14-Year-Old Developer Builds Uncensorable Voting Platform

This week news.Bitcoin.com spoke with Alex Pasfield a fourteen-year-old developer who created a new tool called ‘Bitcoin Voice,’ a platform that enables uncensorable voting for subjects within the bitcoin cash community.

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Bitcoin Voice: A Verifiable Voting Record of Blockchain Users Weighted by Their Transaction Amounts

News.Bitcoin.com spoke with a fourteen-year-old developer who has been working on cryptocurrency projects lately and who has been coding since the age of nine. Recently Pasfield, otherwise known as ‘Plain Crypto’(@Plaincrypt), launched a platform that allows the BCH and BTC community to vote on important subjects by ‘putting their money where their mouth is’ — in a literal sense. Bitcoin Voice is an application that shows public messages tethered to blockchain transactions that are sourced from live data. The website states that it “may be utilized as a verifiable voting record of blockchain users weighted by their transaction amounts.”

Pasfield Coded His First Program at Age Nine

Pasfield says that his dad sparked his interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

“My dad had been teaching me programming at the time and then gave me insight into uncensorable, distributed, peer-to-peer, permissionless, global money systems — And given he and I have somewhat of a libertarian streak, this resonated with me immediately,” Pasfield explains to news.Bitcoin.com.

Since then, I’ve been commissioned by groups in Sweden and Australia to design and build crypto-related and blockchain projects — I’ve got a few smart people around me who have helped show me the ropes.

Reddit Discussions Are Vulnerable to Sybil Attacks

Pasfield says that he remembers riding a bicycle with his father who began to explain to him how programming languages work, and he understood the process. That afternoon Pasfield wrote his first program with a little help from his dad. “Since then, he’s shown me how to separate the back-end, front-end and database to build distributed systems — which gave me great experience with Javascript, HTML, web servers, Python, RDBMSs and Unix system administration.” Further, the fourteen-year-old developer digresses into why he decided to build a voting application for the cryptocurrency community.

“I was working with some of my smart friends who were building solutions in this space, and we saw the debacle that unfolded with the censorship on the /r/bitcoin subreddit that prevented the community from freely discussing how to evolve the Bitcoin protocol,” Pasfield explains to our news team.

There is also the inherent problem that even without the type of censorship that occurred with /r/bitcoin, these community discussion platforms such as Reddit are vulnerable to Sybil attacks and actors who don’t necessarily have skin in the game. i.e. non coin-holders. So, we realised the only way to achieve a global, uncensorable, verifiable voting system that reflected stake was to put it on the blockchain.

Building a Verifiable Voice to Influence the Coin That They’re Invested In

The Bitcoin Voice developer details that there is only one client where you can vote using public label values, which is the Bitcoin Unlimited Cash reference client. Pasfield explains to news.Bitcoin.com that he believes what is really needed is wallet developers incorporating the public label voting system into their wallets. “It’s really easy and only requires a simple change,” Pasfield emphasizes.

The website will soon host technical instructions on how to do this, but meanwhile it would be awesome for wallet developers to contact me for technical developer instructions and look at the reference client.

Pasfield says that he has been looking into the various scaling problems and plans to propose solutions to figure out how scaling can best be solved for the different coins out there. The young developer adds that the reason he built the Bitcoin Voice platform is because “coin holders don’t have any official, verifiable voice to influence the coin that they’re invested in.”

What do you think about this young developer and his project Bitcoin Voice? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock, BCH Logo, and the Bitcoin Voice URL.

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