A Bitcoin-Powered Marketplace Could Change the Future of Secrets

In the modern classic movie Sneakers, a ragtag team of hackers and security engineers attempt to pull off the mother of all crypto-heists – they are hired to steal a hardware device that is capable of decrypting anything. The movie, written and produced in the early 1990s, is oddly prescient about the subject of cryptography and how much of our modern technology depends on its infallibility.
The film’s ending, viewed through the lens of the last decade, takes on a completely new, almost parodical, meaning: the NSA turn out to be the good guys.
Last month, the U99 group announced plans to develop the Slur.io marketplace, a decentralised platform for matching buyers and sellers of secrets. Anonymous sellers post an encrypted version of a secret (along with, I assume, some form of provenance) on the site, and anonymous buyers bid for its decryption keys with bitcoin. Once an agreement has been reached, bitcoin is exchanged, keys are transmitted, and secrets are revealed.
The secrets could literally be anything, and the U99 group has not held back with its examples: trade secrets, source code for proprietary software, proof of tax evasion by major corporations, military intelligence, stolen credit card databases, celebrity nude photos, evidence relevant to ongoing trials – the list, and our collective imaginations, goes on quite a ways (to the avid movie fan, their rundown reads like every conceivable MacGuffin in every heist movie ever made).
U99 envisions Slur.io as Wikileaks 2.0, an ‘incalculable resource for public knowledge and unfiltered access to the truth”. Except that in the future journalists will need to compensate whistleblowers for the extreme risks they take.

This post was published at Coin Desk on January 10, 2015.