The Generational Transition to Programmable Cryptography (opens in new tab)

> Example applications of the Universal Protocol:

> ...your smartphone can generate a cryptographically secure response to any query about your financial history or health, while keeping your underlying data private and in your own control.

My kids love playing '20 questions'. It's rather remarkable how fast you can go from knowing nothing, to very specific information. With a few answers to 'any query' about your financial history or health, your underlying data will be neither private, nor in your control.

This article is pretty far out, but definitely worth a read.

Cryptography is one of these subjects that initially seems interesting in terms of how it works but rather boring in terms of what it does.

But then the more you learn about it, the more you discover how deep the rabbit hole of applications actually is.

This article does a pretty good job of exposing you to how deep the topic of cryptography applications potentially is.

I hear about advanced crypto schemes like this every couple of years but I have yet to see a concrete, practical implementation of it. Is there any software library that will let me perform arbitrary arithmetic on encrypted data without knowing the key, for example?

While there is a certain exciting aspect to this in the same vein as any cyberpunk dystopia might have, it also sounds exceedingly wasteful.

The security properties are interesting but largely overshadowed by economic forces. Things become centralized because they're cheaper and easier for users.

If this system existed, it would have to have _such a good user experience_ to overcome its many inefficiencies.

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?”

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