Just a couple of thoughts around this…
There are a number of overarching challenges that apply to all crypto projects. Key management and trust model configuration are some of the more obvious ones. We’ll use new approaches to start to overcome some of these problems, leveraging and co-coordinating external industrial experts where it’s expedient to do so… kinda like waking-up slopeside and telling Juraj Bednar that we’ve arranged a hardware design team in Taiwan for him and to go build some stuff.
Scale trust
Trust + Complexity cannot compete with trust alone
- John Carvallho
The practice of ‘double entry accounting’ forced much of humanity account for every single cent in accordance with international accounting standards. Even write-offs and losses are booked and tracked. Communities (inc. nations) that aspire to be better and more resilient should probably be doing more:
- Charity
- Debt forgiveness
- Barter
- Community credit
A maximally decentralised cypherpunk project has the opportunity to re-imagine and influence how people use money and exchange value, using UX/UI-nudge in order to influence market participation.
For example, in addition to being able to pay with bitcoin, we could incorporate a ‘barter’ function so that the old lady with chickens can OFFER some eggs and BID for some potatoes, or fish.
If she doesn’t have any eggs left today, but still needs potatoes, perhaps she could mint a community credit note; a form of IOU valid in the local community.
If Alice owes Bob, and Bob owes Carol, and Carol owes Alice… goods or labour of approximately the same value (say ±20% based on price data source or collective reckoning) a cohesive community with shared values and shared objectives might consider the debts to balance to zero, in the interests of the universal proliferation of good times.
Pubky / Synonym are currently in the early stages of a project called ‘Atomicity’ that seeks to scale trust. It might make sense to build to a common specification.
Reduce reliance on names, routes, and root authorities
Marketplace participants use self-sovereign Ed25519 public key(s) as their primary identifier. This creates a need for tools to store and manage keys. Importantly, prompting users to periodically download or synch the public keys of their friends/contacts of would allow people to maintain communication with each other (XOR discovery) in case the paywithbitcoin platform becomes unavailable.
Forking an open source web-browser to accept Ed25519 keys in the search bar, and combining this with P2P routing, would provide a considerable upstep in user sovereignty and resilience.
Meta-data associated with keys (i.e. name / nym / store name / phone number etc.) could also be downloaded/synched or backed-up to the user directory of PubKy homeserver(s).
Airgapped signing devices
Nostr fails because it’s necessary to sign every event with a private key. This necessitates the private key to be on the user’s device.
Signing devices such as the Nitrokey include a secure element and pretty decent compatibility across encryption schemes including Ed25519. However, most of the new versions of the Nitrokey are now NFC, and their centralised distribution model is vulnerable to supply chain attack.
It is clear that the freedom tech ecosystem lacks hardware teams. There are many young capable engineers in the world, but Freedom Tech lacks an upper funnel at [and around] Graduate stage. Cheap fixes to this problem include individual & team engineering design competitions/challenges in Student Newspapers, with prizes in Bitcoin.
Imagine a small spring-loaded device, that clips onto a phone’s camera and the opposite side of the screen. Flashing RGB dots on the phone’s screen sends a data payload, that’s signed by the device, and returned by flashing LED’s via the phone’s camera. Tropic Square, Meshtastic, Blockstream etc. will likely be willing to sponsor such activities.
Incentivise self-sovereignty using nudge theory
In the same way that Air Miles programs use incentives and gamification to encourage the accumulation of miles and ‘status’, app features are an effective way of nudging plebs toward liberty:
- Provide a discount (maybe 1% or so) to users running a full node.
- Provide a small discount to people who contribute hash to a mining pool (using proof ‘shares’ or confirmed purchase of a Mining Note).
- Provide larger discounts to people who contribute a larger amount of hash to a mining pool. (i.e. perhaps Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum tiers akin to airline status tiers).
- Users who make at least one purchase per day over 5 consecutive days receive the latest pack of stickers for free.
- Sellers who frequently accept Plebmarkt barter offers get boosted profiles/listings.
