From my fairly limited knowledge it seems Snapps lend themselves well to situations that require both validation and privacy. I know this has been mentioned in use cases… one obvious application of this in ‘real world’ situations would be a Snapp that could be used to enable voting.
Just on a basic level this could work for local councils, small societies, clubs, schools etc, where they could plug in their members database (excel / mailing list etc) into the Snapp and away they go and be 100% sure the results are accurate.
What do others think about this and the practicalities/logistics of creating a Snapp that could be used for this purpose?
Yeah I think if anyone wants a neutral private voting platform, it could be a really good fit (and a good early Snapps product too).
Got me thinking, who good first users would be, I’d guess any vote that’s over something particularly sensitive, I wonder what those are (maybe union voting?)
Unions would be a good fit, also local councils, school / colleges. There’s a growing trend for fan ownership in sports too, here is a (slightly old) List of fan-owned sports teams - Wikipedia there are a lot!
In some cases, knowing information such as ethnicity can be important. Some people may not want to share their ethnicity. Anonymous voting powered by Mina would be a nice option.
Maybe we could implement something that connects with Estonia’s digital identity to enable voting on anything they deem to be important? For example, we could create an open platform with a nice UI/UX that would make it easy for citizens with digital IDs to vote for anything, given that such citizens meet the criteria defined in the Snark (for example, a citizen of Estonia that’s registered in the X neighbourhood).
PS: Estonia has e-voting for their government elections.
That sounds like an amazing idea. Can anyone from a technical perspective roadmap the technical barriers / requirements to logistically implement something like this?
Hi Pete! I don’t live in Estonia. The country came to my mind because I always heard many great things from them and how they are welcoming to new technologies and blockchain:
Estonia may perhaps be the earliest adopter of distributed ledger technology at a governmental level. As early as 2007, even before the publication of the Bitcoin white paper, the Estonian government was already testing blockchain applications as part of a resolution to be resilient to outsider cyberattacks. e-Estonia, a government policy to facilitate citizen interactions with the state through the use of electronic solutions, has been testing and implementing blockchain in relation to public services for many years. So much so that blockchain is has been tested across a wide range of government services and data registries, such as the national health, judicial, legislative, security and commercial code systems, with plans to extend its use to other spheres such as personal medicine, cyber-security and data embassies. The Estonian government has harnessed the power of blockchain, which, by the very way it functions, is helping to save millions of lives and resources, while mitigating the potential manipulation of sensitive data (such as health data, intelligence information, legislation-related records, etc.) or smart devices (such as military machinery, hospital equipment, intelligent cars etc.).
The entire article can be found here.
From the O1 side, once we have Snapps running, I think the next step would be to create the ability of communicating with Oracles to bridge the connection between Mina and their e-gov APIs.
Awesome idea Joe! I suppose the development is permissionless, right? In that no one can block the access of Mina’s snapp to connect to their ID API or e-voting system?
Yep, it looks like there’s an API for that! I imagine there’d be an UI for them to log in with their government credentials, which would then be used to validate the requirements of a proof for voting (or whatever other use cases we find interesting).
that’s really fantastic. The API could also be used as a source of KYC for Estonian people for participating on-chain activities, and should be not that difficult to port to other countries as well.
Hi - just want to make sure you are aware of the background of Estonian ID - the blockchain element is a bit of a myth unfortunately (it’s more a centralized one way hash stored on a smart card).
Still a root of trust of sorts, just centralized, not DLT…
Thanks for sharing. Mina’s point is, once the zkOracles launches, it can fetch information from web pages, so no need for the data source to be on a blockchain.
