I suppose I could have been more coherent in the original post.
My claims.
1) In the future, cryptography will be a military technology as significant as e.g. nuclear weapons
2) However, how cryptography differs from conventional weapons technology is that giving everyone access to cryptography makes it less of a threat (whereas you would not want to give nukes to everyone)
3) To make cryptography less of a threat to political stability, there should be a concerted effort on the part of cryptography researchers and politicians to enforce that all cryptography research be open.
This might make more sense if you zoomed in, and talked about specific capabilities rather than “cryptography” in general. The current state of crypto is that there are off-the-shelf cyphers that are believed to be unbreakable, and they can also be combined and given larger key sizes to make extra-unbreakable versions in case of mathematical advance. There are also several publicly accessible onion networks. What new capability do you imagine being developed, which would be bad for the world iff it wasn’t open?
I don’t know what Snarles is thinking of, but there are examples that one can provide. For example, if someone finds an efficient way of factoring integers, and keeps this secret, they can probably do a lot more damage than they can if their ability is publicly known. However, I don’t see how in any substantial way that sort of worry connects with snarles’ apparent concern about singletons.
Sorry, I still don’t get it. At this point I’m going to leave this discussion here unless another Less Wrong participant thinks it’s worth my spending more time on.
I suppose I could have been more coherent in the original post.
My claims.
1) In the future, cryptography will be a military technology as significant as e.g. nuclear weapons
2) However, how cryptography differs from conventional weapons technology is that giving everyone access to cryptography makes it less of a threat (whereas you would not want to give nukes to everyone)
3) To make cryptography less of a threat to political stability, there should be a concerted effort on the part of cryptography researchers and politicians to enforce that all cryptography research be open.
This might make more sense if you zoomed in, and talked about specific capabilities rather than “cryptography” in general. The current state of crypto is that there are off-the-shelf cyphers that are believed to be unbreakable, and they can also be combined and given larger key sizes to make extra-unbreakable versions in case of mathematical advance. There are also several publicly accessible onion networks. What new capability do you imagine being developed, which would be bad for the world iff it wasn’t open?
I don’t know what Snarles is thinking of, but there are examples that one can provide. For example, if someone finds an efficient way of factoring integers, and keeps this secret, they can probably do a lot more damage than they can if their ability is publicly known. However, I don’t see how in any substantial way that sort of worry connects with snarles’ apparent concern about singletons.
Sorry, I still don’t get it. At this point I’m going to leave this discussion here unless another Less Wrong participant thinks it’s worth my spending more time on.