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> It worked as long as nobody was trying to go after it. That's been changing I see no evidence of this. Authorities have been going after crypto-currencies us

> It worked as long as nobody was trying to go after it. That's been changing I see no evidence of this. Authorities have been going after crypto-currencies users very effectively ever since the early days of Bitcoin; from the first darknet market takedowns, to arresting people on LocalBitcoins because they didn't register as money transmitters. It sounds like we agree on the limitations of a ledger, but saying it "doesn't work" simply because the physical world exists and governments can arrest you, attempt to track you, make rules for exchanges and merchants etc is nonsense. Of course they can. They can equally block encrypted chat apps, VPNs, prevent device makers from allowing them onto the hardware, force backdoors, effectively threaten people who use them, or spy on your communications locally. None of these things mean that encryption doesn't work, or that it isn't useful.

acdha 5y ago
It's true that encryption is useful despite not being perfect but there's an important bit of missing context: blockchain systems are being sold as suitable protection for people “living in a corrupt authoratarian system” and that changes the risk calculations considerably. If you live in a relatively open democracy, the knowledge that your encrypted chat app could be attacked by the police isn't a huge deal because there's a legal process protecting you but that trade off changes considerably if you are at risk from a hostile government. Systems which require you to leave a public paper-trail for the authorities, for example, are too risky to consider and something more privacy oriented is still a significant gamble — especially since in such an environment it's likely that you'd be at risk simply having it installed on your devices unless you were certain that it made no identifiable network activity. If I lived in China now, for example, I would not want to risk having something like a VPN client or Signal installed on my phone if the police stopped me or started linking DNS lookups to ISP customers.

acdha 5y ago

It's true that encryption is useful despite not being perfect but there's an important bit of missing context: blockchain systems are being sold as suitable protection for people “living in a corrupt authoratarian system” and that changes the risk calculations considerably. If you live in a relatively open democracy, the knowledge that your encrypted chat app could be attacked by the police isn't a huge deal because there's a legal process protecting you but that trade off changes considerably if you are at risk from a hostile government. Systems which require you to leave a public paper-trail for the authorities, for example, are too risky to consider and something more privacy oriented is still a significant gamble — especially since in such an environment it's likely that you'd be at risk simply having it installed on your devices unless you were certain that it made no identifiable network activity. If I lived in China now, for example, I would not want to risk having something like a VPN client or Signal installed on my phone if the police stopped me or started linking DNS lookups to ISP customers.