Re-visiting Pgp Encrypted Phone Numbers and Snail Mail: A Cypherpunk Blindspot?

Juice
2 min readMar 13, 2019

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I wrote of this “idea” a few years ago when I was first learning about cryptography's role in crypto-currency (or first learning about pgp). I’m still not very knowledgeable about the subject but I have some basic understanding of how it works I think.

The idea is simple enough, so much so that I thought I must not understand cryptography in this way, but I recently revisited the idea with @brian_trollz and iirc and understand correctly he agrees it’s trivial to implement.

The idea is that instead of using public phone addresses and house addresses and so on when we are giving out our information we instead hold a private address and we give out corresponding public addresses as if they are pgp keys.

Its obviously a very powerful solution socially because it means you can put filters or expires on who has a number that can reach you. It means that telemarketers can’t brute force your number. Or in regard to mail it means that the sender doesn’t know your name or your actually house address (they might only know the country they are sending to.

The limitation of course is that there needs to be a central authority that routes the information and this authority would have access to some or all of your private details/addresses/keys (or not).

For this reason governments would not be against such technological improvements nor do I think any democratic constitution could not uphold it.

And here I think maybe this is why it hasn’t been implemented which is because the cypherpunks only look for solutions that are separations from government and third parties.

This would be a blind spot created by the crypto-anarchic religious beliefs.

Also if I have not understood something and what I am expressing has a flaw I would like to know and understand.

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