Hi guys, as an engaged investor, I have been wondering whether Firo might have an interesting opportunity we could explore further. Back in 2018, our technology was successfully used for a major election in Thailand — a real-world example of secure and anonymous e-voting.
Given the growing global demand for trusted digital voting solutions, Firo seems well positioned in this field.
So I would like to ask openly:
Were there reasons why this application was not pursued further?
And could it make sense to reconsider this strength in the future?
I’m excited to discuss and hearing your thoughts and perspectives
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Were there reasons why this application was not pursued further?
If your talking elections the obvious answer is dystopian tyrants lol.
From research into this experiment though I would say scalability issues when handling high volume transactions required for large-scale elections. The other being regulatory and legal hurdles.
If your talking about a voting mechanism for the project and not elections I’m pretty sure that is what DAO is. A good example of that is Decred with their on chain voting.
Hi apologies for not responding to this sooner @Dubaiali
Note that Zcoin’s use in the Thai election was rather rudimentary and meant to meet a need rather than be a perfect design. We learnt a lot from that experience and came up with Aura: private voting with reduced trust on tallying authorities.
While the cryptographic design is well understood, it would have required additional funding (around 200k USD) and is rather overkill for Firo voting. While our solution is pretty good and we did try to explore opportunities to explore this further, the entities that we contacted preferred simpler solutions that already had a full product (albeit had more centralized control) and/or were controlled by contractors that they were familiar with. The main benefit of our system is the reduced need for trust in the election organizers but most decision makers don’t see the huge value in this.
While we could probably roll out another startup to pursue this, my heart lies with Firo and its mission rather than starting yet another project and dividing my attention further.