With the recent controversy about the #Election2020, it occurred to me that cheating in a real election and creating bot accounts online are really the same thing: they touch on the so called "proof of human" problem.

This is a big deal in the #crypto world too.

Spammers, bots, sybils, fake dating profiles, election riggers... all are attacks where some entity pretends to be a large number of humans who don't actually exist, in order to further the attacker's goals.

The physical world has a significant defense against this kind of fake-person spam: you have to actually physically turn up with a bag of flesh called a human body, and those are not free to spam.

The introduction of postal voting has negated this advantage though.

The 2020 election was won by postal votes whose authenticity is impossible for me - and maybe impossible for anyone - to determine.

See this thread on the "Proof of Human" problem: https://twitter.com/santisiri/status/1182594365757149184