"Unregulated financial institutions are adjacent to criminal activity"
Right. Any system which is resistant to state supervision and regulation is going to be most attractive to those with the greatest incentive to evade government controls, who are always typical bad guys. There are good guys who want the capability for good reasons, but there's no way to make sure only 'good' guys get it.
The state is always going to argue that the absolute worst of these cases is the reason they cannot tolerate the existence of such systems. To be fair they have a point, but it's also a matter of judgment regarding the tolerable scale of bad acts. I'm frankly a bit surprised that USG hasn't yet gotten serious in the war on end-to-end encryption, having only fired a few warning shots, but if it doesn't have some kind of giant and secret Ace in the hole, then it's probably just a matter of time until it does.
will you record the discussion? Valentine's Day is a tough one to sneak off to listen to a seminar.
Should we have read all of Fragile by the 14th if we want to follow along?
"Unregulated financial institutions are adjacent to criminal activity"
Right. Any system which is resistant to state supervision and regulation is going to be most attractive to those with the greatest incentive to evade government controls, who are always typical bad guys. There are good guys who want the capability for good reasons, but there's no way to make sure only 'good' guys get it.
The state is always going to argue that the absolute worst of these cases is the reason they cannot tolerate the existence of such systems. To be fair they have a point, but it's also a matter of judgment regarding the tolerable scale of bad acts. I'm frankly a bit surprised that USG hasn't yet gotten serious in the war on end-to-end encryption, having only fired a few warning shots, but if it doesn't have some kind of giant and secret Ace in the hole, then it's probably just a matter of time until it does.
The book is available in PDF through JSTOR if one has access.