I'm not doing this for democracy.
I am doing this for Bitcoin, right?
Because I believe Bitcoin is an anchor of truth in the sea of lies.
I've been hearing Bitcoin fixes this for a long time now.
And I disagree.
I think Bitcoiners who figure out how to use the tools that Bitcoin has
to solve problems that are out there in the real world,
face this.
Right?
So I experienced this problem where I would have in 2019,
potentially get sued and get tempted prison for treason.
I needed Bitcoin to defend myself against the state.
And Bitcoin is so powerful that it actually leveled the playing field
between myself and the National Election Authority.
You know, me and my friends and the thousands of them going together on online
can be just as productive or more than a bunch of bureaucrats with an unlimited
and an ungodly amount of money.
The citizens, you know, it's a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 849073.
And the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up.
Today, that guest is Carlos Toriel, aka Carlinho.
Carlos and I take a deep dive into using Bitcoin to provide immutable cryptographic
verification of election results.
And this isn't just some theory.
This was literally done in practice in Guatemala's 2023 election.
Carlos walks us through exactly how the simple proof solution works using open time stamps
and how easy it is to implement on top of any existing election system.
It only took them four days to set this up before the election in Guatemala.
With US elections coming up in November, we know that there is going to be some funny business going on.
But if states and municipalities leverage Bitcoin and implement this simple proof solution,
they'll be able to prove whether their results can be trusted or not.
But you won't have to trust them because you'll be able to verify them for yourself.
Basically, the only reason not to use this solution would be if you plan on committing election fraud.
Which you don't, right?
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to THE Bitcoin podcast wherever you're listening
and give this show a five star rating.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Carlinho.
Dude, welcome. Glad to have you on here.
It's been a little while since I've seen you in the flesh. Hopefully we can change that soon,
but this will have to do for now.
Indeed. It's great to see you, man. Nice setup.
Yeah. I figured the best way to prove that you're a really serious podcaster is to put as much neon as you can behind you,
and then people take you really seriously. That's all it takes, I think.
Yeah. It's going okay. We'll go forget the...
Oh, yeah. I can't do it. I won't cheapen myself to putting the o-face on YouTube thumbnails.
I just don't care if the algorithm likes it more. I just can't.
It just feels... I don't know. I feel like a cheap whore if I did that.
I know.
I'm not about that, but apparently the algorithm loves it. The algorithm is strange.
People like Bloodstaff is fine.
Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.
Well, dude, glad that you're joining here. I want to maybe start out for those that don't know you.
I just ask a very simple question. Take it any way you want. Run with it any way you want.
But who are you and how did you get here today?
Right on. Well, I woke up this morning in Guatemala City where I was born and raised,
and my name is Carlos Torriello. I am known as Carlinho.
And for those who don't know, Guatemala is immediately after Mexico.
So only two borders away from the US.
And I just really love Bitcoin.
And I am convinced that as humanity, we will either be the last generation or the next great one.
So I choose to be a part of the next great generation and I'm convinced that Bitcoin is the most powerful tool for us to achieve that
and potentially stave off complete annihilation.
So anything that I can do in my life's mission is get Central America to win the Bitcoin race.
There are about 50 million Central Americans.
So that's out of the eight billion people around the world.
I think we have certain advantages that if smart people work to get the most out of them,
then Central America can those 50 million people in Central America can be more often than not on the first wave of adoption of Bitcoin.
And if we win that race as a region, I believe it's the fastest way for us to get out of poverty
and provide a unique example for other similar regions around the world to follow.
So my last mission is do everything I can to accelerate Bitcoin adoption in Central America,
which obviously being in Guatemala is just start in Guatemala and spread outwards from there.
It's a great intro and I would say quite a beautiful life's mission. No pressure. Just changing the future of money
and trying to lift an entire continent out of poverty that has been in many ways imposed artificially
by various organizations and governments in the Western world for many generations now.
And I think it's beautiful to see what Bukele is doing in El Salvador.
You see Mele in Argentina, very different types of leaders.
I was just talking to Maya Parbu who is running for president in Suriname.
And it seems that there's this kind of a real movement in South America, in Latin America,
where people are sick of the old guard, they're sick of the corruption,
and instead of just sitting around and complaining about it, they're actually going out and doing something
and making drastic changes. And I think maybe a good way to set the stage for us would be,
can you just kind of give a little bit of a, maybe a history of Guatemala,
also of the, let's say, political process in Guatemala, maybe some high or low moments that have happened,
just so that people kind of know what are the challenges that Guatemala is facing
and have a little bit better of a sense as we go into kind of the next stage of this discussion here.
Sure. So you could go pretty far back, but I guess the short version is
Central America was its own Federation or region operated by the Spanish when they conquered the Americas.
So you had the viceroy of Mexico, you had the viceroy of Maratate Plata,
down in Argentina, Chile area, and you had the viceroy of Colombia or Greater Colombia,
and then you had Central America, which was this like odd thing that didn't fall into any category.
And it's still kind of the same thing where Central America is North America.
Most people don't really understand that. We play in whatever their soccer against Canada or the U.S.
like it's the Caribbean and the Central American small countries that kind of like provide some fodder, right, for the big guys.
Anyway, that goes back to even colonial times under Spanish where we just never really fit anywhere.
And once the Spanish Empire collapsed and independence kind of started spring up around all of that America,
Central America initially separated as a Federation.
And so the original Central America is Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Vicaragua.
Those are the five original regions, countries, states.
And so under the Federation in the early 1800s, we were this Federation, but it lasted a very short time, like less than 10 years, united.
And very quickly, Mexico, other places just kind of, but really it was more our own unbillie.
There were powerful forces in Central America that saw an advantage to divide and conquer.
And basically, the saying here is, I'd rather be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion.
And so Central America has a lot of, you know, mice heads that are convinced of their own self importance.
And so, you know, fast forward through to the, you know, World War II, we kind of just aligned with the U.S.
and the Allied powers against in World War II, even though we had essentially a Mussolini character,
and most of Central America was headed by dictators in the early 1900s.
But of course, when we realized that the U.S. was going to probably win, everyone's like, yay, democracy.
But that's like the message kind of stirred a lot of people, particularly in Guatemala,
like what do you mean, yay, democracy, and we're a part of the, you know, Allied forces.
It's like, you're, there's no difference between you and Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin, right?
And so, shortly after the war ended, there was, or really, right before there was a revolution in the 1940s,
and we, you know, got them out and started a democratic process.
It was a, the reason it's relevant now is because the president that was elected in 1944 as a result of that revolution
is the father of the president that was elected just last year.
So that was over 80 years ago, and it was the last time that Guatemala actually changed its ownership structure.
The way I describe it quickly is Guatemala has had the same owners, but different management in this kind of alliance with the U.S. status quo,
where very shortly after this revolution in the 40s, Guatemala was famously the second country where the CIA carried out an operation to change the government.
So the first one was Iran, and so they kind of fumbled that and, you know, messed it up, and then they were like, let's try again.
And Guatemala was where they hit it up.
But again, I pushed back on saying, oh, it's the U.S. and, you know, there was a lot of local folk, a lot of Guatemalans that were very, very willing to collaborate
and essentially allied themselves and take the duly elected president and impose a military government which had democracy.
But then, you know, they just had sham elections.
And so the ownership structure was the same, and you could say goes back 200 years and they would change the management during every election with sham elections.
And then in the early 80s, we had a revolution, or last revolution, that led to our current constitution.
And in that moment, the main desire of the people was to regain our trust in elections and our ability to vote.
So whereas from the late 50s through the early 80s, you know, people that managed the voting process were essentially military or police officers.
So you would show up to vote and you're like, all right, who do you want to vote for?
Right? It's democracy.
And so after 30 years of that, the primary request of the revolution was we don't want them anymore.
We want the government and the state completely out of the election system.
And we had this lucky break where the guy in charge of setting up that system, I consider him a Satoshi Nakamoto type figure.
His name was out of Google head, rulehead, and he basically 80, 80, some odd years old at the end of his life.
Long history, you know, legal career legal scholar and you know, lawyers are essentially, you know, coders are analog coders, right?
The law is just a very slow way of doing command line.
And so he just figured out with his experience and lifetime, he got a chance to just leave this legacy of in his mind, what would be the perfect voting system?
And it was also lucky because it was right in the early 80s where you had enough computing and computers in general were available, but they weren't fast enough or powerful enough where you could build the entire system.
As in like an electronic voting, like what started happening in the 90s.
So Guatemala still had this setup where the voting system is completely analog paper based, but combined with kind of a way to publish the results and count and count it on on election night.
And the way that the most powerful thing was we were split up into voting tables as citizens.
So all registered voters got assigned at a maximum, I think it's 500 to a voting table.
And these voting tables are manned by citizens.
And they are just like your neighbor.
And it's this organic process of who do you want to be a volunteer?
Like, you know that you would get to handle the votes.
Like just like in the in the 60s and 70s, you know, the guy handling the vote is the guy with the guns.
Now we took it away from them, but you know, we need the citizens to show up, right?
And so there's this organic process of citizens that care about this that understand that whoever handles the vote has the, you know, a lot of power, right?
And so if we get enough people to show up and all men, all these tables, then the citizens are running the election.
Of course, that could potentially be corrupted.
And so the way to counter that is political parties can send these witnesses to oversee the process.
And so it effectively, I see it now as a bit pointer as this proof of work consensus algorithm that is similar to Bitcoin in that the citizen volunteers are like mining notes who are receiving the transactions from the individual votes.
And the political party witnesses who are literally people that are standing right beside you as you're doing this.
And I know this because I did it twice already in 2011 and 2015.
So you've got these guys behind you the whole day. And if you ever do anything funny, they like can take note of that and call the cops and you go to jail, right?
So it's the political parties, the folks that are in the race, like trying to get the power, it's in, it behooves them to be able to witness this.
And this tech that everything is carried out properly.
So you have these competing forces trying to get power, overseeing the citizens to make sure that no funny stuff happens.
And you have to use people's distrust and people's greed as a mechanism to achieve trust in the outcome, right?
So it's a very smart way of creating a proof of work consensus algorithm that you can trust.
And these documents that are published at the end of the election day contain the results of all those 400, 500 votes that are signed to the table.
And so in this document is like the soul of our democracy.
It eliminates the paper balance.
So once this ritual happens where the citizens are counting the ballots and writing down can written numbers of what the totals are, because this happens with political witnesses on top of them, the result is they sign this document.
And so it's like the miners finalize their sign their block and the node validators, the political party witnesses are like validating those they sign off.
And once that happens, that document that block, or I could say more like a coin join is exists and the paper ballots are eliminated.
They no longer have any legal weight because you there is no scenario where you could create more trust in counting the paper ballots than in having you know community neighbors, political party witnesses do this.
So this document that can contain 400, 500 votes eliminates the paper analog individual ballots and becomes the legal document of that table.
Right. And so then the system publishes these documents, allowing anyone to verify them. Right.
So you have a very public transparent paper based auditable trail that is public but it doesn't sacrifice people's right to privacy.
And so it's like the magic of coin joins and, you know, why we should fight to defend them because they protect our, our individual rights but provide public transparency right and so I mean I was explaining all this for what I'm all because right up until last year,
the governing like the status quo that emerged out of this post World War Two alliance carried out the vote but they just stretched their their system way too far and it snapped and the result the election result was extremely unexpected.
And the winner, I can mention earlier was is Bernardo Boarevalo, the son of the president that was elected as a result of the 1944 revolution.
So for the first time in 80 years, there's been a change in the ownership structure of Guatemala, not just the management. Right.
And so now we get to start basically this new era and we'll see where it takes us there's no promises that it's a good thing for that thing but at least we're not stuck in the old status quo and we we finally get a chance to do something different.
I appreciate the context a lot because again I think it's important for people to kind of understand what is the current situation and then also what has changed because I believe there was a pretty large change between like the how the results were tabulated in
the 2019 let's say and in 2023. So could you could you talk a little bit just about the specifics of what were the issues in not this last election but the one before that. And then what was actually the change that happened which is kind of the this is the you know the reason we're chatting here today.
Exactly. So, as I mentioned, I was a volunteer in 2011 and 2015 we carry out national elections and just changed the entire government every four years coincides with the having cycles more or less.
But that's the oddness this conversation but so every four years we have this book. And in 2011 15 I learned how this father sausage gets made, right I was literally inside the belly of the beast, doing my civic duty, you know, overseen by these these people and just fell in love with the process
and I was like, wow, this is this is beautiful. And in 2019. I was asked by my father and my cousin, who both ran for Congress, convinced that oh if you know the good guys don't run then only the bad guys are in government so you got to run and it's like
I won't give you money but I know how the sausage gets made so let me audit the election on you we have so I went from being a citizen volunteer of a mining node to becoming a valid dating node of the system in 2019.
And I connected to the system and on election night in 2019 we have this website that publishes all the results that gets hoovered by all the media and then distributed out to the masses via social media the newspaper radio.
And all that jazz, there's this like centralized source of information. And ever since I can remember that we have the internet we have this website that publishes the results and so I'm connected to it I as a political party witness I have credentials to access the back end database to see what's
going on. And all the databases is an ftp server which for some folks that don't know it's just like a folder that you log into via the internet. And then you, it's supposed to have JPEG files in pictures of the voting totals from every single voting table, which
in 2019, it was five elections and 21,000 tables it was supposed to be 105,000 JPEGs that I was going to see in this database, plus a data, like a CSV file, a table right on an Excel spreadsheet with all the data.
And I'm logged in, and you'd expect Oh, you know, on the for it gets populated to zero, and it just goes up to 105,000 JPEGs. But what happens on election that in 2019 is it jumped from zero to 10,000 down to five up to 30 down to 15 up to 50 down to 20 up to 80 down to 40 down to up to 100 and then down to zero.
And literally on election night, the whole media, everyone is logged into this thing. And it's chaos like it just nothing happens. It, it, it, people see numbers then they refresh and then the numbers are gone. So it's just incredibly uncomfortable where you've got these
newscasters just looking at each other like, what I mean, can you imagine that happening in the US and you'll see and then Fox is just like a second ago, it was saying so and so is winning. Now it's not saying anything.
Like, it's just, I can, I can kind of imagine that happening in the US section. That's a different story. But continue.
Well, maybe it's a cautionary tale like who's running these systems like how do you even know that they're going to work. And like, maybe is it an attack or is it just someone fumbled this like terribly.
We didn't know right and so every for the first time since democracy started all again in Guatemala in 1985. Everyone like you have left right center up down the political parties, everyone is saying, this is election fraud like this is.
This has never happened before we are seeing it with our own eyes. You log in the next day. All of a sudden the data is back on there. But then it crashes again and you can't see anything. And then it turns on again.
And this happens for a period of six days until they finally freeze the website. And so I get dragged into this meeting with all these boomer lawyers to they're asking me, Hey, you're the young guy that like those how this works right.
And this like.
And say, it would be the only way that I would trust anything is next time you publish your JPEGs, you need to give us a an accompanying Shah, a hash identifier for every one of them so that we can at least have the Shahs of the JPEGs.
So I don't know a secure hash algorithm shot. I suggested shot 256, which is what Bitcoin uses. It's very secure. Basically, you can grab any digital fire file like a JPEG, and you have a string of characters that's utterly unique to this JPEG to anything.
So I was like, you, if you need to stop changing your files, and you need to make one final publication and accompany all of these with a shot signature. And the boomers were like, hey, I want a shot.
And so they even published this document this and tweak documents lost the company with their hash secure key something like that. I was like, holy shit, like the common government just issued a document that has the word hash it.
And so finally I got the documents in six days later, which, you know, anyone doing anything digital should understand that six days between a file getting created and a file being given to you is an eternity.
If it's 105,000, like how would you ever trust that anything is believable, right? It's a large enough number where you could sneak in things and basically create whatever reality you want.
But regardless, then it's a matter of and maybe when you bring up one of these files so that people actually can see what I'm saying, because if you when I finally got the documents, mind you, they were supposed to give me 105,000, they gave me 101,000.
So still there's the discrepancy.
It's it was it was bad. Yes, it was bad. But I was like, all right. And that's not even like all of it like at this.
They were like, oh, the lawyer said, till tomorrow Friday at noon, you will produce all of the documents and at noon they give me only like 50,000 documents and I'm like, dude, are you are you serious?
Like, you're like, do I need to call your boss and finally like seven hours later, they give you 101,000. I'm like, all right, 97%. That's that's as far as I guess.
And so at that point, then it becomes a what's called an OCR problem, which is an optical character recognition problem.
And so when we bring this up on screen. So what you're seeing on this fee is one of these JPEGs that contain this one was done by Victoria Mildred as Monica voting table number 709.
And they're saying 167 citizens showed up to vote. And these 167 individual votes were assigned in all of these ways.
Every single line you see here on the left is a different political party. That's more details than you need to know.
But we have 20 some odd people competing for the presidency. Any kind is the opposite of not enough choices. And then over here on the right, you have three signatures corresponding to the citizens.
And then these other signatures are on the signatures of the validating nodes on the political party witnesses.
So once this is signed by everyone there, this document invalid. And so when I finally got these in 2019, six days after this, like, all right, what do these things say?
Well, I'd have to. These are all handwritten digits. And this one looks pretty good. But some of these are just gnarly because every like every single one of these has a different handwriting style.
And there's 100 and some odd thousand of these and they can contain 30 data points. So, you know, do the math. It's like 3 million digits that you have to look at.
And so it's just the kind of problem that you cannot do by yourself or if you do it, it'll take you years. And in elections, information at this point, like, has to be immediate.
Otherwise, losing candidates can create a narrative that is are more important than than truth. And so I built an open source code to with a bunch of volunteers on to try to attempt to look at everything with basically crowd source ways.
And another curious context about Guatemala is this is essentially CAPTCHA, which are you familiar with CAPTCHA whopper?
I sure am.
Right. So you may recall originally the first CAPTCHAs were like you saw one one word and then you saw another one and you just wrote down the words, right?
That's no longer what CAPTCHA does because, you know, it's very easy to get to gain that now. And so now it's called recapture and they show you like the fire hydrant or the bicycles and you're training the AI
Crosswalks and you're trying to figure out does this corner of a crosswalk actually count as a crosswalk and yeah, yeah.
And so those are OCRs, Optical Character Recognition Problems and they were just kind of used in the early 2000s as a way to have services like Google differentiate who is when a new user logs in, is it a bot trying to just mess with my servers or is it a real human being trying to access a service.
And so CAPTCHA was what was used and now we do billions of these days as humanity. But a little known fact about it is CAPTCHA was invented by Guatemalan.
He's the most famous tech entrepreneur in Guatemalan history at this point billionaire, as I understand it, he sold CAPTCHA to Google. His name is Luis Von Anne.
And so as a Guatemalan tech entrepreneur, like if you don't know the story of CAPTCHA, it's like you're like you're not, you're not ready to be a entrepreneur.
So I was just blown away in 2019 that's like our Democratic Republic might fail and collapse because we literally just don't know how to use our own optical character recognition technology.
And you know, CAPTCHA. And so we built an open source version of this to just work with these files and got over 1500 people to try to help us out.
But it took us three, four weeks to set this up. And at that point, the official results had been made public. And so the volunteers that I was relying on just stopped caring, right.
And I was like, if only I had a way to incentivize people value for value, right, like you, you do a small amount of work, I provide some kind of incentive.
And we do this, right. And so I realized that there were limitations because I couldn't pay my users like I all I knew about them was that I had a cell phone number and what that is just that there wasn't a way in 2019 to very quickly do this.
And so we lost interest and I was never able to finish the audit. The results were made official. And I realized our political system is essentially a proof of stake network where the political parties don't even care anymore what the votes say.
They just negotiate between each other, who's got the bigger stake and and then just, you know, decide what is the least inappropriate outcome for them.
And in particular what I what I my suspicion was, and the presidency is this all consuming thing in the media.
And no one's paying attention to how Congress was elected, how small municipal bodies and towns were elected. And so you can very easily imagine that small towns and congressional districts can become bargaining chips for the powers that be in the the
the stakers in this proof of stake network. And so, obviously that helped me realize the value of proof of work versus proof of stake.
And just from 2019 to 2023 realizing like no one's doing the work of validating and running the node.
Our democracy is this transparent thing where all the information is there. And these boomers that I'm talking to that work at these political parties are like, oh, but that's impossible man it's like so much work.
But it's like, like it's possible it's like thousands of you know we'd have to do stuff and that's like when you realize oh so proof of stake people don't know how to work right then so I just kind of waited and said, you know, even though I failed in in
2019, there's got to be stuff particularly in Bitcoin that could help me figure this out. And that's when I attended a human rights Foundation event in Miami back in 2021. And I met the folks from stack work, which, if you all don't know,
stack work is a lightning company that facilitates hyper growth for anyone. And so if you've got all the sudden problem where you need to grow from zero to a lot.
Stack work has ways of developing workflows that allow people to just log on and either to the laptops or through their phones, do massive amounts of work.
And in exchange, they get to redeem that work in Sadoshi's. And so they're building this giant global workforce that is essentially capable of doing anything for you that you could do on a phone.
Right. And I was just blown away because it's like I did my little rinky dink, you know, open source capture thing and then all of a sudden there's this lightning network powered awesome, you know, machine.
And so I just work with them to get it ready. But then we have the other problem of how do you trust the JPEG. Right. Thanks.
I was like, if I get JPEG six days after the election, like that's no bueno man like that's like if you can avoid that. The problem is in 2019 it was like standing under Niagara Falls with a water cup.
You know, it's like, you're not you're not going to catch the waterfall. If you're holding up a paper cup, right. And so if you know there's a flood coming, you just need to build a gigantic bucket that can swallow the entirety of the data.
And that's what we did. So yeah, so.
No, no, no, not at all. So I think that no, because again, the context is important and I wanted to talk about the 2019 election because I think without that without knowing kind of what the problem was solutions don't have context and it's not as readily apparent why that solution was actually so great.
So now I think let's let's talk a little bit about the solution itself and how Bitcoin factored into this. So essentially, well, you know, I'll let I'll let you speak on this but you identified obviously a problem in in 2019 and probably still people look back on that election I'm sure and say, you know, it was rigged we don't know exactly
what how it was rigged or who did the rigging but we know that there was obviously some people say that others say we know exactly that extremists are are trying to to.
To reduce our faith and institutions and you're just like, you know, it's pointless. It's the same propaganda all over the world. That's what you see. It's the exact same lines arguing past each other with with emotional appeals as opposed to what does the data say.
Can I can I just work with data. Yeah. So, so and again here we're talking about a from everything you've said, what the mountains are very much there is pride in this paper ballot election system.
There is there I mean clearly if people are volunteering to go out and do this. They are genuinely wanting to be a part of that democratic process. So is that fair to say like there's a lot of national pride in this.
And in this last one because of all of the pressure from 2019 I know tons of people that were like, I am going to be at table, because I am not letting these people take a house.
I am going to go out and I am going to defend 400. Right. And if you've got enough of us show up, they can't take it from us like we already won this battle. And all we need to do is mobilize and get organized right and and if if if we just
abandoned that space that we fought and died for 40 years ago because I can't remember why this was important because nobody taught me this or whatever. It's like well then then yeah I mean the slow creep of the increasing
authoritarianism is going to come for us and it's just gonna if you allow your liberties to get taken from you then they will get taken from you like no one nothing is given right. And so yes it is completely fair to say and personally I
I see it this way and so I realized no one is helping these people like these people do all this work and yes they protect that individual like 400 person table but who's looking at the entire know like who's who's
who's doing the whole the full note right it's you if you work with a pruned node for those that with Bitcoin or speak it's if you're working with a prune node yeah sure maybe it runs great on your phone but you are relying on someone else's
work to make sure to take a risk on those prune nodes and in general you should be fine but if the situation gets pushed to an extreme you always have the ability to download the full note right and then check it against everyone else's
and make sure that you're not getting rug pulled right and that it's it's applying that same mentality to the voting system and realizing okay. There will be this giant tsunami or waterfall. What can we do and so I built a bunch of tools and in
2020 I made recommendations to the authorities because this was you know budget. Like you said there was a lot of people convinced that you couldn't trust them and so I suggested hey why don't you incorporate at the time I called them blockchain certificates
so that when you make these JPEGs public you accompany them with a hash and you stamp that hash onto some publicly available database that anyone could check and so therefore there would be a much more increased trust in this and so I'm you know this was
2020 I'm getting ready for 2023 I'm just mums the word I'm keeping low profile and I get into the system on June 2023 and my surprise and this is where I'll share my spring because it's much more powerful when it's show and tell
and so I'll start with say at the end day what do I do is digital witness dot IO it's I'm a post election auditor and so I turn the very very boring activity of post election auditing into an arcade game it's I gamified this and these are my top 10 users
number one made 385,000 sets so that's the top score and over 10 has a hundred and 12,000 sets and we get to run this again four years from now at the next election and see if anyone gets a higher score
but anyway how do we do this this is a website called trap dot GT T R E P dot GT it is the preliminary results website so this is the website was saying that the media logs into and uses to report results to the
the population and so you can select between president and Congress Congress municipal authorities and Central American Congress but I'm just going to stick to president
it's a oh see we are displaying 121,227 act us or doc election documents out of a hundred and twenty thousand so 99.123% of the JPEG's and that's her little map and then these votes are distributed in these bar graphs on a national level between all of these clouds that compete in this show
right and so don't trust verify it how do I know that this is how it's made how this is actually added up so this system has over on this side an option to include your voting dating on so we have in 2023 between one and 24,500 so what's your favorite number between
one and 24,500 21.
completely random you completely random no reason for it at all and so now as you can see we're not looking at the national total we're not looking at table number 21 at voting number three new style department of drama in the country of flower and it's the same clown show it before of how you distribute these but it's no longer in the national
totals but rather the local voting table so those 400 potential votes how they got distributed but again this is you know cool database bro if I click on this button though I actually now get to see the JPEGs right so I on election night had credentials to get access to the back
end so I could just download this in a much seamless and more seamless way but you could develop a little web crawler bot that just crawls this website and does what I just did for table number 21 24,500 times and you just rip this out of the internet because it's all public right and all you need to do is you know right click on the JPEG and
download it to your to your yeah and can I start it up but I want to make sure that for for anyone listening watching that this that this part is very clear as we get into this little bit because you did not create some new blockchain for for this you did not you know create some new new token that you also you know we're pumping and dumping on the side what did you actually use for for the the you know the
application these results. I wanted to make that very clear just so that everybody realizes that and maybe just as you're going through this well we can circle back in this too but I kind of want to talk about you know how it's utilizing Bitcoin because people may be
thinking oh is this you know these are these inscriptions are these clogging up the bitcoins bitcoins time chain and so I want to talk about the open time stamps part of this too and just how that works but continue on this just wanted to make sure everybody knows this is not some
token homegrown blockchain this is this is using Bitcoin so to continue so like I was saying earlier that the problem is you know these it's this waterfall of JPEGs in 2023 121,000 so we knew that they were coming and so we had to have a way to prepare for it and that's why I was very
surprised on election night I had my own way of doing this but then all of a sudden there's this really conspicuous orange button I mean that's a that's a rather specific shade of orange and so the question you gotta ask yourself is we're sitting here on June 22nd
to 2024 how do I know that this JPEG that I'm looking at is the same JPEG that what was published on June 25th 2023 and it's almost a year ago to the day.
Well, in 2019 there was no way for you know, but in 2023 the election authority included this button which if you click.
It should work. Oh, another orange little thing Wow. And so you come to the immutable backup solution built by simple proof and you know full transparency I now work for simple proof after being an election auditor and doing all my work and using their tools.
They decide to hire me. And so basically what is simple proof doing is they are providing document verification they're saying they received the document at this moment so June 25th 2023 at 1010 p.m.
time is of GMT minus six so that little bit and so they provide the hash shot 256 so again we went from it being just a document signed by a doomer lawyer in 2019 to actually being published with a shot 256 and then they're saying and this you divide this truth
and block number 795,961 and that block was confirmed on June 25th 1080 PM GT minus six so there's very publicly saying simple to receive this from the election authorities at 1010 p.m.
And within eight minutes you can find that information and oh sorry I should assume that a little bit more within eight minutes that information has now been made public on the blockchain.
Eight minutes later right and how are we doing this and and yes, if you go to open timestamps.org. This is a protocol a time stamping proof standard that has been published since 2016 by primarily Peter Todd and a few others, and it's awesome like it.
I don't know a single bit corner that doesn't like open timestamps I don't know about you Walker have you ever met someone like there doesn't seem to be any reason not to like it because it doesn't so maybe maybe you could clarify here a little bit to what you know because here we're talking
about JPEGs on the blockchain quotes, but this is not actually putting the JPEGs there this is this is taking a hash, exactly on there which is extremely, you know, an inconsequential amount of data relative to a JPEG so can.
I think there's a little bit about just the difference there so the people who may be thinking, what is this you know, is this some NFT clogging it up Bitcoin bullshit, can you talk a little bit about the difference between, you know, you know, ordinals inscriptions the you know what's the topic of the day now, versus open
timestamps and how those are really fundamentally different. So if you go to open timestamps.org, then you scroll down you'll get to this point where it says step and verify, you can literally drag and drop a JPEG of yours anything that you want to the hash permanently permanently on Bitcoin.
And when you do it, you get prompted to download an OTS file. And so visually is very easy to understand. All you need to do is keep a local copy of your JPEG so you're not pushing the storage of the JPEG onto Bitcoin, because that's what an inscription is you know you're
just pushing the actual like data of the JPEG onto the chain. And so you're clogging up the chain and you're consuming a bunch of space on the block space. So you don't do that you just keep the JPEG on on your local drive or somewhere else like you.
And the data storage is off of Bitcoin. And so you just include the hash which is this, you know the shot 256 is just a strain. And this justice string is a very small amount of data. However, it's not even just that because then when you, if you download the JPEG and you keep it on your local server,
then open time sense fits out what's called an OTS file. And so all you need to do is to prove that something existed is use open time steps that download the OTS file the proof. And so if you keep your original JPEG and the proof that open time sense
is just give you and you store that for a million years and Bitcoin is still going a million years from now, you could always prove that a certain document is the same as somewhere in the past. So let's use this exam care of this JPEG right, we are looking at this JPEG that is the same as
what should be on here right for there's number 21. And so looking at the same JPEG so we can visually compare there and download it. So these are two separate contractors with two separate databases. And then there's the OTS file for this specific file, which text based format is kind of
confusing. It's this cache is included in all of this cryptographic proof, which what since the proof is done is created this navigator that visually will allow you to understand why this doesn't plug up the Bitcoin block T.
So here's the hash of that file 7834 we can go back and compare is starts with 7834. And so that hash is now this is a visual graphic representation of the text that I just showed you earlier where this hash is combined into this mother hash with another
hash, right. And so the appended new hash is essentially the result of the two child passions. And that is done again for the next JPEG. And then again for the next JPEG. And you can imagine all beyond these are all of these JPEGs that are just getting
cryptographically kind and prove to one another. And then if you keep following the trail, it goes all the way up to the final root hash of this Merkle tree. And you can copy that hash the hash is right here.
And what they include now in this, the what differentiates the root cache from the rest of the Merkle tree is that it also contains a transaction ID. And so when you click on the link here or you copy the transaction ID and look for it on your own node, which if you're running your
own node, you can do this but they have facilitated a link that goes directly to the transaction ID on mempool.space. You can see all of this transaction data of in fact occur on block number 795961. Here's the time stamp. And then further down in the details, I can pay and find the hash we now are looking at CDA63A, which is
CDAC, the hash from the root. And so we are not storing JPEGs. We are not storing the hashes of JPEGs. We are storing the hashes of the hashes of the JPEGs into one single transaction. So this giant tree that you are seeing now on your
on your screen can taste time stamping proof of potentially an unlimited amount of data, right? Like it's it literally could be trillions of JPEGs all hashed together. And this one last hash is what's going on to Bitcoin in the form of a transaction.
So it is quite literally the opposite of an ordinal or an inscription in that instead of trying to get a single digital file, you know, forever on the chain, you're taking the most amount of data that you could, and compressing it to the smallest footprint that you
could get it to. And that is what's going because you don't care about who owns that transaction. What you care about is just proving that it happens with elections. You don't want to have to trust the politicians in charge. You need to be able to verify for
yourself. But the same goes for Bitcoin hardware. That's where Bitbox comes in. Head to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox o two hardware wallet, then get your Bitcoin off the exchange
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contractors services, Bitcoin consulting can take care of you. So go to Bitcoin consulting dot US and book a consultation today. Again, that's Bitcoin consulting dot US. It's basically it reminds me of there's a
great Julian Assange quote from gosh, I think it was from like 20 2014. Yeah, 2014, but he says that like Bitcoin, its underlying technology breaks Orwell's dictum by providing publication at a certain time and for those that are not
familiar, Orwell's dictum is who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. So Assange's assertion basically is that Bitcoin allows you to break that through proof of publication. And in this case, again, we're, I think it's, I'm sure
somebody more clever than I could make an argument that open time stamps is somehow bad. I would disagree with that argument because I think it's, it's a very efficient way to do this and I know Peter Todd has, you know, promoted this and worked on this solution for a long time and I
think it's a really excellent one. And now we're seeing this used in probably one of the most important ways that it could be, which is to certify and provide verification for election results. Like this is talk about Orwell's dictum like
what's the, the, you know, the past that you want to control? Well, it's what were the results of who's going to be in power for the next four years. This is, this is literally, you know, kind of the type of thing that Assange is envisioning also with various, you know, let's say, you know, WikiLeaks files, let's say, to prove that listen, these did exist and we put them out here at this
time. But, but this is really powerful. And so, I mean, I assume the response this can you give us an idea of what was the, it's you said it took six days just in the 2019 just to get the results in and then they weren't even all in. And then it was weeks after that still trying to figure
out what the hell actually happened here. How did that compare to 2023 when you used Bitcoin when you used open timestamps, when you made this publicly available? What was the, how long did that take to certify the election?
So, in 2019, I, it took me until, you know, because I, I agree completely with what you're saying about proof of publication and that it's, it behooves the citizenry, you know, individuals to keep their own records, right, and, and to keep records of the public records, because if we just allow the state to have
not only the power to emit the records, right, the Oracle produces the record, but then also is the only one in charge of storing and safekeeping and then wouldn't you know it, records would will either disappear or they might change.
In the case of bottom up after I did all this like I said, all right, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to try to do the entire historical archive so I use freedom of information act request against the election authorities to say, I want the entire archive of all of these documents as far back as 1985 with our first
election. And the response was, we can only provide as of 2015. So I have written legal confirmation of what you just said, at least in the case of God, I'm all the election authority had a tragic boating accident in, you know, somewhere 2011 2015, and all of a sudden, you know, there is no historical record of our
most important record which is how the power get transferred. And my message there is, if you care about this, you should start asking for records, and just keep records and use open timestamps timestamp them.
I timestamp everything from 2015 2019 2023. I built this this this tool and that simple proof people built an even better tool. And so the the the waterfall came down on June 2023. Everything got time stamped on that night.
And with the help of stacker, which I can share that that basically not only did the the folks get a sorry.
So I was able to get massive amounts of people over 1000 people to sign up and help me digitize this and turn it into our own database. It does for the national election, which was, you know, the presidency and everything and took us about two weeks to pump out an independent
run audit that was primarily done by young people on the internet. And we compared everything to the official results and we, you know, published that and started getting invited to media to say alright so what what do you think because the the election result was so surprising that
the the regime lost and within days, the argument was done the authorities, there must have been election fraud, because the regime lost. And so it was the kind of opposite of 2019 where they were managed to control it.
In 2023, they got out of their hands. And so they're trying to claim election fraud in the presidency. And we checked everything we went through absolutely everything with thousands of people, and we confirmed no, the we found some differences so it's like
4.2 million people actually voted in the election. And we found that the difference between the winning candidate and the loser was over 220,000 votes. When we went through our results, our results differed by about 30,000, which out of 4.2 million, it's, you'd want it to be less than
the margin of error, but it's within the margin of error. But more importantly, it's within the margin of the 200 plus 1000 votes that made the difference. You're saying look, we went through absolutely everything with a fine teeth comb. And the most that we found in the difference
parties so all of the competing people we found 30,000. So even in the crazy scenario where we just handed all of those, assume there was a mistake and handed those 30,000 votes to the losing candidate. It's, they still lose by over 180,000 votes.
And so it's like, it we joined a lot of voices that were coming out to protect the election results and say, do you're not taking this from us. This was done by the citizens and and respect the results.
Now, the one thing to say is people were obsessed with the presidency. And so the chorus was, oh, everything's fine. Everything's fine with the election like nothing to see here. And we're the only ones with the nuanced argument of, look, the presidency fine.
But what's going on with Congress, what's going on with municipal small local elections, like, no one cares about those. And everyone's like, don't talk about that because it's to nuance, basically, like people.
It's, you know, the public discourse is the lowest common denominator and so a nuanced argument can get weaponized by the, I didn't care. We publish our report to everyone like could look at our results.
And so a lot of people that were concerned about the election results came to us and and did the work of of actually checking the results. And in exchange, they earned some points that if they wanted to, they could redeem for the full team.
So, and so just to kind of clarify here, like the at the on the night of the election, these results, these forms, which are the combination of, you know, 400 ballots, right, are getting time stamped with open time stamps, they're getting
time stamped basically in, you know, near real time, essentially the night of the election. And then, you know, results are announced, you can see all of that you have all that data. But and what's especially important here is that then after the fact, anyone can go back and be able to
review this data and check, okay, yes, this was time sent here. So, you know, it because I think it's an interesting point that at the end of the day, it's, it's not that it is going to potentially fix potential corruption, like you know, you're not going to, you can't solve for human nature,
you know, you can't solve for greed. But what it does do is provide some recourse, it you don't have to just trust the results, you can actually verify them for yourself. And you get a lot of people together. A lot of you know, motivated people trying to verify
this, you can produce a body of work that then can stand up and say, okay, this is our, you know, independent audit of this. And we can actually audit it. I get it's not opaque, it's completely transparent. So that even if, and in this case, like you said, you found a discrepancy,
there was a discrepancy there. But you were able to find it, and you're able to trace exactly what this discrepancy is, it's not just somebody making the claim that well, I think there were these, you know, you're not just saying I believe that there were 30,000 ballots that came out of nowhere were wrong
and you're not just saying, I believe that there were 30,000 ballots that came out of nowhere. And so I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important. And I think that's really important.
And so it's a perfect system. But you are allowing that system to be have a check and balance on it, which is independent auditing independent verification, people who can go through and check this for themselves, there's no need to trust because they can verify.
Exactly. And so I'm showing on the screen that it's basically similar to how as a Bitcoin or you can run a full node and to do so you have to download the blockchain which contains the history of transactions in democracy.
And so the blockchain is the election results. And so what you're showing on the screen is one of these 100 plus thousand documents. And so as one of my lines, I can download my blockchain, which is 120 some 1000 documents.
And I then use Bitcoin and the simple truth implementation of open timestamps to verify that the blockchain that I downloaded is the same blockchain that the Oracle produced, you know, the authorities published.
And then after that, it's just a massive coordination issue, which is how do we check this. And so I invited people online to log in and just get invited to join what you're seeing on your screen which is, I asked it, all right, there's this, I take out all the files that create snippets, and then I can zoom in and out
or move this around and say, right, what is this number that's a handy number 005 I didn't look at it, I input it, I do this on my phone, and I gamified this I can get points.
And so I'm invited to continue to do this. And because it's thousands of people online. Again, what is this this is a little trickier because it's in between maybe I'll get this wrong.
I'm going to say 008. And yet so if you can, if you know that your blockchain is correct, then it's just a matter of can you look.
Can you run the full node fast enough that it's still relevant for the election result because it's a fast moving thing where public opinion has to happen quickly right.
And basically people can just do this and we had over 1000 people join us. And with this green button, if they wanted to, they can just paste an invoice here and experience their first liking transaction.
And so it's the combination. It's my message is to Bitcoin as a particular because the reason it's hard to get through this because there's a lot of nuance but it's a I'm not doing this for democracy.
I am doing this for Bitcoin, right, because I believe Bitcoin is an anchor of truth in the sea of lies.
I've been hearing Bitcoin fixes this for a long time now. And I disagree. I think Bitcoiners who figure out how to use the tools that Bitcoin has to solve problems that are out there in the real world.
Face this right so I experienced this problem where I would have in 2019 potentially get sued and get tempted prison for treason.
I needed Bitcoin to defend myself against the state and Bitcoin is so powerful that it actually leveled the playing field between myself and the National Election Authority where you know me and my friends and then the thousands of them joined together on online can be just as productive or more than a bunch of
bureaucrats with an unlimited and an ungodly amount of money. The citizens, you know, it's a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world.
And so it's the there is a huge need on the in the real world of do people trust elections. And so I think we can either make the you can make the choices as a citizen that you don't care about democracy. It's all rigged and it's all nonsense.
They they are an opportunity to reach normies and citizen just the general population with a different message and a different touch point about Bitcoin of how Bitcoin is a trust machine, a truth machine is when we what Bitcoin is.
So one of the things that Bitcoin has done is proven that we can reach consensus on the most difficult card problem that everyone wants to cheat on which is money. And so if we can reach because that's on that then can we use that to create trust and truth in other scenarios.
So here is like I could care less who won the election in 2023. What I do care about is that I fight for my right as a Guatemalan to be able to download all of the files, make sure that they can't change them on me, and then review what they say, just read them like
literally it's the public record. What is it? Let's make sure it can't change. And then let's just read it and compare it to what they are publicly saying the public record says because there's a lot of assumptions there that, you know, it I found that maybe they just published the record.
And then they're saying what the results are and those don't match like if no one's running the node if you're just running a pruned no, you're just assuming that the note that everything matches right and so it's an exercise of
realizing normally land and citizens everywhere have very strong feelings about democracy and you're not going to change that. But if you help them recover their faith in this and particularly protect some people who care deeply about this for example, the president and his team that won the
election now understand that Bitcoin played a role in this. And so when they get a call from somewhere saying, oh, you're supposed to say that Bitcoin is evil. The president and his staff and congressmen that are running now with Congress judges in the justice
system have to reconcile all the fun around Bitcoin with the fact that Bitcoin protected our voting system and that it's not this isn't me saying this and it's hypothesis is this literally what happened and you can use your own mode and you can learn
how to open source code and check it yourself. Right. So, yeah. I love it and I think that that's it's really first of all it's kind of wild because I actually didn't know that you guys were doing this until you reached out.
And, you know, which I felt like, dang, this, this story like this is, you know, not as, you know, a small election like this was a, a national election. This wasn't some little local, you know, proof of concept. This was done at scale.
9.2 million registered voters in the state of God. Right. That's, that's, that's quite a few. And, you know, it seems that these days, most elections seem to be contested in some way. Somebody has a problem with it, you know, and, and because there is no way to verify for people to verify the results of these
elections themselves, they have to trust, they are forced to trust. But if they don't trust the people who are telling them the results that they don't like because they think that something went on, then there's a problem.
Because of course, if, you know, if your guy lost and the other guy won, and you've heard that there's some shady business going on, and you don't have any way to prove that, but you still don't believe that this was above board in the election sense.
There's no way you're going to accept the results of that. And, you know, it seems that this solution using Bitcoin, where anyone can verify the results, you know, and in real time and audit them after the fact.
This is a way of, again, it's that, it's that core Bitcoin ethos of don't trust, verify. You're not asking anyone, you know, and you're not saying that the results are going to be perfect.
Like, again, you're not fixing the voting system. You're fixing the ability to audit that system and give people faith that whatever the results are, are either correct or incorrect.
And you can see that discrepancy.
There is a big, so yeah, this doesn't fix election fraud, but there is one huge thing that open time Samsung and the simple proof implementation did for Guatemala, in that it essentially eliminated 99% of the attack surface on the election and forced anyone that wanted to attack the
election to attack it on election night. Whereas in 2019 would be attackers had six days to do whatever they wanted with the data. And then we're supposed to trust them.
In 2023, they had essentially the space between Bitcoin blocks to attack the election on election that that's what they get. So I can't say this doesn't, you know, eliminate this isn't a perfect system.
But it essentially increases the resources and the ability that attacker would need to have by, you know, almost infinity, right, like you'd need to attack when people are forced to attack you in a very small moment of time, you panic, you make mistakes
when people make mistakes that when that's when they leave evidence and that's when you catch criminals, right. And so this is a purely on that benefit from the open time Samsung proof side of saying, elections everywhere need to produce evidence, right, in in in the modern
world, if your local election authority doesn't give you access to the data to verify the results for yourself, you should not trust them, you should not allow your local election authority to get away with just giving you some secondary documentation
spit out from a machine that is behind some walled garden private source software, it's like that's gobbledygook like you need to fight for your access to the raw data coming out of the citizens like whatever your process is that counts votes there at some point, there's a result.
And that's like, what whatever that is, if you can get access to that, it's a, well, does your election authority publish that to the internet, because if they do like how are they going to protect from attackers on social media and doing deep fakes how digital
information is vulnerable on the internet. But open time stamps and what simple proof that is basically create this shield to say, we are publishing everything, and we are standing behind it, right, and you cannot change this because this shield is effectively the Bitcoin mining network, which
I mean is hypothetically impossible to reorg at this point. And so we did this so that now people locally and what I'm all just then we this thing that we care a lot about and it's hundreds of thousands of people that care about this a lot they they now know the Bitcoin
is their role in that. And so it just offers people a different touch point, you know, I love the sound money arguments I think we need to keep making them but we're I feel like we're kind of reaching the edges right of how to reach people with different messages, and this is a
huge that is only available to democracies, right, because if you live in a monarchy of whatever, and no one cares about the election like they don't have this, they have the autocracies and dictatorships have the advantage that citizens are getting
infected, so that's maybe pushing them into adopting Bitcoin. But democracies don't need to have a disadvantage at adopting Bitcoin, we can use the voting system as a way to essentially farm more people into the network by just exposing them to
hey, this thing that you care about, Bitcoin can protect it from getting destroyed online, and then also use it to audit it so that you're not just believing what you're being told, but you're you're you're verifying for yourself.
I love that and I think it's, you know, I just kind of speaking of, of, you know, messed is there's a lot of folks in the US are, you know, whatever political party but you know, pushing towards like oh we should go to you know a pure paper ballot system,
because and this idea that that's you know, that's going to be better than having kind of this mismatch system of part digital part paper, you know, part, but without some sort of a tool like this, without the security that Bitcoin's
time chain provides. It seems that that that's not actually fix it you know just going to paper ballots that doesn't fix the problem of being able to verify that the results are authentic. Now if you want to go to a fully digital system, I'm not sure if you're familiar with with true vote.
It's Brett Morrison has worked on yeah so so similar from a verification standpoint but going into a full digital voting system, you know being able to vote with your phone in Guatemala and I know in a lot of other places.
They are very resistant to anything that's fully digital they want to keep the actual voting process paper, but then how do you then in the verification process the auditing process, take that paper and make sure that it is incorruptible and verifiable and that seems to be what this
solution does and so you know different countries may have different ways that they want to implement voting. You know, one is more on the okay voting security and you know election preventing election fraud. The other one is kind of an acknowledgement that look there's
going to be some fraud here either way. This is the way we do things here we do with paper ballots, but we need to make sure that our citizens don't have to trust and that they can verify for themselves a fair characterization.
So, you know there are a ton of ways of doing elections and you know I sympathize and I love paper voting like paper ballots to me it's it just seems like maybe you could build a perfect system but the risks are too great.
And so it's just simpler to rely on paper and I love how God does it. What we have done is basically at that moment where the paper meets the internet and things can go crazy.
Because the results have to be communicated in real time like people everywhere. Everything's connected now. Everyone expects to know on election night who won. And if you've got in the case of the US 150 million, some odd people voting, because you know 300 plus the million
people but really the people that show up to vote are about 150 million. The idea is the compute of that like how do you process all of that and produce on election night like if you don't have a digital element to it it's impossible.
And so doing everything paper based also requires that no one can get access to it and so you're not going to get public opinion to believe it. You have to have a digital, you know interface.
That's where I think the Guadalajara system is this unique place where by kind of historical accident we have this, you know proof of work paper based voting system that has this communication with the digital world once the in person
counting happens so that we can't fake paper like if my people behind me saw like all the votes coming in like that's what happens right. But then when you scan that and it gets to the internet.
And where you if you go through the filter of Bitcoin, which is what we did with open tax sense and simple proof calm is this is now you can differentiate the official record from the fake stuff that anyone can produce and so you're not going to fight
the you know the sensors are going to say oh you know trust and go only to trusted sources like that's that's silly you're never going to stop people from lying like it's it's like you can't pro you know make lying
like that like you it's impossible what you can do to say the truth or at least what's officially true you can demand that the state stand behind it behind it and eliminate the state's ability and anyone's ability to create fake information that
can pass off as official or true. And so it's as I want to live in a world but it's not just elections it's everything that the state the government touches. We're not going to get them to give us the right to publish our own property, our
own tax receipts like there's so many things that are always going to be inside the Oracle of the state, they get to issue reality, but we can demand and remove their ability to change reality.
And so if the government issues anything they have to stand behind it and said, Alright, we use your citizen your resources to do all this stuff. Now we publish it, at least the very least we, we should demand is once you publish, that's it.
Like you can't change it. I can I can use Bitcoin to be 100% sure that what was published, whether it's a criminal record and you know evidence in a court proceeding or the national vote, I could always, you know, 100 years from now come back and say,
This is real. This is what they they they published. If I find that the state published something that's fake. And I have the paper records to prove it. Then I catch them because that's one of the main arguments might the haters have against us is,
Oh, well, all you did was your blockchain wash election fraud, like they still attack the election and all they did. Yeah, sure. It's only like in between the 10 minute blocks, but someone got logged in and they changed the files in that 10 minutes, man.
Like, well, if they did, then they're fucking stupid, because now we have cryptographic immutable proof of a crime. And all we need to do is go and find those citizens that signed the paper that probably took their own picture and find the actual paper document and hold it up to people to say,
Like, we have the official paper version. And that's why paper trails are key. And here's your picture. Like, something's wrong. Right. And so it's like this.
This time step being information to Bitcoin, like you said, like fighting the argument of Orwell is once once you eliminate the ability for the state or anyone to change reality, it only benefits those of us that care about truth.
The only people who lose are the people that benefit from lies. And that's like, I'm now more principled proof and that's the vision that we want to bring to the world of just, yeah, maybe we start with elections and if anyone's listening to this, like, please reach out
to us at simple proof.com. You can contact us or you can look for me on on Twitter, Carlos Torielo or we're a master and simple proof. And we want to bring this to elections where you benefit from removing you know attackers.
Like, this doesn't change the voting process as it is, it's just whatever is published to the internet, let's protect it and let's remove anyone's ability to change it and start with elections but then go to everything that the government produces.
Like you, if you're ever dragged in front of a court because you know you pissed off some bureaucrat that works inside the FBI and he's like, creating phony evidence to try to put you in jail. Like, we should you should have your files and be able to at least for yourself say look that's I don't know where that came from
here's evidence of what was published, you know, back in the day and this is what is real right, removing the state's ability to to lie only benefits those of us that want truth.
And the liars all of a sudden are, you know, less powerful and in in in the world like Dana post truth world I think that's that's incredibly powerful and and you know finding something like open timestamps where I,
it's almost like big winners agree on 21 million and on open timestamps. And even suppose she mentioned it in his private emails that came out of the Craig Wright case is like you, the only other application that he could come up with was time stamping information and why is that useful.
It's, it's, it's because of this, right. It's, and so just let's let my invitation is see the voting process and let's see November as an opportunity to protect the integrity of data and and create a message of truth, right.
And whether it's paper ballots or or digital like whatever it is there's there's there's some digital information that will get published and that digital information could be protected from with the attackers.
And I didn't I didn't mention this.
So now let me bring it up on channel one last time. Why this was valuable while you're while you're bringing that up. Yeah, just wanted to kind of also ask, you know, what would the logistic what are the logistics of rolling this out for a country that wants to do it like let's say even a country
as as large as the USA but which has many more resources like is this something that I mean we all know governments move slower than molasses in January. You know, not January in in Central and South America but January up here in the frigid north.
But what what does that actually look like. I mean, can they roll something like this out fairly easily. Can this be fairly easily integrated into existing procedures to at least say okay, we have digitized these records as soon as they are digitized.
We time stamp them. Is that basically the the the idea and I mean, is there that much infrastructure that needs to be set up or can this be rolled out relatively quickly.
I appreciate that to kind of give the context of for the USA elections. Yes, there is over 150 million voters, and that's more than the 9.2 million registered voters of Guatemala.
However, the United States is a federation. And so it's 50 states have their own election law. And so those each state has its own protocol on how they want manage their votes.
And then the actual authorities that implement this at the local level are local authorities, usually county clerks. And so last I checked, there's over 3000 county clerks, and each one of them is their election authority in their jurisdiction.
So there are like over 3000 voting jurisdictions and over 3000 authorities that could potentially be in a position to make this decision to use Bitcoin. And so, even though Guatemala is smaller than the USA, the voting authority oversees 9.2 million votes.
And it was one group of people that overseeing 9.2 million votes decided to use Bitcoin to protect the voting system in the United States. We could potentially talk to 3000 different election authorities.
And my thing, most of them are going to say no. But I would say, what are the odds of one of them being a Bitcoin earn and not knowing about this, right? And just once they know about this, they could realize this is I have a concern.
Like this also potentially keeps them out of jail, which is what I will show.
Ideal.
Yes. It essentially for an election authority, this is insurance. Oh, you asked like how quickly can we implement this? In the case of Guatemala, simple proof was contracted four days prior to the election.
So we implemented this solution within less than a week.
Why? Because this doesn't this isn't an election solution. This isn't all give me your ballots. No, no, no. This is an inf digital information integrity solution. It's what are you publishing to the Internet?
Do you have a backup plan in case everything goes wrong? All your cloud services, all your local servers, where are you hosting them? Do you do you have a backup?
Simple proof. It can offer you a backup. That's not only like a separate place to store everything in case you get attacked and you need to reboot.
But it's also timestamped to Bitcoin in a very detailed format in a massive way so that you could prove that what you have is reality and that you haven't been attacked or anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
And having a backup of everything timestamped where you can prove what happened will be useful. In the case of Guatemala, so it's the first time we've ever approached an authority.
They decided to invest in it as insurance. It's cheap. It's implemented just, you know, within the cloud and what whatever infrastructure they already have.
It's just like taking very disciplined approach and managing your digital records so that you have careful notes of everything that happened. And this was incredibly valuable in the case of Guatemala, because it is, like I said, they were
election results were very surprising. And so what you're looking at your screen now is the election crimes unit of Guatemala's argument of why there was election tampering.
And so because the election results were so surprising in Guatemala, the justice system was weaponized against the election authorities, and they have been accused of election fraud by the election crimes unit of the Guatemala justice system.
And their main like smoking gun argument is that this curve goes from zero to 40 more or less on the x axis, and it represents the hours on election day. And so on the y axis, it's the number of documents that the JPEG.
And so in gray, it's how many documents were produced. But what they used is the metadata field of the timestamp inside the JPEGs. And so they plotted them out. And this, I've had 16 at 6pm.
So 18 hours after voting, they started is when the voting closed. And yet they're saying, oh, look, 3% of the files, according to the metadata in the JPEGs exist prior to the polls closing.
So this is smoking on evidence that there were files that were manufactured prior to the polls closing. And we saw it in the in the metadata of the JPEGs.
This is the smoking gun. When they finally came out with this in December, this was very concerning is like that. That looks like a smoking gun. Like there's no way a JPEG should exist prior to 6pm.
So obviously what we did was go take a look at what simple proof that timestamps say on Bitcoin. And so now in the orange, you can see the plotting of all the JPEGs coming in as the polls closed.
And so it smoothed out these three kind of moments where you see all these JPEGs. And this is effectively the non smoking gun because it's according to Bitcoin, all of the files were created after polls closed.
But more importantly than not is because of that, it smoothed out these three moments to one single moment. And I can't say anything about you know, time stamping is like carbon dating.
You can't say anything about how whether or not because when you timestamp something to Bitcoin, it only says how old it is, at least as of how old it is.
But it could have been created before, right? It could have, it could be a week older. However, it does mean that if something is on Bitcoin, then it cannot be younger than that.
So basically what this means is the election friends unit presented their arm and saying well 3% was pre was of the JPEGs of the files exist prior to polls closed.
That's, you know, smoking on evidence. But the nice looking gun evidence is saying, what about this? What happened later? Over 53% of the timestamp information on them on the metadata exists in the future.
And so it's like, well, this is odd, because if the information exists on Bitcoin in the past, then what you're suggesting is that the election fraud was committed by time travelers who came from the future and you know, hacked Bitcoin or something.
It's like that that is the, you know, 53% of the data has to be explained now in the context of time traveling because of Bitcoin. This 3% harder to say, but it doesn't just maybe there's a more plausible explanation.
And it turns out that the metadata field of JPEGs is input by the hardware. And so what we found is basically the contractor that did the scanning misconfigure the time zones in the hardware.
And so from 3% of the hardware managing the national voting system thought it was in Samoa out in the, you know, Pacific islands and I think it's GMT plus three.
But then 53% of the scanners thought they were in Baghdad in Iraq. Right. So it's like, what's more plausible. Right. Is it that time travelers from the future attack the Guatemala voting system?
Or is it that a technology contractor made a mistake and, you know, 44% of the machines thought they were in Guatemala, 3% thought they were in Samoa and 53% thought they were in Baghdad.
That's amazing. And who knows, maybe that contractor did not make a mistake. Maybe he was doing exactly what he was told to do, which is find a way to make this look illegitimate.
But that what you just showed is really powerful. Like, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to slander this contractor at all. I'm sure that they did everything completely above board.
But you're right. It's like, okay, what are you going to trust the most secure network in the entire world, Bitcoin, which has never been hacked, gives gives you a heartbeat of that time chain ever, you know, or are you going to trust that this
contractor who put together this graph made a mistake with his time zones. Like, one is, one is highly almost infinitely unlikely. And one is pretty probable.
And you could go and grab a machine and check them yourself too. So it's not, it's provable beyond just Bitcoin.
But yeah, so in this case, then that I mean, that is a not only I think, and I'm really glad that you were able to kind of share this story here today. And I hope that for anyone listening to this.
And if, you know, if we have any elected officials or county clerks that for some reason listen to this podcast, reach out to you.
Because I think that the that's the beauty of of America too is that we are not homogenous in the way that we do things. Decisions can be made at local and at state levels to decide to try new things to certify to add integrity to their own local or state level election process.
And, you know, we have we have some very pro Bitcoin senators if Cynthia Lummis is listening to this right now, you know, get in get in touch with you because this is something that I think you have here proof at scale in Guatemala that this works.
And not only that that it works from the, ah, yes, we'll verify that the, you know, the top line results are pretty much right. But also it stood up against the justice system, trying to come out and say, No, the
weaponization of the justice system, which I'm sure many people listening to this can can find some common ground with. It said, No, the claims that you are making against the integrity of this election are wrong.
We can show it. And then we have a way to go in and say, Ah, look, here's where you made a mistake, actually. Bitcoin was true. Bitcoin is true. Bitcoin will be true.
And that's having at least that piece of certainty in your election process, which won't prevent won't prevent potential fraud, but at least prevents the fraudsters from getting away with it.
That that's that's the thing they may still commit fraud. But now you can you can catch them. You can show that look, you lied. Bitcoin told the truth. You lied. And that's really powerful.
It's it doesn't eliminate the possibility, but it makes it so much harder. And, you know, it is essentially an insurance policy that election authorities can have in case things go wrong.
And if you ask me, what are the odds of things going wrong in November for an election authority anywhere in the USA? I mean, I would say, you know, you bet on it.
And so it in the case of one more, I will say the the justice system is like they presented these arguments in public in December, but they are just this week presenting them officially in court.
So what I just showed you are graphs that I just made because they are still going at this, like they're doubling down on on on time travelers.
And so it's a matter of just more people understanding how this because it's still not too many people understand it. This is cryptography and mathematics we're talking about, you know, and so it's easier to just, you know, it's still working its way through the justice system.
So this accusation, the trial is ongoing. The election prince unit presented this argument in court five days ago. And so now the election authorities have to fight back.
And because they invested in this insurance policy, they have the arguments that with mathematics to to to make this case, we'll see what the judge says and and you know, it's just a matter of saying,
Initially, the election authorities got this because they believed, well, if we publish our documents to the Internet, maybe people will create fake versions using AI for next to nothing.
That's that's that was the reason why they purchased this. But now reality is, they're super glad they have this because they're being accused of this election tampering.
And without Bitcoin, it would be much, much, much harder to prove that this mistake happened. And, you know, I won't, I won't quote Orwell, I'll quote Forrest Glump, right. Shit happens.
Right. And so there's I think there's a very unique opportunity here to, you know, take this into the into the election system.
It's it's simple to implement, but it adds it doesn't make it perfect. But it increases the just it's a net benefit.
It protects the election from would be attackers. And as the corollary, in the case of what I'm like I said, now even people at the presidency and the people that are now in power, understand that Bitcoin isn't just, you know, used by criminals like what the media is telling them.
But that Bitcoin helped that Bitcoin is a tool and they need to understand that they need to invest more time, not just because they'll sell our neighbor next door neighbor has made a legal tender, but also because it protected our voting system.
And so that's the kind of thing that didn't happen in fantasy land and the meme coin, you know, world. That's that happened in the real world.
And so it if you want, if you're interested, please reach out because cloud cloud world is going into overdrive in November and this can provide an anchor of truth for people and your local election authority and maybe folks running in the election.
They can't forget this. You can't unsee something like this. What it happens. And who knows, like what a mom maybe what you're in the protecting against is a simple mistake of misconfiguration of time of time zones and hardware like it.
If democracy dies and we no longer have the ability to fire our elect leaders every four years, because of a time zone configuration issue. I mean, that's just ironic and sad, you know, maybe it like, I just know it, you'll be surprised.
And, and of course, we're more than happy to provide you know lessons and tools that have been useful in Guatemala, you know, and it's just it did work at scale some people said oh but it's a small country it's like I'll remind folks it's over 3000 election authorities
to oversee the 300 million people in the US. So, I think there are very few election authorities that have millions of voters. Most election authorities are small and local so it's less than, you know, tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of voters.
Guatemala has 9.2 million. So it's a single election authority, maybe LA and Manhattan or something will have more voters but Guatemala has it this isn't something you can write off because it's this small country know it's apples to apples.
This was huge. And I just appreciate the opportunity to share a story.
I appreciate you sharing it and I have two thoughts. The first thought that just came into my head is, you know, another reason you wouldn't want to do this on some shitcoin chain, like Ethereum, for example, is because we know that Ethereum can be rolled back, because it literally happened.
This isn't like hypothetical it's that we know that they have rolled it back in the past. So you would never want to trust the integrity of your election to something that is just as susceptible to, you know, insider, insider overreach and you know, running back the clock like on it.
If this was on Ethereum and you were showing me that graph I would say there may have been some time travelers actually because they rolled back time in the sense of the blockchain.
So again, a reason Bitcoin is this perfect tool for this. And the other thought that I had was I was trying to think of reasons not to do this. Like I was trying to think of reasons that you could give and my thought is that the only reason that you would not want to implement this given that you said you implemented it for nine million people in election authority in the space of less than a week.
Insane. So it's fast. We know that it is tamper proof because it is hashing the Bitcoin blockchain. You're not going to tamper with that blockchain.
The only reason I can think of that you would not want to do this is if you plan on lying in the election. If you plan on committing fraud, then you should not use this solution.
Like because that you're going to get caught committing that fraud. So if you are a liar in a fraudster and you are trying to interfere in your election, you definitely do not want to use this solution.
But if you are honest and you want to make sure that the election results are are truthful are verifiable so that you can verify whether or not they were truthful.
I should be careful of my language there. But if you are an honest person who genuinely believes in democracy or at least believes that we should have some oversight in our democratic process, whether or not you believe in democracy itself, you should want this type of solution.
Because this is an opportunity to do just that to to actually you don't have to trust you can verify. But if you're a liar and a cheat and a scoundrel, you definitely want to stay away from this. It's far too truthful for you.
Exactly. And it allows an election authority to signal that very clearly as an election auditor. When I saw that they had this, I was like, Oh my God, like, I don't have to worry about the JPEG's changing.
I still have concerns and worry and worries like it doesn't eliminate that. But being able to stand on firm ground and say, we can at least agree on what's real on a common truth.
I'm not saying that these JPEGs are definitely true, but at least we can work with something that isn't malleable, right? And so that's why it becomes this anchor of truth in the sea of lies.
So not only does it only benefit those that seek truth, it also signals that in a very powerful and meaningful way, where I would hope that over time, it becomes impossible not to do this because if you're if this becomes standard operating procedure, those that don't do something like this, you have to ask your only
benefit like this is not cost prohibitive. This is not an, this doesn't change any, you know, election law procedure like this can be done without touching any law or anything, and it can be done quickly.
Sure, maybe some folks will find some altcoin network that they decide to use as their blockchain. And when people ask us like why do you use Bitcoin is like, Well, it's the most decentralized longest running, safest highest hash power computer network.
Doing anything else is sub optimal. Oh, and because of how efficient open timestamps is, it's also essentially the cheapest way to do this because, you know, maybe an altcoin would say, Oh, let's issue an NFT and like have specific transactions, but then it's like you're paying gas fees on
every single one of these like that doesn't make any sense. Like, this is just extraordinarily efficient. All we want is truth. So there's no good reason against this and I'm truly hopeful and optimistic and just have faith that, you know, as more Bitcoiners hear about this, and elections are coming in, someone is going to be able to talk to the right
person and say, Look, you want to send a positive message to your voters to say you can trust that what we have is is is real, right, like we won't change it. And it's an insurance policy against someone if someone messes up, and and shit happens.
This can cover your ass. You know, so why take the risk it almost like it's too risky not to do this. And so, just happy to share Oh, we created a short 15 minute documentary called immutable democracy.
It's, it's kind of like part one of an ongoing saga right like I said, the election authorities are in court right now. They had to post bail. They, the election authorities fled the country for four months because they didn't believe that they had guarantees to stay.
And so they finally came back in February. And so the sound of continues. But chapter one is what happened last year and it tells a story. It's immutable democracy. You can find it for free on YouTube or go to film dot simple proof dot com. We'd love to know what you think.
I'll let you know that I really enjoyed it. Watched it prior to this. It was really excellent. And, and again, maybe just for forever. I'll link I'll link this in the show notes. I'll link I'll link simple proof and open timestamps you as well.
Is there anywhere else people should go besides besides those anywhere else you want to send people if you're a master or a master of simple proof.
Digital witness is also something I lead it said it's a more like a nonprofit, harder to be like election audit if you, if you're interested in doing the full on audit like I'm very passionate about that. And we can do it.
And it's just a matter of that's that's a lot more work that does require months months of preparation.
The good thing is, you can always do kind of post mortems and in terms of audits right there's a reason why they called post election audits. There's there's, you know, as long as we can download all the data and and trust that it doesn't the can change, then we can take our time with
auditing it. If folks want to do a real time audit of the elections that's possible to do so you can go look for us a digital witness by I owe and or a master. But yeah, it's just I'm on Twitter, Carlos Torielo, Carly you and you know, don't don't abandon your neighbors.
Like, if you're a bit corner and you've given up on democracy, like don't abandon your neighbors. November's going to come you can you can be that guy that he protected your community that gave them that shield, and they won't forget it.
And you know your local authority or your elected official, you're crazy on pole who thinks you're a scammer.
Like you'll finally be able to talk to them about something in the real world. Right. There's a reason why people have such risk in things about money, I think it's like, if you show up to someone tell them do this with your money, they're going to be, they should have resistance against that like it's understandable
that people would be wary of, you know, sound money arguments. But truth and just democracy and life so it's like that's this is a separate thing. Right. And it's mathematics, it's cryptography. It provides a different touch point. So just happy to happy to share.
Sorry, I blabbed on so much but no I always tell people this is a free space to rant and go on tangents. And I think it was like this is a we've now got I just noticed time we've gone for almost, almost two hours here.
And I think this is great because this is actually like gives people the entire full picture and and lets them lets them dive deep. I'll also put out some little clips of this so that people can tag the ever loving hell out of their elected representatives.
Because again, I think to me after having this conversation with you and diving deeper into this. The message for me is, is the only reason not to do this is if you plan on lying.
And it's it's it's that simple don't you want that simple proof, you know, like that.
And of course, it's those thought open protocols we we have built an industrial scale solution that you know, scales, you know, limitlessly basically on on at least one cloud provider and eventually you know very soon more.
But you know, if if you're a hardcore like sovereign individual that just wants to do it on their own like, you can do this on the road. It's just a lot harder. It's, it's funny. It's like it's kind of like Bitcoin in that an individual doing this is easy.
But for the state, we just had scale with so many different files and depending on the volume of data can become unwieldy. And we are there to like we simple proof exists to help folks if they come up with up if you have interest from your local authority.
And it's just this hard, hard problem reach out to us we're more than happy to help. But the other message is, if you don't trust me, like, don't.
But don't stand on the sidelines and get involved. Like you can polish your your coding skills and you can just go to the get cub and learn all this and just build it.
Be there on election night, download everything like ask for freedom of information that request like rip out the guts out of all of the public records stored on your local drives, hash it to Bitcoin.
You never know, you might end up being the guy that they call to, you know, get out of jail, right.
So don't stand on the sidelines like the what's what's happening in November is consequential. And I believe that if we do this right, then as of December, we can credibly say that Bitcoin protects democracy.
And therefore, if you're trying to shut down a Bitcoin miner somewhere, because they're doing, you know, useless math operations, you're actually shutting down what protected democracy.
So if you're against Bitcoin, you're against democracy. And, and I think that's that's a powerful tool to help our friends the miners to defend against ridiculous arguments based on, you know, FUD and nonsense.
If we go out and actually help our neighbors and take a proactive approach at fighting off the clown world insanity slow creep that's just destroyed communities everywhere.
Then, you know, people won't forget that. And, and you can be that hero for your local community, you know, maybe you don't want to but you can also be anonymous and just publish it, you know, just don't stand on the sidelines.
There's a unique opportunity here and the entire world could hear about this story. There's no turning back if if we are able to get this and it becomes standard operating procedure for the, you know, largest or the most powerful democracy the world has ever seen, then, you know, all of a sudden,
a truth can become attainable for everyone, everyone in the world, like this. There's no reason not to do this with everything. Let's timestamp everything to Bitcoin. And then who cares if AI shows up and creates fake stuff like I could care less about your
bogus nonsense. I know what's true. And this just filters the noise so that you can get straight to the signal.
I love it. And I think that's a perfect note to end on. Thank you so much for sharing your time here. This was really fascinating. And I'm going to do whatever I can to poke it as many people as I can. And we've got some well connected Bitcoiners out there.
And we all know that Bitcoiners are quite motivated. So whether or not you think democracy is the ideal system, if it's the system that you're living in right now, you should at least want to make sure that your democracy is not full of shit.
Yeah. And the best way to do that is with Bitcoin. So, Carlino, thank you. Thank you so much. This was a blast. And looking forward to seeing you hopefully in person soon.
Muchas gracias, Walker. Un abrazo.
You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net slash Walker. And if you want to follow the Bitcoin podcast on Twitter, go to at Titcoin podcast and at Walker America. You can also find the video version of this podcast at YouTube.com slash at
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