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This paper theorizes a DAO whose sole purpose is to ingest encrypted leaks, verify them without ever reading them, and then decide—through token-weighted, fully-homomorphic tally—whether to publish for free, auction to the highest bidder, or burn the decryption key. No editorial desk, no courier, no single point of failure. This represents a pure theory-craft of such a "Whistleblower DAO", stripped of moral framing and recruitment calls.
Dark DAO: Any autonomous smart-contract organism that operates under cryptographic darkness. Inputs, state transitions, and even governance tallies can be computed on ciphertext. Outsiders can verify correctness; insiders can remain ignorant of content.
Whistleblower DAO: A subclass whose input bounty predicates always resolve to "provide a zero-knowledge proof that document D satisfies public claim C".
All traffic rides Nym mixnet. Nym's Sphinx packet format and cover traffic provide timing-obfuscation at network scale without the exit-node topology vulnerabilities that plague onion routing.
Ciphertext shards are erasure-coded 30-of-50 and addressed by content hash. Pinning occurs on any programmable storage base (Filecoin, Arweave, or FHE-friendly L2 calldata). The DAO never stores directly; it only stores pointers and encrypted key fragments.
Plaintext → AES-GCM → AES key k → k split via t-of-n threshold BLSShares are re-encrypted to the DAO's aggregate public key. Decryption therefore requires on-chain governance to reach the threshold.
Bounty poster locks collateral and publishes public predicate P(D)
Whistleblower submits (ciphertext, zk-proof)
Proof demonstrates: ∃ D such that P(D)=1 and SHA-256(D)=hash embedded in ciphertext
Verification runs in milliseconds on-chain; no plaintext surfaces
Token holders vote on three outcomes:
A. Public-Drop: Release key shares openly
B. Auction: Sealed-bid Vickrey, proceeds split by contract
C. Burn: Delete key shares, refund bounty minus burn fee
Votes themselves are FHE-ciphertext ballots tallied threshold-style, preventing visibility of partial counts and eliminating last-minute vote buying.
Bounty sizing curve: Collateral required scales non-linearly with estimated impact to deter spam
Reputation token: Soul-bound, non-transferable, awarded only to successful leakers. Higher balance increases future bounty multipliers and voting weight in reveal phase
Yield sink: A slice of every auction feeds a staked reserve that auto-compounds, funding future audits or legal defense pools without identifiable treasury managers
Defection cost: Any single node operator attempting early decryption needs ≥t shares; geographic dispersion plus SGX enclaves raises coordination cost above expected payoff
Content blackmail: While auction option allows adversaries to bid for suppression, public-drop option forces adversaries to outbid the entire market, raising censorship costs
Deepfake dilution: Provenance zk-circuits (sensor fingerprints, device attestation) shift forgery cost from quadratic to exponential in fidelity
Rubber-hose extraction: Social layer risk of threshold key share extraction, mitigated only by bribing keyholders more than adversaries can threaten
Predicate rigging: Bounty poster crafts P(D) so narrowly that only forged documents satisfy it. Counter-play requires open predicate review period before collateral locks
Jurisdictional node takedown: If >n−t nodes reside in one legal regime, subpoena risk centralizes. Ideal: n≥50 nodes across ≥25 jurisdictions; real-world clustering remains an open parameter
Anyone can mint "historical bounty" tokens ex-post; holders retroactively crowdfund rewards when new evidence emerges.
Predicates support logical combinations ("D proves claim C1 OR C2"), enabling combinatorial bounty markets.
Governance can spawn child DAOs with stricter or looser thresholds, creating fractal secrecy levels.
A lattice of interlocking Dark DAOs: leak intake DAOs, verification DAOs, auction DAOs, reputation DAOs. Each specializes, none trusts the others, yet cryptographic proofs bind the entire stack into a single trustless pipeline from secret to sunlight—or to ashes.
Zero-knowledge proofs: Well-established, with efficient implementations (zk-SNARKs, Bulletproofs)
Threshold cryptography: Battle-tested in production systems
Fully homomorphic encryption: Computationally intensive but feasible for simple operations like voting
Mixnets: Nym represents current state-of-the-art in metadata resistance
FHE performance: Current FHE schemes impose significant computational overhead
Key management: Distributed key generation and threshold operations add complexity
Network effects: Requires critical mass of participants for security guarantees
Legal compliance: Jurisdictional arbitrage assumptions may not hold under coordinated enforcement
Incentive alignment: Reputation tokens and economic penalties create reasonable game theory
Market liquidity: Auction mechanisms require sufficient bidder participation
Operational costs: Gas fees, storage costs, and compute requirements need sustainable funding model
Social engineering: Human elements remain the weakest link in cryptographic systems
Regulatory response: Novel legal frameworks could emerge to address such systems
Technical complexity: Implementation difficulty may limit practical deployment
The architecture is theoretically sound and builds on established cryptographic primitives. Primary challenges lie in practical implementation, economic sustainability, and regulatory adaptation rather than fundamental technical impossibility.
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