this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
19 points (67.3% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26734 readers
1866 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I saw this tiktok where this guy was talking about how he'd get his hands on real social security numbers.. this was a clip from a whole story he told about some criminal shit, I was too distracted by my thoughts on how to fix the exploits he used.

Block chains and cryptographic signatures would solve basically every one of his exploits. But regardless of the myriad of reasons as to why we won't adopt cryptography into American laws and bureaucracy, imagine if we did do everything involving government and policy in a cryptographically secure environment.

Imagine if everyone who is born gets assigned a gpg secret key signed by the government and that is your government ID for everything from opening a bank account to paying your taxes to claiming benefits. IMPO I think this is a perfect solution (iif you ignore the human element).

So my question is why wouldn't it be perfect, and what kind of exploits could bad actors use in a cryptographic bureaucracy?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Well if they properly embraced it, you wouldn't get one PGP key implanted at birth. I mean if that private key ever leaks, you're screwed for the rest of your life. And the blockchain has sever shortcomings, too. It's not anonymous, everyone can see every transaction and it's not fast enough for lots of applications.

It'd need to be implemented properly. And most importantly include privacy. You can't just expose millions of people to every attacker. And please think of the not obvious cases... How someone operate it who's in the hospital and unconscious... What if you lost your phone... How can you keep secrets from your (abusive) partner... What about separation of state and private companies... How to prevent a scifi dystopia...

I think if like a few hundred millions of people are subject to it, it needs to be done properly. And I think that'd be possible if the government payed some experts to come up with a really good solution.

Keys need to have sub-keys, IDs be randomized, there needs to be some human in the loop in case something goes wrong. Attestation and not just giving out everything to every company...

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not every blockchain is fully transparent, but I agree that most are.

[–] rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago

Sure. I took "the blockchain" to mean bitcoin. It certainly depends on the implemetation. And on the use-case. In recent years people have put blockchain into everything. But that's not useful either. There are different kinds of blockchain, some more or less useful to certain tasks. And there are applications where blockchains aren't useful at all. so generally it depends on the specific problem we're trying to solve.