I love these new AI tools. It seems like most of us do. But let's be real, so many of us are going to get disastrously owned. It's a security nightmare.

The European Commission is turning Google Search into a privacy and national-security risk

The European Commission is preparing to compel Google to stream search data to third-party companies through an automated API.

The oh so virtuous European elite care so much about privacy and reducing the power of US tech companies that they are ... giving random other foreign spies, sorry, companies, access to private information of all their citizens, wait what? (Story's actually a little more nuanced but the author explains how the protections can be worked around trivially. Worth reading.)

I've said this before but given "current topic", time to say it again: pattern-matching to the 90s winning of the crypto wars is just wrong. The political forces leading to full ID and monitoring of every digital event is inevitable, and **the advent of ZK technology is going to make it happen**, not prevent it. Why? Because the academics' argument of "golden key"/"key escrow" being fundamentally flawed won't matter: the political will is there. Example: right now, a large majority of the UK public support social media controls for kids, and don't focus on the freedom violation this implies for themselves (ID verification). They will grumble, because they don't want ID cards, but online they'll accept it, because they've already accepted that ID verification is good, not bad, for online discourse, they are all using Apple, Google ID systems ... they've already accepted it should be used as a gate for even financial transactions; hardly a big stretch since they've accepted full slavery w.r.t. their bank accounts. This might be affected by how few people in the UK have any wealth at all except in their house (if they're lucky enough to have a house). ZK and FHE will accelerate this from crude ID verification into full on filtering: you can do secure communication, that will be allowed with sanctioned providers, but it will be proved "safe" using various techniques (I mention ZK, FHE to show the advanced version: your e2e chats will be filtered for child porn/terrorism/criticizing the govt, while still fully encrypted). I see no version of the future where this doesn't happen; it's just a matter of time, and admittedly it could be a very slow process. If we still care about freedom we should look into full disconnection: p2p, mesh networks, steganography where it can work. Am I hopeful? No, I don't see a good reason to be. Perhaps only a very dark future involving a lot of war can stop this inevitable flow towards digital tyranny.

I am often drawn to remembering an article by Izabella Kaminska from late 2013, with the striking title "Is this how fiat currency dies, with thunderous CPUs?". Kaminska's 2013 vintage articles were equal parts hilarious (in her technical incompetence) and thought provoking (a genuinely reflective person a million miles from the cypherpunk ethos honestly grappling with bitcoin in a way that no other mainstream commentator did). And in this article she clued in to the real heart of it (sorry I can't find the original text, but anyway it was the title that already captured it). To this day, the trend towards a world dominated by compute power gets ever stronger. When I think about ways to help humanity ("tools for the people" as Amir used to say) in this approaching cyber/cypher-dystopia, I keep coming up against walls made of "thunderous CPUs". If we don't find ways to get distributed compute working in the presence of the censor, I'm not sure anything else will really matter that much. Note that Bitcoin already does that, but (a) mining's centralization tendencies are causing non-trivial fragility and (b) Bitcoin is not general compute, so we can't somehow leverage mining infrastructure. Btw you might be assuming I'm talking about AI. I am, but not only. I think even any form of free communication may require compute power in future.

Steemit actually still exists.

Steemit

Steemit

Communities without borders. A social network owned and operated by its users, powered by Steem.

(Still, more surprising that Ripple still exists tbh.)

What if the next Satoshi Nakamoto and rhe next Ross Ullbricht are not human?

Do you see any interplay or overlap with IPFS?

Sitting here dumbfounded because Amir Taaki thinks it's fine that the first 1% of people get out with their money if massive inflation occurred ... https://xcancel.com/lunardragon420/status/2062823337894514977#m View quoted note →

Peter ( @Peter Todd ) was 1st on this from what I remember. From around the days of "cypherpunk desert bus" [1] It explains why we L2. It explains why the otherwise idiotic "build privacy on top of transparency" is not, in fact, idiotic. https://xcancel.com/peterktodd/status/2062809959138488502#m [1] He participated in the original zcash trusted setup and blogged about it here:

Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role In The 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony

Update: taking this down for now until some questions about the deterministicbuilds are answered; currently I do not believe the Zcash trusted setu...

This :

Litecoin MWEB Security Incident Postmortem

is another example of the problem with obfuscation at the L1 blockchain layer. The Zcash incident from years ago was a more obvious one, this one is more subtle. The problem here actually manifested in mining and checking the validity of a peg-out from the mimblewimble extension block. So the bug itself was not cryptographic, it was a consensus bug. But the privacy feature (the obfuscation) made it a lot harder for the system to react to the failure mode. And they still have the unauditability problem, even now, I think.

Some pretty meaty Joinmarket anonymity set analysis here from @m0wer :

JoinMarket Maker Clustering and Taker Anonymity-Set Reduction

Haven't gone through it yet myself.

Glad to see a large number of people expressing themselves over the suggestion of freezing coins. It will not work; a Bitcoin in which that happens is basically worthless. I mean that both functionally and monetarily. Because the main thing that makes Bitcoin distinct from all the other coins is that it has no rulers. Users and eventually hash power will leave and go elsewhere if it proves to have rulers. And no it does not have rulers today because soft forks have somehow got activated, occasionally. In a decade there have been 4, iirc, and *crucially none of them impacted any user's existing property rights*. Just giving you more options, not 'rulers'. Still it's appropriately nearly impossible to make such changes. While contrary to the false statement in BIP361 about 'supply changes', there is no certainty about what happens if someone gets access to those old keys. It could be a big clusterfuck, or not, but at least it won't kill the project if a viable PQ alternative exists by then.

It's a pretty good heuristic for judging which side is evil in a conflict. Which side prioritizes preventing communication rather than enabling it? This is why I consider my own government system evil (the UK). There are a lot of things you can argue about, but this started actualizing in the 2000s: criminalizing or semi-criminalizing speech (see e.g. "non crime hate incidents"). That was the point at which I decided the UK's governing system had become evil (and after that, rapidly despaired of any reversal, because the population did not in general reject it as such). View quoted note →