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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5506 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Maybe the web should be purely static again. Web 2.0 was a mistake.

I’m not exactly sure how you envision the blockchain helping, here.

There has to be a trusted cert. Just put it on the blockchain, same with domain ownership. When someone holds a domain on the blockchain they can issue a cert for it that lives on the blockchain too and is used for their https.

Blockchains provide low-trust secure public timestamping, which means they can confirm priority and therefore resolve double-spend disputes (which is how they enable cryptocurrency). The issue with certificates is whether the public key is correct in the first place, and blockchains don't provide any additional security beyond the key-signing process - fundamentally you can't trust that a public key is correct unless you trust the person who published it, or someone else who signed it.

If two certificates for the same person or entity with different public keys are published at roughly the same time, either both are valid (you can have multiple public keys) or one should explicitly revoke the other. There is no question of priority.

Shouldn't keys be self published? As in someone has a wallet, they can buy domain ownership on the blockchain, their wallet then publishes the correct key. It is verified by the fact that their wallet is the owner of the domain on the blockchain. Their wallet also sets the config.

Is what you want "the certificate shows this server verifiably is run by the owner of the domain (or an approved proxy)?" That's not all the current regime is doing: there is a nonzero amount of "and is an upright business interest" there that crypto has well-known issues with. How would you revoke or reject certs from malware hosts? Even if LetsEncrypt isn't checking site contents, the browser vendors are still doing so, functionally replicating the original centralized PKI complaints.

there is a nonzero amount of "and is an upright business interest" there that crypto has well-known issues with. How would you revoke or reject certs from malware hosts? Even if LetsEncrypt isn't checking site contents, the browser vendors are still doing so, functionally replicating the original centralized PKI complaints.

You are saying censorship is baked in to the system for safety reasons. The solution here is to make censorship opt-in instead of forced. Censorship companies can run a censorship server that I query if I'm so paranoid about malware websites having TLS certs. If you make it to where I have to obey the censorship authority no matter what, then they inevitably start exploiting their power to perform political censorship.

If you're that concerned about censorship, why use TLS at all? It makes sense if you're concerned about privacy -- assuming your counterparty's certs are actually secured -- but then you also want to make sure your counterparty is who they say they are so you don't leak messages to the wrong parties.

There is a very real privacy-censorship tradeoff here that is inherent in any indirect trust scheme: unless you're trading RSA keys out-of-band with your servers (not bad if you can), the PKI problem isn't really escapable. Web of trust never worked as an alternative. Any centralized solution there begets censorship.

All I need to do is confirm the counterparty is the owner of the domain, which they are on the blockchain under this scheme. It doesn't say whether they are good people or not.

How do you trust your counterparty to keep your conversation private without knowing they are who you think they are, and not a leaky proxy?

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