It’s a pointless waste of money anyway, sea levels will continue to rise and the super storm that will blow it all away is around the corner.

Wasn’t that how “ministry for the future” started?

A similar case was google reimplementing Sun/Oracle Java APIs. Which has been deemed legal after all.

If you’re interested in that kind of problems, here’s some pointer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation

This! The prior knowledge is even fairly small, everyone can toss in a random string + key. The only drawback is that all participants need to have synchronized rounds (one for collecting the random values, one for the decryption keys), and the whole protocol fails if someone decides not send timely their decryption key

Totally agree. Same with electric cars. Yes, they are not great. But we need to find a way to reduce emissions rapidly. Which means re-using already built infrastructure. Which is, as much as it sucks, roads.

How do you measure “efficiency” ? By money spent? Then yes, trees are currently cheaper. But trees are complicated (see other comments). Additionally, even if we cover the whole landmass with trees, there is still a catastrophic amount of Co2 left in the atmosphere.