Earlier quoted context omitted.
> something about Bloom Filters or PGP Signatures or something, I dunno Would this not defeat the purpose? Once an individual was tied to a unique piece of data, they'd be tied to all data in the stream. I think such a system would definitely require guaranteed expiration (impossible?). Or some sort of rotating keys or the metadata piece would still be uniquely identifying. I like this idea, as a concept, but I have…
rickycook responded to this part with a proposal, but I have my own take on some of it: For the "tied to a unique piece of data," that's why I want Bob to download lots of messages, hiding the fact that the person at 14.85.101.86 is the user with the recipient ID of ntULzh2AeEgPH9bKxrn3gUL. Bob should also be rotating his IDs all the time. Maybe they're single-use. And if Bob wants Alice to be able to send him messag…
I wonder if there's a cryptographically secure way to build a known "stream" of one-use tokens (addresses, if you will) based on known "public key." For metadata security, you only hand that public key out to those you trust.
Another thought is the ability to attempt decoding of every message (as you already alluded to). Encode some well-known bytes at the beginning of every message and see if your key can decode and match them. I'm not certain that protects against metadata snooping, since I don't understand the cryptography enough to know if that well-known text would always be the same for a target private key.