Summary of where we are right now

[Tyler Durden]

Since I haven't seen anything come off of the list for a while and since I've
imbibed some nice single-malt, I will for the fuck of it summarize where
things are. Any Cypherpunk with some kinda balls will tell me I'm completely
and absolutely full of shit, but at least I tried, so do better.

1. We won. With Bitcoin and Silk Road along with encrypted peer-to-peer
sharing networks (oh yeah and TOR), it's pretty clear we won. There's a lotta
popular literature out there now discovering Cypherpunks anew. Some form of
Crypto is out there, for those that want to use it, that can can make it real
pain in the ass for TLAs to discover that your "Afghan" is really just a form
of 80s retro-pot.

2. No, we didn't win yet: TOR is a honeypot. That's right, motherfucker: You
do know who really gave TOR its initial impetus, right? And you know why they
did that? They did it precisely because it was too obvious and too expensive
to pull EVERYTHING back to Virginia or wherever. So they figured it was easier
to just get suckers to use some form of encryption (including and specifically
TOR) to send the red flag that someone wanted to hide something, so "look over
here!". Anything TOR'd is certainly backhauled to the greater DC area and, if
there are any additional meta-meta-data risk flags, they'll red light it to
begin cracking. If they can't crack within reasonable time/cost budgets (given
the risk), and if they for some reason feel a little nervous about you, well
they'll just find out where you are and attack your shitty machine. Oh, you
use Linux? Well that's totally different. It's not like they hired any
brilliant math or crypto geek coming out of college or grad school.

3. But we are going to win. Yeah, we're gonna win. Why? Because we want to.
It's not enough to encrypt: The type and context of encryption had to be
hidden as well. Kind of the network version of Rubberhose. But these young
kids who grew up not watching TV because it didn't interact with them, it's
they who will create a stego virus to propagate fake stego everywhere on
Facebook or whatever. It's them who are going to create TOR services that
operate ubiquitously behind the scenes, so that most users dob't even know
they are using it. Hiding the form of encryption will itself be the final
frontier as crypto becomes ubiquitous.

4. Bitcoin, motherfucker. Crazy old cackling May was right. Or at least, he
was right enough. Right enough for me to buy pot or 'cid or shrooms over the
internet and have them sent to my Unabomber shack. Even
less...tasteful...forms of porn will be tolerated precisely because THEY can't
reveal what they can do, at least not unless their own salaries are in
jeopardy. Adrian Lamo? No doubt THEY looked for someone who had contact
Manning so that they could hide what they had intercepted and what they could
do. But they will keep hiding what they can do while a real economy takes over
and sorts out its own.

Yeah, that's it. It's downhill from here. Cypherpunks are dead because they
are no longer needed, so long live the King of the Anarchy.

-TD