Proton Mail, the leading privacy-focused email service, is making its first foray into blockchain technology with Key Transparency, which will allow users to verify email addresses. From a report: In an interview with Fortune, CEO and founder Andy Yen made clear that although the new feature uses blockchain, the key technology behind crypto, Key Transparency isn't "some sketchy cryptocurrency" linked to an "exit scam." A student of cryptography, Yen added that the new feature is "blockchain in a very pure form," and it allows the platform to solve the thorny issue of ensuring that every email address actually belongs to the person who's claiming it.
Proton Mail uses end-to-end encryption, a secure form of communication that ensures only the intended recipient can read the information. Senders encrypt an email using their intended recipient's public key -- a long string of letters and numbers -- which the recipient can then decrypt with their own private key. The issue, Yen said, is ensuring that the public key actually belongs to the intended recipient. "Maybe it's the NSA that has created a fake public key linked to you, and I'm somehow tricked into encrypting data with that public key," he told Fortune. In the security space, the tactic is known as a "man-in-the-middle attack," like a postal worker opening your bank statement to get your social security number and then resealing the envelope.
Blockchains are an immutable ledger, meaning any data initially entered onto them can't be altered. Yen realized that putting users' public keys on a blockchain would create a record ensuring those keys actually belonged to them -- and would be cross-referenced whenever other users send emails. "In order for the verification to be trusted, it needs to be public, and it needs to be unchanging," Yen said.
Curious if anyone here would use a feature like this? It sounds neat but I don't think I'm going to be needing a feature like this on a day-to-day basis, though I could see use cases for folks handling sensitive information.
No. Voting on the blockchain is an even worse idea than money on the blockchain.
In many cases, there are good reasons why these things are done they way they are. I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
A single actor might be able to commit voter fraud in the order of dozes or hundreds of votes perhaps but with a digital voting system based on blockchain, they could do so on the order of thousands or even millions by compromising end-user devices used for voting or buy enough work/stake/whatever to perform a 51% attack.
Same goes for money btw. Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
That's nice but has nothing to do with voter fraud prevention.
I will not reply to the stupid ad hominem. You have made it exceptionally clear that you have no idea what my political views are.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/J5xegDJphvc?si=x3tJw9s1c1WL_WNy
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I'm glad you asked!
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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What does Monero do? Why don't they emulate whatever it is that Monero achieves its reputation and functionality with?
How does it address the issues with like money laundering, KYC, etc? Wouldn't you, in practice, basically need a lawyer to help make sure you "use" it correctly and legally?
A valueless NFT? Not sure I can conceive of such a thing ;)
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Using private cryptocurrency is not illegal, at least in the United States, nor should it be. This is like worrying if it is legal to pay for things with cash.
Yeah my most downvoted comments mention Blockchain 🤣 Capitalism turns everything to shit 💩
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
one video the entire cryptocurrency evangelist community can't disprove
Voting on the blockchain
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Moxie Marlinspike's My first impressions of web3 is also a very relevant thing to share.
As a sampler of the points made, web3 is already re-centralizing around gatekeepers because the average person doesn't want to run their own server (or, in the blockchain case, host their own full copy of the blockchain) and, if the supermajority of users can't see you because the gatekeepers block you, then it doesn't really matter that you're technically still up.
The takeaway on that particular point is that pushing for more and easier data portability is probably the best route in the face of how real-world users behave. (eg. anything stored in a
git
repository, including GitHub project wiki contents, is a great example of that. You've got your data locally with a simplegit clone
and you can upload it to a competing service with a simplegit push
.)I like Dan Olson's video but I don't think it's truly unassailable. There is some real use cases for block chains in low trust networks. One of those being global monetary policy. Another critic is that web3 applications (like Mastadon and Lemmy ..) I think is moving forward even more so as the age of easy money comes to a full close.
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It's the coordinated decentralization that really defines web from web2 and 1. Cooperative vs competitive coordination is just a sub strategy within that, but I don't think either strategy is always best for all problems.