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I don't really understand this thinking. The government swore up and down that NSA wasn't conducting mass surveillance and it turned out that they were. How do

I don't really understand this thinking. The government swore up and down that NSA wasn't conducting mass surveillance and it turned out that they were. How do you trust the government enough to keep its hands out of a digital ledger system that's supposedly private when we all know how valuable that information is? The whole point of crypto to begin with was to pry control away from the government.

barrysteve 4y ago
I get the rebuttal and agree with your sentiment. The government acts as if it's above the law and outside of trust, why bother trying to engage with them? Well I've seen the completely-hidden privacy pattern tried. People tried to cut out the government and at the end of the day, they will lie, cheat and steal because they know their rule is backed up with guns and in legal grey areas, the average tech bro is remarkably vulnerable to the system they live inside. Just look at what happened to Ladar Levison for just being an unknowing facilitator of Snowden, his stuff got nuked. If you want something to be private, there has to be a mechanism to roll back government control and the only way to do that peacefully, is legally inside the system. The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades? This could be a whole new gov department that has a zero trust policy of it's employees like the intelligence agencies have and aimed at keeping pandora's box closed, rather than revealing everything. Training people to keep the lid shut and keeping the unknown, unknown is very different to the CIA/NSA method of harvesting everything it can in the world. Then pretending the same employees that can harvest everything on the planet, won't leak the NSA's database too for their own profit or moral reasons. I don't know, the easy answer is just to roll custom stuff and go private individually and blend in with the herd. For real privacy, there's big big problems that avoiding the gov won't help.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades? Because unlike those secret R&D projects, they don't benefit from not being able to access the data they're storing in your scenario. There's absolutely no way you could trust with absolute certainty that a private blockchain run by the US government, one of the largest acquirers of zero-day vulns, would build such a system and not have some sort of backdoor. They've been caught so many times playing this game, thinking to the clipper chip and beyond. It would be so much simpler and more private to just require everyone to accept cash. The more I think about it, the idea of a private government blockchain that they're not looking at is fundamentally antithetical to the existence of that institution.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    There's absolutely no way you could trust with absolute certainty that a private blockchain run by the US government You're right, you couldn't trust it with absolute certainty. they don't benefit from not being able to access the data they're storing in your scenario The government makes transactions it wishes was private all the time. A politician that could route money through a black box could perform many many patterns. Ollie North supplied guns to the 'good guys'/politically favourable team in the Iran-Contra affair with money from outside the sanctions. It's not required for the government to increase the privacy of money flow, but they could see benefit in it, for better or worse. You're right it is simpler to accept cash in a lot of ways. In a world of mass surveillance, showing up to meet your local drug dealer in a parking lot at 2am, is no longer private and nor is cash. Your number plate was recorded the whole way, your face hit facial recognition cameras and IR scanners at toll gates and the phone booth/mcdonalds wifi picked up your phone's IMEI as you drove past, which is linked to your passport photo you submitted to buy your phone, the cash you got from a bank or business has captured your face. A satellite captured your car moving every 5minutes(?) or so. The cash might not be 'on the books' but nearly everything else you did was, which you need to defeat with perfect opsec to be free from a government audit that can ping the FBI/CIA/NSA/private organizations officially or unofficially, legally or not for information about you. Absolutely Certain™ privacy isn't possible with cash either.

barrysteve 4y ago

I get the rebuttal and agree with your sentiment. The government acts as if it's above the law and outside of trust, why bother trying to engage with them? Well I've seen the completely-hidden privacy pattern tried. People tried to cut out the government and at the end of the day, they will lie, cheat and steal because they know their rule is backed up with guns and in legal grey areas, the average tech bro is remarkably vulnerable to the system they live inside. Just look at what happened to Ladar Levison for just being an unknowing facilitator of Snowden, his stuff got nuked. If you want something to be private, there has to be a mechanism to roll back government control and the only way to do that peacefully, is legally inside the system. The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades? This could be a whole new gov department that has a zero trust policy of it's employees like the intelligence agencies have and aimed at keeping pandora's box closed, rather than revealing everything. Training people to keep the lid shut and keeping the unknown, unknown is very different to the CIA/NSA method of harvesting everything it can in the world. Then pretending the same employees that can harvest everything on the planet, won't leak the NSA's database too for their own profit or moral reasons. I don't know, the easy answer is just to roll custom stuff and go private individually and blend in with the herd. For real privacy, there's big big problems that avoiding the gov won't help.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> The government keeps a whole lot of military R&D projects, warcrimes, space projects, ect, secret from us and only to be declassified X decades later. Why couldn't they be forced to keep transactions private for X decades? Because unlike those secret R&D projects, they don't benefit from not being able to access the data they're storing in your scenario. There's absolutely no way you could trust with absolute certainty that a private blockchain run by the US government, one of the largest acquirers of zero-day vulns, would build such a system and not have some sort of backdoor. They've been caught so many times playing this game, thinking to the clipper chip and beyond. It would be so much simpler and more private to just require everyone to accept cash. The more I think about it, the idea of a private government blockchain that they're not looking at is fundamentally antithetical to the existence of that institution.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  There's absolutely no way you could trust with absolute certainty that a private blockchain run by the US government You're right, you couldn't trust it with absolute certainty. they don't benefit from not being able to access the data they're storing in your scenario The government makes transactions it wishes was private all the time. A politician that could route money through a black box could perform many many patterns. Ollie North supplied guns to the 'good guys'/politically favourable team in the Iran-Contra affair with money from outside the sanctions. It's not required for the government to increase the privacy of money flow, but they could see benefit in it, for better or worse. You're right it is simpler to accept cash in a lot of ways. In a world of mass surveillance, showing up to meet your local drug dealer in a parking lot at 2am, is no longer private and nor is cash. Your number plate was recorded the whole way, your face hit facial recognition cameras and IR scanners at toll gates and the phone booth/mcdonalds wifi picked up your phone's IMEI as you drove past, which is linked to your passport photo you submitted to buy your phone, the cash you got from a bank or business has captured your face. A satellite captured your car moving every 5minutes(?) or so. The cash might not be 'on the books' but nearly everything else you did was, which you need to defeat with perfect opsec to be free from a government audit that can ping the FBI/CIA/NSA/private organizations officially or unofficially, legally or not for information about you. Absolutely Certain™ privacy isn't possible with cash either.