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OK, I wrote up a whole blog post with some more detailed thoughts on this. Curious if anything here resonates with other folks. Thanks to @iame.li, @dholms.at, and @bnewbold.net for helpful pointers and discussions! pckt.blog/b/bits-of-en...

pckt.blogAll data should be permissioned data - Bits of EntropyMy post with vague complaints about the proposal that made for permissioned data got a bit of attention. Daniel was kind enough to take the time to chat with me...

@dholms.at - What is the right venue for discussion on this Permissioned Data proposal you wrote up. atp@ietf.org or something else? I think it is wrong in some pretty fundamental ways. Or at least the motivations are poorly articulated.

The more relevant questions are when is *non-deniability* useful? For whom? That capability is NOT a baseline expectation elsewhere online. The web + screenshots usually don't offer durable, attributable *proof* that someone possesses an authentic copy of what you once put online

Normal, non-deniable crypto provides two features here: 1. It keeps things simple. Better for builders, easier to understand. “Everything works the same except for the ACLs” 2. It enables redistribution in positive cases, if we can design redistribution systems that maintain the ACLs.

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Don’t discount the latter point — redistribution is what lets AT scale as well as it does. I’m surprised that people want to bake in a scaling limit that will force private things to be small.

If privacy is a spectrum, I tend to be most interested in use cases which operate at interpersonal scopes Aside from rent-seeking, what use cases would you find valuable for anything like "broadcast-scale privacy"? The very idea sounds like an oxymoron, so what am I missing?

PS: You may also want to take a closer look at how well syncers might scale, given that they only need a cert from one member to scan the entire space If you squint, couldn't they evolve to function as a members-only caching proxy layer, tied more closely to a space than an app?

The sketch I have in my head is that the space owner could act as essentially a relay for the space. Since the owner is inherently authorized to see everything and trusted to enforce the ACL. So normal relay scaling rules would apply.

Even on an interpersonal scale of users, if you imagine building say a collaborative editing platform, the number of records can scale very quickly. Also, one of the use cases here is subscriber-only feeds — is deniability worth limiting the number of subscribers you can support?

I have to keep reminding myself that you + I are engaged in different activities here My goal is to identify the sweet spot in Daniel's design -- where his chosen constraints make things easier vs. harder Whereas you're sketching out a new design with different core assumptions than he chose

This is preservable with short term message authentication. Some early variants of OTR publishes the private keys after the session (the innovation of Signal, then textsecure, was making asynchronous messages equally protected). It's harder in group settings though

3DH style authentication relies on provenance of the session keys for authentication. You can replicate similar behaviors with short term expiring keypairs. 3rd party logs can still be a problem, but at least they stop being cryptographically certain logs.