Hold on for Dear Life | Hacker News Reader

Hold on for Dear Life

pluralistic.net

31 pointshn_acker11 comments

like 6 years ago I had a job reach out to me once from I think the filecoin or some such. It wasn't something I was interested or suited for but I spoke with the guy and we were clearly talking at right angle at each other. Whatever. I then went out for brews with my friend who is also in tech and I told him about this. He looked into it and then went and bought like 500K of seagate stock, saying to me "these idiots are going to lead to hard drive shortage". He's made all kinds of money on that. Wish I took his lead on that too.

While the article is mostly about cryptocurrency, my response is in re:

> But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can't bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle?

My colleague Moti Yung has studied this and there are some surprising results

https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/639

> Anamorphic Encryption: Private Communication against a Dictator

...

> In this work, as a technical demonstration of the futility of the dictator’s demands, we invent the notion of “Anamorphic Encryption” which shows that even if the dictator gets the keys and the messages used in the system (before anything is sent) and no other system is allowed, there is a covert way within the context of well established public-key cryptosystems for an entity to immediately (with no latency) send piggybacked secure messages which are, in spite of the stringent dictator conditions, hidden from the dictator itself! We feel that this may be an important direct technical argument against the nature of governments’ attempts to police the use of strong cryptographic systems, and we hope to stimulate further works in this direction.

A good update. The next good question might be, okay, what happens next knowing all of this?

I ask because (yes as someone who has dabbled in crypto and also respects the generally valid views of the haters) this stuff isn't going away. For many use cases, love it or not, it works and will be used by some?

Knowing all of this it would be nice to invest a bit into the rule of law instead of divesting from it.

I think the generalized argument here is -- if you mange to secede from the state and become a sovereign, it's better to have a nuclear bomb to back it up. Or maybe not let too many people know you are one until you do.

As someone who is somewhat a long time disciple of Cory Doctorow, having read his book Little Brother, when I was 17, which introduced me to Linux, Privacy/Cryptography and the Surveillance State. I think he is really downplaying the core innovations of bitcoin, which are the incentives and game theory it uses to allow adversaries to play together.

For example in bitcoin if you have enough resources to spam the network, you are incentivized to mine instead, thereby securing the network and produce new blocks.

So I think game theory and aligned incentives can be used to address the law issues, allowing different entities whether its States, Corporations and individuals to work together, even if they absolutely hate each other.

Game theory takes over where cryptography ends. Bitcoin gives us a glimpse of this.

Except when game theory does not account for externalities. As a follower of Doctorow myself, I have to point out that everyone is rent-seeking and that the forces that restrain it are abolished by systems like Bitcoin. So when miners benefit from blocks being limited in size from the resulting restrictions on transaction counts, there's really no one you can turn to and no one who might argue on behalf of the people who aren't so heavily invested in the system. Arguably it is why Ethereum and others became so competitive despite the mindshare dominance of Bitcoin, transactions just got really expensive.

I agree with you and the article. I was just pointing out though, that the main innovation in bitcoin is not the cryptography, but the game theory which goes far enough to allow adversaries to work together, follow the protocol/law. There are very few mechanisms that allow this type of adversarial coordination, another one is nuclear weapons which somewhat prevents war between nuclear states because of mutually assured destruction.

> Except when game theory does not account for externalities. As a follower of Doctorow myself, I have to point out that everyone is rent-seeking and that the forces that restrain it are abolished by systems like Bitcoin.

Yes most definitely. Decentralization is a spectrum. A village can be decentralized because everyone knows each other, and they trust each other to follow the protocol. But when you scale it up to a nation or global level where people don't know each other, you get people that don't want to follow the protocol for whatever reasons. Some attack the participants (wrench attacks) or some directly attack the protocol itself.

Usually the way to mitigate this is by adding a sub-system to filter/moderate out the bad actors. This sub-system than ends up with so much power it centralizes the system. Another way is by federation, which can decentralize the filtering. But the federations can also collude and centralize the network like the centralization of bitcoin miners, as you point out.

When someone is attacking the protocol this is the time when coordination is needed the most. Decentralized coordination on a large scale is hard, though bitcoin solved it for a very narrow use case (but not full proof since miners can collude and centralize).

So yea I agree with you, and with the article. Centralized governance might be a requirement for large scale coordination. But I cant help but see the beauty in in Satoshi's game theory, it being the key innovation in bitcoin and not the cryptography.

Is it

(1) Didn't all the people who were into crypto get into Claude Code instead?

(2) I tried to tell them. They didn't listen. Now they're going to die.

I've read this 3 times now and I still don't really understand what he's trying to say. The split between EFF-style cryptography-coded "technopolitics" and Coinbase-style doesn't exist; the EFF is fundamentally a libertarian project and the Cypherpunks were/are enthusiastic progenitors of cryptofinance and "web3".

> My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn't proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.

> Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing "smart contracts," and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.

So he's saying there is a split between those who believe the state and the rule of law are essential tools of freedom, and those who believe technology can provide its own law and guarantees without any need for the state. None of that is incompatible with the EFF being a libertarian project.

And your confusion derives from…what? When he explains this, you feel the correct response is basically "nuh-uh"?

The divide exists among people. It does not exist among the Cypherpunks.

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