Sure. There are no easy answers; the question is whether encrypting L1 is the right solution.

That's why i mentioned FHE. If/when it becomes practical, filtering is theoretically possible. But I agree client side is already important today.

https://techletters.substack.com/p/the-european-commission-is-turning The oh so virtuous European elite care so much about privacy and reducing the power of US tech companies that they are ... giving random other foreign spies, sorry, companies, access to private information of all their citizens, wait what? (Story's actually a little more nuanced but the author explains how the protections can be worked around trivially. Worth reading.)

I've used both ppq and maple; definitely useful, especially ppq's e2e encrypted to TEE option. I agree that local models continue to move forward, and will be increasingly useful. But if personal devices are fully locked down it will be moot *from the perspective of sovereignty*. (You can also argue that too much compute power will also be locked down).

I think you're right, but it's not that UK people are uniquely stupid or something. It's just that the prevailing narrative they suck up there, and in much of Europe, is uniquely poisonous to their own thriving.

And fwiw (not much), re: my vague war comment, I am talking about the potential long term effect of complete societal value realignment. But, who knows.

Steemit actually still exists. https://steemit.com/ (Still, more surprising that Ripple still exists tbh.)

Do you see any interplay or overlap with IPFS?

Also, open weight models follow the same pattern: can't be stopped easily but small chunk of people will have what it takes to use them, and without approved hardware you are crippled. Tbf this one is a very evolving situation, we'll see.

Yeah there's definitely a desire, but be clear, it's a smallish minority that have this desire for freedom, especially outside the US, sad to say. And fulfilling that desire seems to get harder every year, as in, the devices you actually need, to be functional in the world, are locked down more and more.

I'm really curious why you think "it will be hard to make devices the chokepoint." Isn't that playing out, right now? What proportion of even freedom-aware people, especially outside the US, have a smartphone not controlled by Google or Apple?

Oh, right. But that one is of the type that'll always exist right: voluntarily auditability. Monero has that, zcash has that, Liquid with CT has it. Etc.

I've said this before but given "current topic", time to say it again: pattern-matching to the 90s winning of the crypto wars is just wrong. The political forces leading to full ID and monitoring of every digital event is inevitable, and **the advent of ZK technology is going to make it happen**, not prevent it. Why? Because the academics' argument of "golden key"/"key escrow" being fundamentally flawed won't matter: the political will is there. Example: right now, a large majority of the UK public support social media controls for kids, and don't focus on the freedom violation this implies for themselves (ID verification). They will grumble, because they don't want ID cards, but online they'll accept it, because they've already accepted that ID verification is good, not bad, for online discourse, they are all using Apple, Google ID systems ... they've already accepted it should be used as a gate for even financial transactions; hardly a big stretch since they've accepted full slavery w.r.t. their bank accounts. This might be affected by how few people in the UK have any wealth at all except in their house (if they're lucky enough to have a house). ZK and FHE will accelerate this from crude ID verification into full on filtering: you can do secure communication, that will be allowed with sanctioned providers, but it will be proved "safe" using various techniques (I mention ZK, FHE to show the advanced version: your e2e chats will be filtered for child porn/terrorism/criticizing the govt, while still fully encrypted). I see no version of the future where this doesn't happen; it's just a matter of time, and admittedly it could be a very slow process. If we still care about freedom we should look into full disconnection: p2p, mesh networks, steganography where it can work. Am I hopeful? No, I don't see a good reason to be. Perhaps only a very dark future involving a lot of war can stop this inevitable flow towards digital tyranny.

Peter ( @Peter Todd ) was 1st on this from what I remember. From around the days of "cypherpunk desert bus" [1] It explains why we L2. It explains why the otherwise idiotic "build privacy on top of transparency" is not, in fact, idiotic. https://xcancel.com/peterktodd/status/2062809959138488502#m [1] He participated in the original zcash trusted setup and blogged about it here: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony