apurimac

bitcoin

Which tool you'd use to enhance privacy, receiving on-chain BTC?

What's the most privacy-focus way to receive onchain BTC?

supratic

A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Eric Hughes
March 9, 1993

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.

Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.

Onward.

Eric Hughes



Thirty years ago today, Eric Hughes published the Cypherpunk's Manifesto

lalmeida

nostr

No doubt, Nostr is promising and exciting.

But there is still an unsolved (or at least not properly solved) problem before Nostr becomes "the new Twitter," or the favoured network for hundreds of millions of people: **human-readable handles**.

[NIP-05](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/05.md) is addressing this issue, by allowing users to "verify" a Nostr public key, which means mapping it to a human-readable handle (in fact a DNS-based identifier). But there are still some (important) issues.

In a nutshell, there are only 3 possibilities:

### **1. No verification**

You use Nostr with a default public key, and will be identified on the network as something like:
> npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m

or (HEX):
> 82341f882b6eabcd2ba7f1ef90aad961cf074af15b9ef44a09f9d2a8fbfbe6a2

Advantages: Simple, nothing to do, universal (works on all clients)
Problems: 
. Obviously not amazing for brand recognition
. Terrible to fight fake accounts, scams, impersonating etc.
. I seriously doubt that Nostr could onboard 500M+ users that way 


### **2. Verification through a 3rd party**

You use a dedicated service or app to get your handle (usually for a small fee) under their domain, and will be identified on the network as something like:
> me@SomeCoolNostrName.com

Advantages: Easy.
Problems: 
. Your handle becomes entirely dependant of the chosen service. What if they disappear in a year? What if they change their policy/price? You have no guarantee whatsoever of the perennity of your handle, which is a problem if you start building a community around it. 
.  There is risk of concentration. If the majority of users get an handle at, say, damus.io, Damus becomes the new Twitter, not Nostr. 
. In short, this solution re-introduce centralisation into Nostr.

### **3. Verification on your own, custom domain**

You own a domain name and you use NIP-05 to make your handle verified. You will be identified as something like:
> me@mydomain.com

Advantage: You really control your handle, directly associated to your site/blog/brand

Problems: 
. Not so easy to do. The process involves converting your npub address, creating a JSON file (simple) and sometimes changing the configuration of your Web server (best guides explaining the procedure: [here](https://nostr.how/verify-your-identity) and [here](https://orangepill.dev/nostr-guides/guide-to-verify-nostr-profile-nip05-identifier-with-your-domain/)). Doable, but could be challenging for many users.
. Since it's quite hard to register a domain name anonymously, you lose anonymity (not necessarily a problem since you're precisely trying to "verify" your identity). 
. You also expose yourself to possible censorship. If you do something reprehensible or illegal on Nostr, authorities can ask your hosting provider to shut down your site/domain, terminating your Nostr handle in the process.


. . .


It looks like Nostr suffers from its own trilemma. Either you choose to stick to a poor UX (non-human-readable handles) or you go for solutions that will affect some of the key benefits of Nostr (decentralized, anonymous, uncensorable). 