behindtext

bruce, long time fan, first time caller =)

i'm interested to hear a prediction, provided you're willing to give one, on how the surveillance vs encryption vs law will play out:

surveillance, both online and increasingly offline via cameras in urban areas, has been a persistent problem for citizens seeking privacy. while surveillance has been increasing so has the ubiquitous use of cryptography by individuals and organizations, turning the current situation into an arms race. legislators seem loathe to put any real legal protections in place that benefit privacy or prevent citizens from being prosecuted for crimes related to activities recorded by intelligence services. do you expect that (A) the laws will be amended to actually protect privacy, (B) individuals will be left to fend for themselves (legally speaking) in an environment where there is essentially zero privacy, or (C) intelligence services actually become unable to conduct ubiquitous surveillance due to ubiquitous proper use of crypto?

i figured i would ask you this after seeing recent eric schmidt comments.

until computer manufacturers fix their broken (imo) architecture of peripherals having unmitigated DMA, it will continue to be cheap to hack peoples' machines, even on a targeted basis.

there is no good reason for usb and nic peripherals to have DMA, they should have special memory per peripheral or a cache just for peripherals.

after reading the paper, i feel like it can be quickly summed up in a single SAT-style analogy "bitcoin is to fedwire as sidechains are to banks".

how will the bitcoin sidechain ecosystem differ from the existing banking system? it seems it would only increase the centralization of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole.