Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
what leads you to believe that end to end encrypted communication is a net good for the world? esp in liberal democratic countries where the governments are at least in theory accountable to the people are the costs of letting malevolent actors coordinate worth the benefits? what exactly are those benefits that justify something like kiddie porn being easy to distribute at scale? or are the alleged liberal democracies currently in power more of a fiction than reality? or is it more that someday a less liberal less democratic regime will come into power? steel man positions only
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
On top of everything everyone else is saying, I'd also add that the *physical-space* surveillance capabilities that governments have increased massively over the past 20 years. So if we don't have strong privacy in the digital space, we have no privacy at all. I find that deeply scary.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
"Less liberal less democratic regimes coming to power" isn't even a faraway threat anymore, it feels like it's the reality in the average democratic country in the past decade.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Also on top of that, even if you trust governments, centralized points of data collection get hacked all the time. Incidents are easy to find, just google it (in all countries: USA, China, etc). And so minimizing data collection is just a matter of basic prudence.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Also also, the possibility of things like this is on its own a pretty good argument for being absolutist about secure devices and comms imo: https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1828054194848170321
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