Re:US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance
by __MatrixMan__ on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @01:29PM
(#36230086)
You keep saying that there are many alternatives, but I don't know what you mean. I'd like to outline a scenario and you can tell me which technology you think would scratch the itch:
Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.
Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.
Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly trust people who have validated it.
The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent (this is the kind of thing I mean when I say "coordinating").
I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of ssh connections necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist.
Sneakernet / file transfer / scp will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?
What is both tamper-resistant enough that the government can't delete it, and also public enough that all parties can access the data, if not a public blockchain?
Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.
Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.
Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly trust people who have validated it.
The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent (this is the kind of thing I mean when I say "coordinating").
I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of ssh connections necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist.
Sneakernet / file transfer / scp will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?
What is both tamper-resistant enough that the government can't delete it, and also public enough that all parties can access the data, if not a public blockchain?