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)
