Ian Miers @secparam

I'm curious about this too, and the interplay between encryption, commerce, and payments. Privacy and commerce come up in early writings, both that text and "New Directions in Cryptography." How many of the early folks cared about privacy for payments (dollars, not bitcoins or Sealand dollars)? Cindy Cohn pointed out that cryptocurrency had lost many parts of the broad coalition that supported encryption, despite payment privacy being a similar issue today. And there are a number of reasons for that, some of which you alluded to, and another of which is almost no one in cryptocurrency cares about privacy. But was it more fundamental, were electronic payments just ignored ? What did folks think of early ecash proposals.

"Computers now constitute or will soon constitute adangerous threat to individual privacy " Some of the first notions of cryptography, privacy , and computers came from someone at .... fucking IBM. Yes, this the Feistel of Feistel network fame. These guys were not just in it for the math. (from Steven Levy's Crypto, written in january 2001 when Crypto meant Cryptography)

@pokharna_anushk IBM, especially then, was the establishment. And the boring side of it. So its simply unexpected.

@TalBeerySec @matthew_d_green Ironically, after Hillary Clinton got her leaked emails authenticated by DKIM signing, Matt went on to write a blog post "Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys"blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/11/16/ok-…

Occasionally your cyberpunk future is a tragic comedy. But its never a utopia.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion

2 days ago

I love the cyberpunk future

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@cryptodavidw Wouldn't we assume NSA made that key very securely? Dual EC is known to be backdoored ( and I do mean known, we have letters from US senators asking for the NSAs lessons learned report). IIRC the backdoor was knowing the discreet log of a generator.

@alinush @matthew_d_green Sure, but if we're that constrained by perforated, why are we debating security of math assumptions, not performance? Remember , my original point was this isn't a serious debate

You couldn't up until now. But this debate is happening now. And it's not a debate about performance. we're talking about rollups, where you need a single aggregate or recursive proof of a batch of transactions. If we presuppose that exists for both lattice and hash based proof systems, then you'd just post both proofs. Of course, the state of aggregate lattice proofs is, at least to me , an unknown. But no one seems to be disputing you can plausibly build a roll-up out of them with some more research. If that was in dispute, we'd not need to debate lattice vs hash assumptions. So, like I said, if this was a serious debate about long term safety, we should expect discussions of hybrid systems. Or debates on performance

Dissent is essential to democracy. And when it's needed most, you need either courage or anonymity. We've repackaged anonymity as privacy, dressing it up in friendly clothes. But no one thinks they have privacy today, and it's hard to articulate why that matters. Anonymity and privacy aren't the same thing. Even if they know everything about you, you can use AI to disguise your writing style, use Tor or Apple Private Relay, make a burner account, and still post anonymously. For now.

No, it's just odd. This isn't framed as a debate over performance.If both schemes are comparable, hybrids get much more security for double the cost. And if you were really, earnestly, worried about assumptions, ai cryptanalysis, and long term viability, you'd at least consider it.

@zkproofs @matthew_d_green Thats much less of a point when are talking about deploying a scheme with a fixed hash function or lattice and hardware support. And the fear of catastrophic breaks. And again, if this debate was about safety and not marketing, you'd see calls for hybrid schemes.

Yes. But this misses the context here. There's a terminally online debate between folks trying to sell hash-based solutions as the future of cryptocurrency and lattice-based ones. This is mainly for "zk" proofs (usually not zk) for rollups. No one's taking the reasonable position: let's do hybrid solutions. It's worth remembering both lattices and hashes have structure. We've had at least two hashes (SHA-1, MD5) broken since 2002, and no doubt some lattice schemes I'm forgetting about. And that's before we get into the fact that zk proof depend on more that just hashes or lattices. How many times can we safely recursively prove , for example?

Something is missing here. Telegram chats are virtually all non-encrypted. Group chats don't even support encryption and store data server side. Telegram has a secret chats feature, they're nearly never used, and likely still record metadata. A record request for anyone who meaningfully used Telegram would return more data than this.

@0xmonkeyz Yes, there's a bit more to getting "encrypted money" than encryption. You either need blind signatures and a bank (the 80s version), or zero-knowledge proofs and nullifiers, which is what I spent my PhD on. Now deployed in Zcash, Tornado Cash, Payy, Anoma, and a few others.

Bitcoin isn't private, but against hostile intelligence services (whether that's the CIA or the SVR), the traditional financial system isn't private either. We need better. We finally have the cryptography for the 1980s dream of both encrypted money and encrypted messaging.

Stern Drew @SternDrewCrypto

5 days ago

🚨 CIA Casually Admits Bitcoin Is Used As A Surveillance Tool CIA General Counsel: “Bitcoin isn’t truly anonymous… it’s a TOOL we use for intel gathering.” Now imagine a stablecoin economy…

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(this comment is exaggerated for comedic effect but it’s not wrong)

Udi Wertheimer @udiWertheimer

3 days ago

fun fact: satoshi refused to use the NIST seeds probably because he was somewhat of a bunker mode retard himself, instead used the more obscure secp256k1, and most other cryptocurrencies followed this is why we can’t directly use industry standards like passkeys in blockchains,

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Why buy a quantum computer if AI keeps improving classical computing? If we can build a big enough quantum computer, we get asymptotically faster algorithms for chemistry, optimization, and finance. But the funny thing is, classical computing keeps catching up on the commercially interesting problems. So again, if classical algorithms or their AI-optimized variants are good enough for the commercially viable instances, why buy a computer to run quantum algorithms? Why invest in building one? A number of “hard” problems in theoretical computer science aren’t hard for the average commercial version of the problem. For example, checking for a low-cost route that visits all n cities is the traveling salesman problem, which is NP-hard, meaning the worst-case version is very, very hard. But real-world versions of the problem aren’t, and in fact you can solve many of them with some clever algorithms and a smartphone. A few caveats. For optimization and finance, it’s not even clear you need AI improvements, since the quantum advantage there was smaller to begin with. There's an argument for quantum in scientific computing, specifically simulating quantum physics, but that’s science, not much of a business. And AI may well improve quantum computing itself, e.g. with better error correction, but that helps the supply side, not demand.

Student: the demo characters in our anonymous group chat are Alice, Bob, Master Yoda and Darth Vader. Me, if you are going to do Star Wars references for real world cryptography , you really ought to do: • Cassian Andor • Luthen Rael • Kleya Marki * Lonni Jung