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Comment by Tutanota | Hacker News Reader

Hi there, Tutanota team here. We came across the discussion and wanted to say that we're available for any questions. The decision only affects not encrypted emails, the end-to-end encryption of Tutanota is not affected. To the contrary, the ruling - even though we hoped for a different outcome - again shows why end-to-end encryption is necessary.

This ruling is a follow-up of a previous court order from 2020. We have posted a more detailed comment here: https://np.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/k3sfs5/in_englisch...

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Could you just ban the two accounts? That way you don't have to monitor them. I'm sure you could come up with a plausible terms of service reason.

IANAL, but I imagine that could give rise to (attempted) obstruction of justice. (Maybe it won't hold up in court, but it still gives the DA an opportunity to go after the mail provider.)

But what about the metadata?

If you send end-to-end encrypted data, body, subject line & attachments are encrypted. Email addresses (metadata) can't be encrypted due to the way the email system is set up (interoperability).

This is what BitMessage tried to solve, but it looks a bit unloved right now.

BitMessage was probably the most important experiment in all that blockchain insanity. Among other things, it showed that there are limits for maximum entropy for messaging. E.g. everyone should receive every message to plausibly deny communication, but we have a clear and very short horizon for that amount of data. Hence should expire messages quickly, which does not work in many if not most real world situations.

I don't think bitmessage languished due to any inherent technical obstacle, did it?

It simply didn't attract a lot of interest because most people figured that PGP-encrypted messages sent from throwaway webmail accounts was good enough.

Also the bitmessage software was really horrifically low-quality python, and the project seemed to take the bitcoin attitude that "the first implementation is the spec, multiple implementations equals bad" which was a turn-off. I had a really really hard time putting my faith in that codebase.

I think the idea behind bitmessage will resurface in a cleaner form if a compelling use ever arises. Enough smart people heard about bitmessage that the idea is now "out there" permanently.

If it ever does, I think a neat twist would be changing the Proof of Work (used to limit spam) into Proof of Storage like Chia uses, except that the storage "plots" are the active set of circulating bitmessages (which are encrypted and therefore have no exploitable structure, just like the hash chains in Chia plots) plus a smaller indexing structure. Two birds, one stone. This is not straightforward, but I believe it is possible.

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