Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Architect—Internet Cryptography Pioneer—Co-author TLS & DID Standards—Collaborative Tools & Patterns
Lafayette, CA
Joined January 2007
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The 2024 annual report from @BlockchainComns is here! It highlights our work toward an open, secure, and compassionate digital infrastructure, emphasizing interoperability and self-sovereign wallet standards through key projects: dCBOR, FROST, and Gordian Envelope. 🧵… [1/11]
#QotD (quote of the day)
“The biggest problem of intelligent society is no longer the humanization of machines, but the machinization of humans.” — Liu Yongmou ‡
We keep asking whether machines will become persons. Liu Yongmou asks the better question: will persons become machines? An agent serves a principal. Every system that cannot hear you say no is training you to swap roles. Take back the helm!
‡ “智能社会最大的问题，不再是机器的人化，而是人的机器化。”
— Liú Yǒngmóu (刘永谋), philosopher of technology at Renmin University of China, Beijing, writing in China Science Daily (中国科学报), January 3, 2025, about his book The World After the Intelligence Revolution: AI Technology and the Fate of Human Society (智能革命后的世界：AI技术与人类社会的命运); Chongqing Publishing House, November 2024). Translation of the quote was confirmed & facilitated by AI.
Live steam has started!
Epoch 13 Project Intros | Session, FreeSocks, & Gordian Stack xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1mxPaZMAw…
I will be part of a live stream today hosted by @OctantApp in a 1/2 hour (2pm PDT, 5pm EDT) to discuss privacy, security, and self-sovereignty, along with @session_app @unredacted_org. Come listen and ask questions!
Kicking off the new week with a brand new stream 👀
Speaking freely 🗣️
Learn about onion-routed messaging, fighting censorship, and self-sovereign privacy.
@session_app | @Cryptic_cm
FreeSocks | Zach from @unredacted_org
Gordian Stack | @ChristopherA from @BlockchainComns
See you at 9 PM UTC!
We are not digital serfs. Ten years after I wrote the principles of self-sovereign identity, I'm still building the tools that keep that promise.
If you value autonomy, dignity, and privacy in our digital lives, three minutes and one vote in @OctantApp's Epoch 13 matter:
This week we're part of @OctantApp's Epoch 13, which funds projects advancing privacy, not only on @ethereum but also across the open internet.
Our 3-minute video says how the #GordianStack keeps the #SSI promise, and why we hope you'll vote for it:
developer.blockchaincommons.… 🧵…
Christopher Allen retweeted
"The real solution is not to rely on any single key."
@ChristopherA co-authored TLS and has warned about bad randomness since the 90s.
He says the wallet companies were "very narrow."
With multisig as the default, the Coldcard bug wouldn't have mattered.
S17 E46
In case you have not yet heard, @Vladcostea has been livestreaming from the final installment of @tabconf.
In this episode we have so much, so the summary may be a little longer than usual.
Paul Sztorc, @Truthcoin, talks about his quantum-resistant soft fork demo, why miners will "never" run it, and the eCash hard fork, including claiming coins and liquidity pools instead of paid exchange listings
André Beganski, @andrebeganski chats about joining the MARA Foundation and journalism as a public good
Alex Lewin, @ALewin and Janusz, @januszg_ gives us insight into private AI meets private money and AI making Bitcoin better.
Christopher Allen, @ChristopherA on his path from early crypto work to TLS and Key reuse.
Will, six privacy prisoners and a pardon campaign!
Michael Tidwell, @miketwenty1, the Tabbies awards, why TABConf ends, the no-shill rule and Taproot as his favourite fork.
youtube.com/live/bPu4cSqegsM…
I became CTO of Certicom after the seeds & generators were chosen for the NIST ECDSA curves, but I was always a bit skeptical about the claims of their subversion by NSA, as I knew some of the people and it didn’t make sense. Glad to see some vindication. anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
Our @Cloudflare entry: Open Integrity Forge. Agents work in parallel forks, each with its own 1-hour signing key. Every push is checked against the repo's own rules; only a merge a person signs with a passkey reaches main. Built on Artifacts, Workers & Durable Objects. 🧵/
Cloudflare is hosting a competition to see who will build the next Git platform for an era of AI agents. Artifacts is in open beta, with Workers bindings, data jurisdiction controls, and event subscriptions for repository changes. cfl.re/4iZypy5 #BirthdayWeek
Why it matters for self-sovereignty: the passkey verifies identity; it isn't the identity. The library runs in each app's own Worker, with no identity provider, password or email. Recovery codes are BIP39 or ur:seed URs you can keep or shard using any tool you choose. 4/
Next: passkey servers for a FROST coordinator, or collaborative seed recovery so a shard can lean on Apple's or Google's recovery without either becoming a single point of failure. More from our October developer meeting:
developer.blockchaincommons.… 5៚
Christopher Allen retweeted
MigaLabs is joining the effort to fund privacy projects through @OctantApp Epoch 13!
We pledge to reimburse our team members up to 0.04 ETH each for voluntary contributions to eligible privacy projects during Oct 14–21.
Privacy is essential infrastructure for Ethereum. Let’s support the people building it.
#Ethereum #Privacy
Believe in autonomy, dignity, and privacy for our digital lives? Have a little ETH in a wallet? A single vote can have a large impact on how grants are matched in this quadratic funding round. Six Open Internet projects, who don’t have a deep ETH community base, need your vote:
Here are details on how to participate in voting:
xitter.cf/octantapp/status/21103…
📣 Attention, privacy lovers!
Voting in Epoch 13 - the Privacy Round - is now open and runs through October 21.
“Cool, but I don’t have GLM locked...”
No worries. You don’t need need to have ethereum:0x7dd9c5cba05e151c895fde1cf355c9a1d5da6429 to participate.
Anyone with $ETH can now contribute through the contribute-and-burn path. 🧵
Christopher Allen retweeted
ICANN revealed hundreds of applications for new domain endings earlier this week. Meanwhile, .onion has been here all along. 🧅
What are Onion Services, and why use them? Watch our explainer! @aslnoozdah
👍🙏
Peer-to-Peer: Big government is big tech’s moat
"We cannot let the government or corporations prevent us from having freedom, knowledge, and prosperity. And the best way to do so is by eliminating the means for anyone to play God; to pick winners and losers; to discriminate and oppress."
p2p.coincenter.org/p/big-gov…
I have great gratitude for this community. I joined as a senior fellow as early supporters of @KEricDrexler’s like @marksammillerand & Phil Salin gave me my early career at Xanadu which led to my first cryptographic work, RSAref for PGP, SSLRef, TLS 1.0 and much more. Prescient!
Congratulations to @lifeext @KEricDrexler for having co-founded an organization that was unusually early, often right, and always prescient when it comes to envisioning and building flourishing futures defined by the interplay of strong technology - from molecular nanotechnology, longevity escape velocity, sovereign AI, to neurotechnology. You were the reason I packed up my life a decade ago to move to the Bay and I've been grateful for that every day since.