[Cryptography] WireGuard

[jamesd at echeque.com]

> On 2018-09-02 (245), at 21:28:49, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
>> Using technologies analogous to blockchain, (namecoin) we can make sure that everyone sees the same mapping between a human readable name and its cryptographic identifiers.  This problem now has a known solution.

On 03/09/2018 15:58, Richard Outerbridge wrote:
> What happens when I die: who revokes me?  Do identifiers expire?  Has forking been solved?
Paying, selling, and thus what happens when you die, are implementation 
details.  The security problem is what happens in the simplest possible 
case: when you live and you don't sell.

Forking is potentially a problem, if two people see different roots to 
the Merkle tree, and thus different mappings between public keys.

Everyone wants to use the same namespace as everyone else, thus forking 
is unlikely to be a problem in practice.

Suppose we use my preferred solution, a currency based on proof of stake.

And suppose a minority of stakeholders do not like the rules, and decide 
to fork.  Well, they are a minority, either by numbers, or by crypto 
currency wealth, power and importance, so who cares about their namespace?

In my design, any time you interact with someone to perform a 
transaction, if you have been split from them by a fork, you will get an 
error, so, in the event of a fork, you will soon discover there has been 
a fork, and you will have an incentive to use the main branch.

Suppose the government is displeased that some people are publishing 
bittorrent magnet links to copyrighted material, and forces a fork 
where, in the government favored branch, the names formerly used to 
publish magnet links are now mapped to the FBI.  People are going to 
notice, and go with the main branch, the government disfavored branch, 
where name transfers continue to be performed according to the rules 
favored by the majority of stakeholders.

This may well degenerate into an argument as to how much power the 
government can exercise over the internet, which our moderators have 
banned for going around in circles.  But, even if the government can 
successfully confiscate those names, which I doubt, it cannot intercept 
communications using those names with nobody noticing.  Successfully 
imposing a fork with the desired characteristics would be a big, 
disruptive, and noticeable event.