A very dark vision, darker than my predictions. Our fight matters, even if it will only slow it down. That is still something. Let's not leave a digital slavery world for the next generation. This is my goal at least.

💯 ethereum's "privacy pools" are a great example of this. Proof of innocence View quoted note →

Ugh. So many sleep walking into tyranny. Oblivious. Not a cheery outlook. Fight tyranny however possible, regardless.

Too dark man Too dark

Is that an actual Ethereum thing? Or planned? Is there a writeup somewhere?

Oh, right. But that one is of the type that'll always exist right: voluntarily auditability. Monero has that, zcash has that, Liquid with CT has it. Etc.

The worst part is they aren't even doing this central planning in an attempt to improve life for their citizens (my comparison is China), they're doing it to enslave everyone and lock them into the fiat system. Something very evil is gathering momentum.

Have you looked at Reticulum?

Communist USSR redo, it’s as similar as it gets. Same bad actors, same motives, long game applying lessons learned. Trump’s a tool who won’t be around for the “Miss USSA Pageant.”

This is the end result of "empowering the common man" through democracy. (I put the phrase in quotation marks because it really is quite impossible to "empower" those who are incapable of even coming close to understanding the world around them. All they can ever be are pawns of those who are skilled at manipulating them.)

This is the end result of "empowering the common man" through democracy. (I put the phrase in quotation marks because it really is quite impossible to "empower" those who are incapable of even coming close to understanding the world around them. All they can ever be are pawns of those who are skilled at manipulating them.) View quoted note →

I have mad respect for everything you've done for bitcoin privacy, but this post seems very blackpilled. I personally feel like all of these restrictions on Google and Apple devices are gonna make people want to use open source (and open hardware) even more. Every time I read about restrictions going up in a part of the war, I also read about how vpn downloads are off the chart, etc. With all of the craziness, I feel like we've hit peak tyranny in the sense that people are just not gonna go along with it. Maybe NPCs will go along with it, but I think the ranks of the awake are gaining in numbers. Don't you think so? For example, look at what happened with the vaccine mandates. They had to drop them, and not because they wanted to. It was just because a small percentage of people, maybe ten, fifteen, twenty percent of people said no. Open weights AI models are also giving us tools to fight back against tyranny in many ways. But maybe I'm too optimistic.

Incorrect. We do not live in a democracy. Democracy presupposes that the population has property rights, which the population does not have. We live in an autocracy. Beneath the autocracy lies the Marxist state. The Jew and its eternal partners in criminality, the Marxists, have redefined democracy. It is now Marxism. They have redefined the term democracy into "welfare." This process took 150 years to mature. "Welfare" is nothing but privileges. You do not have any rights, but you have "welfare." What "welfare" constitutes, is at all times decided by the vanguard party of the Marxist state aka the pioneers of the revolution. If you do not have property rights, which is the basis of all other rights, you have absoslutely zero rights. You only have privileges. Privileges are: "Your" life, "your" children, "your" bank accounts, pensions, stocks, socks, guns, speech, movements, et cetera. All privileges can be removed by the property owners aka the lawmakers. The "welfare state" is the world communism of Friedrich Engels. Jew Marxism came in two varieties: Communism/Bolshevism and a social "democracy." Social "democracy" is incremental Marxism aka reform Marxism. Social "democracy" was hatched by Marxist Jews in the 1860s, including Ferdinand Lassalle and Eduard Bernstein. There is no democracy in a social "democracy." A social "democracy" is parasite-slave system on a grand scale, and it is international in reach. If there is an income tax, you do not exist in a democracy. When you have property rights, your person cannot be taxed. If the people can be locked down, there is zero percent democracy. When you have property rights, your ability to speak is absolute. If gun control exists, there is absolutely zero democracy. Property rights and absolute freedom of speech are the core of a democracy. Accordingly, we do not live in a democracy. The only way out is for the noble and valiant plebs is to implement an unprecedented slave revolution. The property owners aka the lawmakers have to exterminated. This natural remedy entails executing the POTUS and all members of the US Congress. Then the honorable plebs shall annihilate the Marxist state apparatus from top to bottom, including all professors, "doctors," psychiatrists, journalists, judges, politicians, magistrates, economists, teachers, bankers, et cetera. Marxism is total in scope, so it must therefore be eradicated in its totality. This is nature's law.

That's why I spend a lot of my time learning, testing and promoting #Reticulum. My kids should have a future without tech oligopole and government autocracy.

We don't have to look that far: remember the travel rule compliance tools for Bitcoin wallets?

The incentives are also quite different. Without strong encryption, the growing e-commerce industry would have started lobbying for it eventually. > Perhaps only a very dark future involving a lot of war can stop this inevitable flow towards digital tyranny. Depends on the details, but as long as electronic equipment still works, war tends to cause (acceptance of) surveilance - including China style street phone inspections. They don't bother with the ZK-facade. Potemkin SNARK? On the bright side: people are having fewer children, so at some point the obsession over protecting them becomes silly :-)

Also on a more optimistic node: when it comes to jailbreaking devices, I do think the incentives will remain freedom-aligned. It will be hard to make devices the chokepoint. Maybe most people will end up having a cheap compliance-phone, for all services that require remote attestation, and a fancy free-phone. Though hopefully even the remote attestion will by made impossible by people consistently leaking these secrets. We'll probably end up with an OAuth-like situation where the government (or some big corporation it trusts) has to approve every login attempt to gated services. But that at least keeps the alternatives within reach.

I'm really curious why you think "it will be hard to make devices the chokepoint." Isn't that playing out, right now? What proportion of even freedom-aware people, especially outside the US, have a smartphone not controlled by Google or Apple?

And fwiw (not much), re: my vague war comment, I am talking about the potential long term effect of complete societal value realignment. But, who knows.

I expect people to keep jailbreaking these devices because they want free music, movies and series. Especially if both Apple and Google further restrict side-loading, while simultaneously banning any torrent like app. If in addition the copyright industry continues to legally harras indiduval downloaders, that'll be good for anonymous VPN use.

World War II gave us a few decades of privacy awareness, that's pretty much expired now.

This is why I prefer physical gold and silver. It doesnt need electricity, a network, a phone, and is immune to government control.

ZK tech is one thing that may be instrumental in stopping it when used with truly private crypto and as part of cryptographic proof technology allowing broader private voluntary interaction. E2E CANNOT be filtered because they cannot get the content EXCEPT by full client side scanning. That is a danger.

That's why i mentioned FHE. If/when it becomes practical, filtering is theoretically possible. But I agree client side is already important today.

Is there any way to accelerate the creation of a wide area mesh network? I feel like that's most of what we're missing.