Proton Mail, the leading privacy-focused email service, is making its first foray into blockchain technology with Key Transparency, which will allow users to verify email addresses. From a report: In an interview with Fortune, CEO and founder Andy Yen made clear that although the new feature uses blockchain, the key technology behind crypto, Key Transparency isn’t “some sketchy cryptocurrency” linked to an “exit scam.” A student of cryptography, Yen added that the new feature is “blockchain in a very pure form,” and it allows the platform to solve the thorny issue of ensuring that every email address actually belongs to the person who’s claiming it.
Proton Mail uses end-to-end encryption, a secure form of communication that ensures only the intended recipient can read the information. Senders encrypt an email using their intended recipient’s public key – a long string of letters and numbers – which the recipient can then decrypt with their own private key. The issue, Yen said, is ensuring that the public key actually belongs to the intended recipient. “Maybe it’s the NSA that has created a fake public key linked to you, and I’m somehow tricked into encrypting data with that public key,” he told Fortune. In the security space, the tactic is known as a “man-in-the-middle attack,” like a postal worker opening your bank statement to get your social security number and then resealing the envelope.
Blockchains are an immutable ledger, meaning any data initially entered onto them can’t be altered. Yen realized that putting users’ public keys on a blockchain would create a record ensuring those keys actually belonged to them – and would be cross-referenced whenever other users send emails. “In order for the verification to be trusted, it needs to be public, and it needs to be unchanging,” Yen said.
Curious if anyone here would use a feature like this? It sounds neat but I don’t think I’m going to be needing a feature like this on a day-to-day basis, though I could see use cases for folks handling sensitive information.
Voting is another concept that would become unhackable overnight
No. Voting on the blockchain is an even worse idea than money on the blockchain.
In many cases, there are good reasons why these things are done they way they are. I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
A single actor might be able to commit voter fraud in the order of dozes or hundreds of votes perhaps but with a digital voting system based on blockchain, they could do so on the order of thousands or even millions by compromising end-user devices used for voting or buy enough work/stake/whatever to perform a 51% attack.
Same goes for money btw. Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
have you seen any of the research that the US government did on it? Homomorphic encryption enables votes to be both public and obfuscated at the same time. I don’t want to write an essay right now but are you truly up to date on this?
Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
I COMPLETELY DISAGREE. It should be exactly as hard as it is to freeze the cash of bad actors. That’s the point of it. I, of course, happen to be a libertarian socialist/anarcho syndicalist. You happen to be a capitalist. You seem to want be in the camp of “you will own nothing and you will like it” but I just so happen to not trust governments and their decisions. I believe in socialism but have seen it co-opted and destroyed by corruption. Anyway, I don’t think that those same clearly corrupted governments should have the unilateral right to prevent me from attemtpting to claw enough back from their corruption and greed to feed my family.
Homomorphic encryption enables votes to be both public and obfuscated at the same time.
That’s nice but has nothing to do with voter fraud prevention.
I will not reply to the stupid ad hominem. You have made it exceptionally clear that you have no idea what my political views are.
If you dislike corruption and capitalists, then why do you like cryptocurrency?
Because properly-implemented cryptocurrencies make corruption impossible. Even the shitty, scammy FTX project had a decentralized ledger, allowing the FTC to quickly and easily forensically untangle SBF’s tangled web of lies and fraud. Even Do Kwan’s TerraLuna hack would have been possible to detect had the project been open source (like any viable crypto project) but regardless of that, it will still now be quite trivial for the regulators prosecuting him and his co-conspirators with fraud.
More learning for those listening in that haven’t already made up their mind like you have: https://youtu.be/J5xegDJphvc?si=x3tJw9s1c1WL_WNy
“You drink water and breathe air. Peter Thiel drinks water and breathes air too. Therefore you are just like Peter Thiel!”
You’re a troll. I literally hate Peter Thiel. He is invested in so many technologies that it’s VERY likely that we’re invested in the same tech somewhere. Pretty sure he doesn’t give a shit about Cardano which is the project I develop applications for.
Spreading your investments out is kind of how investing works when someone is a billionaire, dipshit.
Anyway, that’s enough feeding the trolls for today. Have a good night, intellectually dishonest hiveminder.
