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If I can soft-fork in anything, it would be something far more effective than MW :)
MW is really a scaling tech that has some privacy advantages (primarily due to ephemerality).
Privacy is hard because many of the changes you make don't make your life immediately better, and many often have no felt improvement.
It's more of realizing the need and wanting to preserve your future freedom for those of us in the West than it is some existential crisis.
The West is hard, there is very little "perceived need" even if the real need is high and rapidly growing. I don't even try to evangelize privacy, instead I focus my efforts on tools and resources that can be useful to those that have a wake up call like I had.
There is, however, a rapidly growing segment of the populace (even in the West!) who are realizing the silent oppression that is growing around them and are waking up. Especially over the past four years I've seen massively increased appetite and demand for privacy.
It was a lot of things happening at the same time that led to my falling down the rabbit hole:
- Reading Snowden and Glenn Greenwald's books for the first time
- Seeing "behind the curtain" working in cybersecurity and realizing how easy surveillance was on most people
- Realizing that I was working at a company abusing cybersecurity tech to detect/surveil/imprison a religious minority in China, and finally coming to terms with the fact that even if I didn't directly work on that project, working for the company was contributing to the demise of people's freedom
These things came together within a few months and served as the catalyst to taking the jump and changing my career and off-work priorities, including starting Opt Out.
I've told the story a few times on other pods, but can't think of where exactly ATM. Will drop a link here if I remember one!
Ah, no, I didn't see that! They're definitely a good fit for DNMs as they can really simplify the address UX and cut down on the need for server infra.
However, they don't work right now with multisig (they require MuSig) so it will be some time before it's technically possible for them to use on multisig-backed platforms.
To clarify though -- Silent Payments are really a UX improvement that merely improves privacy by enforcing the "no address reuse" basic privacy practice on Bitcoin w/o requiring extra server infra.
I've tried it but it's... very early IMO. The requirement to run the nodes + web UI yourself give it a HUGE barrier of entry.
However, they are fantastic people (got to talk to one of their team extensively at Monerotopia) and atomic swaps are an invaluable fall-back if better UX options like instant exchangers and AMMs get shutdown or de-list Monero.
Please let me know if I could help, I have some direct comms with him and would love to see this as well :)
Of course, thanks for the fantastic question! Love when it's clear you've put a lot of thought into it.
- Yes, it's a fantastic tool that (due to blinded paths) has a massive effect on making LN more private. Not sure I would say it's "enough" as other critical problems remain, i.e. most people using custodians, those not using custodians using wallets that do server-side path finding, and those not using those still using a few central LSPs and thus having most payments not benefit from onion routing.
- Not at all, LN's complexity for proper self-custodial usage makes it a non-starter, I don't expect to ever see a large DNM that supports LN, much less exclusively uses it. DNM vendors and customers want one thing -- privacy with little hassle. Monero is FAR superior at providing that and LN can't really ever come close due to it's architectural complexity.
I love the idea of integrating payments to incentivize operators, but unfortunately that also incentives Sybil attacks even more -- now they can collect data AND earn fees for doing so! More useful would be something like what Nym is doing where there is a staking system for operators that requires them to put up capital (and expose that capital to slashing or similar penalty mechanisms) in order to earn fees.
The speed problems with Tor are due to the architecture that provides so much privacy, and while they can continue to slowly improve over time, Tor will never be able to match "normal" latency or speed as you're necessarily adding 3+ hops into every connection, and then limiting by (at best) the worst hops bandwidth.
In a nutshell -- if you want freedom, you have to preserve your privacy. Without doing so you will be at best manipulated and coerced by ad companies and corporations, and at worst surveilled and oppressed by nation states.
Freedom requires privacy, and without it all other fundamental human rights fall apart quickly.
Definitely a shift to more people understanding that sacrificing some convenience is worth gaining privacy.