Let’s consider the future. I’ve recently developed a bit of a theory. Consider how (afaik) recordings aren’t often admissible in court because they can be so easily modified. Consider how you can’t trust images anymore because of photoshop et. al. It’s becoming easier and easier to fabricate “reality”. If you account for improvements in VR and/or nanotechnology, given enough time I suspect we won’t be able to trust even our own senses. However, I think this admits a partial solution – cyptography. It seems to me that in order to combat increasing attempts to deceive the average person, efforts may be made to, say, embed a cryptographic chip in the human brain. Such a chip would enable you to sign, verify, and encrypt communications with others, presumably over any medium. You might not be able to trust your eyes, but you can know who is talking to you and what they’re saying. Furthermore, you could talk with anyone in any setting, with only the intended party able to understand you, like a cross-room whisper. Given a challenge-response protocol, no-one could steal your password, no matter how many nanomachines they hid in your keyboard. Speaking of nanomachines, however, raises the question of “what if they try to infiltrate your brain?” Which suggests an nanomechanical immune system of sorts. I think that’s getting off topic, though.

The prevalence of cryptography (made functionally required by the prevalence of IRL spam, basically) could have an additional effect of non-repudiation – if somebody says something, signed with their key, you can prove to the world that they said it. They might simply not sign their message, or use a different protocol, but depending on the manner of its adoption into culture and people skills, not doing so may itself be considered a red flag that they’re acting cagey.

Just some food for thought. In the meantime, I’m considering signing more of my messages with a private key. It’s taken me a while to knuckle down and actually write another post, though [1], and if I delayed in order to make a key and protocol [2], I’d never post anything.

Do I, like, come up with a traditional sign-off? Too much work for now. Bye.

– Erhannis

[1] A lot of thoughts of “oh, is this important enough to make a new post about?” blah blah blah. The opinion I now assert is that it matters more that I write something than that I pick carefully what to write about.

[2] I’m thinking maybe append the SHA-512 of the plain-text post, post the hash to the blockchain for timestamp verification, and append the transaction address to the post. …Hmm, the inclusion of the transaction isn’t secured, could it be altered to be a new transaction address, and does that break anything? Aaaanyway.