[Cryptography] Anonymous rendezvous (was Business opportunities in crypto)

[Ray Dillinger]

If there is a scaling problem in having everyone attempt to decrypt
every message, it is certainly no worse than the scaling problem of
Bitcoin, where everyone checks every transaction.  Which is apparently
far more scalable than I'd have ever thought, but not getting pushed any
further than it's been pushed already.


Still, this is not the same problem I was thinking of when I saw
'Anonymous rendezvous'.  If you already know who you want to rendezvous
with, how is it anonymous?

The 'Anonymous rendezvous' I was thinking of is more about people with a
shared interest who want to discover one another while retaining privacy
about their shared interest.  If Alice and Bob are both... I dunno ...
fish-fondling aficionados, and want to form a forum for friends, fans,
and fellow fish-fondlers, but they don't want to disclose their piscine
interests to people who are probably of other persuasions, then how can
they format a message to be posted in a shared channel that allows them
to discover and communicate with each other without any of the other
channel users learning what those messages are about?

And that's a truly hard problem - one which, I think, is probably
insoluble.  The problem is that among those who might possibly be
respondents if they shared the obscured interest, there would be at
least a few who methodically tried every message against every weird
thing they could think of that someone might be into, freely figuring
out who the few freakish fish-fondlers are.

And the fact that it's a hard problem, IMO, is arguably good, because
people who are into things far less wholesome and harmless than
fish-fondling would have their own different uses for a solution.


Bear