Cryptography pioneer David Chaum says web3 “calculates with a conscience” – TechCrunch

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David Chaum is a giant in the field of computer security and, unsurprisingly, cryptocurrency. His focus since the early 1980s, his company DigiCash sent the first digital payment in 1994, and he’s since doubled down on blockchain and security.

Chaum and his new company, xx.network, are preparing messaging for the future by releasing the first “quantum-resistant” messaging app, a service that’s said to be resistant to brute-force attacks for decades. Called xxmessenger, the app launches today.

“As has become evident over the past 10 years, the most valuable resource in the 21st century is metadata,” Chaum said in an interview. “It can be used to sell products better, or find answers better, but it can also be used to do propaganda better, hunt down dissidents and control populations.”

Chaum’s ultimate goal is absolute security and privacy with respect to everything from payments to voting systems, and, as he put it, “the inability for service providers to gain an advantage over their users”. And he sees Web3 and blockchain as part of that equation.

We spoke with Chaum about why Web3 and blockchain are the future, and why we should be concerned about the NSA reading our messages.

Most of what we want to do digitally (and financially) is possible today, but it exists in a structure that allows a select few to manipulate it themselves.

TechCrunch: I’m sure you have an opinion on the current tech climate. What do you think of the idea that Web3 belongs to VCs? Is Web3 real?

David Chaum: In any iteration of the web, there will be powerful entities that will come in and try to take over the space. But VCs aren’t inherently bad – projects that help the greater good have to get funding from somewhere. VC’s presence in the space just indicates that there will be money to be made in DApps and in building the new open source and decentralized web.

This shows how major players like Facebook have gone to great lengths over the years to knowingly push the false narrative that “strong end-to-end encryption” is the be all and end all of privacy, while at the same time flailing wildly to distract from the metadata capture they were engaged in, which is core to their monetization scheme. Plus, you can start to see it now: they’re starting to prepare for the downfall of their secret metadata monopoly and are trying to get into courier payments as a monetization system they can switch to.

There will be challenges to overcome in the massive shift from a website owned by five major entities to a website owned by absolutely no one, but we are laying the groundwork for that. Web3 isn’t finished, it’s just begun.

You’ve been in the industry for decades. What has changed in recent years?

It seems to me that Bitcoin and the like created something that could no longer be ignored. Now the question is, how can it be presented to the general public in such a way that they can easily adopt this new generation of information technology?

Major platforms have been caught selling out their users and in the process damaging the world deeply. Davos attendees cited ‘lack of social cohesion’ as one of the main issues today, 27% of them, despite never even making it into the top ten in recent years, which traditionally evolves slowly.

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