We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC178: Auditing Elections with Bitcoin w/ Carlos Toriello (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, we have a really fascinating conversation about using Bitcoin's truth machine to help secure the integrity of elections. Now, I know what you're thinking because I was thinking the exact same thing when I was first told about this topic. How in the world can Bitcoin assist in this process that has so many connections to humans that are able to manipulate the results or just interact and conduct fraud.

Starting point is 00:00:32 And isn't the Bitcoin network just about sound money? Well, I'm completely with you. But this past week, I was down in El Salvador for an event, and I ran into the guest of today's show, Mr. Carlos Torrello. And he provided such an incredible overview in what he has already done in Guatemala. And this is something I just had to bring to the listeners of this show to hear for themselves. So, without further delay, here's my chat with Carlos and how Bitcoin is being used to audit election results. Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I am here with Carlos, and I'm excited to have this conversation. This is so different than I think anything I've ever. ever done on this show before. So welcome to the show and very excited to get into this. Appreciate it. I'm a long-time listener, a big fan of your work. So I very much appreciate the opportunity to share with your audience. We bumped into each other when I was down in El Salvador and you started telling me about this topic. And we had also talked about this

Starting point is 00:01:55 at another event, but when I saw you in El Salvador, we had a little bit more time to get into it. And this is just so fascinating to me that the way that Bitcoin is being used in a way that is somewhat unimaginable. It's the trust that you don't. It's the trust machine. Thank you. Thank you. That's where I want to go.

Starting point is 00:02:15 So give people just an overview. When you shot me an email, you said elections put clown world into hyperdrive. I think that's such a great way to phrase this. But take it away, give people a little bit of an overview. Sure. So I'm Carlos Torrejo. People know me as Carlino. I'm from Guatemala. That's next door to El Salvador. And I've been passionate about elections since 2011. When I first joined the volunteer ranks of Guatemala's voting system, the way that voting works in Guatemala is a civilian army is conscripted every four years and called upon and hand, given custody over everyone's ballots. And I went through that experience in 2011 and 2015 in two elections. And I just fell in love with the process.

Starting point is 00:03:10 It really helped me understand the value of proof of work as a consensus algorithm and helped me differentiate why proof of work is so valuable as opposed to proof of stake. And so Guatemala has elections every four years. So you just have to wait around for another four years and you get another crack at it. And then in 2019, instead of coming back as a volunteer where I was manning the voting tables in charge of my neighbor's ballots, I came back as a political party witness. And I did that because a few family members of mine were running for Congress. And they wanted my help and asked me for money, but I said, I don't support political campaigns,

Starting point is 00:03:53 but I will volunteer to oversee the process. And that's where the similarities between how our voting system in Guatemala and proof of work comes into play, particularly Bitcoin, so that political party witnesses, everyone that competes in the election can send a witness to every single voting table all over the country. That's at this, in 2023, there were 25,000 of these. So political parties are supposed to send 25,000 witnesses. to oversee that the rules of the protocol at the voting tables, the custodians handling the votes, are doing the job according to the rules. And that basically turns them into validating notes.

Starting point is 00:04:36 And the volunteers, the citizen volunteers, are effectively mining notes. They're the ones that give the ballots to the citizens around 400 for it at every table. And at the end of the day, they dump out the individual ballots and they count every single one, individually in front of the witnesses so that they are cast as intended. And the tally, the vote tally that this produces is a document that everyone has to sign. And so this document is signed by the miners, the three volunteers that do all the hashing and the mining, but then the witnesses, the political party witnesses, the validating notes have to also sign off. And that is what makes that document come alive.

Starting point is 00:05:23 And it's that signature by the validating nodes that confirms that all of those individual votes were counted as cast. And that tally sheet or summary document per table eliminates all the vote tally sheets, sorry, all the individual votes. And so in that way, this document is eventually made public. And I can show you on my screen.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Yeah, that'd be one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these documents are all public information. So in this case, I'm showing you the example of table number 21,000 out of 25,000. So I just randomly selected one out of 25,000. And you can see the type of election that's happening. In this case, it's the president, the vice president. And these three people down here are the volunteers with their ID, by the way.

Starting point is 00:06:12 And then their signature here demonstrates that they agree to what. work that they did. But then down here, you can see that there was one, two, three, four, five, six different validating nodes signing off on this. And then up here, you can see that, or on the left, you can see all of the political parties and numbers that were assigned to each one. And so the totals of these are what make up this document. In that sense, these documents are a coin join, similar to a coin join in that they are public allowing anyone like me to have access to this and verify the total tally but protecting individuals' rights to privacy by even though I could know that Preston voted at table number 21,000, I would have to basically assume that Preston voted for

Starting point is 00:07:07 any one of these. And so you are protected by combining your votes along with everyone else. And since the counting of each of the votes happens in front of everyone, then this is a very widely witnessed document. And it makes this into basically the best way to confirm that this actually was integrity. At that point, the ballots, individual ballots themselves just disappear. And this is what matters. There's 25,000 of these per election. And each year we do six elections. So there's over 150,000 documents of these.

Starting point is 00:07:41 I work at a nonprofit. Locally, we produce civics and Guateman history textbooks. This is our little websites. We produce these textbooks. And basically, what I realized is there aren't enough young people involved in the election process. And we needed a way to creatively gamify this ability that Guatemans have to don't trust, verify our election system.

Starting point is 00:08:09 And so since these documents are all just posted on the internet for anyone to be able to verify, I figured what we needed was a way to get the crowd and the internet to all collaborate and verify all of these documents. And that's literally what I proposed and published open source software for us to do in 2019, especially because in that year, there was just a very bad election outcome in terms of how this was being published. There was election fraud accusations. The documents were being changed. Anyway, it was a nightmare like the one you could imagine elections could become. And so I figured we could use the trust machine, you know, Bitcoin, to bring trust back to elections.

Starting point is 00:08:56 And so the first thing to understand is if you get involved in election auditing and you, end up auditing all of the documents and your results contradict the results that are being present public by the election authorities, at least Guatemala, where I'm from, that is technically treason. So there's, you know, a lot is on the line if when you publish these documents. And so I realized that I needed something to be able to prove that I never tampered the documents myself. And And this is where Bitcoin really shines, and we found this tool that was built by Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer who I highly recommend everyone research and understand the things that he's built. One of the things he's built is the Open Time Stamps Protocol.

Starting point is 00:09:51 And what this does is it uses the Op Return function within a node. So a node runner can utilize the operturn function to include a piece of data into any transaction, and that information is included on the Bitcoin time chain or the blockchain. I will caveat, I highly respect folks that believe that Bitcoin is only money, and I highly recommend researching the details on how open timestamps works, specifically operturn, because this is all prudable information. The difference between the work that we did and some of the work that's being done that's causing such a concern is that all of our information is basically optional for nodes to run. They can always prune this information, but nodes that do choose to include operand data can include the open timestamps protocol, allowing anyone to anchor some piece of data to the Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:10:56 blockchain as an independent digital notary or witness, a certain piece of data, thereby kind of carbon dating digital information. Famously, actually, in the recent emails revealed through the Craig Wright case where we learned some of what Satoshi Nakamoto's more private beliefs were, one of the things he shared was that the use of the time chain for this purpose was something that he did envisioned. So this is just, you know, a coincidence that we are using the time chain in a way that at least you can go back all the way to Satoshi Nakamoto and more recently Peter Todd and the Open timestamps protocol is attempting to use the time chain in a voluntary manner for

Starting point is 00:11:43 node runners. So what this means is you can use Bitcoin as an anchor for digital information. Going back to what I was saying in terms of our election audit, before unleashing the internet on an audit on documents, on official election documents, the first thing we did and the first thing anyone should do is timestamp all of that information to Bitcoin. Because you could prove then that anyone could replicate whatever your process was because they could prove that the information, the data that they used is the same that you used from that. point in time. Therefore, eliminating all possibility that you could be accused of election tampering. And so in 2019, we did this, but we failed miserably out achieving kind of the mass of users that we needed and the work to achieve this because we just made a bunch of mistakes. But really, when the authorities came out with the results, all of our volunteers or the majority of our volunteers kind of died off.

Starting point is 00:12:49 And I was trying to find ways to motivate them to continue to do the work, but I just failed. However, again, you can always wait for a few years and elections are always clown world. It will always go back into hyperdrive. You know, I did a bunch of research and attended a fair number of Bitcoin events, particularly the Human Rights Foundation's event in Miami in 2021, where I met some folks from Stackwork, who are a company that are a lightning company that enable anyone that has hypergrowth issues to use their systems to develop repetitive tasks on a marketplace and then pay users or allow users to earn sats in exchange for that work.

Starting point is 00:13:39 And so this was just a match made in heaven. And so this year, or rather at this point last year in 2023, when the elections happened in Guatemala, both in June and in August, we prepared the machine and essentially we're able to be ready as soon as the documents were made public and were ready to hash them to Bitcoin, but we're also surprised because the election authority decided to listen to our recommendations from 2019. We had presented a lot of information on how to improve the election system and how they could use this tool themselves. And to our surprise, and maybe now I'll share my screen again, but to our surprise and great

Starting point is 00:14:23 luck, the national authorities of Guatemala for the first time in the history of the world decided to use Bitcoin in this way. Sorry, I'm just going to try to find this real quick up here in my tabs. Essentially, this is the website. And if anyone wants to look at this, you can go to t-R-E-P-G-T. That's the website. It's the preliminary results website. And the authorities decided to publish all 100, you know, hundreds of thousands of election documents online

Starting point is 00:14:59 and show these documents to whoever wanted to see them like we've done in Guatemala for decades now. And for folks watching my screen, I just input the same table number 21,000. Now it's showing you the results of that voting table and you can go by district, by whatever. You can go hammer into specifically your one little table where you could check your vote and you can see, oh, here are all the votes. But it shows you a database and you're like, well, how do I verify instead of just trusting this database? They included this little blue button that shows you that document that I was previously showing you as an example. But again, the question would be, how do you trust that election documents aren't being tampered with throughout the election item and potentially later? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:49 And that's where those that are watching this on the screen will see a very obvious yellow button that appears on this official election results website that when you click on it, it takes you to, a website called Simple Proof. And what Simple Proof did was effectively build a government tech solution for this problem powered by open timestamps. It's a Guatemalan startup, tech startup. And what they have is essentially they always write down at what moment they received a document. Immediately they obtained the Sha 256 hash of that document. that they received, they then added to the Open Time Stamps Protocol, which I'll briefly say

Starting point is 00:16:39 is kind of like, you send transactions to Bitcoin every 10 minutes. And within those 10 minutes, you know, to reach every block, you basically fill up the timestamping protocol with as many hashes of as many JPEG files that you received within those 10 minutes as you want. It could be 10, it could be 10 million, it could be 100 trillion, like literally any amount of data can be hashed into one final root hash, and that is what's included in the oper-turn transaction that's sent to the Bitcoin blockchain. And so then they include the information as to what time that block was confirmed, and

Starting point is 00:17:19 provide you download access for the original file, which you can see here. This is unreal. Yes. Or also the open timestamps file, which is what you see here. here. Yeah. And so this, you know, for those that are listening, what you're seeing now is one final root hash that is an end result of a series of mathematical hashing operations that all prove down to the exact information mathematically and cryptographically that is sent to Bitcoin. So then, for example, you bump into this note that says probably a Bitcoin transaction.

Starting point is 00:17:58 So you can take that information and you can plug it into your node or, for example, you can go into Mempool, include the transaction ID and then ask to see the details. And you'll see that this information, this hash was included here in this transaction back in June 25 at 924. And so therefore there is a transaction in the past. That includes that shot 256, which you can then just look in and find. For people that are hearing this, it got minted into a block or got rode into a block about, what was that, 20, 25 minutes after. And that was probably just, I mean, it could have been that amount of time just because there wasn't a block found. That's like 20 minutes after they actually created this document that it hit the blockchain. So this is this is mind blowing, mind blowing.

Starting point is 00:19:04 What people that are listening might not have heard because I think when they're listening to this, like, yeah, there's still people that can tamper with it. And I think that that's obviously a true statement. But what I would really emphasize is the fact that this document that's being generated and then the sheer number of people that have to sign it collectively together. And then based on the, I saw a documentary before we recorded this. I saw they're taking these forms after they create them. They're sticking them straight into a scanner.

Starting point is 00:19:36 It's automatically then scanning the document. And there's multiple like hard copy versions. And once that one gets scanned, it's being generated straight into this simple proof that that we're looking at right now. Is that correct? Yeah, so I mean, I'd say invite them over to go into the like really needy, gritty of it. But effectively, that's what is published here. So, you know, the best criticism against this that I've heard is well, but they, you know, how do you know that the JPEG file that you showed wasn't, you know, tampered with fire, right?

Starting point is 00:20:12 And that's an excellent concern. And to that, what I would say is now I'm going to show you my screen and actually show you an altered document. of that same one. And on the left, I have the exact same. But you might, you may notice that over here down by over here, there's a hundred. Yes. And then over here, basically I altered this document. Yes.

Starting point is 00:20:36 And so if this happened now, now, if we have time, I could just obtain the hash, the shot 256 hashes of both of these documents and cryptographically prove that they are not the same. And so if someone was able to get, to doctorate and alter a document and get it into the database that was published to the internet, then what that person has done is a crime, A, but number two is there is immutable temper evidence proof that that crime was committed. And all you have to do is find any one of these people that signed the original document and call them to be a witness on the stand. And also all of these people who signed this document, they all took photographs of the original with their own device. Oh, wow. And there's a paper trail with the original, you know, that also should be there, right? So the point here is this is not the panacea that will eliminate election fraud, but it

Starting point is 00:21:40 makes it so that 99% of the attack surface is gone. Holy moment. There's like 1% of an attack surface, which is effectively that 25 minute time frame that you pointed out. But even if they take advantage of that, which would be, we could go into the quantum computing that they would need to really, you know. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right.

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Starting point is 00:26:20 to even be found, right? So, like, if you're looking at that and you could see the fee that it was published with, you could see all of this that if there was a delay that didn't make sense, like all of that is traceable. The whole point is right now elections that rely on paper ballots and paper results are by considered by most respectable computer scientists as the most trustworthy elections that you will find. Paper ballots and paper totals and audit trail than anyone can use to get to the actual results

Starting point is 00:26:57 are the safest way to carry an election. It's when those documents merge with the internet that things get crazy. If when you jump from paper to digital, if at the start of that, you go, you start through the filter of using Bitcoin as your witness of the original, then it doesn't matter if AI, someone with artificial intelligence creates a million copies. You can always use your attestment, your witness data to Bitcoin as the way to differentiate the signal from the noise. But again, even if someone hacked you and was able to put the wrong information,

Starting point is 00:27:42 A, they would have had to do it in a very, very small window of time. And B, you still have the paper trail so you could prove that election tampering occurred, which is very helpful, right, instead of just point fingers at each other. So this is basically the layer one of what happened that allowed us as an auditor to trust the information that was being shared. And I was mentioning our work focuses on young people and what we've believed was we need to make a gamified version of auditing because these documents are boring.

Starting point is 00:28:21 Like the only thing that people care less about than, you know, monetary theory from 100 years ago is doing grunt work of just data entry of digits. That is enough to make anyone want to do something else. That's where we came with our partnership with Stackwork, who built a custom workflow to adapt to what we needed. I've done this, by the way. Carlos sent this over to me, and I did this, and it was really neat. It's really kind of a fascinating thing.

Starting point is 00:28:57 Go ahead. Pull it up on the screen and then walk people through this, Carlos. This is really, really fascinating. Sure. So first thing you're seeing on our screen is our top 10 users. So this is like an arcade. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the users do a lot of work. You can see our top number one user earned 385,000 Satoshi's for their work. It's about two weeks of nonstop data entry that this person did along with a few others. And so what this means is now we can remind people every election cycle. How many Satoshi's you earned in 2023 by just being an election auditor? By gamifying this, it turns elections into an opportunity to tune in, to reach young people with an interesting way of caring about elections. And of course, if they then want to redeem those

Starting point is 00:29:52 Satoshi's, then they've experienced their first lightning transaction. And that's where my main message to Big Pointers that are listening is, we really want to replicate this in other elections where you can work with the official election results and gamify the auditing portion because we believe that the don't trust verify philosophy that is at the root of Bitcoin, if we bring that to elections, we can expose people that have concerns about elections and young people. Those are the two primary populations of people that showed up to help us do this work. And I can't imagine a better group of people that's basically better primed to GROC Bitcoin than someone that's already suspect of the state or a young person and

Starting point is 00:30:39 just expose them to their first lightning transaction in exchange for doing auditing work. And so going back to what I showed you earlier in terms of the example. So basically what this turns into is this is an OCR problem, an optical character recognition problem when you have to go through millions of these documents that have to have to have have handwritten digits corresponding to individual political parties and they're in contained the results. Like I said, this is not tallying individual ballots. This is tallying the coin joins that occur at the 25,000 tables.

Starting point is 00:31:18 Yeah. That means that in our case in Guatemala, we have 9 million voters. So for anyone saying, oh, you guys, it's a small election. It's like, well, I don't know how many counties in the United States have more than 9 million voters, but Guatemala has more than 9 million voters, and that is then turned into 25,000 documents per election. And we had six elections. We had 150,000 of these documents.

Starting point is 00:31:45 Inside each one of them is anywhere between 25 to 40 individual data points that are handwritten. Of course, we attempted to read these things using machines, and we were successful about 70% of the time. So most of the numbers you're seeing on your screen were read by machines. But 30% of the data was a failure. And that's where we needed humans to actually go through the process. And so here I have the stack work environment that was set up for us.

Starting point is 00:32:18 And all you need to do is literally just look at the number with your phone, input the data, and then afterwards, so maybe your folks are seeing this, I have a snippet of something that says CNN000, and obviously this is a scanned image of something that was written by hand. And so all I need to do as a human user is read the numbers, input the data, click done, and boom, I just earned two points. And those points just so happened to be Saturis, that I can redeem, but in order to redeem, I would need to learn how to generate a lightning

Starting point is 00:33:04 invoice. And so we did these jobs, these data inputs over three million times. Our end results, I have the final data here. We did a total of 7.7 million OCRs with machines, so machine readings. We did 1.7 million human jobs. We rewarded 33 million sets and the total number of data points, what's 2.8 million? That was just for 2023. But we also got information for Guatemala's elections from 2019 and 2015.

Starting point is 00:33:41 So we actually audited three separate elections over 450,000 documents. And our users earned over 66 million Satoshi's. in exchange for their work. My message is we should run full nodes on elections. And the tools are ready to do this as long as you live in an election system, a voting system that cares to provide you with the primary source information that is needed to do an audit. And that's the key, right? It's, I'm very passionate and proud to be Guatemalan and I believe the Guatemalan voting system is effectively the best voting system in the world.

Starting point is 00:34:29 And, you know, people say, oh, democracy, this, democracy, that, but they don't understand that not all democracies are created equal. Not all democracies allow a citizen to don't trust, verify their own election. And so I'm a little concerned that as Bitcoin is, we've kind of like given up on democracy. And I'm not saying, I'm not imploring you to believe in democracy. I don't think you should. That's up to you. But I also don't think we should allow dictatorships or autocracies to have an advantage over adopting Bitcoin. I think democracies have these elections and they provide us the opportunity to reach

Starting point is 00:35:15 people that they need to find the don't trust verified philosophy. And all of that energy that clown world is using to pit us against each other, we can use that to actually reach people with Bitcoin. And when people that distrust elections discover Bitcoin, I think they discover hope. Because the option that clown world gives them at the moment is just hate your neighbor. And I am concerned that a lot of people hate their neighbors right now. And if we could just get them to love Bitcoin, then I think democracies will prove to adopt Bitcoin faster than autocracies and dictatorships.

Starting point is 00:36:02 Carlos, this is crazy. This is unbelievable. All I keep thinking, though, as I'm watching this, I'm saying, how in the world can other countries take what has built here, this protocol that you guys have come? up with and replicate it into other nations. That's, I'm just looking at like, how in the world can we get this into other countries' hands to help assist them? Is, have you been consulted about this?

Starting point is 00:36:29 Like, where is that at? Or I'm just kind of curious your thoughts on it. Sure. So again, just remind, what I lead is digital witness, the election auditing piece of this, which kind of like brings together all of the pieces to do this. We use the work of Simple Proof to make sure that our documents are trustworthy. And then we partner with Stackwork to allow our users to do this. People can reach out to SimpleProof. Their website is Simpleproof.com. You can watch the documentary that tells

Starting point is 00:37:04 the story of how this happened in Guatemala. And I'm sure they are open to receiving inquiries. regarding our work as election auditors, you know, the next election in the hemisphere is Mexico. So if there are any Mexican bitcoins watching this or hearing this, I would like to do this in Mexico in June. However, the timetable at this point is so tight that I don't know that it'll be possible. Mexico turns out has essentially the same kind of system. Panama has elections and Dominican Republic have elections as well. And so if anyone wants to audit those elections, please reach out.

Starting point is 00:37:40 You can find me on Twitter. You can find our effort on Noster. I'm sure we can include some of that links in later. We want to do this. Now, so it's a little tight for those elections. But come November for the U.S. elections, generally what I understand in terms of how the election system works in the U.S. is you have 50 states that all 50 have different election laws. And then within those states, you have county clerks who I think more often than not are the ones responsible for implementing the election law.

Starting point is 00:38:14 And so it depends on which state and which county that effectively allows anyone to have access to the primary source data that's produced on election days. And so there I just say, reach out. If you live in the county, step one is just go visit your county clerk and ask them, hey, I'm a big. pointer, let's pretend like I want to audit the election and I come here, you know, day after the election in November and I just ask using a Freedom of Information Act request, you know, using the law and my rights as a citizen to have access to the registry, let's pretend like I'm a person that cares about that. And I ask for access to all of the election documents. What would I get? would I get the primary source data that's built by the voters and the people running the election,

Starting point is 00:39:05 the voting centers? Or do I get some kind of secondary data that some machine, you know, spewed out and that I'd have to trust the code in order to. I think it's useful to know for yourself as a bitcoiner, whether you live in a county where the election system enables you to don't trust verify or for you to find out that you live in a county where it's don't verify trust the election outcome. And I would bet that in the 10,000 or so counties around the United States, there's got to be a few where there's a don't trust, verify philosophy. And because this isn't rocket science. No one's going to Mars with this thing.

Starting point is 00:39:46 This is literally just all I want to do is see the results. I'm not even here to fight you on who won. All I care is that I can look at the data and I can prove to the. myself that one plus one equals two. And that's it. Carlos, I'm enamored by your passion for this topic and this subject and everything that you've, the proof of work that you've done to help construct this. I'm curious, what is driving your deep passion for this? There's something in your past or what is it? My mission in life is to get Central America to be the first region in the world. to adopt Bitcoin. That's 50 million of us. And I just constantly think of, you know, what can I do

Starting point is 00:40:34 to help accelerate that? And knowing my own voting system having worked there, I just love how it works. And so it's, to me, it's I can, I saw a path to teaching Guatemalans about Bitcoin through our voting system, but then also teaching the world about the Guatemalan voting system. And the characteristics that our voting system has, which make it the best voting system in the world. Because instead of trusting anyone else, it's literally your neighbor who gives you your ballot, and then you mark it, you know, and then he, you put it in the little bag. And then your neighbor is the one that counts it in front of everyone. And that's just in this decentralized way.

Starting point is 00:41:19 And so it's teaching Guatemalans about Bitcoin through democracy, but then, you know, teaching Bitcoiners about the best way to run a proper voting system. And I'm just concerned also that electronic voting, e-voting is coming to Guatemala. I've seen a lot of people make that push. And I believe that would be the end of our system. If I can turn all 9 million voters in Guatemala into Bitcoiners, then I'd say we have a fair shot at beating the rest of the world. And in general, Central America has many things going for it where we will, the fact that

Starting point is 00:41:53 we're kind of last in most of the other races for human progress means that we have an advantage in the only race that matters, which is adopting Bitcoin. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why Vanta is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving.

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Starting point is 00:45:15 information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. That was a really interesting comment that you had about the physical paper copies versus using voting machines. And what I find so interesting about Bitcoin and the comparison to what you just said is at Bitcoin's core is this that you have to consume energy, which is tethered to physical reality. Right. And in voting, if we're not tethered to physical reality of literally a pen and paper to write down the vote, it almost seems like you can't do a fair election if you just go straight to the digital. Is this accurate?

Starting point is 00:46:02 You can use, I've seen models where they use the voting machine to allow you to like click on the party person, whoever you want to vote for. And then they print out your individual ballot. Okay. And then you can take that ballot and personally deposit it into a backup paper system. Yes. And then the argument, I believe, has been that especially for something like the U.S., where you have something like 150 million people voting on a single day.

Starting point is 00:46:31 And so the argument is the counting, right? It's how quickly could you generate the block, right, with all the transactions? And the argument was 150 million transactions in a single day. There's no way we could compute that without the help of machines. And that's when the compute went into the digital realm. Now, that's not inherently evil and wrong. What's inherently evil and wrong is not giving people then the paper backup to deduct for themselves and retrace that path to how you actually got.

Starting point is 00:47:12 to that. Yeah. And you could have a system where you're like, you don't necessarily are using pen and paper, even though for us in Guatemala, that just, you know, there's a lot of people that will never trust the machine. And so your trust in the voting system basically boils down to the lowest common denominator of if it's hand, that just allows most people to trust it. Like there's no way people can't see that as real.

Starting point is 00:47:35 In our case, we also solve for the double spend problem by putting ink on people's finger. And it's Indelible Inc. It'll last for a few days. And so, all right, let's say you were able to dupe someone into, you know, believing your election, your, your ID is not yours and you went to vote in another district. Like, props to you, man, all you did was, you know, game one vote. What you need to protect is the ability for someone to digitally, you know, turn themselves into a million voters, which, you know, the paper does allow for that as well.

Starting point is 00:48:07 Yeah. And so it's the counting, right? And that's where it's beautiful to understand that the analogies with Bitcoin of how the nodes achieve consensus in that you have all of the witnesses, all of the interested parties there, when the transactions are happening, they see for themselves, they can check that all the rules are being followed, and then they sign on the block. If the transactions aren't followed, sorry, if the protocol rules aren't followed, then your node will recognize that. So it's just bringing that back to people and empowering communities to do, don't trust, verify.

Starting point is 00:48:45 This is one of the, this is so profound. And if you're a person that's listening to this and you participate in any type of voting system, I don't care what country it is that's trying to exercise democracy, you got to share this with somebody that can take action. And Carlos, I hope that you're, I hope your social account goes wild. I hope that you get contacted by so many people because this is just such important stuff. This is vital for the elimination of clown world. It really is vital. Like, oh, my God, man.

Starting point is 00:49:20 And I'll say doing this work has obviously forced me to work with a great many people who work in elections. And there are a lot of volunteers that power elections and a lot of really good-hearted, well-meaning people who, if it weren't for them, we would never have been a democracy in the first place. So, you know, try to lower your time preference when you talk to them and don't see them as your enemy and like you're the problem with clown world. They're not.

Starting point is 00:49:54 They're trying to do their best in an extremely dysfunctional system. And more often than not, people working at elections do not have any technical background, have no idea what's going on behind the scenes, have never covered. or anything and are very intimidated by all of this, not to mention artificial intelligence. This is probably going to be the worst selection by far in terms of reality and fakeness and what the amount of damage that this is going to do to people and communities everywhere. And so your county clerk, whoever is in charge of your registry of your neighbors, they They are probably not ready for the tidal wave of insanity that is barreling towards them

Starting point is 00:50:41 and will hit them no matter what happens in November. And so basically throw them a lifeline. They say, first of all, I'm sick of people saying Bitcoin fixes this because Bitcoin doesn't fix anything. It's people using Bitcoin that fix, you know, Cloud World. And B, they say Bitcoin is, what is the lifesaver or the, you know, the life-saver. Vote, the life raft, right? It's like, there are so many people that are about to get hit by the tidal wave of clown world come November in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:51:12 They need this life raft. Yeah. And just ask them, look, what's your plan on election night when a million fake documents hit your Twitter feed and Facebook feed and all of this? Like, what is your plan? Do you have any anchor to reality? or are you just going to say no one can have access to any of the data? Because if you say that, that's just worse. If you hide the election information, then that's just going to, you're going to get nuked.

Starting point is 00:51:50 And so it's telling those folks in the driver's seat that are usually like, you know, very well-meaning Gen Xers or boomer moms who like are driving their kids to soccer, you know, practice. and they're already starting to sweat bullets and have sleepless nights. So just tell them like, here's your anchor. This is just one thing that happened in Guatemala. And by the way, the election authorities in Guatemala were in part able to avoid going to jail because of this. There was a criminal accusation against the election authorities for election tampering. And because of, I'll share my screen again. This is crazy.

Starting point is 00:52:32 Let me see. So we, as an auditor, obviously, we published a report. We have a 270-odd page report, which is available for free download on our website. You can see we've published this latest version in March of 2024. And at the very end of this, we can show you basically what the Criminal Justice Department of Guatemala was basically weaponized by the losers of the. election. What people are seeing on their screen are two boxes. On the left, these are called heat maps. On the left, you see three lines around certain hours. This is what the election

Starting point is 00:53:18 authorities claim were the time and date of the creation of the files. And so there are two very obvious lines, but then there's a weaker line here and the number of documents before the 18 hour, which is 6 p.m. versus on the left, on the right, sorry, people are seeing the heat map of what Bitcoin is saying, and it's one single column. And so this is, I kid you not, the main argument of election tampering is what you see on the left. They're saying that there were documents created prior to 6 p.m. on voting night. And therefore, that proves that certain documents were created prior to the voting tables doing the counting, thereby proving that there was election tampering. And the way that they found this, you know, miraculous evidence was that this is what they said to the press in their press conference.

Starting point is 00:54:21 When you right click the JPEG file and you go into properties, you will see a created by, metadata field. And we plotted those and we can see that some of these created by metadata fields were prior to the polls closing. However, that's very concerning for many, many, many reasons. But then when you look at the information on the right, Bitcoin is saying that none of these documents exist prior to the moment in time when the tables started doing their work. And so we were able to prove is that what actually happened was that the contractor delivered the scanners around the country made a mistake when they configured the time zone of the scanner. The scanners just had the wrong time zone. And that's why you see two lines.

Starting point is 00:55:12 And this is the kind of mistake that lands people in jail. But for some reason, the contractor made this mistake. And obviously it was hard for them to prove that mistake. Now, what matters is that the strong line over on the right here that's claiming that a lot of the, most of the files were created eight hours after the election, that line disappears when you contrast that to Bitcoin. So that would mean that someone had access to a time machine that was able to create files in the future, but then plug them into Bitcoin six or eight hours before.

Starting point is 00:55:48 And so either the criminal justice system provides evidence of time travel or now because of Bitcoin, they can show that there was just an honest mistake that explains this situation. I'm still expecting the Guatemalan criminal justice system to issue an arrest warrant for Satoshi Nakamoto. So, you know, anytime now. But the point is, this is one of the things that saved people from going to jail and for the whole voting system to crash, just because a few people misconfigured some hardware. That could be, if that's what finally destroys your democracy, wouldn't that be ironic?

Starting point is 00:56:30 And here's a tool that can keep that from happening. All right, Carlos, I'm sure people are going to want to have the full list of resources. I'm going to just tell them right now, in our show notes, go into the show notes. I'm going to have a ton of things listed. If you were going to highlight one to three things to the listener that you think is really important, I'm just going to say the documentary was amazing to kind of watch the documentary that you sent me. I know there's another one that's only in Spanish right now. I'm looking for my note here on what it was called.

Starting point is 00:57:01 What was it? Paper Democracy. That is currently available in Spanish soon in English. It's much more about the details of the ins and outs of how our voting system works. It'll be out in English soon. And basically, let's not let clown world take so many people that just haven't heard Bitcoin in a way that makes sense to them. And I'm a huge fan of sound money, and I'm sure that many people will be reached with that.

Starting point is 00:57:29 But I think we're kind of reaching the limits of the sound money argument and information, integrity, and being able to an anchor of truth in a sea of different versions of reality, is incredibly valuable and potentially provides a different avenue to reach people with a message that will resonate with them and will peek their curiosity. But in this event, it's just involve young people, right? This is exactly the kind of thing that young people will get engaged in and just expose them to their first lightning transaction and see what happens. I guess my message is just, you know, don't give up on your neighbor.

Starting point is 00:58:07 And let's, you know, try to fight back with truth. And that's just what's driving me. Well, Carlos, I can't thank you enough. This was so fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. And folks, if you're listening to this, here's the guy to talk to. We'll have his Twitter. We'll have all the contact information there in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:58:28 And Carlos, thank you for making time, sir. Anytime. Thank you. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires, the Bitcoin-specific. specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview

Starting point is 00:58:56 in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Bitcoin Fundamentals on your favorite app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC178: Auditing Elections with Bitcoin w/ Carlos Toriello (Bitcoin Podcast)

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