There are schemes for this, but it requires much more than just a hash. You need not only asymmetric cryptography, but some sort of Zero Knowledge Proof if you don’t want to be able to identify the person who voted.
Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.
The Fed has had a wire service (Fedwire) for banks, allowing them to transfer their balances on the Fed’s balance sheet to another bank during settlement, since before the dollar moved off the gold standard. It was initially done with literal telegraphs - not sure at what point it became digital.
It obviously has no pseudo anonymity, is literally the least democratized banking system in existence, and is subject to the government’s whims in a whole host of ways. But it is a digital ledger of massive sums of real dollars (the banks can ask for it in cash if need be), and you couldn’t really steal the money even if you managed to create an unauthorized transfer on some bank’s master account.
So why don't any businesses let me Fedwire them money? It turns out unlike the physical version of cash, this "digital version" has hefty transaction fees and a poor UI meaning no business will take it, unlike how almost all physical businesses will take cash.
They couldn’t get their whole balance in cash I’m sure. But the Fed is the one that handles retiring old paper currency and giving banks fresh currency to give to ATMs and tellers, and I doubt the inflows and outflows are perfectly even for each bank.
The Fed manages printed currency - they’d be irritated, but they literally do provide the physical dollars people need now, and if they felt it was appropriate, they’d produce them as needed.
Just like those airplanes of bills shipped to Iraq, etc. in the past.
Actually, maybe 1 hour downtime for ~ the whole internet every month is a public good provided by Cloudflare. For everyone that doesn’t get paged, that is.
Look at it a user (or even operator) of one individual service that isn’t redundant or safety critical: if choice A has 1/2 the downtime of choice B, you can’t justify choosing choice B by virtue of choice A’s instability.
Even if Oracle evaporated and their contemporary ZFS source became unencumbered, I doubt OpenZFS would want to try and merge significantly parts. They already have their own encryption implementation for example.
It could make it worse. IP from companies that got chopped up and sold for parts can be a nightmare. You may have to do deals with multiple parties, and it can be unclear who owns what (even to the potential owners themselves).
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