Sovereign hardware, agreed. Problem is, it's exactly hardware where economies of scale matter. Maybe if bitcoin miners and AI chips are truly commoditized.

re: Chinese users. I don't know your level of experience with China (I lived there for many years), but I think it very clearly shows the opposite: through a combination of deep packet inspection, a ton of monitoring and intimidating the public, the amount of "wall hopping" that goes on is tremendously small and 95%+ of the population know nothing except what the CCP allows them to. It does not support your case. re: reduced need for cpu/compute: I don't get your idea there, if you are replacing web calls with AI calls you're surely using more compute, not less.

I guess the most useful general comment is: I'm not denying that individual people, at smaller scales, can resist this, with effort. I'm just trying to make a correct prediction about the future of the world generally: I think the overall direction/trend is definitely going one way, not the other way.

Sure. There are no easy answers; the question is whether encrypting L1 is the right solution.

That's why i mentioned FHE. If/when it becomes practical, filtering is theoretically possible. But I agree client side is already important today.

I've used both ppq and maple; definitely useful, especially ppq's e2e encrypted to TEE option. I agree that local models continue to move forward, and will be increasingly useful. But if personal devices are fully locked down it will be moot *from the perspective of sovereignty*. (You can also argue that too much compute power will also be locked down).

I think you're right, but it's not that UK people are uniquely stupid or something. It's just that the prevailing narrative they suck up there, and in much of Europe, is uniquely poisonous to their own thriving.

And fwiw (not much), re: my vague war comment, I am talking about the potential long term effect of complete societal value realignment. But, who knows.

Also, open weight models follow the same pattern: can't be stopped easily but small chunk of people will have what it takes to use them, and without approved hardware you are crippled. Tbf this one is a very evolving situation, we'll see.

Yeah there's definitely a desire, but be clear, it's a smallish minority that have this desire for freedom, especially outside the US, sad to say. And fulfilling that desire seems to get harder every year, as in, the devices you actually need, to be functional in the world, are locked down more and more.

I'm really curious why you think "it will be hard to make devices the chokepoint." Isn't that playing out, right now? What proportion of even freedom-aware people, especially outside the US, have a smartphone not controlled by Google or Apple?

Oh, right. But that one is of the type that'll always exist right: voluntarily auditability. Monero has that, zcash has that, Liquid with CT has it. Etc.