SPIDR Cardano Stake Pool

Digital privacy

A lot of people living in democracies take for granted the privacy we enjoy in our private, physical lives. We would be outraged if government agencies would always be eaves dropping inside our homes. Unfortunately, this very eaves dropping is most likely happening to some degree in our digital realm.

A lot of legislative and executive branches of government simply do not have the right amount of “technical” people within these bodies to protect us from this mass surveillance.

The fact that the European Union would like to weaken encryption by creating backdoors (link is in German, EU resolution titled “Security through encryption and security despite encryption” can be found here) is very worrying to me. Which criminal would continue using flawed encryption algorithms? It seems to me a no-brainer: the only people that would continue using it are regular folks.

Furthermore, massive data gathering is happening all around the world with the goal of targeting criminals. This may seem like a noble cause, but the data gathered is not limited to those of criminals. Enormous amounts of data is also being stored of people who have done nothing wrong. The guarantees that this data will not be misused in the future is lacking. To which degree does gathering huge amounts of data justify the likely small percentage of users that are surveilled and committing crimes.

Tor

One way to strengthen your online anonimity is to use the Tor network. The Tor network is a network which routes your internet traffic through a worldwide network of Tor nodes and multiple layers of encryption. Think of these layers of encryption as an onion ring. You can read more about the Tor protocol here. Ideally, when establishing a connection over Tor, all three nodes are run by different operators. If all nodes in your Tor circuit are owned by the same malicious operator, your anonimity is lost.

One of the possible attacks to the Tor network is that a large share of “malicious” operators join the Tor network. The more malicious operator there are, the more chance your path contains more than one of these nodes from the same party and possibly compromising your anonimity.

I have been running Tor nodes for over a decade. The more non-malicious nodes there are, the safer the network becomes. Since 2019 I’ve been running a Tor relay that averages over 2 TB of traffic daily.

[notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 2 days 0:00 hours, with 48622 circuits open. I've sent 4423.03 GB and received 4386.05 GB. I've received 528695 connections on IPv4 and 5902 on IPv6. I've made 164124 connections with IPv4 and 18565 with IPv6.

By delegating your ADA to the SPIDR Stake Pool, you are indirectly helping me strengthen the Tor network by running more Tor nodes.

Should you delegate to the SPIDR stake pool?

If you plan on staking your ADA for a long time, you are very welcome to stake your ADA with the SPIDR pool!

The SPIDR Stake Pool would like to attract people concerned about digital privacy. Any delegators are whole-heartedly welcomed!

Let’s try to not end up in an Orwellian world. Even though some would argue we are already living in one.