Jesus, talk about solving problems that doesn't exist.
What will be the next, mind control programs?
Backbone network taps 'did not exist' either...until Snowden released the NSA docs last year. Until then they were paranoid fantasies. I remember when 4 or 5 undersea cables went down in rapid succession maybe 5 or 6 years ago. I personally thought it entirely likely that this was a result of taps going in. Of course the hypothesis was roundly derided as some sort of paranoid fantasy.
Fortunately (or not) it has never really bothered me to be labeled a 'conspiracy theorist'. Time has proven again and again that it has resulted in a more accurate view of the world. In fact I only every really heard of and became interested in Bitcoin itself because of looney-tunes whacko interpretations of how monetary systems worked. Right or wrong, my outlying views on the subject have directly resulted in a huge increase in my financial statement if nothing else. Predating Bitcoin in fact.
I'm not quite sure what your take is, but I admit there is a few use cases where such a thing would be useful, like when an old woman is being robbed of her smartphone with btc on it. If there was some kind of massive scale abuse though, we would have bigger problems that couldn't be solved by turning off phones willy-nilly.
That said, I completely agree on getting open hardware going. I have been arguing that for quite some time myself.
