| I gave a talk in October where I said that some things that original cypherpunks got right were + Money and payments as locus of power + Naming and identity as locus of power + Access to cryptography as locus of power + Governments' appetite for electronic surveillance + Anonymity enabling otherwise impossible interactions and some things that they got wrong were - Vanguardism - Sybils and models of public discourse - Adaptability and resources of state actors - Software vulnerability - Decentralization is consistently expensive (in many different ways) and few people have agreed that they need it - Extreme technical fragility of anonymity (deanonymization, correlations, uniqueness of items in high-dimensional datasets, stylometry and behavioral uniqueness) (This is not meant to suggest that the cypherpunks didn't talk or think about these issues, just that they tended to underestimate how big a challenge they would represent.) |
I would like further to say, as I said in another comment, Cyphernomicon is one of the most valuable document worth to read, an amazing collecting of farseeing ideas. The widespread of data breach, privacy-invading computer systems and software, tendency of authoritarianism and mass surveillance in the digital world, how Internet will change whistleblowing, and even cryptographic ransomware were predicted.
They got a lot of things correct. But many great ideas are still not implemented. I'm listing a few that I really want to see and use today...
* In Tim May's Cyphernomicon, two concepts are of great significance: anonymity, AND reputation. The most common argument today against anonymity is, "how can you trust these people", but the problem has been answered early: you build a system and community based on reputation. Unfortunately, nowadays, only the first part of the vision, anonymity, is partially implemented, but there is almost no deployed reputation/identity system.
There are some of them, e.g. Web-of-Trust based, blockchain-based, Reddit/Hacker News karma, but I think we still don't have figure out a system that implements May's vision. I really want to see something similar to the Cyberspace in True Names or Ender's Game... Currently the best approximation is just 4chan + Reddit + Second Life + Tor, or perhaps OpenBazaar and BitNation?, which is not very interesting.
And of course, there are reasons. If you attach an identity to anonymity, it downgrades to pseudonymity. Having a long-term pseudonymity is very dangerous, once you have leaked ~30 bit of entropy, your anonymity is basically finished. Another hard problem of reputation is Sybil Attack.
* Dining cryptographers, or DC-net, a revolutionary anonymous network by David Chaum, which eliminates correlation attacks and information-theoretic secure. Cypherpunks saw the Onion Routing of Cypherpunk Remailing can be written in an afternoon of Perl hacking, it shouldn't be hard to perfect the system and move to DC-net within the next 5 years.
But the hard problems of DC-net has been overlooked, one non-cooperative participant can DoS the entire network. The solution is the construction of a BLAME protocol for kicking out malicious nodes out. I think we just managed to solve most of the problem with a functional prototype, DISSENT, in 2015 (20 years later!!). Until a practical network has been engineered, DC-net is still like One-Time Pad, good on paper but not useful in practice.