hi everyone charles hoskinson here i figured i'd make a fun whiteboard video post-election uh about a conspiracy theory that's been floating around the uh the webs uh spread by a gentleman named steve ooh we have the crazy pen hang on a second here let me uh switch this over let's do white because that's a little bit better for everyone and i'm not exactly sure how to pronounce uh his name i think it's piacenik but uh it's a polish name but apparently it's a cuban descent old fellow uh been floating around the intelligence circles forever uh has a colorful history and made a lot of really crazy claims and it's called the q f s blockchain watermark conspiracy theory okay and so basically uh as far as i can tell and it's it's hard to know because there's some variations of this thing floating around the idea is that uh the trump administration conducted a sting where they put some form of a fingerprint on either the ballots or the envelopes that's not clear we'll go through both of those in a moment and the idea was that they could differentiate between an original ballot and a fraud ballot fraudulent ballot so basically one that was inserted in ideally to make joe biden win and qfs stands for quantum financial system i'm not sure what finance has to do with e-voting but uh okay and i guess they're using the blockchain as a storage layer to store all these commitments okay so let's talk about american mail in voting so if you are an american you have two options to vote one is in person so you go to a polling place and they check your name on a list and if you're registered they say okay you can vote uh you go into a booth and you click some buttons it's either a voting machine or if you're in an older county i think they still do some form of a paper ballot where you punch something or something like that okay the other and this was the majority uh for the 2020 election is mainland why because of coronavirus okay with a mainland ballot you start with registration and you have to give the state that you live in your address and depending on the state some other data like you know you'll include the name date of birth party you can register independent or republican or democrat or libertarian or what have you and so forth okay so that's step one is registration okay then somebody is going to take a look at those registrations and say yes this is a valid registration and if so then you are eligible to vote in mail and at some point they're gonna go ahead and mail a ballot to your residence okay so you'll get a ballot here's your little envelope has hundreds of over 100 million people learned and if you open the envelope you'll find another envelope and in my case in colorado that was blue and then you'll find within the actual ballot that has all of the names of different people to vote donald trump and biden and so forth and some are national and some are state-specific and some are municipalities for example i live in a particular congressional district so i was allowed to vote on that congressman and other people live in different districts could vote on that congressman and so forth and i could vote on my local senator but i could not vote for example on state of california stuff okay then what you're going to do is you take the ballot after you've filled it out and put it into the envelope and sign it then you mail it okay then it gets collected and then it gets sent to the counting facility okay after it gets sent to the counting facility the people counting the votes they're going to have this signed envelope a little orange here and with your signature and how they handle that signed envelope is they will open it well first they will check the signature so somehow your state has your signature on file you sign the envelope they're going to look at what the digital record is compare it with the signature that you put on the envelope and they're going to go ahead and say okay well if that looks good if good then go to 10a which is it's counted and these counting process has many people involved you have observers they watch accounting as it happens you have machines that are generally not internet connected and you have people who are counters in many cases volunteers some paid employees usually bipartisan okay so that's the counting process and then at some point it gets tabulated and gets aggregated aggregated and then you have totals and then you declare a winner through some sort of certification process okay so the conspiracy theory is basically saying that at some point in this process from registration to uh ballots being mailed to ballots being sent then it has been corrupted and hundreds of thousands if not millions of ballots are fraudulent and at some point in this chain they have been introduced into the voting process so that when the tallies are made biden is the winner okay and this steve fellow put his entire reputation on it and he said well trump knew this and he was conducting a very sophisticated sting operation where either and this wasn't clear in the video the ballot itself or the envelope of the ballot or perhaps both there was some form of special watermark that is invisible to the naked eye but that watermark is somehow connected to the registration information so that you can distinguish a legitimate ballot that had been registered from a ballot that was introduced into the supply chain and then because you can distinguish between the two you would be obviously able to detect the problems with the aggregation in the tally okay and i guess the blockchain component is that well that those watermarks are what are called cryptographically a commitment so you would need some place to put the commitments that have several properties they're auditable uh they're time stamped and they are immutable okay audible time stamped and immutable so those are the three properties that you'd like to have for commitments so that's something that you can put there and then you can open the commitment verify that indeed matches somebody okay so what's wrong with this conspiracy theory well first off there's an open question of well who prints the ballots and i guess it depends on how conspiratorial you are this part of the process the opening and the checking of signatures and so forth that is a massively decentralized process that is observed by third parties who are always watching so this part of the process probably works and is very difficult to have fraud occur but this is the old garbage inn garbage out type of a situation and the garbage in garbage out is that you are assuming that the ballots coming in are real and legitimate there are two data inputs here one are the ballots and then two is data on the registered people so you need via the signature verification to have a database of signatures that has to be inserted into the process so if you are a conspiracy theorist and you think that this entire election has been compromised the vector of attack would be to add additional signatures or registered people into that database and then second to add counterfeit ballots into that database okay well into the process so the postman shows up and he's got five hundred uh ballots for biden or something like that and these uh people here they would never even know because they're fungible and the signatures match and so forth okay so obviously there has to be checks and balances and controls about how those ballots arrive through the process so the idea of this qr at qfs conspiracy theory is that when you're introducing those fake ballots and those fake registrations into the system the registrations would not be represented on the qfs watermark database your blockchain would have no record of that stuff it would say hang on a second here this stuff doesn't exist and they also those ballots that are introduced would not have the watermark okay so on the surface that would be a way of preventing an attack like this from happening so let's talk about that first off who prints the ballots are they printed by the states are they printed by the federal government are they printed by private companies reality is they are printed by a small set of private companies okay and the next question is when would you introduce the watermark the watermark has to be connected to personally identifiable information if it's to be useful for detecting a fraudulent ballot versus another ballot so you would have to connect it somehow have access to the voter registration database of every single state okay and you would then need to somehow after the ballot's been printed because i suspect that they'll just be printed in a generic way for the state have some sort of intermediate step where somebody gets access to those ballots and is able to put this fingerprint on now this is a sting operation because you're being very conspiratorial and you're seeing the entire democratic party's involved in it so you'd have to add all of these fingerprints these watermarks in secretly okay so somebody would have to get access to the ballot between the time it was printed and what is fungible fungible meaning that it doesn't belong to anybody and intervene when the envelope has been introduced into the process so basically it's being prepared to be mailed to people and do this in every state that you're doing this thing and i believe the person claimed that 12 states were involved okay and potentially do this for over maybe 100 million ballots who knows how many all right so who would be responsible for that that's one huge thing and you have to do this whole thing secretly in 12 different states and nobody can find out about it okay the other thing is that you actually have to produce evidence that you're doing this why because that evidence has to be admissible in court it's not good enough just to put a watermark on it you actually have to show that you had put a watermark on all of these ballots and how would you be able to differentiate these legitimate envelopes that are being mailed out and so forth from manipulations in the registration database how would you know that those records are accurate so you'd have to somehow have the ability to cross-reference the registration database from the actual legitimate registration database so you'd have to have some sort of audit capability now okay you know the intelligence community probably can do that you know they have records on everybody they have these link ubiquitous timeline evaluated uh dossiers on people called looted okay so they have pretty significant capabilities there so i guess if you're willing to admit the intelligence agencies are involved in this maybe they would be able to create a much better registration figure a print to differentiate fraudulent registrations from real registrations and then somehow transmit that to the fingerprinting process to the secret group of people that would be fingerprinting these particular ballots and while you're doing it secretly you also have to do it in a way that the evidence would be admissible in court because when you go to the supreme court and these other people or whoever is going to be basically deciding on this they have to be convinced that your system was holistic that all of the ballots that weren't stamped with this are indeed illegitimate ballots okay then there's a question of well how do you introduce these fraudulent ballots into the system no one's ever been able to clearly articulate that like ballots have just magically appeared okay well then how and who how many people would be required to do that who are these people that would do that and you would have to know that this is going to happen have evidence of this because you'd have to have justification for this entire sting operation if it's to be an actual federal investigation with the doj or some law enforcement body like the fbi they would had to have picked up a conspiracy to insert all of these ballots which would give judicial cause to have an investigation and then these people would have to be involved in the sting and these people would have to be involved in producing that evidence that these things are happening okay so there the conspirators would have to be known and linked to the biden campaign or have some association or else why would they want this guy to win and basically you have to have a high enough burden of evidence that you can differentiate that you would have completeness for all the balance okay so anyway we have a lot of stuff going on here there's these apparently there's watermarks hidden invisible watermarks that you can detect after the fact they're committed to the chain the fbi has to be involved the intelligence community has to be involved uh and they have to do this secretly and allow the election fraud to happen not stop it but allow it to happen and allow those votes to be initially counted okay then i guess the second part of the conspiracy theory is that the national guard and i'm not sure why the national guard would be involved but the national guard's been deployed and arrests are imminent a bunch of people are going to be arrested we don't use the national guard in the military for law enforcement i think that's posse comitatus is the idea there we use these guys for law enforcement especially in federal crimes that cross borders so i'm not sure why the national guard would be involved but i guess they are and they've been sent to all of these different facilities so obviously if you're deploying large amounts of soldiers there would be evidence of those deployments and i'm not sure who which group here and if those people have been arrested or not and if the military is arresting them that's interesting it looks a lot like a coup so more questions here but anyway you can quickly see how this thing unravels and falls apart you know it's not an ideal system and i think that our voting system can be massively improved and i'm a big proponent of e-voting when you get the kinks out and you have good cryptographic properties and there are many things you can introduce into the e-voting process like a paper backup and so forth that can dramatically increase its strength and there are real questions to ask like for example the fidelity of the registration database and many of you have received mail-in ballots from states you used to reside in or multiple ballots from old addresses and that's true there are many problems with the existing mail-in system and if people were dishonest local fraud can occur but that local fraud works in both directions some people are fraudulent for the republicans some people are fraudulent for the democrats tends to balance out statistically and tends to be very small when you build a scale system for 150 million people uh it's okay to have twenty or thirty thousand mistakes here and there especially when those mistakes are sampled from both sides of a two-party system what you have to always be vigilant against is a situation where a foreign adversary who has a lot of sophistication can have god mode control over the entire system and arbitrarily change uh outcomes for example can add a whole bunch of registrations you'd like a property that you receive no more votes than votes registered and that's actually something that people are complaining about is that there seems to be at least anecdotal evidence that perhaps we have more voters who have voted than people who have registered now there can be a variety of reasons for that from absentee ballots to same-day registration and other things where the databases were perhaps out of date or it could be the case that people were registered fraudulently on the rolls you know and this is what the audit oversight mechanism and recount mechanism is designed for is to catch these types of things uh but what often happens with conspiratorial thinking and wishful thinking is that people invent fantasies and steve apparently has gone from being a doctor to a psy to a fiction writer who writes clancy novels and these types of things and they say oh uh don't worry we're playing four dimensional chess and there's some sort of elaborate uh sting that's going on and that's why we lost when the far more likely outcome is just well no president's ever been reelected during a depression level economy 200 000 americans died and while a blue wave did not occur it's really difficult to win re-election in this type of an environment and trump had a pretty good showing in fact a better showing than the one that he had in 2016 in many respects it's just there were a lot more people voting this time around and those people were pretty passionate because they've been radicalized by a very aggressive media for four years pretty plausible that there's simply more people that voted for biden but there's a group of people that can't accept that and so they invent these bizarre conspiracies that watermarks exist and a whole bunch of fraudulent ballots have been introduced into the system but they never give you an explanation of how that was done or who did it and they never give you an explanation of well how could this not be detected and why are the people who are involved in investigating these things able to intervene and detect that remember that we're not talking about trump as an outsider he is the incumbent president and he appointed people like bill barr for example and the director of the central intelligence agency and the director of the nsa and you can believe in a conspiracy of a deep state but given that he appointed the people who run these very agencies wouldn't he have at least an enclave within these agencies who would be capable of detecting and looking for these things you know uh department of homeland security uh partnered with voter works back in 2019 specifically to start investigating technology to secure our election systems and there are many federal agencies uh some in the intelligence community and some in law enforcement and some like dhs that's kind of a hybrid organization that work every day to look at these things and audit these things and these things because they're so decentralized there's many different systems that are used there's a great degree of resilience in the system now the downside is that it's slow bureaucratic it's hard to count occasionally dead people get ballots especially people who died and because databases are fractured um they don't update in time and yeah these things happen but those are local events the prospect of being able to introduce hundreds of thousands of ballots strategically in different places and not have the regular apparatuses of the government detect that then you have to ask why doesn't china do this then why doesn't russia do this then why doesn't a corporation do this if it's so easy to do and the answer is because it's not easy to do it's really really hard to do and the prospect that you can solve one conspiracy with another conspiracy if such a thing did exist and these capabilities did exist how could trump then secretly create a water stamping program and have nothing leak you look at the preponderance of the evidence the trump white house hasn't been able to keep a single secret the last four years they have no message discipline and trump himself likes leaking information all the time for example to bob woodward in his recent book so in a very undisciplined white house that doesn't have a good grasp of how to deal with these types of operations seems entire very unlikely that they would be able to pull out a counter conspiracy involve the wrong actors i'm not sure why the national guard's involved and be able to thwart this great deep state conspiracy to be undone by the supreme court for those of you uh who are trump supporters and i know many in the cryptocurrency space are the reality is it looks like joe biden won this election and america is riding with biden and it may be tempting to get seduced by an appealing conspiracy theory that's going to solve all the problems the american people have spoken now we might not like that outcome or you might love the outcome but it is what it is and if there's any solace to be held it looks like we're headed into divided government as a country and a great reset is happening both domestically and globally where we as a people are going to start asking questions of what next uh biden did not win by an overwhelming majority in fact he lost seats in the congress and it's very likely given his weakness as a candidate that in 2022 a red wave is going to occur very similar to the 1994 uh red wave that occurred that put newt gingrich and the rest of these folks in power if that occurs then a bipartisan government's going to have to form or the american people are again going to have another contentious decision in 2024. so we'll see what happens from my side i build these types of systems and we think about e-voting and we worry about adversaries and one of the reasons why we write academic papers is that there's a formal way of doing analysis in these systems both in the scientific cryptographic sense and in the information security sense where you think about physical security and so forth and the proportionality of a threat and how to ameliorate these types of threats and i firmly believe that if we have the right will as a nation within four years the american presidential election in 2024 can be done with the blockchain backend and and verifiability and potentially completely online if we wanted to or in a hybrid sense where there's a paper component and an online component for my part we'll build these systems we'll propose these systems and the very least we'll try to get them used in primaries because i do think that there are many benefits to them if your cost of running an election goes way down you can ask the american people more often for advice second it's clear that as we move beyond this election a lot of people no longer have faith in the credibility of the electoral process no matter what i say there will be millions of americans who believe that qfs is actually real or ballot fraud has occurred in mass to the extent that it can influence and change the results of the election and they will look for confirmation bias for that rob gloyovich will go on newsmax and say it happened and therefore it happened none of the people who say it happens actually offer you tangible evidence and they'll usually say the tangible evidence doesn't exist because the deep state prevents it or a media conspiracy prevents it from occurring now this is bipartisan in 2016 the democrats could not accept the outcome of the 2016 election it was inconceivable to them that their candidate hillary clinton could lose to a reality tv star so they invented their own conspiracy theory russian interference but they never actually provided any evidence for that and we the american people spent three years dealing with bob mueller and all of these other things looking for the smoking gun of collusion and there was never anything substantively there at the end of the day no one present provided any evidence of a single vote that got changed from clinton to trump as a result of a russian hacker and they said well the russians they ran some ads there we go they they they did some stuff on facebook they spread misinformation the number one spreader of misinformation in elections in the world is the united states of america we do it all the time followed by china they do it all the time as well so uh it's kind of strange that in every election this occurs and uh 2016 is the one where it really mattered and of course they went uh parabolic why because they couldn't accept the outcome and now the temptation for the right is to have the same reality occur where we're going to say the entire integrity of the electoral system must have been compromised because our candidate was so awesome that the only way he could be beaten is with fraud trump as the president the 45th president of the united states is going to have to make a decision whether he does what every single president in american history has done and facilitate the peaceful transition of power or if he does not now if he does not these very same institutions that currently work for him will very quickly work against him because his power is very ephemeral at the moment and remind him that peaceful transition of power is an american principle that we have but i suspect after the lawsuits fail to get any fruit and the recounts really don't get anywhere that unfortunately for him he's going to become the 45th president to be replaced by the 46th president president biden and no amount of whining or conspiracy theories is going to change that and america moves on we always do whether we love our leaders or hate our leaders our leaders are finite they retire at some point in four years or in eight years they move on and the next ones come and we now have the prospects of a 78 year old man and who is showing signs of dementia if you look at his recent eight-minute speech it was extraordinary to me uh and uh hopefully the people around him have enough judgment and wisdom to be able to calm everybody down because i don't think he can personally do that but we'll see and we'll see where we go with this whole thing but wishful thinking and conspiracy theories aren't going to get you anywhere and i'm sorry to say steve you too are going to go to the way of trump for saying these types of things i don't believe there's any giant sting operation and national guard arresting people and i don't believe that there was anything foundationally wrong with the structure of the american voting system i just think it's bureaucratic inefficient highly variable in its uh outcome and it should not take in a modern economy this long to know who the winners are and i think the costs of running the system are way too high and they tend to disenfranchise a lot of people who ought to participate and there are better ways of doing things which is why we build these ways as do many others and we're going to have an e-voting renaissance as a result of the frustration that people feel now i do believe fraud can happen happens all the time and it's a local phenomena people sometimes do destroy ballots people sometimes do have fraudulent registration sometimes people living in an apartment will get the old person's ballots and forge their signature and vote on their behalf certainly does happen and all systems of 100 plus million people you expect that the point of blockchain e-voting is to massively reduce that reality but you can't make it get to zero you can just mitigate a little of it no matter how good your system is there's going to be mistakes that are made issues that are made people may very simply misread the ballot and accidentally vote for the wrong person that's something that happened with the butterfly ballot in 2000 with the uh bush v gore phenomena where a lot of people accidentally voted for pat buchanan not realizing that they were voting for him when they intended on voting for al gore many of us would say hang on a second here how can any idiot make that kind of mistake well it happens we misread things all the time and if you have 100 million people doing something it's very easy for a few hundred of them to make a mistake garbage and garbage out so are we going to put this one on the books 2020 and nobody's quite happy with it democrats wanted a blue wave and a mandate to go and introduce socialism to the country and the republicans wanted a repudiation of uh riding with biden and all of these things and no side got anything except for a rebuke from the american people saying get your together let's get back to work and start working together instead of a part hopefully they get the message and the 46th president carries that mandate out if he believes he has a mandate for critical race theory and all of these other things that have been espoused during the democratic primaries he's going to get a very rude awakening in a red wave in 2022 to remind him of that again if he tries to unite people who knows maybe the history will be kind on the biden administration but history will not be kind on the conspiracy theories that have no basis especially ones that are really easy to disprove stay skeptical and as always think for yourself cheers everybody
