The first part of your proposal makes sense to me...

I'm struggling to follow your "reversed" idea, though. Maybe try giving me the ELI5 version.

Thanks, Chi.

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Changing the subject abruptly, I may as well use this post to ask (the forum) a question that's been on my mind for a while now: Is anyone else bothered by SMF externalizing PMs? As in, does anyone else find it odd that, on the one hand, the highest bug bounty ($60K, currently) on Bitcointalk relates to PM privacy, but, on the other hand, and in the name of convenience, the PMs you send are likely being re-sent to some outside server that you almost always have no dependable details on? (As in, who is the PM recipient's mailbox provider? Are you OK with that provider's data-handling policy? Are you OK with their level of programming/security competence, along with their stance on privacy to begin with? Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Are you OK with the contents of your correspondence, either now or in the future, being used to improve their services and train their models? And so on.)

I've been on-and-off thinking about this for a long time, but, what reminded me of it recently was reading the following (from a wonderful essay I bumped into while going over the WabiSabi paper):


I see three arguments against caring too much about this problem (all of which I can poke holes in, but, I'm playing devil's advocate here):

(a1) The forum is already man-in-the-middled (courtesy of Cloudflare, which is an obvious intelligence-gathering nexus), so, chances are good that the forum's PMs are being collected anyway.

(a2) People should be encrypting sensitive correspondence.

(a3) It's very convenient to be able to entirely read incoming PMs without having to be signed-in to Bitcointalk.

I guess, my counter-arguments go:

(c1) That's true, but, in my heart of hearts, I hope that theymos will eventually either find the energy himself, or develop enough trust in another networking-savvy programmer, to move the forum back to an in-house anti-DDoS system.

(c2) That's true, and it's what I do myself when something is really sensitive, but, I have a really hard time believing that most forum users know how to correctly do this and are disciplined enough to actually make themselves do it (especially for typical PM conversations, where no individual thing you're discussing is especially sensitive, but, taken as a whole, you'd still prefer the conversation to remain just between the communicating parties).

(c3) Is it, though? If you still received a notification by e-mail (with just the sender and subject of the PM, but without the actual message), would it really be so inconvenient if you couldn't read the whole PM right from your mailbox? (I mean, you'll have to use Bitcointalk anyway in order to reply to the message, so, what have you really gained by being able to quickly pre-read the PM? Isn't knowing who sent the message, and what it concerns, enough for you to go on until the next time you're signed-in?)

There's a really simple SMF patch that would prevent personal messages from being routinely transmitted outside of Bitcointalk's own system boundary:


Basically, e-mailed PM notifications would remain as-is, except that the "The message they sent you was:" part would no longer be included.

Is it only me, or, does it make sense to you, too, to take a convenience (experienced by some subset of PM-receiving users), and swap it for a very probable increase in privacy (experienced by basically every PM-sending user)?