and challenges associated with public digital ledgers, or blockchains.”

Blockchains have the power to create entirely new kinds of businesses and more people are starting to realize this everyday.

Blockchain is still relatively new. The industry is still in its infancy. We can expect a variety of new use cases to be introduced in 2017.

Bitcoin in 2017

Bitcoin is the largest and most well know blockchain project. It is currently traded all around the world and more businesses are beginning to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.

In addition to growth and adoption, Bitcoin will focus on security and scalability. The DAO hack demonstrated the need for advanced security protocols for all blockchain projects. Scalability is also an issue.  “Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 3.3 tps (7 tps theoretical) due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB. Scalability will remain the holy grail of blockchain technology.”

Ethereum in 2017

Many people believe the public blockchain with the most attainable and impactful scalability roadmap is Ethereum.

Here are some of the Ethereum projects to look out for:

Infura is an enterprise-grade Ethereum-based blockchain infrastructure being used in IoT, and in conjunction with the public Ethereum blockchain and Inter Planetary File System (IPFS). Developers interface with Infura via Web3/RPC.

MetaMask is a bridge that allows you to visit the distributed web of tomorrow in your browser today. It allows you to run Ethereum dApps right in your browser without running a full Ethereum node.

BlockApps is an enterprise-grade Ethereum-based blockchain infrastructure solution used in banking, payments, insurance, supply chain and others. BlockApps is designed to provide a permissioned Ethereum environment which easily operates at scale, allowing applications to handle a high volume of transactions per second. Developers can build interfaces with their permissioned blockchain using a REST API.

Steemit in 2017

Steemit.com is the world’s fastest growing decentralized social media platform. Steemit connects to a robust blockchain database called Steem. This blockchain database distributes rewards in cryptocurrency to the users who bring the best content (blogs, comments, videos etc.) to the Steemit site.

On January 17th, 2017 Steemit.com was featured on Forbes.com. Author, Roger Aitken covered the 2017 comprehensive roadmap for Steemit.com.

The big news surrounds the Steemit.com migration to Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest hosting provider. Steemit has racked up over 120,000 registered users in around 6 months and they need to be able to handle more traffic as the platform grows.

Steemit Co-founder & CEO, Ned Scott is quoted several times throughout the article:

 “2017 will be our banner year and the community will see a ton of upgrades from now until the end of March. Migrating hosting to reputable third parties allows us to focus all of our time and attention on development of the site, software, and community – not on scaling or maintaining servers or hosting infrastructure.”

Follow My Vote in 2017

Follow My Vote continues to pioneer end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting software in 2017. See our Github repo for updates on our software.

In 2016, we managed to get featured on Forbes.com and successfully integrated our stake-weighted voting software with the BitShares blockchain.

It’s important to note that, when designing our stake-weighted voting system’s architecture, we designed it in such a way to ensure that our blockchain voting software was portable from one blockchain to another. (contact us if you are interested in a custom blockchain voting solution)

2016 was filled with momentous achievements for Follow My Vote. Here you can see we reached out to and networked with some of the top technology leaders and politicians. (Gary Johnson & John McAfee featured)

We anticipate that 2017 will be filled with many Follow My Vote software releases and partnerships, in an effort to bring end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting to the world.

Learn about our stake weighted blockchain voting software.

Learn about our 1 person 1 vote blockchain voting software.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post What’s In Store For Blockchain In 2017? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

With all the technology we have these days, it is truly amazing that there has been little to no innovation in the voting scene, UNTIL NOW! Here is a piece of what Nelson wrote about Follow My Vote and blockchain voting:

Blockchain could be adapted for elections to allow early voting from smartphones; allow second-by-second, public audit transparency of the ballot; allow you to change your vote right up to the poll close; and provide instant results right then and there.

Follow My Vote is a blockchain-based voting software solution that promises to revolutionize elections.

It works along the same principals as Bitcoin, where an encrypted ledger is distributed using computer power. That open-source, secure, peer-to-peer asset maintenance and payment system could be mimicked for numerous other purposes, many say.

That includes banking, distributed patient medical data, real estate transactions and elections. I wrote about a private blockchain operating system recently that promises to fix banking software problems.

Follow My Vote says its system, as with other blockchains, removes vulnerabilities. Fraud, external influence such as intimidation, miscounting and other shenanigans are eliminated.

Plus, voting would join the 21st century à la social media. The individual’s actual vote, not just his post-vote tweet or polling station’s exit poll, becomes an element in play on election day.

Transparency is a benefit, too, the organization says of yet-to-be adopted software.

After Nelson discussed Follow My Vote, he went on to explain how blockchain technology works. The explanation is short and to the point.

Roughly, blockchain works by securely managing a database via network nodes that all maintain a copy of the ledger. It’s supposedly impossible to scam because each node has a copy of the database, and the pending transactions, added in a block, are determined as valid through hash markings.

Head over to Network World to read the rest of the article.

If you are interested in learning more about how blockchains work, watch Follow My Vote CTO, Nathan Hourt, break it down in this video.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post Network World Talks Follow My Vote & Blockchains appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Can’t go back to the past – paper ballots

In David Dill’s article in the Stanford news, he believes that paper ballots is the gold standard we should stick to. But in reality, it’s not like we can go back to paper votes either, the amount of work of tabulating and counting the votes will only increase as the United States’ population increases.  The commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections during a panel about America’s voting technology crisis states: (46:30 in the video below)

Paper ballots also aren’t cheap. We have localities … Fairfax County, for example, they have scanning equipment and the ballots that they got printed. We are talking close to $100,000 just for ballot printing (…) It’s not realistic to expect hand counting after the election, it’s just an incredible task the amount of people and resources required. As Doug mentioned, it also isn’t just as accurate.

David Dill might be a successful computer scientist, but he would probably be a starving economist. The Country just can’t afford to spend $100,000 per county on 3,143 counties in the United States, that’s over 300 billion dollars per election.

The current systems just aren’t working

Dill also talked about how the voting systems can easily be hacked, and there is truth to the statement. The guardian reported in April 2015 that “Touchscreen voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002 and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to a state report.” A computer scientist at tech research group SRI International stated that “The AVS WinVote machines, used in three presidential elections in Virginia, ‘would get an F-minus‘ in security.” With both our current system and past system realistically unusable, what do we do you might ask.

The Solution

The solution to this problem is end-to-end verifiable online voting. Follow My Vote hopes to be the lead innovator in this new technology. Through cryptographically secure voting, every machine has to be registered to a user who has been verified through a picture and government ID card along with an ID Key. Each user then has the ability to vote only once, but can change their vote until the poll closes. The blockchain technology allows an individual to audit their vote or the entire election if they wanted to.

About the author: David Brock is a Marketing Intern of Follow My Vote.

The post Paper Ballots and Current Voting Systems are not Secure nor Feasible appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Upon creating, launching, and marketing Follow My Vote’s Kickstarter campaign, it has become quite clear that I made some mistakes I now know to avoid with future crowdfunding campaigns. After the review, we compiled the 8 biggest mistakes to avoid when launching your Kickstarter.

1) Not Keeping Your Feet On The Ground

If the fundraising goal you are planning on setting seems too high, it probably is set to high. When most people see a huge fundraising goal on a Kickstarter project, they immediately consider it unrealistic and usually choose not to fund campaign in fear of being associated to something that was considered a failure, as opposed to a success.

It goes without saying that launching our Kickstarter with a goal of raising $3,210,000 definitely scared a lot of would be contributors away.

2) Not Sending The Right Message

When creating your Kickstarter campaign, make sure that the message is clear, concise, and cohesive.

By choosing such an astronomically high fundraising goal, another mistake I believe I made was sending the wrong impression about:

– who we are at Follow My Vote
– what we are trying to accomplish in the near term
– what we are willing to sacrifice to make it happen

Based on the way our Kickstarter was positioned, some people may have gotten the impression that this was some sort of get rich quick scheme for us. To be clear, our Kickstarter was in no way, shape, or form meant to be a cash grab. We’re not in this to get rich. We are in this to solve a problem.

Not only have I personally invested my life savings into this project, it’s important for the public to know that we are paying ourselves next to nothing to work on this project on behalf of the people. To be completely transparent, our salaries are set at $2200/month. This means that each of us on the core team (Will, Nathan, and I) are making just $26,400/year, and that’s before Uncle Sam takes his cut. After taxes, we are looking at around $1600/month on which to survive, and we have the pay stubs to prove it. We are stretching every dollar that we have, while making just enough money to make our ends meet.

We are a lean startup; it is in our DNA. In proposing a project budget that would result paying a large portion of our staff six-figure salaries, we admittedly strayed from our path. In our recruiting efforts, we have always chosen to hire people that are truly passionate about helping us fulfill our mission and less concerned about how much money they are getting paid to do so.

To continue to be successful, we must stay true to ourselves, put the mission above all else, and be willing to work at or below what the market demands. And, as we look to grow our team, we want to attract others that are willing and able to do the same.

3) Not Breaking down Your Big Project Into Smaller Projects

Kickstarter campaigns with smaller fundraising goals typically get funded. The larger the fundraising goal, the less likely the campaign will get successfully funded. Therefore, if you have big ambitious plans in your future, it’s best to break down your Kickstarter campaign into multiple projects for each stage of your journey, so I’m learning.

Although we have very ambitious plans to put a fully-functioning software application into the Google Play and Apple App Stores that supports end-to-end verifiable elections hosted on the blockchain, as early as the summer of 2017, it doesn’t mean that we should look to raise all the money we think we will need to make it happen in a single Kickstarter campaign.

At this point, we should be looking to raise just enough money to get us to our near term goal of developing software capable of hosting a mock election in parallel to the United States Presidential Election of 2016.

4) Not Taking Advantage of Kickstarter’s Viral Algorithm

Kickstarter campaign creators all want their projects to go viral. What I’ve learned from my research is that, if you meet 30% of your goal within the first 3 days of your campaign, your campaign will be picked up by Kickstarter’s viral algorithm. Having reached 30% of your goal just 3 days after launch, Kickstarter sees your project as one that is highly likely to get funded, and they will start featuring your campaign on the Kickstarter website and in emails that go out to other Kickstarter users.

Prior to launching our Kickstarter campaign, I wasn’t aware of this viral aspect of Kickstarter. I also had no idea how people we’d be able to reach and/or how much they’d be willing to contribute once they saw our project. One thing I know now is that raising over $1,000,000 on Kickstarter in 3 days is completely unrealistic for any campaign.

5) Making Your Kickstarter Not Inclusive To Everyone

The more inclusive your Kickstarter campaign is, the more likely it will be successful. If anyone can contribute, the chances are that, more people will contribute. It is strictly a numbers game.

In specifically stating that we are targeting Millennials with our Kickstarter campaign, we instantly alienated 65% of the population. We are developing verifiable voting software for people of all ages to use to conveniently and securely vote from their own device on Election Day, so naturally our Kickstarter campaign should welcome contributions from people of all ages.

6) Not Keeping It Short & Sweet

As a best practice, Kickstarter recommends setting your Kickstarter campaign duration to 30 days or less. However, when setting the duration, you are allowed up to 60 days to run your Kickstarter campaign. So, I did.

Upon doing so, I remember thinking, “If we are going to raise $3,210,000, we are going to need as much time as we can get.” You’d think that giving yourself more time to raise money would be the smart thing to do, right? However, one thing I failed to realize is that, if you choose to run your campaign for longer than 30 days, what you’re really saying is that you are not confident that you can get your campaign funded in 30 days. With this in mind, people will pick up on your lack of confidence and may avoid contributing to your Kickstart campaign altogether.

Setting a shorter duration not only exudes confidence, which can be contagious, it also create a sense of urgency for people to donate in fear of missing an opportunity to be a part of a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign.

7) Picking A Poor Launch Date & Not Contacting Your Supporters Immediately

Your existing network of supporters will likely be willing to contribute to your Kickstarter campaign. So, when picking the launch date for your Kickstarter campaign, be sure to pick a date when you have some down time to focus on actively reaching out to your supporters. Upon launching your Kickstarter campaign, take a few minutes out of your day to craft a brief message that notifies each of your supporters about the launch and personally invites them to be contributor to your Kickstarter campaign.

This is another area where I clearly made a few mistakes.

When picking our Kickstarter campaign’s launch date, I chose to symbolically launch our Kickstarter campaign on April 13th, in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. In hindsight, it was not the best timing for our launch date, as I had two week long business trips lined up and was forced to wait until I got back to our offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, to begin the outreach process.

To make matters worse, having already delayed my initial outreach emails by two weeks, I spent yet another week crafting comprehensive heart-felt messages that I thought would really appeal to my supporters. Shortly after sending them out, I received some feedback from our supporters that, although my personal messages were powerful and moving, they were way too long. In the age of 140 character tweets fighting for everyone’s attention, most people would have been immediately stopped reading the email as soon as they realized how long it was.

8) Spending Too Much Money On Marketing

If people aren’t contributing to your Kickstarter at the rate you were expecting, dumping money into costly paid marketing campaigns isn’t likely to make a big difference. The chances are that you have a bigger issue than you realize. Take a step back, figure out what’s really wrong with your Kickstarter campaign, and fix it.

In our case, we made all of the above mistakes. And, being that Kickstarter will not allow you to change your fundraising goal, once you launch your Kickstarter campaign, we now have one of two options:

1) fix our mistakes and reboot
2) accept defeat and move on

Never fear. It’s not over for us. We will never admit defeat. We will never give up. We are fully committed to fulfilling our mission. Failure is simply not an option. We will always find a way to win and, with Kickstarter, it is no different.

I hope you take to heart what we have learned and remember the mistakes to avoid when launching your Kickstarter if you decide to go the crowdfunding route.

Other companies have launched Kickstarter campaigns that failed their first time around, only to become a huge success the second time around. For instance, the chart below features several gaming projects that had successful Kickstarter reboots:

SOURCE: http://stonemaiergames.com/kickstarter-lesson-50-how-to-reboot-an-unsuccessful-kickstarter-project/

Knowing what we know now, I’m proudly announcing Follow My Vote’s decision to reboot our Kickstarter campaign on June 3rd, 2016.

If you have contributed to our first Kickstarter campaign, I’d like to sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing so. You are now considered family to me. If there is anything that I could ever do for you, just let me know. I trust that we can count on you to contribute to our new campaign.

Keep in mind, if we reach 30% of our goal within the first 3 days of the campaign, we will be able to take advantage of Kickstarter’s viral algorithm (as mentioned in lesson #4).

Mark your calendars now! And, on June 3rd, be sure to visit this link to make your contribution: Kickstarter Reboot.

About the author: Adam Ernest is the CEO & Co-founder of Follow My Vote.

The post 8 Mistakes To Avoid When Launching Your Kickstarter appeared first on Follow My Vote.

The post Google Tries Their Own Voting System: A Liquid Democracy Experiment appeared first on Follow My Vote.

A consensus has formed around the proposition that polling, especially in multi-candidate presidential races, has become inaccurate and unreliable.

This judgment, rendered by respected experts, exposes the absurdity and corruption of the recent decision by the Commission on Presidential Debates to continue using polls to determine who will be on the stage in the fall of 2016.

Jill Lepore’s excellent article in the Nov. 16 issue of The New Yorker is only the latest in a series of authoritative pieces providing evidence of how “horse-race” polling isn’t working anymore – and explaining why. Dan Balz made similar points in a Washington Post article on Nov. 7. Michael Barone, the dean of election analysts, co-founder of The Almanac of American Politics, and pollster himself for nine years, made the case against polling on Nov. 11 in the Wall Street Journal. He also quoted his American Enterprise Institute colleague, Karlyn Bowman, saying that this may be “the end of polling as we know it.”

The New York Times has run several pieces on the subject, including an op-ed in June by Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers scholar who is past president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research.

Dr. Zukin concluded:

“We are less sure how to conduct good survey research now than we were four years ago, and much less than eight years ago… In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we’re off base.”

The evidence abounds. It includes the Israeli and British elections and, on Nov. 3, the Kentucky governor’s race. The polls had the Democrat winning, but the Republican won in what was practically a landslide, 53% to 44%.

The reasons for the declining accuracy of polls are now well known:

• sharply falling response rates by voters called for their opinions,
• the difficulty and expense involved in reaching people who have abandoned land lines for cell phones (a law bans auto-dialing to mobile phones),
• and the near-impossibility of adjusting results to achieve the proper weighting of demographic groups and to determine which of the respondents will actually show up to vote.

As a result, Gallup, the premier U.S. polling organization, announced recently that it would not poll for the primaries this year and might not poll for the general election either.

But the main problem with polling is the uses to which it is being put – especially making it the main criterion for admission to debates. Lepore quotes Scott Keeter, director of survey research for Pew: “I don’t think polling is really up to the task of deciding the field for the headliner debate.”

Read more at: ivn.us

The post Polls Are Ineffective, So Why Do We Trust Them? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Talk to most people about Bitcoin and several things come to mind: a secretive inventor, illicit marketplaces and the failure of one of its largest exchanges. Not exactly the kind of images most entrepreneurs want to be associated with.

But it turns out that currency might not be the most exciting thing to come out of the Bitcoin craze. Instead, it’s the technology that makes Bitcoin work, known as the blockchain, which will be truly revolutionary.

Before leaping ahead, a word on how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin, of course, is a digital currency that can be used like cash to pay for a growing number of goods and services. When someone uses Bitcoin to, say, buy a pizza, that transaction is recorded on a “block,” or a file of data. Once a block is full (determined by time — on average every 10 minutes — rather than quantity), the next block to be created incorporates computer code that refers to the preceding block — thereby building a permanent string of records known as the blockchain.
Read more at: forbes.com

The post Blockchain Potential appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Carter, 90, said he initially thought he had only weeks to live when he first learned of the diagnosis. He’s now more optimistic, placing his fate in the hands of God. At the news conference in Atlanta where he sat alone before a bank of reporters and cameras, Carter said he would begin a course of radiation therapy on Thursday afternoon.

“I have had a wonderful life,” Carter said with the same unsparing honesty and meticulous detail that marked his presidency. “I’m ready for anything and I’m looking forward to new adventure,” Carter said, in the 40-minute appearance before the cameras, in which he frequently beamed his huge smile and never fell prey to emotion.

“It is in the hands of God, whom I worship.”

Carter, speaking slowly and softly and wearing a coat and tie with blue jeans, said he had been overwhelmed with phone calls of support — including outreach from Secretary of State John Kerry and former presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush, who called at once. Carter said he wasn’t in a lot of discomfort but had some shoulder pain.

Read more at: cnn.com.

The post Former President Jimmy Carter’s Diagnosis appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Recently, Tsipras decided to put the power directly in the hands of the people via a national Greek referendum.  Eurozone leaders watched impassively as 60% of Greeks voted against accepting the bailout proposal, and instead to send the negotiators back to the drawing board.  While the outcome of their vote isn’t surprising, how they voted is.

The video shows a group of what are presumed to be poll officials first dumping a box of votes onto a pair of side-by-side tables, and then gathering the votes by hand into ambiguous piles.  This methodology is troubling, as the economic crisis has polarized the Greek people and there are embittered advocates in both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps.  Between the harsh austerity measures which Greeks have labored under for years, and Tsipras’ highly influential campaign for a ‘no’ vote in the Greek referendum, it is not unthinkable that a well-meaning poll worker abused his or her position to unduly influence the vote.  So while investors around the world waited nervously for the outcome of the referendum,  3,558,450 votes were cast and shoddily hand-counted.

This is just one of many situations in which online voting software, like Follow My Vote’s, would have delivered a faster, more trustworthy, and transparent election result and expedited a negotiation process which has been a cause of much anxiety for global investors and spiked volatility in European markets.  Put simply, the fact that such archaic voting methods were used in a decision as important as the Greek referendum underscores the need for more modern voting practices; especially in a globalized world where the decisions of a handful of Greeks affects not only the Greek economy but that of the entire world.

The post Questionable Voting Practices in the Greek Referendum? You Decide. appeared first on Follow My Vote.