The responses to my last video about the Division of Elections have been interesting to me. The biggest surprise was the number of people asking me to run for Lt Governor, however Ranked Choice voting did away with that race. It’s a flattering sentiment but it isn’t a race anymore, now, its a nod from a Governor candidate.

I would like to address the folks who felt insulted, or belittled by my commentary. I’m sorry to have hurt your feelings. Also, just a little bit not sorry. My intent was not to bash my fellow conservatives, but to address a contingent of you who actually are intentionally ignorant, the definition of troglodyte, on the subject of blockchain technology. You hear the world bitcoin, and then say “what is it, it’s just a bunch of ones and zeros, it doesn’t have ANY VALUE.” and then you go buy your coffee with the same ones and zeros that have the same kind of value. Shared belief ONLY. You dollar is inherently worthless, in case you didn’t know.

So many people stop learning as soon as someone gives them a slogan, or epithet, that makes them feel like they understand things. It’s called the illusion of knowledge. You just need a folder to put any and all information in, and heaven help you if someone else labels your folder something bad at the outset, or even more scary, something good.

There are still humans running around wearing masks because in the beginning, they let someone else label their mask folder with the word Good Science. A discipline originally born to better understand the wonder of creation. They should have (especially now) added the work Junk before science, but alas…

It is far easier to fool someone than to convince them they have been fooled. If you believe that the entire crypto industry can be boiled down to a catchphrase, or a slogan, then YOU have been fooled. I won’t call you foolish, but I will call you human. Hear that ring of truth.

I am not perfect, and I should have found a better way to shake people out of their calcified positions than to tease and poke fun. The best part about being conservative is learning from one another… having differences of opinion that don’t end in being cut-off from friendships, disinvited from Thanksgiving dinner, and instead, some reflection.

All that to say, I have also gotten a phone-melting amount of messages from honest conservatives who realized that I was trying to wake them up to fact that they may yet have something to learn about the world. Lots of men and women of the watch have texted and emailed saying “guilty as charged, I can gap a spark plug, I have a lot to learn…” and that was my only hope and intent.

We can all agree there are a hundred ways to do something wrong for every way to do it right. I am not suggesting that anything labeled a blockchain solution is a panacea and the way forward. Especially where a state agency and the greedy good-old-boy-club of Alaska politics is concerned. Certain blockchains have outages and other problems, because they were built quickly and have glaring issues. Wyoming just decided to move forward with a stablecoin project using the blockchain that has had more outages and problems than ANY OTHER major chain, because it had the bottomless pockets of Venture Capital shilling it from the inside, behind closed doors, in a opaque process that violated state statute… and there’s gonna be lawsuits because it was a corrupt process. It boggles the mind, but you cannot ever underestimate the power of human greed.

Other blockchains were built slowly and carefully and have NEVER gone down, not even once, not even during a very sophisticated, worldwide ip attack. You release a whitepaper and ask the community “this works, prove us wrong.” When no one can, then you implement. Some blockchains are incredibly robust, and others are just copies of bitcoin or ethereum, or built as a joke, that would be memecoins, and millions of people are buying those tokens like the fifteenth century Dutch buying Tulips, Tulip Mania, because they were certain, number go up. Sadly, some people WILL make a fortune, enough that it continues to entice a certain kind of person who by and large will find them, and their money, soon parted. But there I go again with the poking fun. Actually people who lose money on memecoins I will call fools, because you are literally investing via what the finance world refers to as the greater fool theory. So if that shoe fits, so be it.

The world of crypto is big. Massive. Just like the world of money and finance is massive. You can trust an outfit like Oxford Gold a lot more than the payday loan guy working out of the side of a pawn shop who hasn’t dumped his ashtray since Obama was president, even though they both are a part of the world of money.

A solution to our voting system that is transparent and SECURE is paramount, that much is agreed upon. I am not advocating that any project on any blockchain would be an improvement to an all hand count and every room and human involved videotaped and publicly archived. The latter IS the stopgap we need for now until a correct solution has been carefully crafted, out in the open, in a very public process… which is a total departure from how this state currently operates. In my opinion, you should be able to vote from anywhere, even change your vote if you want until election night, know it was counted and on election night at 6pm, you know the results of the election.

We’ll get there one day, I just wish for once Alaska might take the lead. Time’s a wasting.