I came from the oldschool cypherpunk cryptogeeks when it meant secure comms and not shitcoin.
There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.
And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.
The point was never to make it impossible to have E2E communication. They just want to make it too inconvenient so that they can spy on the ordinary people. Criminals will, of course, find a way to have secure conversations – this is just a pretext.
Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the cost of enforcing laws against the use of strong encryption.
The public blockchain is the first solution to create a stateful protocol that is fully decentralized and can persist over a long period of time. For a public blockchain to function, it requires a native digital currency that compensates the parties who provide the economically costly digital signal that is used to coordinate the convergence on a shared state.
There was a subset of us who thought that encryption wasn't the final goal, but steganography was needed to HIDE the encrypted comms. Else simple encryption could be attacked legally, or with a crowbar.
And with every bloody week a large government is "let's backdoor encryption haha" its high time to really develop stego that can overlay on top of text, pictures, audio, and video. Only then can they play fuck-fuck games about spying on our comms, and they'll see innocuous banter - but its really stego'd comms overlay.