Code Is A Weapon

In the era of ubiquitous surveillance and globally-banked cryptocurrency projects like Facebook's Libra, how can cryptoanarchists fight back? Through cryptographic code! We'll survey the grim state of surveillance, starting with the industrialization of NSA mass surveillance via companies like Chainanalysis to the recent targeting of Assange. We'll present two new systems that are capable of resisting even global adversaries with a full view of the network: Anonymous credentials and mix-networks.

We'll explain how new advances in mix-networking can be integrated with anonymous access credentials to provide end-to-end privacy against even the most powerful of adversaries.

We'll demonstrate how mix-nets provide better anonymity than either Tor or VPNs, and how probabilistic mix-networks such as Loopix can be extended to handle a decentralized environment. We'll also describe new advances in anonymous access credentials, so that with threshold signatures they also function in a decentralized environment. Lastly, we'll discuss how financial incentives enabled by blockchains allow these technologies to become self-sustaining.

#hcpp19 #optout #paralelnipolis #instituteofcryptoanarchy