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William Allen
@williamallen.eth
Is the desire for e2e/zero knowledge encryption (Skiff, Proton, Signal etc) a stated preference with a much smaller TAM vs the revealed preference of 'just good enough' or 'the devs will add it later' encryption?
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
Part of the stated vs revealed preference of E2EE, ZK, MPC, and other cryptographic approaches, hell, even cryptocurrencies, is that the value delivered has to be greater than the investment. With Signal, a lot of heavy lifting is done to make it as usable as possible, and even then, there are still rough edges.
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
Part of this is because it is incredibly difficult to retain the security guarantees by smoothing some of those rough edges. Part of it is because a more holistic solution is required (PKI, such as Apple's iCloud Keychain infrastructure and Advanced Data Protection, has now enabled equivalent security with easier use)
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
Building that holistic solution doesn't happen overnight, and while significant engineering expense went into the new iMessage security features, it still remains limited to iMessage. Revealed preference: if you can't talk to Android users over iMessage, what do you do? Downgrade security.
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
The thing is, people don't realize how crucial the privacy and secrecy guarantees of strong encryption are, until they don't have it but need it. (See women's health care restrictions being passed that have lead to overzealous AGs requesting medical records from out of state)
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Cassie Heart
@cassie
So ultimately, the revealed preference will be like water: taking the path of least resistance. And similarly, until something holistic emerges that makes E2EE, ZK, MPC, etc. all as accessible, intuitive and abundant as water, people will continue to live in the drought of cryptographic accessibility.
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Agost Biro
@agostbiro
^ this + the really interesting thing for me is how advanced cryptography enables novel applications. E.g. a decentralized dating app where devs can build mini apps with users’ data without getting access to it. Users come for the functionality, but get strong privacy, since it’s not possible to build without it
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Agost Biro
@agostbiro
(Devs will come since, given a choice, they’ll invest in a decentralized platform over a centralized one after the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit debacles of the past decade)
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