show me the money

Inspiration

Our goal is to make campaign financing transparent and democratized. One of the members of the team, Emilie, used to work for the NYS Attorney General's Office and witnessed numerous public integrity cases. We want to eliminate election fraud and the ability for wealthy corporations or lobbyist groups to hold all of the power in our elections, both local and national, by swaying the campaigns with exorbitant funding.

What it does

We are using the concept of a blockchain-based Token-Curated Registry to grant voters the power to decide which donors should be allowed to contribute towards a campaign. Our platform would give registered voters a token on the network, which would have no financial value, but rather would represent their voting power. Each network would represent a voting district, and a blockchain TCR would be created for each election. Potential donors wishing to contribute to a campaign would have to submit an application and deposit through the platform that the token holders (the voters) could challenge, if she or he wanted to. If challenged, all of the token holders (the voters) would have to vote on whether to accept or reject the donor. If accepted, the donor would be added to the blockchain TCR, available for everyone to view. At least some token holders would have to mine the blockchain TCR, which could have the unfortunate issue of granting those token holders more tokens on the network, which would make their votes have more weight in the application process. This is an problem we plan to address after our prototype is built.

Check out our prototype website: Show Me The Money Link

How we built it

We created our own private Ethereum network and executed a simple smart contract to test the network. We then proceeded to start building a TCR in the private network. We created an instance in AWS that is going to be the boot node for our private network. The boot node will get loaded with the TCR to be the constant reference for peers. We also started creating an API to connect our prototyoe website to the TCR.

Challenges we ran into

We had to learn blockchain technology from scratch! But that was definitely a large part of the fun.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning about TCRs and finding a way to apply the technology in a novel way to tackle an important and ongoing issue.

What we learned

Everything we could about blockchain, Solidity and TCRs! Our biggest takeaway from this hackathon is our deeper understanding of blockchain technology, what we can do with it and how to actually code with it.

What's next for show me the money

Our next step of the process would be to finish developing our TCR and then make it function with the website we created through the API we started developing. Once a fully functioning prototype is available, we would proceed to tackle some of the issues that arise with respect to mining on this blockchain, and find practical ways to counteract those.