[funky music] Welcome back to Bitcoin, Season 2 from Blockspace Media.
Bitcoin Season 2 is about new ideas and new conversations on Bitcoin. It's the technical and the cultural mixed together for an exciting era of new topics on the oldest blockchain.
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So today, I've got Carlino of SimpleProof.com, an election auditing effort, and he's explaining, I think, an underrepresented story of the past year, which is timestamping election results, particularly this very interesting event in Guatemala.
It's already been implemented at scale and already been used to prevent election fraud. So I'm gonna bring up Car- Carlos Carlino. Welcome to Bitcoin Season 2. Appreciate it, Charlie. It's great to be here.
So I mentioned, like, I'm kinda surprised I hadn't heard very much of this the past year.
Maybe it didn't get circulated in Bitcoin cir- you know, narrative or circles, but, you know, we hear all about, like, Bitcoin in El Salvador.
But it seems to be that, like, reducing or preventing election fraud in another Central American co- country like Guatemala is almost more impactful, and, you know, this audience is of, of Bitcoin Season 2 is a little more ordinals and inscriptions, like, crossover.
This might resonate with them. I'll b- I'll back up, and I'll get out of the way. [laughs] Explain to me what you guys did in Guatemala last year.
Well, I appreciate that, and, uh, uh, for those that don't know, Guatemala is next door to El Salvador, the country right after Mexico, so it's literally, like, two borders away.
And yeah, I was born and raised in Guatemala, and we have a very interesting and, and awesome voting system that I got the opportunity to be a part of in 2011 and 2015, where what we do is we distribute all registered voters based on their, you know, residential address that they report, you know, when they, you know, get their ID or whatever, and they're assigned to these voting tables.
And so the voting tables are manned by citizen volunteers that are just, y- basically select- called upon in a very decentralized way.
In 2023, those were 25,000 voting tables, and each one had around 400 citizens assigned to them.
So in total, Guatemala has 9.2 million voters, registered voters, that get distributed out to these 25,000 tables as of 2023.
So I had this experience in 2011, 2015, where I was at this table doing this work and kind of realized that our voting system and voting systems in general are consensus algorithms, right?
It's just a really complicated way for a ton of people to make a decision about something, right?
And in the case of paper-based consensus algorithms, or paper-based voting, it essentially boils down to proof of work, right?
So if you don't have machines doing the computing and all that, and it's just a bunch of people, you know, 'cause literally what you do at the end of the voting day is you take out the ballots, you show them in front of witnesses, and you literally, like, just write down, "All right, one vote for Charlie," right?
And then you pull out the other one that's like, "Oh, another vote for, you know, Bob," or whatever, right?
So it's all done paper-based, and so it is, is this proof-of-work consensus algorithm that at the end of the voting day, as a voting table volunteer, what you do, after you show this to everyone, is you create a document that has the totals of your table.
And so instead of having 9.2 million, you know, documents that you have to, you know, verify, you actually boil it down to one document per table, which turns into 25,000 per election in 2023.
And in 2019, when I was involved again in this, a, a, a, a f- few family members ran for office, and they asked for my help, and so I became a witness of the system.
And at the end of election night, all of these documents are scanned and published on the internet. And so in 2019, we had this situation where the website crashed. I was plugged into the database.
I could see it get nuked and then rebooted with 100,000 fresh JPEGs and then nuked again and reboo- booted with 100,000 fresh JPEGs. And that happened over the course of six days.
So you're like, [laughs] "You know, do I believe these JPEGs?" And so we... It was very scarring.
Guatemala had never gone through that in 2019, and it led to the first serious accusations of election fraud from all walks of life. Like, this wasn't a left-right issue in 2019.
There were plenty of people from all walks of life accusing a system of election fraud. Again, that was 2019.
And so I did a bunch of work as an election auditor to, you know, demonstrate that this was all nonsense, and we had to improve the system.
That's when I discovered the Open Timestamps protocol developed by Peter Todd.Which I don't know if we should stop to mention that a little bit or, or, or, or after, but, um- Yeah.
Well, we can, you can say, like, it just timestamps data onto Bitcoin. We can come back and talk about it. Excellent. Uh, and so I used that in 2019 to say, "Well, it took you six days to give me election documents.
I might as well timestamp it, you know, at this point, 'cause I don't want you to change them without, you know, proof, um, from this moment going forward."
And so I made a bunch of recommendations to the election authority saying, "Look, in the future, if you want to avoid this, what you should do is as soon as you publish these documents to the internet, you should use..."
What I at the po- the time called a blockchain certification. And so basically s- drawing parallels to what I did with the open timestamps, I'm saying, "Look, this is possible to do.
All you would need to do is as soon as it gets to the internet, you use some blockchain solution to give society a, a proof that those JPEGs aren't manipulated," right?
And so fast-forward to 2023 and our election last year, and, uh, you know, I was very surprised.
I was as an election auditor ready to, to go to, to audit everything, and fortunately, I was like, wow, like, they, they accepted my recommendations.
And what happened was they contracted this company, simpleproof.com, which is a Guatemalan startup that now I work for, they hired me recently.
And what simpleproof.com built is a government, you know, indust- industrial scale version of open timestamps, where as soon as these documents were generated on election night in, on June 25th, 2023, they were immediately timestamped using the open timestamps protocol and, you know, a few other solutions to make sure that no- what happened in twen- 2019 didn't happen again.
And so the entirety of over 150,000 documents that make up the Guatemalan voting system and contain the summary, you know, the, the totals of millions upon millions of votes, those documents were timestamped to Bitcoin in a very efficient way that allowed...
Well, first, reduced the attack surface to what happened in 2019, where you had six days to manipulate the JPEGs, down to basically the, the space between blocks. Blocks, right? So literally the block spaces.
Yeah, the first block spaces, right?
So where on average, it's like 10, 15 minutes that these documents were o- on a database somewhere before they got, you know, proven on Bitcoin, so that if someone did want to attack the election in Guatemala, they would've had to do it within that, like, 10-minute time window.
And then also because it gets timestamped to Bitcoin, it just becomes a permanent evidence of manipulation that because we have paper-based system, you could then, you know, use the paper to prove if anything funny happened, right?
So in- we are the first country in the world to use Bitcoin and specifically the Bitcoin blockchain to protect our voting system. Yeah.
It's funny 'cause I got the, I got the white paper right here behind me, and part of what Satoshi, like, described Bitcoin as is that it's like a decentralized timestamping server.
And it's, it- th- it's very poetic that this is now full circle actively being used to timestamp votes in Guatemala. I'm gonna say this a bit back to you.
Like, as soon as the ballot comes in, you're basically taking that ballot, generating a proof of that ballot having been vo- you know, looking a certain way, posting that to Bitcoin.
Just let, let me correct that and, and, and maybe- Yeah... it'll be easier if I share my screen. Um- Yeah, share your screen. Walk me through this. Sure.
So to start, if folks haven't investigated the open timestamps protocol, please start there, opentimestamps.org. Uh, it's really cool and similar to Bitcoin in that it's very simple to use as a individual.
You literally go to opentimestamps.org, drag and drop anything that you would want to, you know, timestamp. A, a, you know, any file, any digital file, you can drag and drop here.
And as an individual, this is easy, and Bitcoiners everywhere have been doing it for ages. What we did was we had hundreds of thousands of these. So what I'm showing now is trep.gt.
This is the preliminary results election website of Guatemala. And so if you go to T-R-E-P dot G-T, you can do this for yourself, where when you click either of those buttons, it takes you to see the...
I'm gonna have to zoom out a little bit. Do, do, do, do, do. There we go. So it's selecting the presidential election. We have five elections.
We have Congress and municipal corporations, but let's focus on just the executive branch.
And so you can go down here and see, oh, you know, there's a pretty little map and, you know, some bar graphs with the national totals, but I want to don't trust verify this.
So I could go to the full right of the screen and input any number between 1,020... Sorry, one and 24,500. So what's your favorite number there between one and 24,000, Charlie? Let's just do 1,000. 1,000. So
if you do this, now instead of looking at the national totals, which are supposed to be the, you know, sum, the, the summation of all of the voting tables, now you're looking at an individual table, but you wanna don't trust verify.
You scroll down, there's this Ver button. When you click that, it brings up this JPEG, which was the physical document that was signed by three citizens, in this case, Jose Luis, Maria Elena, and Maria Elena.
[laughs] Two Maria Elenas. And what they're saying is hand- this is handwritten.
At the end of the voting day, they wrote, "278 citizens bothered to show up to vote, and their votes are distributed amongst all these parties in this way," all handwritten.
And so what you were, to correct what you were saying earlier, it's not the individual ballots that are scanned.
It's the voting table total-Which is what happens when the volunteers, who are these citizens up top, and they sign down here, they tally the total votes, right?
So 400 citizens were assigned to this table, but out of those 278 showed up, and then they distribute the votes.
And that's where I, I, I mean, this is kind of a proof of work consensus algorithm, algorithm, and it's similar to Bitcoin in that I see these citizens that are signing here, the s- u-up here, these three citizens that man the tables, as mining nodes.
They do the hashing of, like, l- taking the transactions, the individual ballots, and then creating the block, right?
This is a block template that they're, that they're filling out, and they do this in front of these witnesses which are sent by political parties, and they sign.
So it's one, two, three, four, five, six witnesses, and that's where I see these guys as the validating nodes, right?
So they are checking the work of the miners, and if they sign, it's they agree with the block that they're producing.
And this, this, this JPEG, which again, there's hundreds of thousands of these 'cause there's 25,000 tables and there were five different elections.
And so once this JPEG is created, this is what gets scanned, and immediately it gets verified, which is this conspicuously orange button here that you can click on.
And so the question you gotta ask yourself is, what I was showing you before, how do we know that it's actually the document from election night? How do we know it hasn't been tampered with?
And so Simple Proof, the, the company that I now work for, developed an immutable backup solution which was purchased by the election authorities of Guatemala, and what they're saying here is on June 25th at 11:16 in the PM on GMT -6, we received this JPEG.
This is the SHA-256 hash of that JPEG, and here is the block where you can find evidence and proof of that.
And further down, here is the date and, and time confirmation of that block, which means that they are very publicly telling you that they received this JPEG, and within a matter of, let's see, 11:16 to 12:20- 12:19.
So in this case, this is a, an outlier in that it took them one hour and three minutes to h- get the hash of the proof onto Bitcoin. Again, it's not as, as good as 10 minutes, but it's definitely better than six days.
But then further down you can download and see the JPEG so that you can compare the two different contractors' database, the, the two different JPEGs to one another. But more importantly,
we publish also the OTS file, which is the open timestamps file that the open timestamps protocol generates.
And here you can see the text-based version of this, which is a bunch of cryptographic proofs, but that's kind of almost impossible to really figure out.
What Simple Proof has also developed is an open timestamps navigator that allows you to see how the Merkle trees and the SHA-256s of that JPEG, this C- D7B29 in this case, we can go back and verify it's yes, that is the same hash
for the JPEG. And through a series of Merkle trees or, or, or, or hash, uh, functions, you can see that this trail leads all the way up to a final root hash.
And so through a series of cryptographic proofs, we can get to a final SHA-256 that can...
is available this transaction ID, which if you're running at your own node, you can p- get this transaction ID, look it on, on, on your node.
But if not, you can just click the link to go to the mempool.space, and at that point we can go down to the op_return portion of the details and then look for that hash, and there it is. So- So- There we go...
yeah, this is, this is the crazy thing because I think, like, you know, again, I'm gonna regurgitate this kind of for the ordinals people, like, the, the past year's kind of been dominated by criticism of putting JPEGs on Bitcoin.
And but this is very interesting because this says we're going to hash the JPEGs. We're going to compress this data incredibly, incredibly well- Provably... because, yeah, be- because you...
all you care about is just proving that something existed in a certain way at a certain time.
So it reduces the service area for election fraud for somebody to come in and to take all those ballots and then to alter them, and then a new reality of election results magically pops up out of nowhere.
This says, I can go to mempool.space, or better yet my own node, and verify the hash of these ballots myself.
So I, I, I, I, I can trust that maybe my local precinct is, is, is telling me the truth, but I can also verify that they didn't alter the documents after a certain time. Exactly.
And, and again, I wanna just push back and say it's not the individual ballots, it's the summary total of about 200, 3- 300, 400 votes into one document.
Um, in the case of Guatemala, we don't get access to JPEGs for the individual ballots for, you know, basically privacy concerns and stuff like that. Yeah.
But we do get access to these JPEGs that are essentially kind of like coin joints, right? So it's like- Yeah, but this is, but this is- Yeah...
is a significant leap forwards in just, just proving the existence of election results. For sure.
I mean, basically what it boils down to is what Simple Proof is, is building is using Bitcoin to uphold information integrity with immutable, immutable record keeping and trustless verification. So it's...
The, the origin of why this was so important to, to, to us and, and, and my recommendation to the election authority in Guatemala is that as an election auditor in 2019, if I audited the election and I found proof of election fraud-My lawyers told me they're probably going to send you to prison because they're gonna accuse you of election tampering.
So how could I defend myself from that? It would be, I would need a mechanism to prove that I never tampered the JPEGs. I have to... The, the onus is on me to demonstrate that I never committed election fraud.
And so by incorporating this, the election authorities, what they are doing is they are standing behind the data that they publish to say, "Look, on election night, everything we publish is immutable," essentially.
Like, I- not even the state with... I mean, unless they figure out a way to reorg the Bitcoin blockchain, which, you know, is arguably impossible.
What the election authority is doing is they're standing behind what they publish and saying, "We are removing our own ability and anyone's ability to manipulate digital information."
So in a post-truth world, and this, partic- particularly with elections, what this means is now you can rely on digital data.
Now you can differentiate a JPEG that is official from a JPEG that was just, you know, created by AI and published by some random sock puppet online, right?
And so to me, the way I say it is Bitco- that Bitcoin can become an anchor of truth in a sea of lies. Who cares if people create fake information and, and populate the internet with millions of fake JPEGs?
You can use Bitcoin to say, "These are the real ones, and I could care less about everything else." That's a line, that's a clip right there. You mention that, y- you know, going...
I, I, you, you shared a story with me of how this is, this, these timestamps have already been used to dispute or challenge some election fraud.
I know that this also may be kind of a, a tricky topic to navigate, but could you try to attempt to explain how this has already been used in a dispute in the Guatemalan election? For sure.
So I believe, uh, pictures, uh, are, are, uh, say a thousand- I'll show, I'll share the screen again for you. Yeah. Well, so, so I, like I said, I, I now work for Simple Proof, but I'm also an election auditor.
And oops, so this is my report from March, 2024. People can find it on digitalwitness.io. It's in Spanish. It's a 272-page report, so all in Spanish.
So, but if we go down to the bottom, basically what we found was, so the election results of Guatemala were surprising. The way I like to describe it is Guatemala's been ruled by the same owners for about 80 years.
The last time we had real change was around 1955. That's when the CIA intervened. Guatemala's famously the second country that was, uh, intervened by the CIA.
The first one was Iran, and number two was Guatemala in 1955 when they deposed Jacobo Arbenz. And then after that, we started this civil war, and I mean, it, it's been the same owners since then. And in 2023,
so the same owners, and they changed the management, right? So they, they, they replace the, the, the, the president, the, the, the manager, but the owners are, have, have, hadn't changed since 1955.
And so the s- the event was so surprising that what the regime did with that, you know, 'cause they didn't wanna lose, it doesn't like to lose, the outgoing government weaponized the judiciary and accused the election authorities of election tampering.
And so what you're seeing on your screen is the fact, on the right-hand side, for, for those that are just listening to this, is what we did was we created a heat map of all the timestamp data that was produced on Bitcoin.
And so on the right, you can see what Bitcoin says in terms of timestamps. And, and so it concentrates, you know, like, on election night, there were 125,000 documents created.
And so with this heat map, we can see that the immense majority, like 90 some odd percent, is all around the midnight hour of election night. So that's what people are saying.
On the X-axis it's, it's time, on the Y-axis it's amounts. And so mo- or, or anyway, most of the, the documents are around midnight on Bitcoin.
And on the left is what the judiciary through the election crimes unit accused the election authorities of election fraud.
And so on the left you see three lines, two hard ones, and then one kind of vague one at the beginning.
And so what they're accusing is saying there are documents, it's about 7% of the documents were created prior to 6:00 PM. And it's like, well, what do you mean created prior to 6:00 PM?
And it's, they basically took the metadata timestamp. So JPEGs have a little thing called date created by, and so that timestamp is just inside the file and you can see it. Uh, but that's created by the hardware, right?
And so they're saying 7% of the documents were created prior to 6:00 PM, and that's proof positive that there's enough documents that were created prior to the votes being counted, 'cause, you know, the voting stations end, or the po- polls close at 6:00 PM, so how could a JPEG be created before 6:00 PM?
And so that was super concerning. And when they published this in December, and this is, like, their smoking gun, right? Say, "We've got the smoking gun. They created JPEGs prior to 6:00 PM."
But the problem is there's this really strong, you know, third line of JPEGs created around the 34-hour mark. And when you compare that to Bitcoin, it forces you to essentially present...
And that's why the little logo that people are seeing here is the Back to the Future logo, but in Spanish, Volver al Futuro.
And so the logic and, and the mathematics that-The election crimes unit is using to argue election fraud would require to explain how JPEGs were created in the future after they already exist on Bitcoin.
And so this is forty-five percent of all the election documents.
And so the judiciary now has to argue that time travelers hacked the election of Guatemala, or by using Bitcoin we can come up with a more logical explanation, which is the technology contractor that was hired, and paid good money to do this,
made a s- m- made a huge mistake and they misconfigured the time zones of the hardware. And so that's why you have three lines.
It's basically 7% of the machines thought they were in, you know, the Pacific Islands, 45% thought they were in Africa, and about 50% believed that they were in Guatemala.
And so obviously you're going to get different, you know, timestamps. And if it weren't for Bitcoin, there would not be an independent, you know, version of the truth that proves this mistake.
And so had the authorities not used this solution, some of us believe that the current president would not have been allowed to take power because the outgoing regime would have successfully argued that there was election fraud, and this was purely because of a mistake, right?
So if someone makes a mistake in configuring time zones, maybe that's the difference between the president taking office and not.
But if you use Bitcoin, you can actually prove what really happened with an independent arbiter that could care less about your opinions about the truth, but rather is just based on mathematics.
This, yeah, this is really cool. I, I, I think I'll probab- I, you know, we, we talked with Peter Todd himself on the, on one of our other podcasts for Blockspace on the Mining Pod, uh, last month.
And I was asking him about this, this, this story in Guatemala, and he says he was not, he really didn't have a whole lot to do with it.
This is something that you guys and Simple Proof put together, executed, promoted, got all the way up to the Guatemalan, like, governing bodies to actually execute this.
But it, you know, I live in, in the, in, in the United States where there are, there is accusation of election fraud, but it's not widespread, it's not pervasive. It doesn't like...
It, it is eating into the fabric of society, but not quite as deeply as it is in Guatemala. But there are other places around the world that
may have these concerns, or just simple third-party verification could reduce some criticism. Talk to me, Carolina, about, like, the future plans that you guys are working towards.
I know that, you know, you did this in Guatemala successfully, but what are you try... What's on the, the, the pathway here? What lies ahead? Thanks. Well, we, the origin of this is there's a concern of what happens when
even, like, the state on state disagrees with itself? But, you know, for me, it was in that 2019, if I get accused of treason, which is what election fraud in Guatemala can lead to, how can I prove what is real, right?
And in the digital world, it's so hard to prove what's real. It- th- there's no way really to do it, but Bitcoin at least allows you to
increase the likelihood of something being real and decrease considerably and potentially eliminate the possibility of sneaking in fake things.
At the very least, your, any would-be attacker would be forced to do it on the moment of creation. And what we, what I wanna do is live in a world where
the state and, you know, essentially, and anyone who gets the opportunity to create something, that should be the, the end of it, right?
Like, once, say, a tax record is created, evidence that could be used in court, like anything that's really material and important, once it's created, if you timestamp it to Bitcoin, then in the future, if some- if an attacker, if someone wants to, you know, change evidence and say that you're the one that is guilty of something, then we sh- we can use Bitcoin to protect ourselves against that.
And so the election gave us an, a, an opportunity to prove the use case, but it goes well beyond that to say, really this is public registries everywhere.
In a future where AI makes it trivial to create fake stuff, like Bit- Bitcoin is our anchor to reality. Bitcoin is the anchor of truth in a sea of lies.
And so we are now seeing interest from the Guatemalan government and, and other aspects of Guatemala saying, "Wow, if this is useful for elections, then that's, like, our most important public registry.
It, it literally defines the transfer of power. Can we use it in, in other areas?"
And so we're starting to see demand for this in elsewhere, but in particular for the US, I would say there's going to be a lot of concern, and as an auditor, when I saw my Guatemalan election authorities publishing all the data timestamped to Bitcoin, I mean, it gave me so much peace of saying, "Wow," like I, I don't have to concern myself of potentially, like, reality changing and, and fighting this endless battle of what's real and what's not.
Rather, when an authority says, "We stand by our work, and you can check it yourself. You don't need to trust us, here it is." That says something incredibly powerful.
And so we are interested in finding people in the US who would be, you know, who would want to work with us and, and find ways of deploying this ahead of the November elections. Please reach out.
You can contact us via simpleproof.com, we're, we're on Nostr.
But in general, it's just an invitation to anyone ahead of November of saying, "You can help your neighbors, you can help your local authority protect against an onslaught of madness that could hit them in November, and prove a use case where Bitcoin, and specifically the Bitcoin blockchain-Protects democracy, protect us, protects truth.
Allows those of us that are more interested in truth than the lies to come to an agreement, to, to reach consensus.
And in Guatemala at least, what that's allowed me to do is give normies a different touch point to Bitcoin, where now it's they know that Bitcoin protected democracy, so now they're a bit more open to hearing about all the other cool stuff that you can do with it, right?
So I just invite people to see it as an opportunity to reach your neighbors with a different touch point.
Yeah, it's interesting 'cause you, you bring up, yeah, this is a, this is a different way of using Bitcoin than simple, the, the simple, straightforward monetary use case.
And this is interestingly, kind of central to the broader Bitcoin discussion right now. And maybe this is a f- this, maybe this is a reason why
I, maybe I'm ignorant, but I haven't seemed like this, this seemed like a very big story. It didn't seem to circulate in Bitcoin circles.
And, and to me, this is, like, one of the, like, this is very aligned with what Bitcoin's purpose is. I'll invite you, you know, speculate, like, why i- is this not popular?
Is this because this is a non-monetary use of Bitcoin, that it's a little bit, it's not as resonant with some of the current North American Bitcoin narrative? What are your thoughts here?
My thoughts are, we had to kind of lay low, to be honest, 'cause there was a, a, it was a bit dangerous for a while.
Uh, you know, some people fled the country in Guatemala, like, literally, the election authorities w- who are some of the highest-ranking judges in Guatemala, like, it's the Supreme Court of Guatemala, then there's another supreme court, and then there's these guys.
It's eight, eight of them, and four of them literally just fled the country from October through February. And so it wasn't until March that we can really, like, the dust kind of settled.
This was, this was a war in Guatemala and, you know, finally someone won, and now you have clarity moving forward, and so we can speak much more clearly about this than we were before because there was danger.
And so I think there's, there's an element of that, of just, like, being our, ourselves ca- careful and, and not necessarily speaking out about this too much.
But then in addition, I think, uh, this isn't something, this, this is a, a good middle of the road, right? Like, I, I do not know a single Bitcoiner that is against the use of OpenTimestamps.
Bitcoiners don't agree on basically anything except 21 million and OpenTimestamps.
[laughs] And so it's like, but agreement between Bitcoiners and, and generally in media, like, I think Bitcoin will need to be careful of, of realizing that we can also fall prey to, to getting attacked from fiat and, and, and the, the, the, the old world of bringing in these bad, uh, traditions of, "Oh, if something is, if, if we are all in agreement, then it's not sexy, and so let's not talk about it.
Let's just g- get ourselves into tribes and hate each other and, and wanna kill each other, and not pay attention to the fact that we're actually allies in a much greater war [laughs] that is going on."
And so I, I, I think it's lower your time preference. Like, this is, we, we hope this is going to be relevant.
We're actively looking for people to help us take this, like, the use case is proven, the t- the tools are built.
It's, it's, it's clear that this can help in democracies and elsewhere, and now we wanna take it so that you, you, you don't have to talk about Guatemala as, like, oh, this random place that's full of, you know, who cares about Guatemala?
And like, maybe I care a little bit about El Salvador, but who cares about Guatemala? Let's, let's take it to the US, right?
Let, let, let's find a county somewhere, like, find a county clerk, find an elections commissioner that's already orange-pilled and tell them about this, 'cause this is, A, cheap, and B, a very clear use case where the mining of Bitcoin can protect information integrity.
And you can, if you protect information integrity in elections, you have effection- effectively protected democracy, which means that Bitcoin protects democracy, and if you're against Bitcoin, then you're against democracy, right?
And so I see it as
we had to prove the use case and it was dangerous, and we're now coming up for air, and it's right on schedule so that we can turn this into a watershed moment for all of Bitcoin in November, where, you know, there will be a, a before and after, right?
People will now, I, I hope, demand that all election documents be timestamped to Bitcoin.
And eventually, all public registries, but we should at least start with what's arguably the most important function of the state, which is transferring power to a legitimately [laughs] elected, you know, person.
So let's start there and, and work our way up.
It would be very poetic if Guatemala, the country who about 80 some odd years ago, the United States very invasively altered the, the f- the future of, if Guatemala served as a demonstration for the way the United States could reduce and prevent our own question and accusation of corruption domestically.
So I look forward to Bitcoin quite literally fixing this, generations and decades of, of problems with the existing fiat world. Carlinho, thank you so much for sharing this with me. What are your parting thoughts?
And again, call to action, where do the listeners go to follow you and pay attention to what they can do to help? So appreciate it. Uh, I, I do wanna emphasize that this doesn't, this, this isn't foolproof.
This doesn't eliminate all possibility of election fraud. But I think we can get bogged down into thinking that in allowing perfection becoming the enemy of good.
I come from a, from a very different angle from the developing world of saying, you know, "Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Doing this is a, an incremental, like, very logical, obvious benefit to elections everywhere, and it's an easy win for Bitcoiners. And so, you know-I would argue it eliminated 99% of the attack surface.
And so, yeah, there's still 1% of attack surface, but let's at least make it harder for people [laughs] who want to attack us. Like, there's, there's no argument against this.
And then just reach out because if November is barreling down towards us, uh, the way the elections work in the US is they're run by local authorities, so it's not one single body like Guatemala.
Like, we convinced the one single body that r- runs the national election here.
In the US, you've got about 3,000 local election authorities that are all facing this incredibly monstrous challenge come November, and odds are they're your neighbor.
You know, they're, they're, they're someone that you grew up with or whatever, and they probably don't know how to protect themselves.
And so I believe that they will never forget if you showed up and said, "Hey, dude, like, what's your plan in November? Like, are you gonna publish any data to the internet?
'Cause if you do, you realize you're opening yourself to an attack from AI and who knows what else. Here's a very simple, cheap way to protect yourself." And, and, you know, it's gonna help them.
Like, in our case, it's helping the election authorities avoid jail time in Guatemala. Like, it's... That is what's happening.
And so if you do that for your neighbor, they won't forget it, and they won't forget that Bitcoin played a role. And so it is much easier to fight the FUD and get people to just open up to it from a very different way.
And so, yeah, don't, don't, don't forget your neighbor. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This does not fix all, like, everything. Like, there's... We, we don't touch the ballots.
This is, this is purely there's this thing that already happens. We're just gonna come in and, and help those people that are involved there.
And it's, it's been a wild ride, and, you know, we're just very happy to share what we have learned and hope that people take advantage of it and just contact us. Rock on.
Thank you so much, Carlinho, and I look forward to seeing you at more Bitcoin conferences in real life. You're gonna be in Nashville perhaps?
I will be speaking at Nashville along with Peter Todd to discuss why timestamping elections is a good idea, so, uh, look forward to that. All right. Make sure to go to that stage.
I'll also see you in Nashville, Carlinho. Thank you so much. This is Bitcoin Season 2, new conversations and new ideas from new people on Bitcoin. Bitcoin Season 2 is produced by Blockspace Media.
Make sure to check out other podcasts, The Gort Show, the Mining Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter, blockspace.media. See you next week.
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