IACR News item: 16 October 2015
Zhichao Zhao, T-H. Hubert Chan
ePrint Reportexpressive enough to setup digital contracts whose fund transfer can be enforced automatically.
In this paper, we design protocols for the bitcoin
voting problem, in which there are n voters, each of which wishes to fund exactly one of two candidates A and B. The winning candidate is determined by majority voting, while the privacy of individual vote is preserved. Moreover, the decision is irrevocable in the sense
that once the outcome is revealed, the winning candidate is guaranteed to have the funding from all n voters.
As in previous works, each voter is incentivized to follow the protocol by being required to put a deposit in the system, which will be used as compensation if he deviates from the protocol. Our solution is similar to previous protocols used for lottery, but needs
an additional phase to distribute secret random numbers via zero-knowledge-proofs. Moreover, we have resolved a security issue in previous protocols that could prevent compensation from being paid.
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