> Blockchain allows for anonymous participation, so to say.
No, different agents are voting. Democracy could be totally anonymous, in principle- get a secret key, generate a valid public one-time key, and your vote is verifiably valid but nobody has any idea who voted, much less who they voted for. If everyone is registered, you don't even have any useful information about who could have voted. Even in reality, your identity is discarded as soon as possible.
Blockchains are inherently public. Validators are NOT anonymously participating- they may be owned anonymously, but the owner isn't the one with the actual right to vote.
It's not just a semantic difference. In a real election, your ballot comes in a voter envelope. The ballot is anonymous inside the envelope, and the envelope is opened blind, but kept until the election is over. If they get two envelopes from the same person, they know it was a fraudulent vote. Once those envelopes are thrown out, there is nothing tying you to an election at all.
On the blockchain you effectively never throw out the voter envelope. Your vote -and what you voted for- can both be tied back to you via ownership of the voting agent. There is zero inherent protection of that relationship. All protection is done externally and the system does not do anything more than making sure it's not actively impossible to conceal your identity.
The vote is public, yes, but the participation is anonymous. I can easily set up two different miners, both controlled by me, but with different addresses. There is not generally an easy way of looking up agent ownership.
And while participation could in theory be anonymous for democracies, as you've described, I'm not aware of any country that actually does that?
No, different agents are voting. Democracy could be totally anonymous, in principle- get a secret key, generate a valid public one-time key, and your vote is verifiably valid but nobody has any idea who voted, much less who they voted for. If everyone is registered, you don't even have any useful information about who could have voted. Even in reality, your identity is discarded as soon as possible.
Blockchains are inherently public. Validators are NOT anonymously participating- they may be owned anonymously, but the owner isn't the one with the actual right to vote.
It's not just a semantic difference. In a real election, your ballot comes in a voter envelope. The ballot is anonymous inside the envelope, and the envelope is opened blind, but kept until the election is over. If they get two envelopes from the same person, they know it was a fraudulent vote. Once those envelopes are thrown out, there is nothing tying you to an election at all.
On the blockchain you effectively never throw out the voter envelope. Your vote -and what you voted for- can both be tied back to you via ownership of the voting agent. There is zero inherent protection of that relationship. All protection is done externally and the system does not do anything more than making sure it's not actively impossible to conceal your identity.