5 karma · joined November 16, 2022
One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures. LibreOffice could create a new service like keybase.io but that is also centralized and we saw how that went. Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.
How does this fit with zero knowledge proofs that the blog mentions? There may be signature attestations you can make that you want to be private from the receiver, but made in a way that the receiver can still verify the signature is valid.
EDIT: Since I am on a throwaway account, my replies are being throttled. This could be another application of ZKP: create a proof that my main account has significant karma to post, without sacrificing my privacy.
How does this fit with zero knowledge proofs that the blog mentions? There may be signature attestations you can make that you want to be private from the receiver, but made in a way that the receiver can still verify the signature is valid.
Another way to view it, is as a digital economy running on a different set of technologies. You don't need to "invest" or "time the market" or anything, you just buy ETH to use it as a gas token.
Buy some ETH, an amount you are OK to write to zero like you would a hamburger or movie ticket purchase. Move the ETH off a CEX into your own self custody wallet to understand what it means to hold an asset with nothing but a private key. Convert it to stable coins with DEX like Uniswap, to avoid thinking about price. Send them to and fro, use DeFi, buy a ENS domain. It might cost you $10-50 total but you will probably come out of the experience with a better understanding of crypto, and you might also start to see traditional banking infrastructure differently, maybe slower or less verifiable or less secure or too centralized or too hard to build programmable interfaces on top of.
In mastodon, if the impersonator is self hosting the impersonating domain, your only solution is to complain to the registrar or try to get support from other instances to block the domain. The same mechanisms of getting clients and servers to block requests happening in the censor resistant protocol does happen in ens and crypto based systems, if criminal behavior is involved or heavy moderation is wanted.
These moderations already exist on services built on top of ENS, like tornadocash.eth.limo which fails to resolve because the .limo domain is following US sanctions.
> In the example you gave, an impersonator is subject to the rules of their Mastodon instance
Just to point out, the impersonator can self-host, so Mastodon protocol has no course to expel them except for each other instance to suspend the impersonator one at a time, or to come to consensus on large blocklists.
Tornado cash: the domain is still resolvable to an IPFS hosted website[1]. As far as ENS is concerned as a name service and URI resolving mechanism, it is working great. This doesn't mean the smart contract that facilitates tornado cash deposits is working that well: if the US says you will be criminalized for touching a smart contract, then nobody will want to touch it, and tornado cash depends on many people using it to provide anonymity.
> If you were actually concerned about censorship, an expensive service which leaves a public audit trail for prosecutors would not be the optimal starting point.
If you are referring to tornado cash, I think you are mistaken.
[1] https://twitter.com/liamzebedee/status/1578127982173908992
> If the holder is using it maliciously to scam people by tricking them into thinking it's the real Apple, then yes!
Try applying your logic to Twitter and its current situation. Is it a good thing that accounts impersonating others are being suspended from the network?
Mastodon does not have this same centralization, so @teraflop@teraflop.xyz could impersonate your @teraflop@teraflop.com account. There is no centralized entity that controls the whole Mastodon and ActivityPub network, which I think is a good design decision for a less centralized protocol.
And see my sibling comment:
> Maybe you can track them down and get a legal action strong enough that they honor it
That's fine, it's how our legal system works. Using a bank as an example: they can eject you as a customer if you do something they think is criminal, even before you have had a fair trial that might prove you innocent. ENS and crypto both ask: what if you create protocols where users actually do have complete ownership over their assets, and no single entity has more control over the ledger than another?
[1] https://etherscan.io/enslookup-search?search=tornadocash.eth
If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol.