When you pull your crypto driven system out of the light, you are going to have to fight what lives in the dark. If you screwed up the protocol of your system and it's taken over, well it's gone, you exist outside the law and there are no means to get it back. Do a bunch of trolls with stolen crypto generation means exist on your network and flood out all the legitimate users, well too bad.
Civil society exists between the authoritarians that want dominion over everything and those that embrace chaos and would leave the world in ruin. It is a delicate and imperfect balance, but where it exists allows humanity to flourish.
Merely improving the tor network's name resolution has nothing to do with your grand philosophical argument against internet freedom.
A rare win/win.
"civil society tends to operate in the open"
... Some of us aren't up to your standards of civility and propriety, and we're going to find ways to get on without your permission.
Especially when you can make the case that doing so will help their bottom line and legal footing.
Successive governments have undermined the authority of judicial review and I'd support anyone campaigning to change that. But, the solution isn't to try and build a system that prevents the government from ever piercing the privacy of citizens. That's just a recipe for anarchy.
Honestly, maybe a few years ago I might have been on your side. But, this whole cryptocurrency saga has just soured me on techno-libertarianism. A society needs an effective government (accountable to the people) that can enforce the law.
I agree it presents a lot of problems, crypto has harmed millions of people, and the people who presented crypto as investments should be held accountable by standard government rules.
But yes, these are indeed complicated problems. All I really know is that I sleep much better at night knowing I've never aided this movement in any way.
I'm a big fan of your thoughtful speeches while you grapple with these sticky situations. But why not just invest some pocket change in helping solve TOR's name resolution problem so that removal from the clearnet isn't the death sentence it currently is?
There's a simple and obvious solution to this which doesn't interfere with your principles or your business model: a crypto-driven system for assigning human readable addresses to onion addresses. With that in place and included in the tor browser and in a simple browser plugin for other browsers, you can focus on fighting DDOS attacks on clearnet sites instead of being the reluctant referee of the world's communication.