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I wonder if the future of a company like Protonmail is that it has to be open source. Almost like simply an API, no privacy statement, no marketing, just a smar

I wonder if the future of a company like Protonmail is that it has to be open source. Almost like simply an API, no privacy statement, no marketing, just a smart contract. More like UniSwap.

ta988 5y ago
How do you do emails on a blockchain? Is that another of those scenarios where "it will work when everybody will switch to the chain" ?
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  The naive way would just be to send a transaction to the recipient’s wallet address (or more practically, their ENS name) where the transaction payload is an encrypted text message. As you point out, that requires both parties be on the blockchain. If you want to send/receive off-chain, you would probably just set up a trusted relay. e.g. send an ethereum tx to emailrelay.eth and it would forward it over the SMTP system. Send an email from a SMTP client to recipientaddr.eth@emailrelay.eth.link and it’ll do the reverse. This implementation would have the relay see all your plaintext messages. Not much different from how centralized email services like gmail operate, in practice. There’s nothing that makes any of this technically infeasible to a knowledgeable dev today — maybe it even already exists (ethmail.cc shows there’s at least interest in it). Transaction fees kill this from a practicality point of view. Probably you want to roll this out on a layer 2 network, and those are still pretty new things.
  - istingray 5y ago
    Oh neat wasn't aware of ethmail.cc will check it out
  - plafl 5y ago
    > Transaction fees kill this from a practicality point That depends on the amount. If it's small it could be a feature.
  - randomswede 5y ago
    Submit encrypted message to sufficiently large and stable data processor (bitcoin blockchain, hackernews, reddit, ...). Provide pointer to message via side channel to recipient. Done. Now, that has OTHEHR problems. So, as anything but a napkin sketch, don't take it too seriously.
atoav 5y ago
Who pays the servers then?
- istingray 5y ago
  The users. Who else?
  - aembleton 5y ago
    An intelligence agency such as the CIA
  - atoav 5y ago
    Okay so whom are they paying?
    - istingray 5y ago
      In the decentralized scenario, the users are paying the underlying system as well as the particular itself. Check out Uniswap as an example. Users pay ether to run a process, and pay Uniswap a fee for the protocol.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

I wonder if the future of a company like Protonmail is that it has to be open source. Almost like simply an API, no privacy statement, no marketing, just a smart contract. More like UniSwap.

ta988 5y ago

How do you do emails on a blockchain? Is that another of those scenarios where "it will work when everybody will switch to the chain" ?

wallacoloo 5y ago
The naive way would just be to send a transaction to the recipient’s wallet address (or more practically, their ENS name) where the transaction payload is an encrypted text message. As you point out, that requires both parties be on the blockchain. If you want to send/receive off-chain, you would probably just set up a trusted relay. e.g. send an ethereum tx to emailrelay.eth and it would forward it over the SMTP system. Send an email from a SMTP client to recipientaddr.eth@emailrelay.eth.link and it’ll do the reverse. This implementation would have the relay see all your plaintext messages. Not much different from how centralized email services like gmail operate, in practice. There’s nothing that makes any of this technically infeasible to a knowledgeable dev today — maybe it even already exists (ethmail.cc shows there’s at least interest in it). Transaction fees kill this from a practicality point of view. Probably you want to roll this out on a layer 2 network, and those are still pretty new things.
- istingray 5y ago
  Oh neat wasn't aware of ethmail.cc will check it out
- plafl 5y ago
  > Transaction fees kill this from a practicality point That depends on the amount. If it's small it could be a feature.
- randomswede 5y ago
  Submit encrypted message to sufficiently large and stable data processor (bitcoin blockchain, hackernews, reddit, ...). Provide pointer to message via side channel to recipient. Done. Now, that has OTHEHR problems. So, as anything but a napkin sketch, don't take it too seriously.

atoav 5y ago

Who pays the servers then?

istingray 5y ago
The users. Who else?
- aembleton 5y ago
  An intelligence agency such as the CIA
- atoav 5y ago
  Okay so whom are they paying?
  - istingray 5y ago
    In the decentralized scenario, the users are paying the underlying system as well as the particular itself. Check out Uniswap as an example. Users pay ether to run a process, and pay Uniswap a fee for the protocol.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]