Most of the technical reasons can be bypassed by making a single
subscriber key (public and private) available as a part of the
subscription process, but that eliminates most of the technical
advantages of encryption, so it's really a moot point.

It also means there's pretty much no point in keeping archives, because it's inevitable that the keys will become separated from the archives. And if the key is part of the archive, then what's the purpose of the crypto in the first place?

Once, for my job, I had to look into the way the Roman Senate conducted its elections. I was able to find ballots that were over 1500 years old. It was pretty neat, and it changed my perspective on things like crypto.

The crypto dream is that the confidentiality of our messages will be preserved for centuries after our death, which sounds really great up until you consider what an archaeologist circa 4000 AD is going to be thinking. "I have a stack of records here that could shed light on the way people lived in a long-dead civilization, but I can't read them. Why? What were these people doing that they thought their email to their Aunt Edna needed to remain secret for all time? Why is it that, millennia after they're gone, Aunt Edna's recipe for potato salad has to be gone with them?"

Or think about your own kids, circa 2040 AD. "I'd love to read these emails between Mom and Dad when they were courting, but ... they were afraid of Somebody-with-an-S reading their emails. I wonder if they ever thought that the Somebody might be their son, who wanted to understand after their deaths how it was these two people came to meet and fall in love."

Historians called the early medieval period "the Dark Ages" not because the era was full of villainy and evil, but because record-keeping became so austere that we really don't know much of what happened for that period. Much like dark matter (matter, but we don't know anything about it, hence it's dark), dark energy (energy, but we don't know anything about it, hence it's dark), the Dark Ages are an era we know little about.

We're living in a new Dark Age right now. Historians of the future are going to see human record-keeping basically end around 1960. Fewer records were printed out and more were put on digital media -- media that deteriorates much more quickly than paper, and depends on technology to read it, technologies which become obsolete and are discarded even faster than the media degrades.

So when you hear people advocate "crypto everywhere, always, for everything," ask yourself this: if they get what they want, what will it do to future generations' ability to make sense of our time?

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