Why is cypherpunks dying? Because, all crypto is economics, and the
economics of crypto isn't as favorable as we thought. As the saying goes,
those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.
Declan McCullagh wrote:
> * Instead of digital cash taking over the world, we're all using credit
> cards. Cybercash has, I'm told, not just moved to credit cards, but it's
> even purchased a cash register -- yep, the meatspace kind -- company.
This may be somewhat of a historical accident. If only Netscape wasn't so
quick to come out with SSL, or David Chaum forgot to patent blinding, or
his company had a better business model, or ... But as Tim pointed out, for
online shopping digital cash doesn't really buy you very much privacy since
UPS needs your address anyway. For the more interesting uses of digital
cash you need an untraceable network, which brings us to ZKS.
> * Instead of Zero Knowlege, the company that wanted to be as cypherpunkly
> as possible, doing the right thing, it still has not released source code,
> it has acquired exclusive rights to key patents and said it will not
> license them freely, and it has not implemented (last I checked) basic
> features like link padding in its technology.
The real killer is this: strong untraceability is expensive. If you want to
achieve strong secrecy you can just spend one millisecond of your CPU time
to encrypt a message that can't be decrypted in a million years. But if you
want to achieve strong untraceability you have to increase your bandwidth
usage a hundred fold and make changes to network protocols that make them
more prone to failures both accidental and intentional. If ZKS decides
there is not enough of a market for strong untraceability at a price they
can offer, can we really blame them? If we have to blame someone we should
blame economics and ultimately physics and mathematics.
