Anon Tech Revolution: Why and How with Rachel-Rose O'leary from DarkFi #Monerotopia23

[Applause] [Music] hello oh yeah hey okay perfect there we go so hopefully my sound's okay yep loud and clear excellent okay so we we're good to go yeah go ahead okay okay thank you um so thanks so much uh for coming to see my talk um and sorry that I can't be there in person um so my name is Rose uh I'm a programmer at the layer one blockchain for anonymous engineering which is called darki um and uh you know we're big fans of Monero and uh i' I've been in the Monero Community for a number of years um but in this talk I'm I'm going to explain um kind of three dimensions of the work that we're doing in darkfy so the first is um about our thesis uh so I will explain um the kind of macro conditions that I believe are um you know compelling privacy and an anonymity Technologies to grow um so it's essentially our B tees for for anonymous uh software including Monero um then I will briefly reflect on the kind of bigger questions that are at work here you know um in the first section we will look at how how um anonymity allows us to break away from um the surveillance state but the second part of the speech is about you know what is the motivation that's driving that effort to uh decouple from the surveillance apparatus so it's a bit more of a philosophical segment and then finally in the third part uh of the talk I will look at darkfy um on a high level technically and I will explain you know what are what are the core technical components and uh how do we use them to create Anonymous applications um so to start off I'll explain our thesis uh this is a image of a feedback loop between surveillance and anonymity um so you know as many of you or anyone who's worked in Anonymous technology knows uh creating Anonymous tooling and working in cryptography more broadly is very much a cat and mouse game in which you have to continuously evolve your techniques in order to in in order to adapt to an enemy which is also increasingly evolving and becoming more um sophisticated so what we see is the mutual co-development of these two technical spheres one which is uh based on surveillance and the other which is based on anonymity and as each World evolves more um technically the other is forc to also evolve so you know we this is a kind of arms race that is present within um C cryptography and you know it implies that we will see an escalation both in terms of the extensity of surveillance but also the sophistication of anonymous tooling so in terms of crypto I believe these two um these two processes map onto the crypto industry um in this way that they become kind of equivalent to what we call regi what we call darki where this force of surveillance um that is creating increasingly Advanced um uh surveillance tooling that maps onto this world of what we call regi whereas darki represents the side of the crypto industry that is conserved with building um antifragile parallel infrastructure um and you know keeping in mind the feedback loop that is present that was discussed in the previous slide um in which we have the mutual co-development of these two spheres of technical res research in the same way we see a similar Divergence happening uh inside of crypto between RFI and darki where you know regulated crypto is increasingly adapting to the whims of uh the surveillance State and dark fight is decoupling through encryption anonymity uh from that paradig and creating a new one beyond the confines of the surveillance state um so you know I mentioned briefly uh this notion of antifragility um you may have heard of it before it gets discussed uh quite frequently when talk about cryptocurrency you know Bitcoin is often called antifragile money um but what we have here is a image which explains the concept um so on the top uh on the top uh part of the image we have an anti fragile system um so as you can see it's a positive convexity curve uh where we have this um upward momentum that is not a linear momentum but actually turns Upward at an exponential rate um similarly we have the fragile system which is negatively convex or concave which is what the the kind of primary author of this concept Nicola tab talks about he talks about convexity and and concave systems fragile and antifragile and to put it in simple language an antifragile system is something that absorbs shocks and becomes stronger whereas a fragile system is something that breaks when the external external environment become increasingly hostile and crypto today exists on a frag uh fragility Spectrum so we have both antifragile and fragile uh projects that are coexisting inside of crypto so I I'll just briefly kind of reflect a little bit more on the kind of nature of this um of this property of antifertility so this diagram is describing a linear relationship between users um and time uh so this it basically makes the statement um you know over time this graph is uh acing more users um so you could say something similar to like in terms of our thesis what what we anticipate so you could say over time more users will start using privacy software like Monero or dark fi um however uh as we saw in the previous diagram there's it's not this linear relationship when we're talking about antifragility it's more like an there's something more extreme stream going on so you know we're looking for a dynamic which is something closer to exponential that integrates feedback loops somehow as part of this uh part of its trajectory so um this is this is a quote which I believe brings us a little bit closer to that um exponential Dynamic that we're looking for um so some of you may know jark uh J Stark was a German Kurdish um you know uh um Visionary who took the um the 3D printed gun idea that was first introduced by Cody Wilson and kind of brought it to its most simplest and and pure version which was you know a a weapon that anyone could build using like readily available DIY Hardware um so he built this highly accessible weapon and was killed by the German state um two years ago but this is a quote from him he says if something unfort unfortunate happens to one individual another individual will take his place it's a Hydra you cannot completely kill you cut off one head another pops off we are impossible to stop um so this beautiful quote I think gets us a little bit closer to the kind of dynamic that we're looking for when we talk about antifragile systems um and you know it brings to mind another uh kind of idea that comes up which is um a friend described before as the the law of insurgencies so you know in in an Insurgency uh if one person is killed you know rather than uh stopping the the process it actually amplifies it and accelerates it so you have this Dynamic where you know a revolutionary is K killed and 20 more revolutionaries show up to take her place um so that's again you know that's getting a little bit closer to the kind of dynamic that we're talking about when we say antifragility um so you may be familiar with Met's law this is a law that is uh again used in crypto as a way to potentially value networks so meta's law states that the value of a network is equivalent to the number of the users squared um so you know that's a that's an exponential relationship and you know is a little bit closer to the kind of dynamic that we're looking for when we when we value when we try to um when we try to measure and model anti frigidity um so we propose a version of this Met's law that we call J Stark's law and this is essentially the same notion but um expanded W with the the uh ethics of free software so you know when we talk about free software what's really interesting is free software puts um user empowerment and developer empowerment in positive feedback with each other um so you know the the the the you users and developers are empowered together in equal proportion so you know we take that ethic we kind of fuse it with the meta's law and we propose this J Stark's law which says user empowerment is uh positively correlated with system antifertility and they're actually in positive feedback with each other so the more empowered a user base the more antifragile a network becomes and this is key to understanding you know why we believe anonymity is going to grow uh so like the real test of fragile systems and antifragile systems is actually the external environment um so when the external environment turns hostile uh transparent systems um undergo this this fragility collapse where users and value kind of uh flood out from the networks um this is what we expect to happen if for example uh self- custody is made illegal or crypto is made illegal or Anonymous crypto is made illegal um so you know on a fully transparent system where users have liability you can imagine that they might um you know in a fragile way rapidly exit those those networks however in an anonymous blockchain the opposite is true um so we find that the more harsh the external environment the better it actually is um for that blockchain um so you know far from disincentivizing the use of anonymous software um having regulatory pressure actually increases the it's its justification so you know it kind of underscores the utility of anonymous software and as well as that it also uh it also starts up a kind of radicalization process where the members of the community are increasingly Vindicated in their work so a good example of this is happened in tornado cach on ethereum where you know there was the ofac sanction and instead of you know uh suppressing the thing the the the use of tornado cash it actually rallied a whole community of ideological people to protect it um and now uh recently the the levels of of usage have returned to pre- ofac levels so you know rather than um suppressing that software you know the the harsher regulatory conditions actually increased its utility uh so that's what we call the regul uh the regulation trap and it's part of this um process um that we see playing out between Anonymous and surveillance-based systems um so you know that was a kind of a brief overview of like what our thesis is in terms of why we expect the um Anonymous blockchains like Monero and darki to continuously acrw more users and more value in a way that is not linear but in fact exponential um and you know increasing is increases within harsh environments H so that was a little bit like our our our our economic macro thesis um but now I will reflect on okay so you know why uh why make this transition at all you know like why why cross the bridge to the to the new anonymous world and leave behind the the surveillance um the surveillance-based one um so I spoke about several feedback loops uh that are intrinsic to this process but um you know I think what's really important to emphasize is that these Loops are not uh static uh static Loops they don't just they're just not like a single ins insulated feedback which is like circling onto itself in a static way um but it's more like uh it's more like an open spiral so these uh antifragile um networks and ecosystems they are spiraling outward away from the confines of the surveillance State into this new world of anonymous software um so it's a kind of an exit like a cybernetic exit from the digital cage of surveillance um and so you know that brings to mind the question yet why why are we exiting and what is driving this process and to answer those kind of questions it helps to look at philosophy um so I show this image here um Frederick n says something I think that's very wise where he says that there are um different kinds of morality there's what he calls slave morality and also Master morality and the master basically imposes his morality onto the slave and the slave uh he has this master morality imposed onto him and he basically you know he wants to escape out of that morality that's been imposed on him so what he does is basically uh flips the morality upside down and he creates an inverted version of that morality that is uh what n calls slave morality so the slave morality is basically the opposite of what the master says is good and then you armed with this uh with this weapon of like a new uh ideological system he overthrows the master but you know because uh the slave has has not fully transcended the master and hasn't really escaped those those confines that the master has imposed onto the slave um it just perpetuates the cycle of of domination you know and the cycle of the of the Master Slave dialectic and the slave hasn't succeeded in actually transcending um that that ethical Paradigm so n says he warns us against this he says you know we shouldn't be doing Simple inverted morality we should become what he calls philosophers of the future um which are able to create create new values that exist beyond that which is imposed by the master onto the slave um and I think that's a really important Point especially because in in Cipher Punk and in a lot of crypto Anarchist communities we see a lot of uh techniques of inversion subversion you know people uh like thinking about parallel systems counter economy um and you know it's not that it's a bad thing I think it can be generative but it's also to be aware that we have to be very conscious of that and try and transcend those the the that Master morality um and not fall into the Trap of doing a simple inverted repetition that n warns us about and the way that ner suggests that we become philosophers of the future that can create new values is becoming well-versed and and very attuned to the different forces that are present in the world and trying to navigate those forces and and and analyze them in a process that he calls genealogy which is okay what are the different forces how do they interact with each other you know what is causing them um so you could see the first part of this of this talk which was showing the Dynamics between anonymity and surveillance as being an attempt towards a kind of genealogy that it n recommends so uh here's another philosopher who says something similar um Abdullah aan uh who um was the founder of the um or like a key figure in Kurdish revolutionary politics and um so he he's been in prison for the past 20 years on an island off of the coast of turkey where he's written five books um only the first three have been translated from English but these are three concepts um that are explained in the the third book um which I I think uh also can be used along with nich's ideas uh to try to transcend you know this dialectic and to create new values beyond the surveillance State um so he says basically moral uh Society is is inherently moral and political and what the state does is that it it it it basically attacks society and it separates Society from its moral and politics and so the task of revolutionaries should be to restore that moral and politics that is inherent to society so he recommends several uh techniques for this one is quin which means self- knowledge uh or know thyself it's kind of like a an inner process of reflection whereby people and communities and societies can reflect on their their own roots and Origins you know and what constitutes them um and you know what are their myths what are their histories then uh qu Partin that means self-defense that's uh something which applies to weapons um but not just weapons but self-defense in a more expansive way which includes you know um uh ideological self-defense uh psychological self-defense um and it's part of actually you know articulating um The Contours of a culture and a society and um that's particularly important because one of the ways in which the state perpetuates its uh kind of strangle hold on society is by seizing its defenses finally then he talks about the the concept of hon which um is a is a beautiful world word that means uh several things simultaneously so it means um both self-being or autonomy but also self- becoming uh so it's like the process of becoming autonomous but also the fact of being autonomous um so that's kind of like the goal of um the nation is to you know uh go undergo the process or the Journey of becoming autonomous um and through that achieve a kind of Freedom um so this brings me to a um a pattern that we see sometimes inside of sci-fi um which is the um which is one of my favorite patterns in in science fiction movies and it involves when a society or culture makes contact with an alien species a good example is for example in the expanse where they discover the ring so it's a moment where you have a like a relatively stable society that makes contact with some kind of an alien uh like whether a species or a technology that completely reconfigures the horizons of the possible and it kind of permanently overwrites uh the the space of potentialities that are uh you know creating the future so it's this transformative contact UM of a civilization with something so dramatically exterior and so dramatically beyond the frame of reference that it it it you know it Perman it's a permanent uh transformation um on the part of that Society uh so you know I think that's a really interesting um um moment and I think it's one that we're that we're entering into um when we talk about um an anonymity Anonymous software and you know this this notion about of uh becoming philosophers of the future beyond the surveillance stage um so Anonymous engineering is Xeno technques that means Anonymous engineering is alien techniques and I'm going to going to explain a little bit briefly on what Anonymous engineering is um but if you guys are also attending the remote stage tomorrow I'd also highly recommend the talk by Amir Taki at 10: am Mexican time where he will talk more deeply about these Concepts um but I will just touch on it lightly here to say that um Anonymous engineering is the new is a new design space um which darki is um trying to give developers access too and dark fight is a is a L1 for anonymous engineering um so essentially in the past number of years there's been a huge amount of innovation in Anonymous Technologies uh ZK multi-party computation fully homomorphic encryption many other tricks and techniques that are being made available to Developers for the first time um and so what darkfly is trying to do is to give developers a environment where they can use those tools to construct Anonymous applications um so I will now talk through a few aspects of the you know the you know what is darki technically uh so we're we're different to something like Monero because Monero is a blockchain for money uh fundamentally it's like bit coin but Anonymous um darki is more like ethereum it's like um a Monero but with smart contracts uh so the current status of darkfy is we're on test net it's our first test net so it's an alpha and on there we have running um a Anonymous proof of stake called oror cryonis um which allows for an anonymous leader selection so the whoever is actually creating the blocks is not revealed to the Network um we also combine that Anonymous proof of stake with a general purpose smart contract infrastructure which allows us to create and deploy Anonymous applications and we have several apps uh currently working on the testet which are using this infrastructure uh for example we have uh the F world's first Anonymous Dow we have Anonymous um OTC or Atomic swaps um we have the anonymous transactions themselves staking and unstaking and finally we also have a chat app which I will talk a little bit more about in a moment do you love coffee and Monera as much as we do consider making gratuitous dorg your daily cup pay with Monera for premium fresh beans and if you like what you taste send a digital cash tip directly to the farmers that made it possible proceeds help us grow this channel gratuitous and [Music] Monero and so to dive a little bit more deeply into how darki achieves a generalizable Anonymous computation um I will just explain uh how that works slightly so on darkfy network um all full nodes are both provs and verifiers um so the provs are creating the anonymous transactions uh where they're inputting their secret data and the verifiers are um verifying those transactions um making sure everything's fine at the level of the crypto and also at the signatures and then they update they run a state transition F function and they update the state um with the new um transaction that went through so in terms of generalizability what's really important on darki is that darki uh is that transactions contain multiple function call data so call data is just arbitrary data of any kind that is defined by the smart contract um so this data can contain all sorts of things depending on the application uh so that could include zero knowledge proofs signatur commitments um or anything that your application might require um we're thinking very much in this expanded way where we're not just giving developers access to ZK but really providing them with many tools to make um fully featureful uh Anonymous applications and so these are some dimensions of our smart contract architecture on the ZK side we have a um virtual machine which um allows to write circuits using Halo 2 um which is the underlying ZK algorithm which does not require a trusted setup so it's different to the um the ZK used by zcash um so there's no trusted setup and that's running in in a virtual machine and we also have a Assembly Language that allows us to write um uh circuits in uh using that um so that's one aspect that can be used by applications and then we combine that uh zero knowledge component with a wasm runtime which is where we actually deploy the smart contracts and where they actually execute the functions and so on and these smart contracts that are written in wasum so there any wasm compatible language ours are written in Rust we also give developers access to a SDK which is um a toolkit where they can make use of signature atures elliptic curve cryptography commitments Etc and we will um continue continue to expand um the techniques that developers can access um within this um tool chain uh so I'm just going to quickly look at some of the smart contracts that we have on darki um so you guys can get an intuition for how that's working so here are some um smart contract function calls um we have transfer um we have swap that's how you like trade any currency in a atomic peer-to-peer way and we also have staking and unstaking these are function calls that are available on the wasm contracts and that can also be used inside of applications um then you know in terms of the Dow we have a de with several steps um these these are all working on test net so you can create an anonymous do you can um anonymously submit a proposal to the Dow the Dow can vote and then um you know anyone with the uh with the access rights can then execute the proposal by the Dow I will quickly that's a quick overview I will explain a little bit more detail uh in the next slide um so here we have the um darki transaction method um so a nice example of what we call Anonymous engineering is actually this method um so it's something called the sapling payments scheme it is used by zcash and and various other projects as well um and so it's it's an example of of a protocol that allows us to send money around anonymously using these like intelligent cryptographic uh techniques so I'm not going to talk through in detail what's happening here um but you know basically we we reveal information we make proofs and we reveal information in a protocol that determines and enforces the the the steps and like the flow of events so it has to be done in like one way and it can't be done in any other way and so it's deterministic and it's kind of an irreversible step-by-step process that cannot be cheated um so you know here we have basically two steps there's like a mint and a burn step um darkfy it's at the moment a fully utxo model and which means we have inputs and outputs similar to Monero um and as you can see here when we make a an anonymous transaction we're actually creating both a mint proof and a burn proof where we're actually in our input we're we're we're we're burning a coin and in our output we're minting a coin and part of this again I'm not going to spend too long is you know we we create this um secret value called the nullifier um which is allowing for double spend protection and when we burn the coin in the input that's actually ensuring that we cannot spend that coin ever again it's it's considered spent um so yeah I will quickly go through the rest um so this I yeah sorry and I'll just say like I don't know if if if people are watching they if they want to take a photo here they can actually study this is like a very simplified version of um of what's happening in the transactions so on the left we it explains like first you've got you've got the burn proof and you're menting the the the uh the you have the mint proof and on the right hand side we have we have like a simplified version of what both those proofs contain in terms of the protocol um so but I'm I'm not I'm not going to spend too long so I'll let you guys uh read that and um okay next I will briefly explain how the Dow works so the Dow that we have it's um basically the most simplified kind of version of a dare that you could have so it's like a very basic primitive Dow um which is intentional and you know there's several steps H so first step is to actually create a D um you mint a DA which has like a number of settings like you set when you create the Dow including at the proposer limit a quorum and the approval ratio so those settings just determine okay how many governance tokens do I need in order to make a proposal that's one of them uh what how many tokens um need to be of all the minted tokens how many tokens need to be uh voting on this proposal for it to be considered valid and finally what is the ratio of yes to no votes uh in order for that proposal to execute so you create a dow and you you decide when you create it what how you wanted you know set these different um settings then um basically anyone can anyone with sufficient governance tokens can create a a proposal to the Dow and a proposal basically says transfer some amount of tokens to an address specified in The Proposal um and the proposal is encrypt and shared with the Dow members uh the Dow members then vote on the proposal and then you know anyone calls this function anyone with the access rights calls the function exec and that will you know enforce that okay is is it within the proposal limit is the Quorum uh accepted and you know what is the approval ratio and then depending on whether that passes all the checks The Proposal will execute which means um money will be sent from the D wallet to the wallet specified in The Proposal um so this is a mechanism um by which we can anonymously um in a collective way uh make decisions about the spending of a of a treasury um so that's really powerful and what's interesting also because of the way that dark f is built is that you can actually use this as a form of onchain protocol own liquidity which means you can build applications that can uh spend from a treasury in an anonymous way according to logic that you write inside of that according to onchain logic that you specify inside an application and so that's potentially very powerful um and it's the it's it's just it's just one of the apps that we built and we plan to build many more such apps um so you know back to the kind of um basic overview of dark fry and I I will be wrapping up very quickly um so you know dark fry also has a peer-to-peer component and so we use a peer-to-peer Network um and the way that it's been built is to be like intentionally modular and simple so that we can um easily uh plug in other kind of um anonymity layers so we're we're we have support for Nim uh for tour and TLS you can optionally choose how you want to anonymize your um your network traffic so we're the only uh project at the moment that is offering support for this and network level anonymity which is so important um then you know we also put a big emphasis on developer Anonymous developer communication uh so we built around chat application which is a fully Anonymous uh peer-to-peer chat we have um that as you can see here this is this is our Dev chat every U Mondays at 4:00 Central European Time we have a meeting um we also have encrypted channels encrypted DMS you can change your nickname as many times as you want so it's highly Anonymous and it's fully peer-to-peer basically IRC that's been um that's been uh uh reconfigured to to work in a peer-to-peer context um and with these additional anonymity features um and so we use this as our primary developer coordination we also have a task management system which is peer-to-peer and Anonymous and we're planning to migrate away from GitHub uh so that our developers can work on dark fight in a way that is uh fully Anonymous H deniable and and peer-to-peer uh so you know in terms of the current status um we we are on testet we're currently stabilizing this release um we're also doing s ulations to um figure out like like what is what is the token going to be like you know what are the block rewards going to be what is the fees uh so everything related to token and and fees is currently being uh tested and simulated um and so the next release we will deploy um a test net which has a a more advanced fee model and also has a um a token and with uh with proper um rewards Etc um so that's the next test net and then uh once that's running we're going to have the audit uh so we will audit all the different aspects of the code base um once then we finish the auditing phase we will deploy main net uh the current timeline for that is end of year but really it depends on how long the audit takes because um you know that could create additional work for us um so that's it um please again feel free to take a picture or a screenshot of this slide H check out our website you've got everything on there um you know it has a links to our docs which explains many things that I explained in more detail uh check out our Twitter and also feel free to visit our GitHub and but mostly if you really want to talk with us and you're interested uh come on Mondays at four o'clock to the dev meeting on our Anonymous IRC there's instructions in the in the docs on how to set up the IRC um it's it's really good and fun and uh it's honestly the best chat available on the market and it's a it's a really good portal um to the dark F community and uh and um uh and uh Network as well uh so that's it uh thanks very much for coming to my talk and sorry I couldn't be there in person bye that was so great oh my God I uh I took a look at the slides earlier and I knew it was going to be great um and that did not let me down all right I'm gonna try my best to juggle the questions that appear in chat with um the microphone as I've just been informed there's a there's a microphone in that room that you guys are welcome to use and there's supposed to be a camera up but it seems to have just gone down um for a while the camera wasn't working because the dongle was stolen and and then it was up and now it's down I don't know it's happening but uh if the camera doesn't come back up and there aren't uh people who I can see who are ready to speak then we're just gonna have to try our best to have anybody who wants to ask questions on the microphone um uh please just feel free to interject whenever is appropriate all right I can already see a bunch coming in here Rose are you are you here to take questions yeah I can I can take a few questions for sure okay just few all right all right one says um I can see how harsher regulations will ganize those already in the choir but won't it discourage those who are more not less yeah I mean um I think there's kind well what I'm banking on is that there's a kind of Tipping Point where um you know even people who are at the moment you get a lot of people saying like oh like why would I H care about privacy you know I I don't have anything to hide um and I do think there's a there's like a Tipping Point of authoritarianism where like even those people um want to be private at some point uh so like you know an example would be China where um pretty much everyone uses VPN um so so uh so so I do think there's a there's a Tipping Point but also um we're very much interested in like what you said the kind of the the the choir in the sense of like um building better tools for those groups and people that are already um like needing this software but that are currently underserved um so we believe that there is a market for this that exists um you know even among like kind of a a more Niche crowd um but we wna we want to serve that market because we believe it's it's it's big and underserved and actually you know Monero uh is a kind of indicator of the of the market that's that's kind of latent um and ready to be tapped into yeah yeah definitely here's one how does the an anonymity model man I cannot speak today guard against imposs Bad actors inflation inflation oh infiltration yeah infil so infiltration yeah um because I was going to say that in terms of inflation like the supply is known of the coin but um in terms of infiltration on the Dow uh it's a it's a you know it's something which so we worked on the Assange da um which was that was last year um we raised over 50 million and the goal was free Assange by all means necessary that was the the mission statement but then you know when it came to it like it was very difficult because we were coordinating in public to free An Enemy of the State and there were loads of concerns about um you know the the uh the Dow being sabotaged um by infiltrators um so I don't think that um having an anonymous Dow makes it necessarily any less liable to um or more or less liable to capture by uh any actor that might want to um you know destabilize the Dow as soon as you're kind of coordinating in a in a in an online decentralized way you're going to introduce those kind of attack factors um so I would say that like it it depends on each Dow what the kind of threat model of the Dow is so I could totally imagine a dow which um is just like a group of 10 people they all know each other personally um and you know they they have this like very robust kind of security where they don't just let random people into the Dow um it's just like those guys that are they're just managing their thing but you could also Imagine like more public Dow uh so something like a Sange da which anyone can join um so that would be like a different story but then you have to kind of distinguish between um like Anonymous in terms of the onchain uh and Anonymous in terms of like the forums and the IRC you know or wherever you happen to be like uh like the communication part of the Dow uh so you know as we have on E at the moment it's like um everything on the blockchain side is completely transparent but then you have like these chat rooms where you don't already know who you're talking with um so yeah we're we're we're basically we're basically making that more extreme because we're providing better uh Anonymous tooling on both sides like in on the coordination communication side but also on the on the blockchain side I think the blockchain one is like especially important because without that you're really just like doxing your behavior and balances to the whole world and you know just wrap up on the kind of on the thread related to Assange we uh we raised all this money um and then we entered into an nft auction it was like part of the the kind of Dow mission was to like buy this nft um and what ended up happening was because our Max bid was known on chain that we had 50 million on our treasury there was no one who was willing to bid against us it created like a very inorganic Market environment where there was no bids um and you know it really made us realize that actually you need anonymity for markets uh and you know for auctions for for many kind of Gam the game theoretical scenarios you require information asymmetry uh so that was very Illuminating and what ended up happening was uh we were pressured to put a Max bid so send all the money um and move basically that money that got sent to the nft was then moved into a offchain foundation and you know that was the Assange family uh who wanted to do that because they were so worried about like state level um uh attacks where basically the da would be infiltrated um so yeah that's you know it's a concern I think different DS will have to deal with their own OPC and infosec uh according to their use case basically yeah I think I think this is so fantastic I think um the you know the future of uh decentralized infrastructure not only needs to be trustless by default but also Anonymous in in maybe opaque or dark as you might call it because then on top of that uh if that's the default then you can you can build whatever amount of trust and transparency and and identity on top of that uh you know with all the examples that you gave of dows doing you know whatever whatever things that that they want to do it's it's really hard to build um you know something on top of a totally transparent chain that um has any degree of you know onity so yeah this is so fantastic thank you so much um oh there is one more uh would you like to take one more yeah I I'll happy to take one more sure uh why don't we see the radicalization you describe already happening today there have been so many stories of privacy infringements data collecting Etc but people seem unmoved generally yeah I mean um yes yes no uh like it is it is very disconcerting how um kind of numb people are and I think there's a there's a really great Book C by um Shana zuu called surveillance capitalism and in that she talks about something she calls the dispossession cycle which is like how um in the in the course of like since the 2000s so in the last like uh 20 years um we have become like as a society especially in the west kind of increasingly numb and normalized to the idea of like you know constant surveillance um and she kind of tries to analyze what are the how did that come about and like you know why did um uh how yeah how how how are these like companies Etc through marketing or or propaganda or through their philosophy able to convince people that giving up their information is is is a good thing um and so you know and just to be just completely nor and normalized by the the level of data extraction um so I think we have seen that happen and you know it is a bit um it is a bit concerning especially when uh I I hear a lot of people saying also in crypto that privacy is losing the mem War um in the sense that privacy is like it loses the meme War because the the kind of counter argument to privacy is always um oh why would I need privacy if I'm not doing something bad and just the very kind of framing of that question like hijacks the kind of latent um you know the the the kind of latent like the natural latent uh kind of n of of of of hiding information uh and it just it creates this this notion it kind of forces this notion that like you know everything should be automatically transparent and anything else is like illegal or like you know or like evil um but yeah so so I do think this is like a meme a meme a meme problem uh and and we've gone we've tried to go the other way where like firstly like leading into the notion that like actually it's like privacy is not you know zcash they say privacy privacy is normal but we prefer like the Monera thing which is like no like like like privacy is is scary you know privacy is powerful um it's it's something abnormal it's something like it's something alien and and something empowering and that's going to change everything and and really you know what we're trying to do with dark f is also to to make it into a positive narrative which is not just about um you know subverting the regime but actually establishing a new one um so you know there's there's like an affirmation there it's not it's not simply like a a negative project but it's actually about World building and I think that that narrative uh has potential to grow um beyond the the kind of more traditional um like Cipher buunk core given that it has this like this this affirmation um however I would also say that we don't need everyone um to agree or support our mission in order for it to succeed um like the history of of revolutions is always the history of like a small focused minority um acting you know so sometimes against the the wishes of like a majority um demographic that is often complicit with the with the oppressor um so you know I think I like I agree and um and Etc but uh there is a certain degree that like this this Tech Will it is going to happen it is happening um and it will happen irrespective of the support of of the main mainstream people however I will just say also quickly before I finish uh in terms of the radical ization process I do think um it is happening in crypto itself a little bit more since the tornado cach thing um so tornado cach happened um if you like go on to the telegram group it was very interesting what happened then because you know I was expecting like people to like oh I can't use this telegram group because it's like illegal but actually was like super active and everyone was writing there they were all sh sharing like how to access tornado cash like from you know um decentralized RPC providers and you know redeploying it on ipfs and redeploying the GitHub um so there was a kind of rallying of the community um and I think in at least on the ethereum side we've seen many more people coming out in support of privacy that that previously were not um as vocal about it so you know there has been some um kind of assert of values inside of crypto um that's for sure but I I don't know if it if if if it extends to the broader public uh it doesn't seem to at least at the moment yeah I absolutely agree I think um uh technology the technology long ago passed the past the rate of change needed for Humanity to just not be able to adapt uh find new wisdom for it at all and it and we're still trying to figure out it's it's strange how we're still trying trying to figure out that we actually do value privacy in so much of our cultures not just our Western one but but around the world you know rely on the presumption that you know when we when we you know speak to each other in the confines of our own home there's real privacy there and not like an Alexa listening to us and whatnot yeah it just I find it really interesting yeah the you you definitely made a great point that that resonated with me uh when you mention how uh people um to counter to counter that argument will often say things like well I have nothing to hide yeah well um if there are no other questions um that was fantastic uh thank you so much for presenting rose that was so great um thanks for having me sorry I couldn't be there I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend [Music] [Music]

2024-03-31 15:58

Other news