That’s a pipe dream. Like „untraceable, not-controlled-by-banks, decentralised currency bitcoin“. As soon as it becomes popular, it gets regulated.

Yes, it’s stupid. But it’s the reality of things.

Regulated and decentralized are not opposing ends on the same spectrum, under a mature government one can have both.

> Regulated and decentralized are not opposing ends on the same spectrum, under a mature government one can have both

The point is it's regulated irrespective of the government's maturity. If it only works under a mature government, it's superfluous as a social tool. (Technology usually is.)

it is, when the regulating authority is centralised

> [...] bitcoin“. As soon as it becomes popular, it gets regulated.

And, before it gets popular and regulated, it gets overrun by criminals?

Definitely the case with Bitcoin. I don't know about ProtonMail, though.

What is a criminal but a person who acts against pre-existing regulation anyway?

Bitcoin's 'criminal' use is/was 95% narcotics. In a world without a superficial 'war on drugs', where a state had no right to tell a citizen what to put into their own body, no user, no dealer would be criminal.

If you wish to fight crime, the solution might not be to 'make more things criminal', but to 'make less things criminal'.

On the other hand, I have been using bitcoin for cross-border value transfers where banks would have taken ridiculous fees, and I have used bitcoin for online micro-transactions where setting up other payment systems would have been expensive.

The fact that governments have regulated cryptocurrency does not change the value proposition of the technology.

The governments have also regulated cocaine. It didn’t work there, either.

Governments would certainly like to regulate Bitcoin, and many have passed laws to this effect. But it's still possible to use it in a way that effectively skirts all this regulation, because of its decentralized nature.

Would you care to remind everybody how they can guarantee that the party they are interacting with is in fact Proton even though anybody watching or facilitating the interaction won't be able to know?

Today? Use their .onion address[0] over Tor and TLS. The TLS certificate is secure by the tor secret service key. No WebPKI or centralized CAs required.

For tomorrow we should keep exploring and adopting improvements. Pick your poison.

[0]: Discovery left as excercise for reader

By this logic one could simply download Protonmail's TLS certificate instead of trusting a CA and access the service via clearnet. Fully decentralized. Discovery, once again, left as excercise for reader.

Presumably the ISPs and vendors will be forced to block you/Proton there via regular means, so no.

And how exactly would that work?

Consider the way BitTorrent works. You don't have to know what your peers are going to be, or where. You don't have to trust your peers: as long as they serve blocks with correct hashes, you are safe to take data from them. Equally, they don't have to know you or trust you.

It, of course, does not work for email. OTOH protocols like briar [1] theoretically could.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar_(software)

Alright, so how do you propose we decentralize the Internet physically? Because that's really the crux of this. And what has allowed the mass surveillance by state actors.

and when that happens, immediately every government ll step inside and turn your decentralized internet into a regulated firewalled one. I think don't understand the drawbacks of this stuff enough. Terrorists and drug cartels leave no trace behind on such networks.

Replace "decentralized internet" by "uncensorable internet".

To me, the most promising such technology is reticulum[0]. I'm interested if someone knows of good alternatives

[0] https://reticulum.network/

I tried to connect a couple of Android-based "Sideband" clients over anything except public Internet, to no avail, not sure why.

(I have several relevant devices, amateur licence and radios, etc)

I succeeded! Can't really help though very wilm start donating to them.