[Cryptography] Business opportunities in crypto

[Henry Baker]

I had lunch with a colleague the other day and we were
discussing business opportunities in the crypto space.

I suggested several possibilities, and I'd love to know
if anyone is already working on such things.

1. Digital Wills. Almost everyone now has tens of id/pw
pairs that access bank accounts, social media accounts,
etc., but these data are incredibly toxic, as even a
small % of these data could be used to take over your
identity and destroy your life. Nevertheless, if you
pass on, someone has to be able to access these accounts
to properly administrate your assets according to your
will. Clearly, some number of people -- your lawyer,
your family members, the govt, etc. -- need to know
some of the bits, but only when your death certificate
is filed can your accounts be accessed, and then only
by a combination of those people, and not by any
individual person.

2. Privacy-preserving ad bidding. A bipartisan committee
of Congress has recently raised this issue as a national
security concern. Surely, after years of research, someone
in the crypto community has come up with protocols that
both protect bidders from one another, as well as protect
the privacy of the intended 'victim' of the ad from all
of the bidders (including the winning bidder).

3. Better stock market trading mechanisms. Currently, if
you put in a 'buy' or 'sell' order, your own broker can
'front-run' you (hello Robinhood!) and offer an epsilon
better bid than you, so you as a customer will only get
your transaction done after all of the front-runners
have been satisfied. Surely, there is a crypto protocol
that won't reveal anything about your order until *after*
it has been executed, so that front-running can no longer
happen, and won't reveal anything about losing bids at
all (because they may be good-til-cancelled orders, which
want to remain in the queue for future bidding).

4. Privacy-preserving wifi/BT/wireless handshakes. While
a small amount of progress was made several years ago
on random MAC addresses during scanning, the 'real',
'(semi-) fixed' MAC address is still used. Isn't there
some sort of zero knowledge challenge/response protocol
that could be used instead -- e.g., your MAC address
becomes a sort of private PKE key which you can prove
you have, but the wifi hotspot never actually learns
the bits of your now-private MAC address.

I'm sure that most of you can come up with additional
suggestions, all of which could solve real problems
better than just-another-crypto-currency.