Hold on for Dear Life

PaulHoule

Is it (1) Didn't all the people who were into crypto get into Claude Code instead? or (2) I tried to tell them. They didn't listen. Now they're going to die. ?

jrm4

A good update. The next good question might be, okay, what happens next knowing all of this? I ask because (yes as someone who has dabbled in crypto and also respects the generally valid views of the haters) this stuff isn't going away. For many use cases, love it or not, it works and will be used by some?

tptacek

I've read this 3 times now and I still don't really understand what he's trying to say. The split between EFF-style cryptography-coded "technopolitics" and Coinbase-style doesn't exist; the EFF is fundamentally a libertarian project and the Cypherpunks were/are enthusiastic progenitors of cryptofinance and "web3".

danielodievich

like 6 years ago I had a job reach out to me once from I think the filecoin or some such. It wasn't something I was interested or suited for but I spoke with the guy and we were clearly talking at right angle at each other. Whatever. I then went out for brews with my friend who is also in tech and I told him about this. He looked into it and then went and bought like 500K of seagate stock, saying to me "these idiots are going to lead to hard drive shortage". He's made all kinds of money on that. Wish I took his lead on that too.

j2kun

While the article is mostly about cryptocurrency, my response is in re: > But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can't bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle? My colleague Moti Yung has studied this and there are some surprising results https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/639 > Anamorphic Encryption: Private Communication against a Dictator ... > In this work, as a technical demonstration of the futility of the dictator’s demands, we invent the notion of “Anamorphic Encryption” which shows that even if the dictator gets the keys and the messages used in the system (before anything is sent) and no other system is allowed, there is a covert way within the context of well established public-key cryptosystems for an entity to immediately (with no latency) send piggybacked secure messages which are, in spite of the stringent dictator conditions, hidden from the dictator itself! We feel that this may be an important direct technical argument against the nature of governments’ attempts to police the use of strong cryptographic systems, and we hope to stimulate further works in this direction.

merelydev

As someone who is somewhat a long time disciple of Cory Doctorow, having read his book Little Brother, when I was 17, which introduced me to Linux, Privacy/Cryptography and the Surveillance State. I think he is really downplaying the core innovations of bitcoin, which are the incentives and game theory it uses to allow adversaries to play together. For example in bitcoin if you have enough resources to spam the network, you are incentivized to mine instead, thereby securing the network and produce new blocks. So I think game theory and aligned incentives can be used to address the law issues, allowing different entities whether its States, Corporations and individuals to work together, even if they absolutely hate each other. Game theory takes over where cryptography ends. Bitcoin gives us a glimpse of this.