Bitcoin is overrated and the institutional interest is not even positive thing IMO. For those who are obsessed with price, this can be a tough pill to swallow. But when did BlackRock and traditional finance became something to look forward to? These people could not kill crypto and now they want to take over crypto. I never understood the hype about Bitcoin during the later half of its existence. All the things BTC can do can be accomplished even better by altcoins.

If we aim to spread freedom and decentralization, we need to spread good accessible technologies to billions of users. PGP was released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann to allow users to have end to end encrypted communications. In February 1993 Zimmermann became a target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for "munitions export without a license". They were planning to put him in jail for years. PHP never caught on and there was a significant backlash against Phil Zimmermann's arrest. The tyrants of USSA eventually dropped the case.

Accessibility and Userbase Should Be a Priority

I want to share an important blog written by Moxie Marlinspike (best known for his contributions to Signal Messenger). The blog was published on February 24th, 2015. It will take some time before we onboard him to blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike already had a bad first impression with web 3. I will inscribe his words on this decentralized blockchain and it may last longer and and tamper proof than merely storing on a few personal servers.

I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seem to be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the years to leave it be.

When I receive a _GPG encrypted_ email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the feeling that I don’t want to read it. Sometimes I actually contemplate creating a filter for them so that they bypass my inbox entirely, but for now I sigh, unlock my key, start reading, and – with a faint glimmer of hope – am typically disappointed.

I didn’t start out thinking this way. After all, my website even has my GPG key posted under my email address. It’s a feeling that has slowly crept up on me over the past decade, but I didn’t immediately understand where it came from. There’s no obvious unifying theme to the content of these emails, and they’re always written in earnest – not spam, or some form of harassment.

Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by _someone who would voluntarily use GPG_. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.

Increasingly, it’s a club that I don’t want to belong to anymore.

### A philosophical dead end

In 1997, at the dawn of the internet’s potential, the working hypothesis for privacy enhancing technology was simple: we’d develop really flexible power tools for ourselves, and then teach everyone to be like us. Everyone sending messages to each other would just need to understand the basic principles of cryptography.

GPG is the result of that origin story. Instead of developing opinionated software with a simple interface, GPG was written to be as powerful and flexible as possible. It’s up to the user whether the underlying cipher is SERPENT or IDEA or TwoFish. The GnuPG [man page](http://linux.die.net/man/1/gpg) is over sixteen thousand words long; for comparison, the novel _Fahrenheit 451_ is only 40k words.

Worse, it turns out that nobody else found all this stuff to be fascinating. Even though GPG has been around for almost 20 years, [there are only ~50,000 keys in the “strong set,”](http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/plot/) and less than [4 million keys](https://sks-keyservers.net/status/key_development.php) have _ever_ been published to the SKS keyserver pool _ever_. By today’s standards, that’s a shockingly small user base for a month of activity, much less 20 years.

### A technology dead end

In addition to the design philosophy, the technology itself is also a product of that era. As Matthew Green has [noted](http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/whats-matter-with-pgp.html), “poking through an OpenPGP implementation is like visiting a museum of 1990s crypto.” The protocol reflects layers of cruft built up over the 20 years that it took for cryptography (and software engineering) to really come of age, and the fundamental architecture of PGP also leaves no room for now critical concepts like [forward secrecy](https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/).

All of this baggage has been distilled into a ballooning penumbra of OpenPGP specifications and notes so prolific that the entire picture is almost impossible to grasp. Even projects that are engaged in the process of writing a simplified experience on top of GPG suffer from this legacy: Mailpile had to write 1400 lines of _python_ code [just to interface with a native GnuPG installation](https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2014-10-07_Some_Thoughts_on_GnuPG.html) for basic operations, and it still isn’t rock solid.

### What we have

Today, journalists use GPG to communicate with sources securely, activists use it to coordinate world wide, and software companies use it to help secure their infrastructure. Some really heroic people have put in an enormous amount of effort to get us here, at substantial personal cost, and with little support.

Looking forward, however, I think of GPG as a glorious experiment that has run its course. The journalists who depend on it struggle with it and often mess up (“I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”), the activists who use it do so relatively sparingly (“wait, this thing wants my finger print?”), and no other sane person is willing to use it by default. Even the projects that attempt to use it as a dependency struggle.

These are deep structural problems. GPG isn’t the thing that’s going to take us to ubiquitous end to end encryption, and if it were, it’d be kind of a shame to finally get there with 1990’s cryptography. If there’s any good news, it’s that GPG’s [minimal install base](http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/plot/) means we aren’t locked in to this madness, and can start fresh with a different design philosophy. When we do, let’s use GPG as a warning for our new experiments, and remember that “innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1000 things.”

In the 1990s, I was excited about the future, and I dreamed of a world where _everyone_ would install GPG. Now I’m still excited about the future, but I dream of a world where _I_ can uninstall it.

Session Does It Well

Session is a project that make Signal look bad for privacy. It is a project that is deeply involved with cryptosphere. Read the article linked on the heading to learn more about the project. Most people who are even heavily invested in cryptocurrency have not hear about a DAPP called Session. Session is not even presented as a DAPP. It is presented as an app to privately communicate without sending metadata (which Signal does not protect you from). Look at the website and see if you can find any reference to cryptocurrency.

I will help you where to find the reference. Scroll to the bottom of the page and there will be a link to Oxen Website. That is where you will find a link from Session to cryptocurrency. If you have installed Session, you will notice that you are essentially creating a cryptocurrency wallet for your communications.

Where Does Session Rank?

Even most experts in cryptosphere are not aware of Session and the DAPP does not even show up among popular ranking websites. A 750,000 userbase that is growing will rank Session a at 7th place and it can climb up over time. There is no bear market for sending messages! This is what is important about utility. When there is utility there is less need to speculate on prices and hype.

People Eat Without Knowing About The Digestive System

People use the internet without knowing anything about the inner workings of it. Even if we explain them the "magic", they may not understand it. We have to skip to the part where people simply "use" the technology. Do you even know how you visit a website when you enter the URL?

PGP was a flawed invention. Using PGP for E-mail is a lot of work and the privacy attained is far lower than what Session provides. Even if a messenger had lesser privacy, if it is easy to use, people will use it. The focus should be on increasing the privacy and freedom in the world. Refusing to drive a car because it is not the Lambo you wanted is not a good move. We can built a better world brick by brick. We can build it incrementally.

Governments Want to Crush Encryption

When Phil Zimmermann and few tech savvy users were using PGP, USSA was trying to crush it. It turned out hardly anybody was taking time to use PGP. When governments around the world are trying to crush end to end encryption today, the backlash is far higher and stakes are many orders of magnitudes better due to end to end encryption being widespread.

Usage is Better Than TradFi Money

Money flowing into cryptosphere can do 3 things. Not all of them are good things.

1. Increase development with better funding
2. Create hype + higher Token prices
3. Take control over the direction of development

Take a look at how things have been going with Uniswap. The open source code is amazing. What the company and the front end doing and the direction they are going is a completely different story. We cannot let our goals and principles diminished by the entities that made the existing systems of the world so terrible. We should aim to be our own banks; not wish bankers will buy our crypto!

We Need Projects That Are Decoupled from $BTC and Markets

The tides are slowly becoming more favorable for cryptocurrency prices. These are good times to build impactful decentralized projects. We need to get more users to play games, share their thoughts, send encrypted messages, create art and engage in commerce. I love DeFi and I an very much invested in DeFi. I am not close minded enough to think that money and few niches are all there is to Decentralized Ledgers and smart contracts.

@vsc.network is building a second layer on $HIVE and they have a DHF Proposal to help development. @splinterlands will soon release Land Expansion and Rebellion (set for December 5th). Koinos is quietly building world's best modular and free to use blockchain. I'm already a user and a fan of Session. There can be many projects that do not they are a part of cryptosphere. These have a chance at changing the world without being dragged around by $BTC or $ETH price.

Let There Be Evergreen DAPPs!

Posted Using InLeo Alpha

Posted Using InLeo Alpha