I have given this stuff a lot of thought. I have spent $1M and years to build a company that builds decentralized social networks (https://ift.tt/2poGpeY) and now a company that uses crypto to secure payments and elections (https://ift.tt/3kfJyZA)
So I have spent a long time thinking about, and spoken to a lot of serious people about, encryption, byzantine security and human rights (including Noam Chomsky, Tim Berners-Lee, Leslie Lamport, the MaidSAFE people and others).
I have come to a seemingly contrarian type conclusion that perhaps flies in the face of what HN typically says, but I hope that, instead of knee-jerk downvoting it, you think about it and let’s have a discussion based on substance.
There is a difference between using crypto primitives for signatures and zk proofs to secure everyone’s TRUST in a resilient, decentralized system, and using encryption to hide content from others.
To be honest ... I no longer think that end-to-end encryption is the right solution to human rights problems. If citizens are reduced to sneaking around and denying their activities to survive, their governmental system is way past due for fixing. This is like the “good slave owners” delaying the abolition of slavery. You’re solving the wrong problem. I believe that crypto is needed to secure decentralized byzantine fault tolerant systems like Ethereum etc. to be TRUSTED, not to hide information. Signatures, not encryption, if you will. If anything, it is the government who doesn’t want encryption to be broken (eg of copyrighted DVD content etc.) and there is an inherent contradiction since anyone who consumes unencrypted content can reshare it.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030085
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