"On darknet markets, a lot of vendors understand that using PGP is important because they spend a lot of time worried about being raided and sent to jail. End users don't understand this as much, so PGP usage varies for casual buyers." https://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-decentralization-d813dcf653fc … @backus
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Threat modeling makes sense here. [Random consumer] doesn't have to worry about a fed raid, like you pointed out. [Buying in order to resell to friends] ups the ante a little, but not a lot. Etc.
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Yeah, I just feel like thi reasoning doesn't port over to ideologically-motivated stuff for many people. If people breaking the law can't be bothered to encrypt their address, what are the odds they use a decentralized Facebook because they are vaguely concerned about privacy?
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Near-zero, IMO.
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Needs to wait until actual consumer impact happens from the centralized platform. Censorship could be it, but this runs into the Voat/Gab issue where your no-witch-hunting platform attracts 90% witches. Doubtless some other ways the centralized providers could screw up, ->
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but many of these would just open the door for a new centralized platform to eat their lunch.
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Figuring out PGP was probably the most difficult step for me in using a darknet market. I was usually lazy with PGP and with Dream never used it. I was an end user so not worried about cops really.
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Yeah it’s legitimately confusing. I’m an engineer so I just use the command line stuff, but I actually find the GUI stuff a bit more confusing
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I dunno, I feel like GnuPG is not so hardpic.twitter.com/HqzXkGB975
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Importing keys, generating my own keys, signing stuff, armor vs. binary output, then encrypting text that wasn't already a file. Granted, last time I tried it was many years ago. Maybe I'm a snowflake, but I still felt like the learning curve was kinda steep
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oof key management definitely sucks
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Yeah. This stuff is a hard problem too and something that has haunted privacy for a long time I think. One of the "silver linings for crypto-haters" I like to mention is that crypto/ICO hype may actually fund breakthroughs for thishttps://twitter.com/backus/status/1009286381682581504 …
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Incentivize tech industry to not build monopolies
Fund UI experiments for privacy tools
Expose students to cryptography, distributed systems
Provide crypto + distributed systems case studies for academia