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Jurisdiction Is Nearly Irrelevant to the Security of Encrypted Messaging Apps


Every time I lightly touch on this point, I always get someone who insists on arguing with me about it, so I thought it would be worth making a dedicated, singular-focused blog post about this topi…

If this vaguely sounds blockchainy to you, you would be correct: Every cryptocurrency ledger is a consensus protocol (often “proof-of-work”) stapled onto a transparency log, and from there, they build fancier features like smart contracts and zero-knowledge virtual machines. If your use case is to focus on scaling up group chats to large numbers of participants, efficiently, and don’t care about obfuscating metadata or social graphs, you might find MLS a more natural fit for your application. If you’re worried about the government holding a gun to some developer’s head and instructing them to compromise millions of people–including their own employees and innocent civilians–just to specifically get access to your messages, you might be better served by learning some hacker opsec(STFU is the best policy) than trying to communicate at all.

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