First I'll say the government already has an ID system with a backdoor they mandate you use (your federal social security ID and state ID). The backdoor isn't very interesting because anyone with your ID in hand also has it.
So how about this:
1. State assigns citizens an ID at birth
2. State allows citizens to submit a public key along with their ID at any time
3. Citizens can go to their bank / private social network / whatever and say "this is my public key, you can use it to sign messages to me, and you can verify someone a) alive and b) a citizen of $state is reading it (from here you can bootstrap whatever protocol you want)
4. The state<>citizen network established in (2) is constantly under attack as stealing someones private key valuable so you also need a legal and technical framework to defend it
The protocol for submitting private keys and defending it from attack is a much longer post, I'm convinced there are ways to do it that drastically favor defense over offense, but that's not the point here.
Our question is can a government force it's way into the protocol you bootstrapped on top
How would they?
1. They could reset your public key to one they control the secret to, and then impersonate you digitally to break into your bank or social network. However I don't think they could do this secretly (the key update would necessarily be publically visible), so it's not really a back door. They can already do this with a search warrant. And if you're paranoid you can bootstrap your secondary cryptographic networks with multiple factors. So, this is on net more secure for you.
2. They could try to recover your secret key by force or warrant - but again not a back door.
I think the real concern isn't backdooring it's blacklisting, if this system becomes the L1 for every L2 crytographic interaction, they can practically remove your ability to freely transact. But that's a political problem you address with political means, I'm convinced from a technical perspective this is more secure and far cheaper for everyone.
Whatever clever crypto system you think of: if it needs to work for the general population, it needs to go hand-in-hand with UX.
Say your example: a user generates a pub/priv keypair locally and shares the public one with the government.
How does the government know you’re rightfully sending the ID?
How does the user know what they are sending? Can the app/website/tool/person at post office they are using to generate+store+send the public key be trusted by the user? How can the government give trust to the user that this tool/person can be trusted?
And there we have attestation again. Or walled app stores, or certification as we have for physical services.
The way to do it _today_ requires enormous amounts of HBM! However, we've never designed inference accelerators, which is actually a quite "trivial" problem, but we've just never had a need.
Groq (acqui-hired by NVidia) came up with a different processor architecture: metric shit-tons of SRAM attached to a modest single core deterministic processor. No HBM needed on this card, and 32x faster inference than today's best GPUs at inference!
These LPUs are pretty useless for training though, which is useful for companies training models! Training is expensive, inference is cheap (someday, not now).
There's also a Canadian company that _literally burned the model as a silicon mask_ on a chip. It's unbelievably (1000x) fast, but not flexible of course: https://chatjimmy.ai
SRAM and HBM are two completely different things though... SRAM is what your L1,L2,L3 caches are made of (most of the time, asterisks exist). This is something we've been doing for years and is a proven technology thats unbelievably cheap. It's all part of the processor.
Strictly speaking there is that one startup that compiles entire models into huge ASIC. With trade off that entire hardware becomes outdated when new model version is released in 2-3 months.
I didn't say he's failing at everything - SpaceX certainly seems a huge success. Telsa had been doing well, although sales are now declining fast, and the Cybertruck has been a failure. He massively overpaid for Twitter, ruined the site, then got X.ai to bail him out. X.ai seems like a failure - evidentially not enough demand to utilize the data center he built for it, and when have you seen anyone say they use Grok for anything ?
And now SpaceX investors are going to be left as the bag holders for X.ai/Twitter.
It is always so odd seeing how many internet people consider any new attempt that doesn't go immediately viral with success as a bad mark on someone's character.
If you're not able to see a whole slew of "bad marks" on Musk's character, then you haven't been paying much attention. It's not either/or - you can be be successful in some areas while being a childish twit and moron in others.
I think I've just seen many more fake/exaggerated "bad marks" than real ones so I've become bitter. He's definitely not been perfect, but the areas I see flaws (he can be extremely rude, some drug abuse, doesn't treat close/loved ones well, seems to lash out when getting too close to someone, can be very Ego driven and doesn't admit it until it's too late, constantly needs to be at war with someone) are always just passed over for "He's a LiTErAL NAzI" and "He is HOARDING all the MonEY because he's SO GreedY"- which are just so demonstrably false.
Overall though, to classify the work he's done and the impact on the world as unsuccessful is just insane. It's almost always from someone who hasn't even managed to lead a team of 10 through one project too.
Yeah his luck is annoying. But he stoped having any character and ethics. He literaly was with his Tesla in front of the White House and bought himself a seat next to a Clown.
But he also plays in areas were market disruption can't be done by many people at all.
But look Tesla: He did the cybertruck debakel. He tanked Tesla as a brand, he is burning money on xAI and Twitter, he destroyed a beloved brand Twitter. He did the boring company garbage.
The only thing this shows is some kind of masterclass between manipulation, public ignorance, luck, economy of high invest high risk and risk adverse industries.
Starlink doesn't scale very well which is a low margin business, especially when Amazon and the others are joining the club.
xAI is just a loss.
Twitter probably still a loss.
Tesla made a lot of money with co2 certificates. And a market were people were quite ignorant for a long.
Space-X he wants to push that to the death, without a real endplan. He now talks about Mars and Datacenter in space like there is any real business up their.
This reads a lot like "the way I choose to live is the best and everyone else is sad." Anyone in a dense suburb is getting all the fresh food they want from a choice of 6 different grocery stores. And it's silly to complain about suburbs being crowded in comparison to cities.
Especially since America is happier than most European countries [1]. And the ones that are happier are the Nordics and Ireland which are more suburban and less dense.
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