Thanks for the detailed response - first of all, I don't see all uses of crypto as problematic by any means - and I'm very glad that good police work and invest

Thanks for the detailed response - first of all, I don't see all uses of crypto as problematic by any means - and I'm very glad that good police work and investigation can, and does, track down malicious behaviour even when enabled by the latest technology. Ultimately all these things are about human networks at the end of the day, and we're all fallible, and I generally trust that there's more sunlight than darkness. I also completely agree that pretty much every technological innovation throughout history - weapons, communication mediums, etc - are used by both 'police and thieves', or whichever actors fit in the white/black boxes in the given situation. The problem in my mind is more general - it's that crypto and concealment are just an evolution of the status quo - the arms race continues, with more 'secrets whispered in the woods', yet average people are already losing their day-to-day privacy, in vast numbers, and crimes still occur of course. Opening everything is clearly radical and/or impossible, and it's a long-term idea/concept rather than anything feasible in the near future. Despite my ramblings, I'm a realist, and I've worked on migrating many, many legacy systems, so I'm familiar with the challenges, but this is the only process I've reasoned about so far regarding disruption of the arms race itself, as opposed to just evolution of arms, so I'm hunting for counter-arguments and these are good ones. Enabling dissidence is a very good point, and I think it highlights the problems with hierarchy/power itself and information disparity. If neither party was able to operate without the knowledge of the other, then dissidence could take place openly without fear of hidden/unknown retribution. Trusting that the system is really 'open' and that you can see all the communications is definitely a challenge though (unsolvable?) Regarding your final point, I'd say that although crime is part of a darker aspect of human nature (which can be encouraged, manipulated or instilled), we have been controlling our own education and evolution for generations through society and religion and choice of partners - so why can't we see this as an optimization problem, and try to guide ourselves towards a less criminal and violent nature? (PS: the final point is a bit rhetorical - I think we have been for a long time already - cannibalism isn't hugely popular for example)