If I'm a whistleblower in an active case and I end up dead before testifying, I absolutely DO want the general public to speculate about my cause of death.
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/23/peter-thiel-jeff-thomas/
Let’s unpack that. By “crypto” you probably mean cryptocurrency, but let’s not forget it’s the same crypto as in cryptography. You absolutely want cryptography involved in something like this for obvious reasons.
You’ve probably also heard the term blockchain and immediately think of speculative currency futures. So throw that to the wind for a second and imagine how useful a distributed list of records linked and verifiable with cryptographic hash functions would be for this project.
Then finally, run this all in a secure and autonomous way so that under certain conditions the action of releasing the key will happen. In other words: a smart contract.
This is an absolutely perfect use of Ethereum. If you think cryptocurrencies are useless, then consider that projects like this are what give them actual real world use cases.
Isn’t effectively all the trust still in the party releasing it at the right time, or not releasing it otherwise? If so, is the blockchain aspect anything other than decentralization theater?
I guess one thing you can do with a blockchain is keeping that trusted party honest and accountable for not releasing at the desired date and in the absence of a liveness signal, but I’m not sure that’s the biggest trust issue here (for me, them taking a look without my permission would be the bigger one).
Now none of your friends have to know each other. No friend can peek on their own, they can't conspire with each other, and if one of them gets compromised, it doesn't put the others at risk. It's basically the same idea as "social recovery wallets," which some people use to protect large amounts of funds.
If you don't have any friends then as you suggest, a conceivable infrastructure would be to pay anonymous providers to deposit funds in the contract, which they would lose they don't provide their key fragment in a timely manner after the liveness signal fails. For verification, the contract would have to hold hashes of the key fragments. Each depositor would include a public key with the deposit, which the whistleblower can use to encrypt and post a key fragment. (Of course the vulnerability here is the whistleblower's own key.)
The contract should probably also hold a hash of the encrypted document, which would be posted somewhere public.
But still, while this solves the problem of availability (the shardholders could get their stake slashed if they don't publish their secrets after the failsafe condition is reached, because not publishing something on-chain is publicly observeable), does it help that much with secrecy, i.e. not leaking the secret unintentionally and possibly non-publicly?
I guess you could bet on the shardholders not having an easy way to coordinate collusion with somebody willing to pay for it, maybe by increasing the danger of defection (e.g. by allowing everyone that obtains a secret without the condition being met to claim the shardholder's stake?), but the game theory seems more complicated there.
A well-funded journalist could pay the bonds plus extra. I think the only defense would be to have a large number of such contracts, many of them without journalistic value.
Distributing the key among trusted friends who don't know each other seems like the best option.
That would incentivize some to pose as "collusion coordinators" ("let's all get together and see what's inside") and then just claim the stake of everybody agreeing. But if somebody could establish a reputation for not doing that and paying defectors well in an iterated game...
> Distributing the key among trusted friends who don't know each other seems like the best option.
Yeah, that also seems like the most realistic option to me. But then you don't need the blockchain :)
For the friendless option, don't return all the stake if secrets are submitted despite proof of life. Instead, return a small portion to incentivize reporting, and burn the rest.
Otherwise, the coordinator has more to gain by actually coordinating collusion (i.e. secretly pay off shardholders, reassemble the key, monetize what's in it, don't do anything on-chain) than by revealing the collusion in non-iterated games.
If I understand right, your concern with this is that the coordinator could pay off shardholders to reveal their shards directly to the coordinator, avoid revealing shards to the contract, and then the shardholders can get their money back.
However, the shardholders do have to worry that the coordinator will go ahead and reveal, collecting that 1% and burning the rest. Or it could be 10%, or 50%, whatever seems sufficiently tempting to coordinators....given the burn risk, the coordinator has to pay >100% to shardholders regardless (assuming non-iterated).
Maximum theft temptation to coordinators is 100% return, but this removes the financial loss to shardholders who simply reveal prematurely on their own. But maybe even losing 10% is sufficient to dissuade that, and then you have to trust coordinators with access to 90% of your funds.
And all this, hopefully, is in the context of the general public having no idea how much economic value the document in question has to a coordinator. In fact, if coordinators routinely pay shardholders more than their deposits, it would pay people to put up lots of worthless documents and collect the payments.
The trust is held in your own code implementation of the contract and that ETH will continue to exist and not be hard-forked or Shor'd or something.
> Tested it years ago, to lock up 1 ETH in essentially a CD for a year.
That's not locking up a secret, that's locking up value.
But it seems like there might be a game theoretic way to ensure that, as your sibling commenter has outlined.
How to schedule an outgoing email through Gmail:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9214606?hl=en&co=GENI...
through Outlook
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/delay-or-schedule...
through Apple Mail
https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-schedule-email-on-iphone-i...
through Proton Mail
Although I don't know how you could make any kind of Blockchain containing data to be released at some condition and no way to release it before? If it's all public in the Blockchain it's all already public. You need atrusted authority that has a secret key to unlock the data. And if you have that all that Blockchain stuff is utterly redundant anyway.
Publicly making claims and being named as a potential witness in a court case seems a clear line.
F.ex. the resources listed on the US House's Whistleblower Ombuds page: https://whistleblower.house.gov/whistleblower-support-organi...
This guy had plenty of money for a therapist to help with his mental health issues.
What more do you think we could we do for them?
So why didn't I immediately publish it all while alive? Perhaps I preferred to control the flow of information, redact certain parts, or extort the organisation I was blowing the whistle on. None of those seem all that important to me compared to deterring people from assassinating me in the first place.
... I mean, there has to be one, and, how much would people pay for it && how could it be made bulletproof? Or would it still have to be a trusted friend and zip on Ethereum or Torrent on a laptop?
edit: there was already a comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42413585
I don't know how it works in the US but there are definitely countries where after x years of disappearance you are legally declared death. And, yes, some people who are still alive and, say, left the EU for some country in South America, are still alive. Which is not my point. My point is that for inheritance purposes etc. there are countries who'll declared you death if you don't give any sign of life for x years.
Then, for example, consider n = 5, k = 3 - if any 3 of 5 selected friends decide the trigger has been met, they can work together to decrypt the information. But a group of 2 of the 5 could not - reducing the chance of it leaking early if a key share is stolen / someone betrays or so on. It also reduces the chance of it not being released when it should, due someone refusing or being unable to act (in that case, up to 2 friends could be incapacitated, unwilling to follow the instructions, or whatever, and it could still be released).
Right now, as an individual, you'd have pretty small number of trusted N's (from parents definition). With some organization, maybe you could get that number way up, so possibility of destroying the entire scheme could be close to impossible with rounding up large number of the population.
The internet wildly speculating would probably get back to my mom and sister which would really upset them. Once I’m gone my beliefs/causes wouldn’t be more important than my family’s happiness.
I don't think I have delusions of grandeur, I worry that the cost of exterminating people algorithmically could become so low that they could decide to start taking out small fries in batches.
A lot of narratives which would have sounded insane 5 years ago actually seem plausible nowadays... Yet the stigma still exists. It's still taboo to speculate on the evils that modern tech could facilitate and the plausible deniability it could provide.
My guess is that the cost of taking out a small fry today is already extremely low, and a desperate low-life could be hired for less than $1000 to kill a random person that doesn't have a security detail.
High profile, protected target? You probably couldn't find a random low-life to do it, much less successfully. And no matter what jurisdiction you want to commit the murder in, it will be more expensive than if your target was a random average joe, or jane.
Country is a place where the rule of law and legal enforcement are strongly applied and taken seriously? It will become harder and more expensive. Criminals are often stupid, but even stupid criminals in countries that take legal matters seriously are rarely freewheeling about contract murder that they actually mean to commit. The pool of willing potential killers would be smaller in such countries.
And finally, the nature of the murder: Need to kill someone in a way that looks like suicide or accident? That won't be something you hire a low-life to do on the cheap.
On the other hand, if you just need someone with modest to poor protection dead and you live in a country with weak legal mechanisms, then the situation becomes as favorable as you could want given your murderous needs. Assuming you have the right connections, a random gangbanger or would-be gangbanger on a motorbike can do the job for very cheap indeed. In the country I live in this is common and the people (often just teenagers) paid to do it will go for broke if offered as little as a couple grand or sometimes much less.
Also, if targeting small individuals, it's rarely one individual that's the issue, but a whole group. When Stalin or Hitler started systematically exterminating millions of people, it was essentially done algorithmically. The costs became very low for them to target whole groups of people.
I suspect that once you have the power of life or death over individuals, you automatically hold such power over large groups. Because you need a corrupt structure and once the structure is corrupt to that extent there is no clear line between 1 person and 1 million persons.
Also I suspect only one or a handful of individuals can have such power because otherwise such crimes can be used as a bait and trap by political opponents. Without absolute power, the risk of getting caught and prosecuted always exists.
The only benefit of turning it into gossip is to dissuade other whistleblowers, without the inconvenience of actually having to kill anyone.
And the key here is that the future would be whistleblowers hear about it. That is where the gossip is important.
In fact it doesn’t even have to be a real assasination. Just the rumour that it might have been is able to dissuade others.
Which part of this is unclear to you? Or which part are you asking about?
I answered that. Understanding and describing how it works doesn’t mean that the alternative of keeping silent about suspected deaths is prefered.
Nowhere in history has a culture of secrecy resulted in a more open and honest government.