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TylerJay comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Not related to CH102, but I just realized that "Slytherin System" messages are a physical implementation of Tor. Entry node who knows only the sender and the middle node, middle node who knows only the entry and exit nodes, exit node who knows only the middle node and the receiver.
Yep. I enjoyed seeing a mix net in MoR. Incidentally, can you see any weaknesses in the Slytherin System as described?
Sure: there's no indication of delivery, so you don't even know if one of the hops in your message opened all the envelopes, took all the money, read your private note, and trashed it.
I think there's a bonus feature to having two hops in the middle. If the sender finds that the recipient never received the message, he immediately distrusts his first hop and perhaps publishes the knowledge. If the first hop wasn't the culprit, he either publishes the second hop's unreliability or takes horrible devious Slytheriny vengeance on them.
So, due to mutually assured destruction, neither hop wants to defect and risk losing a nice income source permanently.
Yes, without public-key crypto or at least crypto of some sort, you easily lose any secrecy to any bad actors in the mix net. But the absence of dummy messages or very high traffic also means you don't necessarily get anonymity either: just observe everyone in the System.
"Tor" stands for "The Onion Router", and I could have sworn that Harry explicitly thought of the Slytherin System as "onion routing" at one point but I can't seem to find it.