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

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Fri, May 7, 2021 at 7:43 AM jrzx <jrzx at protonmail.ch> wrote:

> On Thursday, May 6, 2021 2:08 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <
> phill at hallambaker.com> wrote:
>
> The WebPKI was designed to do two things:
>
> 1) Allow a party with an established reputation to claim it on the Web.
> 2) To allow a party with no reputation to establish that they are
> accountable to some civil authority.
>
>
> By now, however, all the important reputations are established *on* the
> web, so
> moving existing reputations to the web no longer matters.
>

That is not really the case. Due to the inanities of the design of DNS,
nobody knows what names bind to a given reputation and which do not.

Case in point, amazon.co.uk, is that Amazon or not? Now amazon.com.il?
amazon.co.ca?

I really could not tell you which of those are Amazon and which are not.
The underlying problem that cannot be fixed in the DNS is that it reifies a
naive taxonomy as the basis for the names. And the confounding factor is
that the second worse gang of charlatans, rent-seekers, thieves and
nerdo-wells on the net have captured the system.


And sometimes you would rather be able to deal with entities *not*
> accountable
> to some civil authority, because the civil authority wants to tax,
> regulate and forbid
> what you want to do.
>
> Observe the rise of crypto currency exchanges that go to considerable
> lengths
> to avoid regulation, DEX and DeFi
>

Which is not surprising given the rate at which the operators of said
exchanges take the money and run. I don't know about you, but I can count
the number of people I trust in the crypto-currency space on my horns. And
contrary to the propaganda, the fact that so many people end up losing so
much money so often is a sign that crypto-currencies are crypto-theatre not
crypto-security.


Accountability still matters, case in point if buying stuff advertised in
Facebook ads. There are many things I am very tempted to buy but I would
never buy anything advertised through FB unless I knew the reputation of
the company out of band because over 80% of the adverts I see are obvious
frauds. A machinist's lathe weighing 1.5 ton and costing $6500 for $195, a
handmade steampunk keyboard which really costs $700 for $39. etc. etc.

Of course it is in the interests of Amazon, Facebook and Google to pull up
the ladder and prevent any new entrants coming into the field to compete
against them. Preventing small businesses establishing reputations is part
of that strategy.
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