The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis

The cypherpunks were wrong (but also right)

Cory Doctorow
OneZero
Published in
10 min readMar 27, 2022

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A medieval engraving of a prisoner being tortured on a rack; in the background is a waterfall effect from The Matrix.

Listen to those who extol the virtues of blockchain and cryptocurrency and pretty soon, you’ll hear about the power of cryptocurrency to resist tyranny.

This isn’t a novel claim: the cypherpunk movement of the early 1990s (widely acknowledged as the intellectual and technological…

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