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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Yes having more connection with your community can help get more friends and a richer social life which can be helpful, but look at how insular people within communities over time have become now that we are now bound to the only interaction with those directly around us, via travel and communication.

    online and even better local and also online groups are what I am going to argue would be the best way forward. Looking at the rAbetterWorld’s consensus engine and how it could help people male friends and combat loneliness I see how having easy ways for people to interact with those around them and discuss common interests could happen.

    The idea is that a website or something like this and the other website but also like many other aspects of other websites; like how one painting is like another because they both have color you might say. The websites’s main idea is to find consensus on a topic, but the topic can be anything and there would be cross-subject like links for related things, but how related they are is something people could vote on and over time a consensus could be reached. In fact voting on everything is sort of the idea, but there are many types of votes that mean specific things. here though say we have a community of people and they are interacting on a popular topic, they could sort if by locality and talk to those around them. Now the idea here Quickly falls apart from what we might ever see happen because all the users in this theoretical system have to be verified like being registered to vote. Once verified you or any of your anonymous child accounts and be banned forever and your contributions reversed if the rules are violated too many times, and worst is who decides such a thing, the rest of the people who are eligible to vote on that topic. of course the votes are weighted based on your knowledge of a subject, but the questions about what is relevant are chosen by voting. Not all that voting happens from inside the group thou














  • I think this is relevant for anyone that has not read it,

    A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto Eric Hughes March 9, 1993

    Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

    If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

    Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.

    Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

    Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

    We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.

    We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

    We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

    Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.

    Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.

    For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

    The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.

    Onward.

    Eric Hughes