Jared Polis of Colorado plans to put his status on the Blockchain

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It has become all too clear this election season that technology issues are becoming a key part of voters' campaigns and concerns. The Democratic candidate for the governor of Colorado, the representative of the United States Jared Polis, wants to add blockchain to the list of elements that voters consider this year. But what does it mean?

Polis currently represents the second Colorado district in the House, and won the nomination to the Democratic Gubernatorial last month. He held his seat in the Chamber for about a decade and was a fairly solid progressive. Supports Medicare for everyone, some rules for weapons and environmental protection. If he wins in November, he will become the first openly gay man to be elected governor in the United States. But he is not exactly the kind of organizer of the democratic community. Open Secrets lists his personal fortune at nearly $ 400 million, starting in 2014.

The congressman made a lot of money during the days of the dot-com boom by a couple of just startups at the right time. As a politician, he tried to use that background as a force that advertises its self-financing as a way to project that is not owned by corporate interests and that pushes its technology into good faith as a reason to be able to pave the way for these types of problems . In an interview given to Gizmodo on Thursday, he claimed to have always been one of the first to adopt "if at the start of the BBS they had grown in the 80s, playing with the Internet during the period. university "and was on board with cryptocurrencies of

As a member of the Congress, Polis was a great defender of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. When Senator Joe Manchin called for an absolute ban on Bitcoin, Polis responded with a satirical request to ban the US dollar in which he elaborated some of his real criticism of the legal currency and beliefs in the advantages of cryptocurrency. He also supported some regulations in the cryptosphere as a push to require federal employees to disclose their participations in cryptocurrency.

"The goal of our policy is to make Colorado the leader in today's innovative blockchain companies and to help companies succeed." [19659007] On Wednesday, Polis added a series of limited proposals regarding the blockchain to its government platform that at least give us an idea of ​​what it means for a politician to campaign on the blockchain. Being a state race, the supervision of the SEC is not his particular concern. The creation of a business-friendly environment is a cornerstone of state races and Polis does a job of it. "The goal of our policy is to make Colorado the leader in today's innovative blockchain companies and help businesses succeed," he told us

Like the blockchain itself, it could mean many things. For Polis, it seems to mean following a path similar to the recent efforts of Wyoming to give blockchain startups a bit of regulatory certainty by following federal laws. This is an election, and we will not get a lot of details that can be cut and cut by the critics, but Polis told us that he would like to solve part of the "ambiguity" of the federal rules, encourage the investment of the fintech company , remove some license requirements for token securities and exempt cryptocurrencies from state monetary transition laws. He says that these companies are "trying to adapt what they are doing in an obsolete, obsolete and often obsolete federal law."

If this sounds a bit libertarian, it is. In a state like Colorado that is big on individual freedoms like legalized cannabis, this could be an advantage. But deregulation is not the only thing it focuses on. Polis also wants to explore how the blockchain could be used for voting security.

West Virginia caused a riot this week when it announced a pilot program to allow overseas troops to vote with a mobile phone app created by a company called Voatz . Security experts immediately came out to criticize the idea and for to create holes in the company's security declarations. However, the test program ends up working, it is good for everyone to be skeptical about the potential blockchain to improve electoral security because that particular implementation remains undersized.

Polis is not ready to necessarily support the transfer of all votes on the blockchain system. He likes paper cards and told us, "this would be more the way information is generated and stored from those paper forms than to do it in a centralized database that would be done through a distributed ledger."

Anyone who says with certainty that decentralized blockchain records are a fiction that will never work does not know what they're talking about. The same goes for anyone who says with certainty that it's the next big thing. In the case of what Polis talks about, it is true that a decentralized system where records are stored on multiple systems has the potential to be more secure than leaving records on a single server. It would make it extremely difficult to alter the results stored on a blockchain network, and Polis sees the potential for voters to "be able to confirm even what their vote is and that it has been counted in the right way."

The Congressman also believes that the blockchain could be used to simplify the process of archiving public records and making them available to the public. "We're talking more than anything, from contracts, to spending, to Colorado titles, many of the aspects of state-intensive data government can be more secure and accessible through distributed registries," he said. From a political standpoint, this about say blockchain innovation could mean that government registers make it online faster and more securely. And if all goes well, it could mean that it saves government money. Polis is not ready to put a dollar amount on those savings

There is absolutely no reason to believe that any of these problems will change a single vote in this race, but at least gives Polis an image to be a farsighted guy and willing to try new things. His Republican adversary, Walker Stapleton, is committed to restricting immigration, not to control weapons and to open federal land to the energy sector, in other words, nothing new there. Stapleton has also had to deal with the high profile relationship of his family with the Ku Klux Klan in the past.

"We would use our Consumer Protection Act to ensure that products sold as Internet access meet a net neutrality threshold."

A batch of voters of a number will surely care of: net neutrality. Around 80 percent of Americans support net neutrality, and a survey last month found that 57 percent of voters view the reintegration of network neutrality regulations as a matter of elections. Polis supports the federal protections of Title II for the free and open web – just the protections that the Republican majority of the Federal Communications Commission voted to eliminate at the end of last year – but a measure to restore the neutrality of the network that has approved the Senate is blocked in the Chamber.
[19659003] The setting of rules on net neutrality at the federal level is still as Polis would prefer it to be managed, but told us that as governor he would attack the issue at the state level. He is careful not to say that he will make a law that reflects the protection of Title II in Colorado because it would require a different legal framework. "We would use our Consumer Protection Act to ensure that products sold as Internet access meet a network neutrality threshold," he said.

Another problem that the Coloradans could get is the municipal broadband. Local property networks are popular in the state and 19 municipalities voted to move forward with their own networks last year. State law requires that cities have a vote to start creating their own network, and the major telecommunications companies love it. The industrial groups financed by Comcast have paid almost a million dollars in a referendum in the small community of Fort Collins, Colorado, in an attempt to stop the city's push to the municipal broadband, but the plan has still failed miserably thanks to a strong support for public internet service management. Polis says he will work on the legislature to change the law so that the city council and mayor can simply import a useful law without forcing an expensive election. "

If voters revolve around the blockchain this year, we will feel much more in our politics, and it is a strange problem that has not yet found its partisan division. But the lines were clearly drawn from technology when it comes to issues such as net neutrality or antitrust regulation for monopolistic societies. And based on the recent Congressional hearings in which politicians have shown themselves completely unaware of the issues at stake in technology, it seems that the conversation goes on before the blockchain has a chance to be part of every aspect of our lives without many of we pay attention.

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