Solana

Solana is a rather new open source project, launching officially in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The project competes to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions contending against platforms like Ethereum. 

Solana (SOL) uses a unique hybrid consensus model. Proof-of-history (PoH) is combined with the proof-of-stake (PoS) to reach consensus on the blockchain. Proof-of-stake has been used by many other projects, but proof-of-history is a bit more noteworthy. PoH uses a verifiable delay function (VDF) to assign timestamps on the blockchain in a decentralized manner. Ethereum, by contrast, uses outside programs to assign a timestamp so transactions can be validated in the order they were received. On Solana, this forces block producers to go through the VDF to get to their assigned slot and produce a block. On the Solana chain, data is inserted into the sequence by appending the hash of the data of the previously generated states. The state, input data, and count are all published. This creates an upper bound on time and since PoH can reference a previous hash, the lower bound time is also known. Therefore the VDF will indicate the exact time of any transaction. This entire process is important because it allows the Solana chain to speed up transaction speed. Since everyone knows the exact time, validation can be completed much quicker. Solana now has the capability to process up to 50,000 transactions per second. 

Solana’s future looks bright with their Proof-of-history innovation. They also boast low fees and a growing marketplace for NFTs. 

Bitcoin Cash 

Bitcoin Cash was created in 2017 as a result of concerns about the scalability of Bitcoin. Developers and Bitcoin influencers could not come to terms on the best way to scale the blockchain. Some supporters pushed for the Segregated Witness update while others called for scaling onchain by increasing the block size. A hard fork occurred and two blockchains emerged, one called Bitcoin and one called Bitcoin Cash. 

Bitcoin Cash is the project that chose to scale onchain, and is considered by many to be the continuation of the original Bitcoin project as peer-to-peer electronic cash. Bitcoin moved on with SegWit which has been described as inelegant and complicated, creating two parallel sets of rules for evaluating transactions, but ignoring one of them. SegWit technically breaks Bitcoin’s security by empowering miners and anyone who can coerce them to steal balances. according to the Bitcoin protocol, all segwit transactions can be spent by anybody with no proof of authorization. That means that literally anyone can make a transaction that spends the bitcoins in a SegWit address. The “witness data” (which is the rules for who’s allowed to claim the outputs, and the proof that the rules were followed on the inputs that claim the outputs) is moved out of the main block and replaced with a simple “anyone can spend me, there are no rules and no proofs,” and it’s up to miners to know what the rules really are, ignore the “anyone can spend me” instruction, and instead apply the rules from the witness data. Even so, Bitcoin has continued to gain popularity and value, dominating the cryptocurrency space. 

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has not experienced the same rise as Bitcoin, but has been innovating nonetheless. The principal goal of Bitcoin Cash is to provide more economic freedom to those who need it in the world. In this regard they have been making strides. These include advancements to the blockchain such as introducing Schnorr Signatures, the implementation of a token standard called SLP, and a new difficulty algorithm. Bitcoin Cash has also been successful assisting communities in countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and South Sudan. Flipstarter is another exciting project for Bitcoin Cash. The project is a noncustodial crowdfunding tool that uses BCH. This tool empowers the community to use its own means to fund valuable projects for the BCH environment. Bitcoin Cash is also making moves with regard to institutional investment. Greyscale is now offering shares of the Bitcoin Cash Trust to institutions allowing institutions to disregard custody concerns. A new fungibility protocol directed at obscuring transactions on the BCH chain called Cashfusion was implemented, which is a big step forward for privacy. A whopping $3.2 billion has been anonymized via Cashfusion. Lastly, Bitcoin Cash is now a competitor in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. General Protocols launched Anyhedge and Detoken, which are two new DeFi tools designed to operate on top of the BCH protocol.

Avalanche

Avalanche (AVAX) launched it’s mainnet in 2020 and has grown leaps and bounds in 2021. The project  is a layer one blockchain that focuses on decentralized applications and custom blockchain networks. Avalanche is competing directly with Ethereum in the smart contract space and hopes their higher transaction output will give them competitive advantage. (TPS is upwards of 6500 currently) 

What makes Avalanche special is their use of three interoperable blockchains to achieve true decentralization at scale. The three chains are the Exchange Chain (X-Chain), the Contract Chain (C-Chain), and the Platform Chain (P-Chain). The X-Chain serves as an exchange for the AVAX tokens and other assets on the chain. This blockchain is run by the Avalanche consensus mechanism. This mechanism works to allow all nodes to process and validate transactions by enlisting a directed acyclic graph (DAG) protocol. By doing this, transactions are processed simultaneously, and validators can be statistically certain transactions are correct via their random polling. The C-Chain exists to run smart contracts and dApps. This chain includes the Avalanche Virtual Machine giving devs the ability to fork Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible dApps. The C-Chain is operated by the Snowman consensus mechanism, which is the implementation of the Avalanche consensus protocol for linear chains. The final blockchain in the trifecta is the P-Chain. This chain coordinates the network validators and controls subnets. Subnets are sets of validators. The P-Chain also runs on the Snowman consensus mechanism. 

We commend Avalanche for their continued development of blockchain bridges, which allows the transfer of data between two different blockchain projects.

This completes our blockchain highlights post for 2021.

DISCLAIMER: We do not endorse these projects; we are simply recognizing that these groups have made significant innovations in the blockchain space. Use our contact form if any info about these projects needs updating and/or if there are any new innovations in the blockchain or open source fields Follow My Vote should be made aware of.

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Under the new system, slated for public use in 2020, voters will indicate their choices on a touchscreen-operated tablet, after which a machine at the voting booth will print and process their paper ballots to be tallied. This is a leap from the ink-based system, which has remained unchanged since its adoption in 2003.

Currently the open source voting system is being developed and they are working on the user experience. The project is being tested on citizens for refinement of the interface. All demographics are getting a chance to test the system including senior citizens, people with disabilities, veterans, and speakers of foreign languages.

The county is also looking at ways to increase their voter turnout. One way they hope to do this is through a “poll pass”, which would allow voters to pre-check their vote on their phone and have a QR code scanned when they walk into the polling place. They hope that this will streamline the voting process and increase civic engagement.

LA County has partnered with Travis County in Texas to help build the open source voting system and carry out the plan.

We commend LA County for moving toward a more open source voting model! However this is a small step in the right direction. We would like to point out that people still have to go to the polls, wait in line, and their system will still waste paper.   Specialized and expensive machines will still have to be purchased for tallying ballots and recording the results. The fact is, election officials will still be the only people to tally the votes, meaning everyone must continue to trust them (The possibility of corruption still exists). We believe that one of the most important parts of an election is the vote recording process. It is not who votes that matters, but who counts the votes. And with Follow My Vote we put the vote counting in the hands of the people.

Check out all the benefits of our online open source voting platform here and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Source: Los Angeles County voting to shift from inkblots to open source

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

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Other organizations like the California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO) are also working to bring open-source principles to American elections. “Every ballot that’s cast in the United States is counted by a machine, so we owe it to the voters and the public to use the most secure, most transparent, most auditable technology,” says former CAVO President Kammi Foote, who is also the elected registrar of voters for Inyo County, California. “Open source has proven itself in the private sector,” says Foote. “Now governments around the world are starting to look at open source as a good business model.”

The primitiveness of our voting technology is surprising in an era when we routinely use smartphones, big data is revolutionizing business, and the Internet of Things is spreading across the landscape. As Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum puts it, “Why haven’t we been able to apply an equal level of innovation in the way we vote?”

Time and again Americans are reminded of how inadequate our voting technology is. In 2000 it was the disastrous Florida recount, with its infamous “hanging chads.” In 2004 it was the Ohio recount. In 2008 a Minnesota recount. There were also problems in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries and the 2013 Virginia attorney-general race, not to mention innumerable, less-publicized local problems around the country.

One reason is that the U.S. elections-administration structure is decentralized and sprawling, delegating control to individual states and cities, which select and buy their own voting technology. Explains Foote, “Different jurisdictions use different technologies according to their budgets and timelines.” Sometimes they cobble together several kinds of technologies that only barely meet their needs. With about 180,000 precincts in the U.S., the outcome is a mishmash of machines, regulated by surprisingly few standards. While the 2002 Help America Vote Act appropriated billions of dollars to states to replace their punch-card- and lever-based voting machines with electronic ones, it didn’t do much to give them better electronic technology to choose from.

Because the voting-machine market is dominated by just three companies — Election System and Software, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic — elections administrators are left with very few options. Without any real competition and regulated by testing standards that are a decade old, incumbent voting-machine vendors have zero incentive to update their systems. According to Foote, “How can they invest in new technologies when they don’t know what future governments will allow?”

So elections administrators frequently buy outdated machines, use them for an election, and then store them away until the next one. As Miller puts it, “A voting machine spends most of its life in silence in cold, dark warehouses … only to be woken up periodically for one day of sheer chaos.” And as the machines grow older, the risk of problems also grows. “We’re still using 20-year-old technology that we know is problematic,” says Foote. If elections administrators could instead pool their resources together to develop free, open-source software, then run it on cheap, off-the-shelf hardware, they could ensure that every jurisdiction, no matter its budget, has the same access to the best voting technology available.

Read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post

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