Cryptome has been leaking its user logs for over a year

[Robert Hettinga]

> On Oct 8, 2015, at 6:23 AM, John Young <jya at pipeline.com> wrote:
> 
> We also told Best log files are the dirtiest secret of the Internet, none are
> secure, none private, none singular, admins and websites lie about using
> them, exploiting them, deleting them, needing them, stealing them, accusing
> about them, inflating them, rigging them. They pay for the Net, thus not ever
> going away or kept secure.

Information that is only valuable because of book-entry transaction settlement, by the way. Like, say, (for the current generation of ancom cypherpunks, who don’t know commerce from the dictatorship of the proletariat) checks, credit cards, and, yes, bitcoin. The blockchain is merely :-) a cryptographically secure inviolate public ledger, remember. It may be possible to hide transactions there, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.

Because we *need* biometricly-provable is-a-physical-person and-then-you-go-to-jail-if-you-lie identity in order for transactions to even execute, much clear and settle, we’ve created an entire industry based on the leftover information exhaust, dovetailing nicely with our former practice of massive industrial production runs of exactly identical goods, and thus the transfer-pricing of ostensibly marketable (as in free exchange, not as in advertising) assets, now migrated to the internet with a vengeance, to be used as evidence against us in a court of law, Arlo.


Instantaneously-settled transactions, like, say, with blind signatures, which, not coincidentally, required no counterparty identity to function, only a linked list of expired certificates, only readable at the time of double spending, is why I joined the original cypherpunks list to begin with. In 1994. We’ve been at this a long time. 

At the time, I had digital good that I could email to someone, like say, Oak Ridge Labs, but they could only send me a paper purchase order by return mail. Which I then had to reply to that purchase order, by mail, with a paper invoice, which they would then send me a paper check, also in the mail, which would then clear. Within five business days. Usually.


So now we’re learning, in increasingly intimate detail, something I first observed in public at the last Financial Cryptography Conference I went to, almost ten years ago: the closer you get to T-0 transaction settlement you get, the more dangerous identity-based finance becomes.

And that’s also why I still say that financial cryptography is the only cryptography that matters.

Cheers,
RAH