1/ There are two kinds of very intelligent people I see in #crypto privacy. One group naturally gets privacy and the other deeply struggles with it. Surprisingly, much of it boils down to personality.
2/ The intelligent people who don't get privacy are generally optimistic about human nature. They tend to view people as basically good and they have a tendency to see the best in others. They are often overly honest, trusting, and kind.
3/ Many of them you could probably look at and correctly guess that they don't jay walk even if the streets are empty.
To them, privacy is largely about keeping your personal life and business dealings confidential from others. LE and govt aren't considered bad actors.
4/ Their conception of ideal privacy is a balance between providing confidentiality to the average person without impeding law enforcement from catching the "bad guys". Think of this as https + VPN. They would consider cooperating with LE for the right reasons.
5/ These people often think of privacy almost strictly in terms of technology and on a per-tx basis. They may prefer #zcash over #monero because zk-SNARKs have a provably bigger anonymity set per tx.
6/ The other group of intelligent people who get privacy better think of the world in very different terms. They are much more skeptical of human nature and especially governments.
7/ To them, privacy is meant to protect people from being targeted by their governments. The idea of cooperating with LE or govts is deeply disturbing. Privacy is considered a human rights issue and in some cases a life-or-death situation (e.g. political dissidents).
8/ Their conception of ideal privacy is digital cash. Cash payments are by default confidential, untraceable, fungible. Think of this as Tor + PGP.
9/ This group thinks about privacy in more practical terms. They take into consideration the countermeasures three-letter agencies take to to subvert privacy tech. Decentralization matters. Trust is an anti-pattern. Mandatory privacy or gtfo.
1/ I use first principles to explore better product-market fit for dapps b/c apparently nobody has thought of a process more efficient than throwing $13B at ICOs and seeing what comes out of it.
2/ To start off dapps have three properties: 1. trust minimized computing 2. tight coupling with a monetary system 3. censorship-resistance (platform dependent)
If you want a killer dapp you might want to leverage these.
3/ As I wrote in a previous article, dapps are really inefficient compared to web services.
they're way way too inefficient to be a general computing platform. It's even more important now that ppl leverage things dapps are good at, like #3.
1/ I think the NSA / CIA knows who Satoshi is, or at least has him on a short-list. Reason being that if Bitcoin were created by a foreign government, it would be a pretty big national security risk.
2/ Picture a foreign government inserting subtle backdoors in the original implementation. If BTC becomes big, exploiting those backdoors can severely disrupt an advanced economy.
3/ Original open-source devs, not just Satoshi, could reasonably be spies. They could insert new subtle backdoors themselves.