Secure Input Output's Threat Model (Essay state: rough)
“Wikileaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us” – Satoshi Nakamoto, December 11, 2010.
Wikileaks was forced to use the nascent bitcoin to raise funds. The money was used to keep servers up in the face of adversity.
For years I’ve been mulling over what a networking protocol + distributed programming language would look like such that it could weather the storm of the state taking on such inflammatory information as leaked government documents.
13 years later, through my indabas I have uncovered an information source more inflammatory than wikileaks; prediction markets.
Prediction markets essentially distill your point of view, your truth, to a single atomic piece of information that accrues value for a time period. The more inflammatory the question the more value it accrues, the more it broadcasts into society. All social maneuvering is made irrelevant. One cannot character assassinate your opponent to suppress the truth. What you believe doesn’t matter. As what you say or believe and what you actually do are three different things. In prediction markets the only thing that matters is what you do. That is expressed in an atomic form of a bet.
“Would the country be better off if the president was fired?”. Should this question be broadcast into society via a prediction market what would the retaliation be? What happens when the prediction market generates so much truth as to neutralize all state propaganda? What if it’s able to neutralize all propaganda revealing what actually happened?
How does the state respond to this?
Assume there are teams of highly intelligent people behind a specific bet. They have inside information to whether a president stole from the coffers. The information source should be protected. Protected at a protocol level.
Bitcoin demonstrated it has a fighting chance of separating money from state. Much akin to earlier aspirations of separating religion from state.
How does one do what bitcoin did but do it for data? Done is such a way that even the state is unable to censor the network.
The internet is literally run by gentleman’s handshakes. There is absolutely no security at BGP level. When you operate your bitcoin node, many people think it’s a foregone conclusion that bitcoin can last forever. This is far from true. Should you pose to be a problem. The state may demand your ISP cut your IP address. Should bitcoin ever become a problem deep packet inspection at ISP level is trivial to do. Just as the Chinese Communist Party have blocked all major Nostr relays.
Make no mistake bitcoin and similar sorts of technology is easy to wipe out. The onset of a world war will turn the internet into a tightly controlled communication medium. Thus, for the sovereign individual, one needs to be able to create their own networks and wire them together. The same networking protocol should operate over every new transport.