SoK: Uncentralisable Ledgers and their Impact on Voting Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores uncentralisable ledgers, their properties, and potential to revolutionize voting systems and identity management by ensuring everlasting decentralization and trustlessness.

Contribution

It introduces the concepts of strong and soft uncentralisability, links them to perfect forkability, and proposes uncentralisable ledgers as a new cryptographic primitive for voting and identity.

Findings

Uncentralisable ledgers enable trustless voting systems.

Blockchain-based voting projects are reviewed.

Self-sovereign identity is a key application of uncentralisable ledgers.

Abstract

As we observe a trend towards the recentralisation of the Internet, this paper raises the question of guaranteeing an everlasting decentralisation. We introduce the properties of strong and soft uncentralisability in order to describe systems in which all authorities can be untrusted at any time without affecting the system. We link the soft uncentralisability to another property called perfect forkability. Using that knowledge, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called uncentralisable ledger and study its properties. We use those properties to analyse what an uncentralisable ledger may offer to classic electronic voting systems and how it opens up the realm of possibilities for completely new voting mechanisms. We review a list of selected projects that implement voting systems using blockchain technol- ogy. We then conclude that the true revolutionary feature enabled by uncentralisable ledgers is a self-sovereign and distributed identity provider.