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

Phillip Hallam-Baker phill at hallambaker.com
Wed May 19 14:45:04 EDT 2021


On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 12:52 PM Natanael <natanael.l at gmail.com> wrote:

> Establishing that broad consensus of knowledge exists across many entities
> without centralization is literally the main innovation of Bitcoin via
> proof of work. But like PHB mentioned for his Mesh system, knowing that you
> share a common association between a name and a public key isn't enough to
> establish an identity, as you still have no trust anchor (although it
> simplifies the task). In addition to his Mesh, there also trusted
> timestamping and transparency logs (keybase.io uses the latter) which
> shows alternative ways to implement this capability through federated
> entities (using distributed knowledge as rollback prevention/detection).
>

The Mesh doesn't impose a trust model, it provides a toolkit to support
multiple models as required by different circumstances. The validation
criteria Alice applies to Bob are different according to what she wants to
do with him, arrange dinner, buy his yacht, invest in his mutual fund, ask
his advice as her bank manager, etc.

Notarizing validation events is very powerful as the cost of backdating an
attack is essentially infinite. The Mesh part is the Mesh formed by cross
notarization of the notary logs. So Alice sends her log apex to her Mesh
Service Provider, which in turn sends its notary apex to the callsign
registry, which sends its apex to the MSP which sends its apex back to
Alice. At this point, Alice is her own root of trust for notarizing all
events prior to the time she sent her apex value.

[NB this is only one form of notarization allowed but it is easiest to
explain with respect to a single node everyone is two degrees of connection
away from.]



> Stuff like checking for low entropy names and pseudonym age in a system
> like this is only a heuristic at best for detecting a MITM or Sybil attack.
> Trust anchors are important.
>

And for certain transactions, the real question is not 'is this secure' but
'who will make me whole'. Credit card transactions are easy to secure as
every transaction is insured.

The Madoff scheme demonstrates why this form of safeguard is important -
Ponzi schemes are always sure fire bets until they aren't.
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