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Comment by Catbert59 | Hacker News Reader

The only safe communication is decentralized communication, capable of multiplexing multiple techniques (IP, BLE, LoRa, etc.) under the hood of cryptographically safe routing and messaging algorithms that work over unreliable links.

Maybe even with small-range offline radio mailboxes so you can deliver and gather messages from/to highly suppressed people which then can be send back into the "online" network automatically without further interaction.

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Well, I’ve been in the decentralization space (and mocked for it by some on HN) for a decade at least.

When Moxie wrote a thoughtful critique of decentralization, I wrote an article addressing his criticisms and spoke about why decentralization matters: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

There are many great decentralized alternatives. I know the founders for most of them, and interviewed some, like the founder of the original (and current) Freenet, probably the earliest private content sharing network ever launched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

Here are some more of my interviews regarding freedom of speech, including with regulators, sociopolitical thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman’s grandson, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179795

Here is a map of the global war on end-to-end encryption, with updates on how we have been losing this war: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

In my opinion, the most secure network is Autonomi.com, which was previously Maidsafe. It is FULLY decentralized and encrypted, and those guys have been at it far longer than Matrix. I have been on their forums and they have been on ours for years, debating various architectural and economic tradeoffs.

I might be completely wrong/off the mark here, but could it be related to that everything decentralised here is about blockchain (or even DLTs) which is just really weird for almost any idea... Who comes up with weirdness to stuff every square peg in a round hole? Sorry if you are not that person, but when I open the Autonomi page, I see 'not block chain', 'add your eth wallet', 'dlt based'... Why?

You asked why everything decentralized is about blockchain. Then you proceed to say Autonomi says “NOT blockchain” and still that triggers you? I think the problem may be on HN for being triggered by certain words.

Here is why. True anonymity and freedom requires not trusting a centralized party. So you’re going to need a way to achieve some sort of consensus and durability. Also if you are anonymous, how do you pay for storage? You can’t have accounts! Answer: you need utility tokens, a form of cryptocurrency that needs to solve the double-spend problem.

So any project that is serious about solutions arrives at these elements every time. Perhaps the only exception is early BitTorrent where everyone sharing had to be seeding too. But that only works for popular movies and such!

I think it depends on what you want to achieve; this solves another decentralised thing than I would want. I want users in a group to share data which is not possible to be ever retrievable by someone outside the group. So the data is encrypted between the members of the group, on THEIR devices only. And when the group collapses and/or users remove the data from their device, it cannot be retrieved in any way. Unlike any distributed decentralised network where, if we get good enough in 'n' years, we can just get that info from the chain and decrypt it. Even if the creators of the data disbanded and have no wish for any of this. I see for payments blockchain makes some sense, although it's hardly anonymous anymore, but for any other goal, I don't want anything stored where I don't have control. Ideally that is, of course life doesn't work like that.

I think there is no need to buy storage (you already have it); there needs to be software to share it in a way that is p2p and not via ANY other machines that are not owned by the members of the group (for instance, your family).

That's it. Also prevents from chat control being effective. Who is working in that space? I see this as an answer to many privacy/gov overreach issues.

Quantum communication channels are going to be cool, but then we'll have quantum bugs (covert listening.)

or true E2E encryption

One thing that is true about the article is that E2EE encryption is nowhere near enough. Metadata leaks of any kind are probably worse than leaking data itself.

I very much prefer to guarantee that data doesn't leave my trusted servers in the first place, rather than to encrypt it.

>I very much prefer to guarantee that data doesn't leave my trusted servers in the first place, rather than to encrypt it.

what's the rationale behind this? The point of a server is to ... serve things. If you're not gonna exchange data you might as well put a hard drive in a closet.

The point of encryption, to securely send information across adversarial channels, has made it possible that I can take my most secret information and send it across my worst enemies network and I don't need to care. Who on earth wants to go back to a world where I have to hide plain text documents in the sock drawer?

DPI firewalled states like China show that they are extremely effective in adapting to new protocols.

Having a second diverse link that is cheap to setup would be an alternative.

does such an open source project exist?

A lot of people metion "Reticulum" in this regard. But that's a one-man-show project.

The only project that got some serious momentum is Meshtastic. That's decentralized LoRa with flooding/next-hop-routing that can be backed with MQTT.

I think a huge step forward would be a decentralized BLE LE (a super robust Bluetooth Low Energy mode) Mesh based application as it can be used on smartphones.

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