📅 Original date posted:2014-08-19
📝 Original message:What, exactly, do we hope to achieve from having end-to-end encryption?
Even if it worked perfectly, it wouldn't be very useful.
But it won't work perfectly, because we don't have any method of
authentication. The bitcoin network is trivially MITMable. It's designed to
work even in the face of that, but any encryption we implement will just
get blown away by anyone who cares enough to stand in the middle of two
nodes.
As far as I can see, we get a microscopic obfuscatory advantage over a very
weak passive attacker, at the cost of hugely increased software complexity
(and possibly increased CPU time).
So again; what do we hope to achieve? Why bother? Not a lot of sensitive
information is transmitted in the clear. The little information that might
be considered sensitive is better protected by anonymization (a la Tor),
not encryption.
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William Yager [ARCHIVE] /
npub1mt…qzgqk
2023-06-07 15:25:22
in reply to nevent1q…q24c
Author Public Key
npub1mtzsyxnmqze93rehd90508tdg7k4mwktknmtamqam55446tkaq7qnqzgqkPublished at
2023-06-07 15:25:22Event JSON
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"pubkey": "dac5021a7b00b2588f37695f479d6d47ad5dbacbb4f6beec1ddd295ae976e83c",
"created_at": 1686151522,
"kind": 1,
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"content": "📅 Original date posted:2014-08-19\n📝 Original message:What, exactly, do we hope to achieve from having end-to-end encryption?\n\nEven if it worked perfectly, it wouldn't be very useful.\n\nBut it won't work perfectly, because we don't have any method of\nauthentication. The bitcoin network is trivially MITMable. It's designed to\nwork even in the face of that, but any encryption we implement will just\nget blown away by anyone who cares enough to stand in the middle of two\nnodes.\n\nAs far as I can see, we get a microscopic obfuscatory advantage over a very\nweak passive attacker, at the cost of hugely increased software complexity\n(and possibly increased CPU time).\n\nSo again; what do we hope to achieve? Why bother? Not a lot of sensitive\ninformation is transmitted in the clear. The little information that might\nbe considered sensitive is better protected by anonymization (a la Tor),\nnot encryption.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140819/1be9d73c/attachment.html\u003e",
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}