[Cryptography] Curating opinion: Re: Anonymous rendezvous

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 6:41 AM jrzx <jrzx at protonmail.ch> wrote:

> > > If NewEgg and its reviewers were strongly
> > > pseudonymous, and their product links
> > > were hashes to immutable data or a third party
> > > signature to mutable data, it would
> > > work even better.
>
> PM Salz, Rich via cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:
> > Why would it be better and in what ways? Please be
> > specific, and don’t just do a hand-wave about it being
> > the way of the future.
>
> Because when one runs a web site with a community of
> commenters, those commenters, and the owner of the website
> himself, are subject to threats, intimidation, pressure,
> and sometimes violence and the threat of violence.
>
> To take a less political example, consider the drama
> around Enron.
>
> Enron was a Ponzi scheme.  They would buy stuff on credit,
> sell it for cash, and have the person they bought stuff
> from deliver it to the person they sold it to, without
> themselves ever going near the stuff, and without the
> stuff ever going near them.
>

Enron was a very different type of criminal enterprise that was made
possible by the very 'anti-government', 'free-market' rhetoric on which the
above is premised.

California had a completely serviceable means of producing and distributing
electricity. It was boring as heck but it worked since Loomis and co
financed rural electrification in the 1930s. The whole enterprise ran as a
regulated public utility.

Then the Grifters Obvious Party came along and persuaded people that
'deregulation' would be so much more efficient. They didn't actually
deregulate in any meaningful sense, they introduced a set of rules that
made it possible for a cartel of producers to game the system and extort
vast unearned rents.

And the reason I oppose criminal-currencies is precisely the fact that it
is the same old flim-flam: Tell the sheep gubermint is bad and they will
happily follow you right to the slaughterhouse. Frauds the scale of Enron
are unusual in the regulated finance industry and they are usually made
possible by corrupt politicians being paid to pass legislation to remove
regulations. Frauds the scale of Enron and larger are endemic in the
criminal currency world. One Coin, Mt Gox, Quadrifinex, Tether, etc. etc.

Cryptography does not respond to ideology.
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