A privacy-preserving, decentralized and functional Bitcoin e-voting protocol

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized Bitcoin-based voting protocol that ensures privacy, security, and efficiency by combining shuffling mechanisms and threshold signatures, reducing transactions and enhancing functionality.

Contribution

It presents a novel privacy-preserving voting protocol leveraging Bitcoin, with improved efficiency and functionality over existing schemes.

Findings

Protocol guarantees correctness, decentralization, and privacy.

Fewer transactions compared to other schemes.

Achieves a more functional voting method.

Abstract

Bitcoin, as a decentralized digital currency, has caused extensive research interest. There are many studies based on related protocols on Bitcoin, Bitcoin-based voting protocols also received attention in related literature. In this paper, we propose a Bitcoin-based decentralized privacy-preserving voting mechanism. It is assumed that there are n voters and m candidates. The candidate who obtains t ballots can get x Bitcoins from each voter, namely nx Bitcoins in total. We use a shuffling mechanism to protect voter's voting privacy, at the same time, decentralized threshold signatures were used to guarantee security and assign voting rights. The protocol can achieve correctness, decentralization and privacy-preservings. By contrast with other schemes, our protocol has a smaller number of transactions and can achieve a more functional voting method.