ProtonMail is building a blockchain feature for email validation | Hacker News Reader

ProtonMail is building a blockchain feature for email validation

joltmailer.com

9 pointsmaoro16 comments

I’m confused by this article - I thought ProtonMail already did public key encryption on people’s emails? And where does blockchain fit into this?

Found the source [0], I guess the article author made a summary or similar. It was cross-posted to Slashdot too [1] automatically based on the time.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20231116120902/https://fortune.c...

[1]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/11/16/141213/proton-mail-...

This is the source, and a much better article: https://fortune.com/crypto/2023/11/16/privacy-proton-mail-ke...

> And where does blockchain fit into this?

It’s got electrolytes. Just like ai. Is what we crave.

On a serious note this article makes no sense, nor the “feature”.

I'm pretty sure it was generated using GPT or similar. It is worded as a summary of an article and GPT checkers report that it was likely generated.

> GPT checkers report that it was likely generated.

I agree it looks GPT generated.

However, I would not use an online “GPT checker” as I don’t trust them to be actually reliable at all.

Keeping a common ledger that contains potentially untrusted data is one of the few use cases I can see where a block chain made sense.

Way back in the day (and maybe still, I’m not sure) didn’t MIT run a PGP key database? The only problem I had with it was that I didn’t have an expiration date on an old key so it hung around forever.

This doesn’t explain how the blockchain relates to the goal of sending email.

I was expecting it to mention Hashcash which was invented by Adam Back in 1997 as a way to prevent email spam. Hashcash was a big inspiration for “Satoshi Nakamoto” when he built Bitcoin.

The article also does not explain how the private keys of the users relate to this.

Will the PGP public keys of the users be stored on their blockchain? Will the encrypted mails be stored on their blockchain? Both? Neither? What else?

It’s all about encrypted email messages. They’re talking about using a blockchain as a universal public key directory. I assume PM is doing this internally already since they already know the public keys on their own hosted accounts, but that’s not the case when PM exchanges email outside their own service/domain. A big challenge I don’t see addresses or discussed in the article is how blocks would be created and added to the chain if it’s going to be made public (and therefore useful outside of PM’s internal systems/email).

I have a hard time understanding the link between the feature of a key server and block chain.

This is a great idea to simplify PGP, love it, but nothing to do with block chain at all.

Basically a public key server where all recipients have their public key available to send email too and have proton mail use it automatically.

Last time around people get very angry when they realized Gmail DKIM/DMARC signatures were authenticating emails they would have rather not made public as real.

A PKI is not a blockchain.

What? Did a bot write this? This title and article make no sense at all. That's just public-key crypto, no blockchain involved.

"Blockchain" is one of the current buzzwords that has to be slapped on everything. Not long before they do a v2 with "AI".

Is it still though? I thought that had died out after all the bitcoin fiascos

In technical circles, yes. But those things trickle down over time, through the media, marketing drones, bureaucrats and politicians even sometimes down to the rest of the population. So when things are already dead with our kind, e.g. the politicians or the news might still be full into "blockchain something something".

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