ie. if you really want to change the world instead of paying lip service to it and going for the money grab, here's one opportunity.

Indeed. Listen up all you MIT kids: do you want to be cooler than Mark Zuckerberg, or do you want to be cooler than John McCarthy, Tim Berners-Lee and Captain Crunch all rolled into one?

How do you pay for it?

I have a team of capable engineers, and relationships with network/wifi hardware/firmware developers. What I don't have is $2-10M to spend designing open protocols (and building the software), especially with no obvious commercial upside.

No idea, but that doesn't mean it can't be done either non-profit-wise or even with significant upside, it's just your chances of VC-money and selling to a major corporation for fuck-you money are diminished relative to TechCrunch friendly buzzword related startups.

Non-profit might be the best way to go, here. I'm sure you can wrangle up enough in donations and FOSS contributions to make it work. The idea of an Internet free from political and legal malfeasance is one whose time has come, and enough people are realizing that fact that there should be sufficient collective energy to move a well-designed system forward.

Kick-starter? I'll pitch in just to see a decent (and open) white paper come out of it.

Last I heard, Mr "future of authenticity" was just acquired by Twitter. :-)

As I understand it, typing in all-caps or just bashing your face into the keyboard is considered poor form around here, so instead I'll just calmly state that this information displeases me immensely, and evokes a not inconsiderably bitter sense of irony.

:-)

I trust Moxie to be doing the right thing.

Twitter didn't buy Moxie Marlinspike. They bought one of his companies, which makes a variety of encrypted solutions for mobile phones. The Convergence project (which is an alternative to certificate authorities) remains independent of Whisper Systems.