Tity Moni

I attended @VitalikButerin’s talk today. I wish I could have asked a question, but there was no Q&A, so let me share my thoughts here, hoping he might reply if I make any sense. Vitalik opened his talk by discussing the need to play in defense mode against future risks to cryptography. His argument was simple.. there is a non-zero chance that AI or future computing advances could break today’s encryption, and we have no idea when that might happen. So why not prepare as if it could happen tomorrow? He discussed encrypted data backups involving one or a few operators to ensure we don’t lose access to our data in such scenarios. He also discussed older concepts like mixnets and DC-nets, questioning whether Tor’s approach to network anonymity might be outdated and whether routing through fewer stations could be more practical. Now, I understand the intention behind making our infrastructure resilient to future cryptographic failures. But I have a few questions.. Who decides which entities become these operators? And who decides whom we should trust? Even if data remains encrypted, these operators could become powerful points of surveillance, censorship, or institutional control. And what if governments, corporations, or large institutions eventually become those operators? Don’t you think we are simply making a U-turn to the exact spot from where we started this journey? The cypherpunk movement spent decades building systems that reduce our dependence on trusted intermediaries. Now, in the name of protecting those systems, are we introducing new intermediaries again? I also think we should distinguish between protecting data availability, confidentiality, and censorship resistance. Saving data doesn’t necessarily mean saving privacy or freedom. Of course, distributed backups, threshold cryptography, and independent operators could reduce these risks. But how do we ensure those operators remain independent, permissionless, and resistant to institutional capture? And my biggest question is.. Do you think it’s a better idea to compromise the values of a system to save something built on those very same values? We should prepare for cryptography getting broken by future technology, but shouldn’t we equally prepare for our infrastructure getting captured by institutions? Because if we save the data but lose privacy, freedom, and permissionless access, what exactly have we saved? Maybe the real challenge isn’t just making cryptography resilient.. It’s making sure the cypherpunk values survive along with it.