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RE: Tauchain and the privacy question (benefits of secret contracts and private knowledge)
I think data scarcification, i.e. any errrmmm ... message to be usable ONLY by the addressee and ONLY the way authorized, without any possibility to resend, amend, store, copy ... etc. is unavoidable consequence of Tau, and doable under Tau's own cryptographic means. I said many times what I think on 'privacy' - it is only and always about effective OWNERSHIP of information. Nowadays ownership is enforceable the fiat, external, coercion way. Blockchain is not trustless it is self-enforcing. Those who put info ownership under blockchain way of self-enforcement ... well ... ( Hardware is copiable too). https://people.cs.umass.edu/~immerman/pub/uniform.pdf
Faced with a sort of arms race type scenario (once people figure out how valuable the ideas behind Tauchain really are) then we will potentially greatly benefit if as you say the creator maintains cryptographic ownership rights. The law is flawed as there is corruption, decisions from humans can be purchased a lot cheaper than the cost of mining or of trying to corrupt a decentralized network. So in a way this could allow for the data scarcification as you say or as I like to say it allows for the creators to maintain digital rights through cryptographic leverage.
Leveraging the law works only sometimes. Leveraging money works if you have a lot of it. Leveraging cryptography can work for anybody. Suddenly you do not have to be rich to receive the same ownership benefits as you could get with a legally enforced contract. In fact you could get better benefits because it's cryptographically self enforced in such a way that a promise can't be broken.
Isn't the keeping of promises the whole basis behind all contracts? So cryptography allows the creator to promise to deliver and allows the creator to set terms written in "stone" or in cryptography which is as hard as stone, and to provide permissions, access controls, access limits, but also to accept limits on their control such as time limits, or a limit measured in the computation it takes to break a certain puzzle (computational limits) so that if someone really wants to open source or unlock certain data then they'll direct mining toward it (if the data is worth enough to spend the resources).
The ideal to me is not to make it impossible to unlock data because we might someday be faced with a situation where it's in the best interest of the world to do so. The ideal is to make it sufficiently expensive that only the most important situations would be able to amass the resources to break the puzzle. Puzzle cryptography has great use here I think.
There are many ways to lock something up via a puzzle. A puzzle which can only be unlocked by "mining" which is to dedicate computation resources to produce enough tokens to pay the fee to unlock the cryptography. This token could be held by the programmer who wrote the code which would make sure the programmer will get paid if the community decides to unlock his source code.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10623-018-0461-x
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity16/technical-sessions/presentation/biryukov
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10623-018-0461-x
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity16/technical-sessions/presentation/biryukov
The ideal or what I call the ideal is with time lock and puzzle mining if you, me, with a team of others have a discussion on Tauchain which solves a problem in the world but we want our solution to remain private along with our knowledge bases for only a fixed period of time (say the time we expect to live (+60 years) then time lock encryption would allow us to make the promise in the smart contract form that all of our private knowledge base will be released after +60 years time no matter what.
This would allow the community to trust us because future generations would benefit not just from our solution but the knowledge we arrived at would not be at risk of being lost. The library of Alexandria problem is averted.
Mine to unlock would be to have a time lock puzzle which with ordinary hardware would for example take +60 years to unlock but with specialized hardware which would be some kind of ASIC then this could perhaps be reduced to 10 years, or 6 years, or 10 months, depending on how much computation resources society chooses to throw at it. In this way we can have a means in an emergency to release knowledge from a time lock but at a predictably high cost. The cost could be predicted for example as the amount of memory required or some other resource which in theory could be paid for perhaps using Agoras itself to rent these resources.
Mine to unlock is speculative because I don't see anyone actually having done it. But I don't see anything theoretically which would make it impossible to do either. So I think that is something which will happen sooner or later.