Silk Road did just fine to the tune of billions without true anonymity
Silk Road had a design where it’s owner had the power to remove individual sellers. It’s not structurally different when it comes to the ability to exclude people wanting to sell services that the owners don’t like.
If I put a BTC address in this comment you could send me money right now with no financial or government intermediaries
We still live in a world where you complain about big tech having the ability to wield power by shutting down money transfer even when a killer was hired on Hydra to go after a law enforcement official. Hydra kicks you off the market when you fail their quality checks and isn’t doesn’t allow anyone to do anything as well.
If I were to put that address on an anonymous service it would be no different, just harder to track and censor it.
This shows that there’s no technical obstacle in the way. The obstacles that do exist are due to big tech being able to provide much more user-friendly software because they can pay for it’s development.
We might have a future where people still develop the software we need for decentral communication but the reason we don’t have that now is economics.
The internet isn’t perfect but it’s resilient enough that billion dollar companies like Elsivier can’t bring down sci-hub after years of fighting it. Wikileaks even still has their original URL.
That’s not where the practical problems of implementing alternate infrastructure lie.
Given that Wikileaks is quite capable of publishing without Assange, most of the people running Wikileaks are free. I don’t have information about the current size of that team but they seem to be functional without Assange. Both the leak about the investigation into the alleged Syrian chemical weapons attack and the Fishrot files are examples that people don’t want published.
Assange isn’t free because he thought it was valuable for PR reasons for Wikileaks to have spoke people that aren’t anonymous and not because anonymisation technology doesn’t work.
I’m not sure why Alexandra Elbakyan made the decision not to be anonymous but I haven’t heared that stories of it being due to anonymisation tech failing.
Silk Road had a design where it’s owner had the power to remove individual sellers. It’s not structurally different when it comes to the ability to exclude people wanting to sell services that the owners don’t like.
We still live in a world where you complain about big tech having the ability to wield power by shutting down money transfer even when a killer was hired on Hydra to go after a law enforcement official. Hydra kicks you off the market when you fail their quality checks and isn’t doesn’t allow anyone to do anything as well.
This shows that there’s no technical obstacle in the way. The obstacles that do exist are due to big tech being able to provide much more user-friendly software because they can pay for it’s development.
We might have a future where people still develop the software we need for decentral communication but the reason we don’t have that now is economics.
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The internet isn’t perfect but it’s resilient enough that billion dollar companies like Elsivier can’t bring down sci-hub after years of fighting it. Wikileaks even still has their original URL.
That’s not where the practical problems of implementing alternate infrastructure lie.
-
Given that Wikileaks is quite capable of publishing without Assange, most of the people running Wikileaks are free. I don’t have information about the current size of that team but they seem to be functional without Assange. Both the leak about the investigation into the alleged Syrian chemical weapons attack and the Fishrot files are examples that people don’t want published.
Assange isn’t free because he thought it was valuable for PR reasons for Wikileaks to have spoke people that aren’t anonymous and not because anonymisation technology doesn’t work.
I’m not sure why Alexandra Elbakyan made the decision not to be anonymous but I haven’t heared that stories of it being due to anonymisation tech failing.