149 lines
8.5 KiB
Markdown
149 lines
8.5 KiB
Markdown
---
|
||
title: How to Save the World
|
||
...
|
||
I have almost completed an enormous design document for an uncensorable social network intended to contain a non evil scalable proof of stake currency, and I have a wallet that can generate secrets, but the wallet is missing no end of critical features – it is pre-pre alpha. When it is early pre alpha, I am going to publish it on Gitea, and call for assistance.
|
||
|
||
Here is a link to one version of the [white paper](social_networking.html), focusing primarily on social media. (But though information wants to be free, programmers need to get paid.)
|
||
|
||
Here is a link to [another version](white_paper.html) of the white paper, focusing primarily on money and getting rich by protecting capitalism from the state.
|
||
|
||
# Speech and commerce
|
||
|
||
As the internet goes, so goes the world. For freedom of speech to
|
||
exist, there must be freedom of speech on the internet, and if there is
|
||
freedom of speech on the internet, there is freedom of speech, for
|
||
governments will find it very hard to stop it. If freedom of information,
|
||
file sharing and open source code on the internet, then there is freedom
|
||
of information, if there is freedom of association on the internet, then
|
||
there is freedom of association – and, the big one, the one we have least,
|
||
the one under most severe threat, if there is freedom of commerce on the
|
||
internet …
|
||
|
||
We can establish these freedoms by technological and business means
|
||
instead of political means. These means turned out to be more difficult
|
||
than expected in the heady days of the [cypherpunk](cypherpunk_program.html)
|
||
movement.
|
||
|
||
To secure all these, we need the right software, software that
|
||
successfully applies the cryptographic tools that have been developed.
|
||
|
||
Governments are getting worse, governments *always* get worse,
|
||
yet what is outside the government’s power is getting stronger.
|
||
|
||
It is the nature of governments to always get worse over time, resulting
|
||
in them either collapsing or being bypassed by new forms of government.
|
||
|
||
The cypherpunk program was that governments would be bypassed, as
|
||
organization moved to the internet, hidden behind cryptography. The
|
||
cypherpunk program died, yet lives – for China’s industrialization is
|
||
being organized through the VPNs of firms whose servers are located in the
|
||
cayman islands. These firms do transactions largely by trading each other’s
|
||
IOUs in private conversations rather than through regular bank
|
||
’t. Cypherpunks imagined that they would be living in tropical
|
||
paradises running businesses nominally located in tax havens. It has not
|
||
come true for them, but an increasing proportion of the world’s business
|
||
does work that way.
|
||
|
||
In the cypherpunk vision, people of moderate wealth would escape the
|
||
power of government – unfortunately what is happening is merely
|
||
billionaires escaping the power of government. To revive and accomplish
|
||
the cypherpunk vision, we need to make these capabilities and methods more
|
||
widely available – available not just to the super rich but to the better
|
||
off middle class – not necessarily the ordinary middle class, but rather
|
||
the sort of middle class person who has a passport in more than one
|
||
country and does not need to show up at the office at 9AM every
|
||
morning. From thence it will eventually trickle down to the regular
|
||
middle class.
|
||
|
||
At the same time as we see a billion people industrializing in an
|
||
industrialization run from islands on the internet, we also see a variety
|
||
of private use of force organizations also organized over the internet
|
||
popping up – thus for example the extortion operation against oil
|
||
companies in Nigeria was in part run over the internet from South Africa.
|
||
Somali pirates were largely eradicated by private security firms whose
|
||
home nation is far from clear.
|
||
|
||
We are seeing entirely legal and government approved mercenaries, not
|
||
quite legal and sort of government approved mercenaries, illegal but
|
||
government tolerated militias and armed mosques, illegal distributors of
|
||
recreational chemicals very successfully resisting government power, and
|
||
assorted extortionists and terrorists. Yes, extortionists and terrorists
|
||
are bad things, but that people are ever less inclined to rely on
|
||
government provision of protection against them is a good thing.
|
||
|
||
The power of states is increasing, in the sense that taxes and
|
||
regulation is increasing, that government ownership is increasing, that
|
||
large firms function by special privilege granted by the government to
|
||
those firms to the detriment of those less privileged – but at the same
|
||
time, that which is outside the power of the state is growing
|
||
stronger. It is a pattern that recurs every few hundred years,
|
||
leading to the renewal, or the collapse, of civilization.
|
||
|
||
# Major concepts
|
||
|
||
- PKI and SSL needs to be obsoleted and replaced. As Bruce
|
||
Schneier said in Secrets and Lies: 〝SSL is just simply a (very
|
||
slow) Diffie-Hellman key-exchange method. Digital certificates
|
||
provide no actual security for electronic commerce; it’s a complete sham〞
|
||
|
||
The underlying problem is that our mental name handling
|
||
mechanism is intended for the relatively small social groups of the
|
||
Neolithic. True names fail when we attempt to scale to the internet.
|
||
The current name system is rooted in governmental and quasi
|
||
governmental entities, who use this power to gently encourage
|
||
nominally private institutions to censor the internet. Similarly, the
|
||
encryption system of https allows the government to intercept any
|
||
website with a man in the middle attack. To fix this, we need a
|
||
name system rooted in the blockchain, with encryption rooted in
|
||
Zooko’s triangle, as with crypto currency
|
||
|
||
- [Zooko’s triangle](zookos_triangle.html), The solution is an ID system based on Zooko’s
|
||
triangle, allowing everyone to have as many IDs as they want, but
|
||
no one else can forge their IDs, ensuring that each identity has a
|
||
corresponding public key, thus making end to end encryption easy.
|
||
These identities may correspond to people you can instant message,
|
||
or web sites, particularly secure web sites that require logon, such
|
||
as banks, or indeed any service. Thus, they also correspond to
|
||
bank accounts, that work like Swiss numbered bank account, in that your identity is a secret.
|
||
- Protocol negotiation at the levels equivalent to TCP and UDP, and
|
||
default encryption and authentication at those levels, as with ssh.
|
||
- Ability to introduce new protocols and upgrade old protocols without central coordination, just as Zooko allows us to introduce
|
||
new identities without central coordination. Central authority is failing, has become an obstacle, instead of the fast way to get things done.
|
||
- File sharing with upload credits.
|
||
- Single signon, buddy list user interface for web page logon.
|
||
- Messaging system integrated with single signon – message
|
||
authentication, all messages end to end encrypted. Zooko identity
|
||
means yurls, which means a problem in getting people onto our buddy list.
|
||
- Money transfer integrated with instant messaging.
|
||
- Money transfer uses ripple.
|
||
- Each money transfer creates a record of accompanying obligation,
|
||
equivalent record on both sides of the transaction. You can put put
|
||
money in a message, and for the recipient to get it out of the
|
||
message, he has to sign a receipt that says this money is for such
|
||
and such, and he took the money – a receipt that only the person who
|
||
sent the money and the person who received the money can read, and
|
||
any financial intermediaries cannot read, though they will need
|
||
proof that the requested receipt exists, without them being able to
|
||
read what the receipt is for. The records provide a basis for
|
||
generating reputation of Zooko based identities.
|
||
|
||
This web page is intended to keep track of the various technologies
|
||
needed to implement liberty on the internet. There are lots of them, and
|
||
they are all fairly complex and many of them subtle and very difficult to
|
||
understand, so this web page will always be severely incomplete. Right now
|
||
it is almost totally incomplete, I have just got started listing stuff:
|
||
|
||
# Details
|
||
|
||
This list severely incomplete, when finished will be at least a screen’s
|
||
worth, probably several screens.
|
||
|
||
- [how to build an operating system that is largely immune to viruses, Trojans and spyware](safe_operating_system.html)
|
||
- [how to stop
|
||
phishing and browser session hijacking, how to do browser security
|
||
right.](how_browser_security_should_be_done.html)
|
||
- [How to do VPNs right](how_to_do_VPNs.html)
|
||
- [How to prevent malware](safe_operating_system.html)
|
||
- [The cypherpunk program](cypherpunk_program.html)
|
||
- [Replacing TCP and UDP](names/TCP.html)
|