| The adoption of advanced cryptography has struggled for decades. It’s a long-running cause of frustration to cryptographers, i.e. “why do we keep on developing more and more advanced schemes yet the real world doesn’t use them?” This sentiment runs through this piece as an undercurrent. Part of the frustration comes from the fact, which is emphasised throughout the piece, that all these things are possible in real life. The utopia of autonomous MPC and ZK agents running obfuscated programs to prove identity attributes, vote, etc is all possible, if only we rewrite the entire internet. The stumbling block, as ever, is human nature. This utopia would decay in just the same way that the bitcoin utopia did, moving from a perfect libertarian idea for an incorruptible currency to a cesspit of fraud, manipulation and speculation. In Moxie Marlinspike’s article on web 3, he makes the case that the decentralisation promises of web 3 will inevitably decay and be reshaped as a new form of centralisation, leaving us in a potentially worse place than before. Pretty much the same arguments apply here. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting read. But it would be fascinating to see this approached from a human perspective, I.e. “what are the compelling adoption vectors?” and “how can we avoid re-centralisation?” |