RE: Tauchain and the privacy question (benefits of secret contracts and private knowledge)
This is an extremely eye-opening post for me. I know nothing of Tau Chain, Enigma, or Agoras and I'm having trouble understanding what the three have to do with one another. Any relation to Lamden (TAU as listen on coinmarketcap?)
In regards to this broad query regarding secrecy/privacy, it's not an easily solvable dilemma. Ideally, radical transparency should work the best since it's closest to how nature operates. In reality, the need to mitigate the damage done by devious actors is a constant spectre hanging over the development and successful deployment of any new technology.
That being said, the potential damage done by secrecy (which is not so different from the damage done by directly lying) in my view outweighs any of the potential benefits. The idea of time-locked algorithms is ingenious, though wasteful. I think it would work relatively well at maintaining the farce that is copyright/"intellectual property."
I'm torn, because what you present seems like it would work well for the time being and near future, but wouldn't be a true solution. Secrecy tends to promote corruption, elitism, and centralization, so I view it as the enemy of any truly advanced blockchain.
The opposite. Nature is all about privacy. Predators use camouflage to help them get closer to prey so the exact location of an animal is private. Prey uses all kinds of evolved mechanisms from hard shells to other mechanisms to protect themselves from predators. Humans evolved different languages so as to protect our minds from being invaded by foreign enemies.
The idea that nature is transparent is interesting because I see in history only greater and greater levels of privacy. Even the concept of God (omnipotent) whether you believe was invented or is real is really the only being which is supposed to know what everyone is doing and thinking.
So radical transparency to me never existed in nature from what I can see. The state of nature from what I can see is a state of war and in war privacy saves lives while transparency only makes it easier for predators, parasites, etc. Now you can make a case that predators rely on privacy (camouflage) and that parasites rely on privacy (being really small so harder to detect) and so on and this is all true but you also can say humans speaking different languages and having brains which can think privately have always relied on privacy as well.
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Thanks for the reply. I think your reading of the term 'nature' is different than mine. I did a perhaps poor job of conveying it, and it's a less common use of the term (in English.) One way of thinking of it is the entire universe as an intelligent organism, or perhaps a monolithic brain.
I suppose the most similar idea in contemporary western intellectual consciousness would be pantheistic ways of conceiving of reality.
All concepts are invented. Yet, what allows them to exist is real in the truest sense.
In humans, perhaps. Again I think we have diverging definitions of the term privacy. I see it as a somewhat spurious construct invented by the mind that is a byproduct of the emergence of sentience. It is useful for survival but a hindrance to knowledge.
That's a different angle than I've considered being an aspect of 'privacy-as-I-know-it.' Thank you for it. I tend to think the root of many disagreements is caused by discrepancies in definition of terms. Here, and below, you stripped some of the negative associations of the term I held.
For now, to this I'll just say I really appreciate your point of view and it has enlightened me/expanded my understanding of the idea of "privacy" in its most quintessential form :-)
I am familiar with the concepts like panspermia for example but from what I know about physics all things are temporary. The privacy that existed for life in the past was based on the fact that a lifeform would eventually die and deteriorate to dust. The entropy is what I'm referring to in physics.
Written language changed this particularly for the human species. Very few species or perhaps we are the only species really which can record our history in stone so future generations can inherit our knowledge. Privacy in the sense that I think about it is that you can encode your knowledge in such a way that it lasts as long as you want it to last and is released when you want it to be released. In other words it is access control.
For sake of humanity I think most or perhaps even all knowledge should be released at some point. But some knowledge is better released after a person is dead which is why I state access control is really what privacy is about. If you're not alive to see it released then it will not matter for you and has no impact on your security. If you are alive then it could impact your security.
An example could be that you don't want your net worth to be known to the public until after you die. This is a matter of access control.
My argument is it doesn't have to be. The world can get the release of all knowledge at some date in the future. The competitive advantage that comes from keeping knowledge private does not last forever and can be set to expire. So I agree if it's locked up forever it does society no good because we can't learn from it but then if it's not locked up for some period of time then it presents a different problem.
This is why I favor expiration dates. In fact, classified information typically has expiration dates. It's classified for some period of years and then it's declassified.
In physics I don't know what consciousness is. I don't know what sentience is or whether it's real because physics can't answer these questions. Science cannot answer these questions. So the natural debate if we go by physics and science, can't include consciousness or sentience. We can speak of computation but this isn't restricted to living beings. The universe computes.
BTW Tauchain isn't Lamden (TAU) on Coinmarketcap. Tauchain is AGRS (Agoras) on Bitshares. Enigma is ENG on Coinmarketcap. What they all have to do with each other is they all are important projects in my opinion and I hold.