This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. And by accountability I don’t even mean about bad actors, necessarily, more just not being able to hold someone to anything. Being hyperdependent on one or a few people continuing to show up and keep at what they were doing for stuff that can impact hundreds, thousands, or more. I don’t know what the answer is there because it’s hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. … I don’t know what the answer is there because it’s hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.
Part of the answer is m-of-n cryptography (and other crypto), but the tools around it are barely usable for technically inclined people, much less those that aren’t. It’s a common enough story, unfortunately. Theoretically, the tech is all there to ameliorate these problems. Practically, only people with encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric tooling have access. And typically, there aren’t enough of those people to go around.
Can you explain more about how this relates to alleviating the problem? I’m curious and admittedly, when I read “crypto”, I think of big tech grifters, but I know that’s not all of cryptography as a field.
Can you explain more about how this relates to alleviating the problem? I’m curious and admittedly, when I read “crypto”, I think of big tech grifters, but I know that’s not all of cryptography as a field.
Cryptocurrency has forever ruined “crypto” :(
But in any case, m-of-n cryptography (Shamir Secret Sharing) permits “m” keys out of a total “n” keys to unlock a secret, such as the login credentials for a domain registrar. So long as “m” keys are available, the login credentials can be recovered. This avoids having a single point of failure, for example, where only one person knows the login credentials and is AWOL. So long as “m” other folks are still around and active, they can recover the login credentials without the AWOL person.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. And by accountability I don’t even mean about bad actors, necessarily, more just not being able to hold someone to anything. Being hyperdependent on one or a few people continuing to show up and keep at what they were doing for stuff that can impact hundreds, thousands, or more. I don’t know what the answer is there because it’s hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.
Part of the answer is m-of-n cryptography (and other crypto), but the tools around it are barely usable for technically inclined people, much less those that aren’t. It’s a common enough story, unfortunately. Theoretically, the tech is all there to ameliorate these problems. Practically, only people with encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric tooling have access. And typically, there aren’t enough of those people to go around.
Can you explain more about how this relates to alleviating the problem? I’m curious and admittedly, when I read “crypto”, I think of big tech grifters, but I know that’s not all of cryptography as a field.
Cryptocurrency has forever ruined “crypto” :(
But in any case, m-of-n cryptography (Shamir Secret Sharing) permits “m” keys out of a total “n” keys to unlock a secret, such as the login credentials for a domain registrar. So long as “m” keys are available, the login credentials can be recovered. This avoids having a single point of failure, for example, where only one person knows the login credentials and is AWOL. So long as “m” other folks are still around and active, they can recover the login credentials without the AWOL person.
Oh interesting, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!