3 ms·
The distinction between "useful" and "unusually useful" for criminal purposes is a very important one. It might be worth highlighting more explicitly in the art
by nbadg 11y ago
The distinction between "useful" and "unusually useful" for criminal purposes is a very important one. It might be worth highlighting more explicitly in the article, since it sounds like you may be the author.
> "Success" that doesn't accomplish the rest of our goals isn't success at all
I'm not talking about survival, I'm talking about success. In the article you draw a distinction between failure by death ("range safety") and failure by incorrectness ("mature non-republic"); the remaining option, then, would be success -- including meeting your goals.
My point is that survival is implicit in this definition of success, and from a risk management standpoint, political pressure from entities like the FBI is a very real threat. Many of us understand that the FBI's argument is enormously problematic, but that's largely irrelevant: they think it's valid, and that's all that matters when they're the ones applying real-world political pressure.
Put plainly: the FBI is advocating changing laws to make strong end-to-end cryptography illegal (unless the feds have access, which by definition isn't E2EE). This pressure is a real-world fact; what are you doing to mitigate it? Or what about Turkey, where it's already quasi-illegal?
- yarvin9 11y agoIt's certainly a tradeoff which admits no perfect success. Yes, any network that isn't hosted on the FBI's own servers can be used for some sort of crime. Fortunately, in our real republic as it stands, there's a relatively wide margin of safety between government-pwned networking on the top, and a darknet on the bottom. Let's hope it persists.
- pcmonk 11y agoI'm not the author, but I do work for Urbit. Sure, success is impossible without survival. But survival without e2e crypto can't be success, which is why it's baked into the system. Some risks are avoidable while some aren't. How do we mitigate this risk? Don't give the FBI any reason to worry about us in particular. Don't market to unsavory types. Be above board and make a useful service that lots of people use. Nothing more complicated than that.