💾 Archived View for jdj.golf › gemlog › the-endless-fight-for-anonymity.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:43:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Recently, I've been uping my security/privacy standards, like using my own self hosted services and using i2p or tor for accessing the web. I try to stay anonymous when ever possible. You probably know this already, but unfortunately, no matter if your me or a 3 letter american organization, nothing on the internet can have an 100% anonymity guarntee. The reason I'm saying this, is because I've been thinking of scenario's were we get 'too used' to anonymity on the internet, and why we always need to be a step ahead when using/developing these tools.
Say the world accepts monero as a currency, and is used across the world for most personal/buisness transactions (which would be awesome). Assuming the idea of the blockchain in full scale like this works, everyone would be able to make anonymous transactions. Nice. But like all anonymizing tools, monero uses methods like encryption, ring signatures, etc. These are all very good ways to keep transactions private, but can be broken, since privacy isn't a fundamental concept in the internet. Now say there's been a vulnerability in monero, or quantum computers became a thing. Now all transactions have been made public. This wouldn't be completely devestating, it's the kind of future that bitcoin would take on. But people have been so used the privacy they've gotten, that they're not doing things like using seperate wallets so that people can't correlate their transactions. Which they shouldn't have too anyways, because the system was meant to be anonymous in the first place. Now people don't know what to do. Monero would likely crumble from people fleeing to another crypto. Not extremelly economically threatening, but still not ideal at all.
The same kind of scenario goes for mixnets like i2p and tor. If the system was cracked (like what is happening to tor right now, which is why I'm looking into i2p), it would lead to people not knowing where to go for x amount of time for a private internet. It would put a wall in the road of being sure you'll be anonymous, therefore people not wanting to go to use the internet. Again, not devestating, but something that should be avoided at all costs.
These kinds of tools are extremely important to use, but we need to make sure that we're always putting our best work into these technologies, creating new technologies, always staying ahead of the game. We're doing a good job right now, but making this as a reminder for it to stay that way.