Amir Taaki, Ivan Jelincic & Rose O'Leary: DarkFi – Let There Be Dark (Part 2 of 2) #424

Transcript

welcome to app center the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is brian crane and i'm here with sunny agarwal so today we are going to do the second part of a long episode we did with amy taki rose o'leary and ivan gallanche so this is episode 424 if you have not listened to 423 the first part of this conversation you know i recommend you do that and you start there and you listen to all of them together but it was really fantastic conversation and i really enjoyed it so they are working on a project called dark fight basically trying to bring privacy uh to d5

so before we go into the second part of the episode uh we would like to share a few words about our sponsors this week so first of all we have gnosis so digital assets today on web 3 are usually controlled by a single private key but that process is a challenge because when a private key is lost or compromised and all the funds are gone the gnosis safe solves this problem knows the safe is a smart wallet that enables users to control digital assets with much more granular permission involving multiple private keys a subset of which is required for executing transactions so these keys can then be stored in different hardware or software wallets or even shared across multiple

people gnosis saves extra layer of security and personalization make it the most trusted web free asset management solution for individuals teams and dolls a lot of dollars using gnosis safe and in total already more than one hundred billion dollars worth of digital assets are stored on the ground to save the day and on top of that the closest safe also provides the opportunity for developers to plug into the platform and build their own apps and permission modules so visit gnosis-safe the io to learn more and get started setting up your own save and second of all we have tally so tally is a new wallet for web3 and d5 that sees the wallet as a public good

think of it like a community owned alternative to metamask it has all the features of metamask but the difference is that tally is 100 open source under the gplb3 license and it's 100 user owned with all the profits flowing back to the community not a corporation the launch of tally is coming in the new year but the team have just released an early version of the community to the community the talent community edition before the dial launches you know what features are in your idea well what annoys you about your current wallet try out tally join the community on discord they have community calls uh each week with you know hundreds of

people joining and you know get involved so all of the info you need is at tally.cash that's t-a-l-l-y dot cash and with that let's go to our episode so you know one of the other challenges i know with like amms in zero knowledge because so you know i've spent a lot of time doing research on this as well i'm not really a cryptographer my co-founder is and so he you know understands this way better than me but like a lot of defy today requires shared state and with zero knowledge systems you usually you know you you can design non-utxos or in all systems but it's like you know it's a good mental model to think about it in where like

when you're making a zero knowledge transaction you need to know the state that you're about to apply your transaction to and that basically turns into a world where maybe everyone can only do only one transaction per block can be uh executed like like that touches a piece of shared state so you have one amm and 10 people want to try to trade on it only one of them can so for osmosis you know which is the project i work on well our solution was say like hey the amm sits outside of the outside of the privacy system and we instead just have a shielded pool z cash style shielded pool and whenever someone wants to do a trade

assets pop out of the shielded uh pool hit the amm do the swap and then come straight back into the shielded pool and then the user's wallets should just automatically roll over their um addresses so our solution was hey ignore the hard problem let's do the simple problem which is just have you know at the asset layer in zero knowledge and not the smart contract because to do most of the interesting smart contracts that require shared state from what we understood we need like even more advanced cryptography techniques like mpc and stuff to uh make them work so is that stuff you're also like thinking about as well i just i just jump in quickly and then

i'm gonna pass through a mirror um so i think that like you're completely writing everything you've outlined um amm is kind of like a paradox within cks basically cannot be done without um de-anonymizing the amounts or the participants so um uh we have to evolve new concepts but i think that zero knowledge is a unique opportunity to do that and the reason why is like there's this really generative uh role that constraints play uh in design so um d5 itself came from unlike amms themselves came from engineering you know within a set of constraints um which the constraint in that case is

like how do we do order books in a way which is like peer-to-peer um and decentralized and and that's where like okay we can use this curve you know that's where that idea came from so i think you know over time we will see the same kind of thinking happening within the zk space um and as opposed to being a kind of restrictive thing it could actually blow open new ways of thinking about finance we need a field of zk5 like a redesigning of all these d5 primitives to like work within the zero knowledge world and constraints and such yeah we just call it dark fight yeah as you mentioned you alluded to mpc which is one way of

updating the state so all these techniques can work together um as rose said the i like to call it isomorphisms with trad phy that's what d5 is it's like we're trying to explore how do we port these trap fi concepts over um i think the the blockchain algos are getting a lot faster so the whole kind of order book constraint is becoming like less of a problem um but zk introduced like a different set of constraints and actually the order book model is better for for zk than uh the amm

uh that can be implemented in inside of zk um as as well as a liquidation engine so you can have a leverage uh fully anonymized leverage but there's also other kind of market mechanisms you know where you know for people to buy and sell on the market it's not just restricted to you know central limit order books and amms so you know um so that's kind of something we just have to essentially prototype into many products build them see what gains traction how do people adapt and and tried many different designs you know i have literally i have like uh four different designs in my head

about things i want to try out so is this dark do you see this as like a new um smart contract blockchain kind of similar to like you have you know ethereum and solana and you know others or is this more some sort of zero knowledge take that will plug into different blockchains and or and if it's a smart contract shop it will just be like a proof-of-stake blockchain or someone's staking mechanism or like like yeah what's this gonna look like so one of the first products that we're actually kind of gearing up to make will be a a doll like an anonymous style and actually uh we're gonna make probably

use tendermint uh bft for that and and tendermint's core because it's got the ibc inter blockchain protocol what essentially is like the blockchain is not our focus we might inside of our toolkit provide a blockchain that people can use in their products and then and then bridges that people can use to connect these blockchains together uh but the yeah the cosmos model um you know uh nim is using tendermint on the back end z cash is switching to tendermint you know so that's more like the crypto way that i feel

okay that's very cool yeah so basically could be sort of its own blockchain and then you just use ibc to send assets over and then you can do you know privacy like you can do things there and then take them out again yeah i will say quickly that um it's similar to uh something like eth which is generic um you know evm with like programmable smart contracts and but it's different in that um you know we're very much committed to the the philosophy of unix so we we want to make like small like modular tooling which can be composed um together um to create projects and so like amir said

like you can kind of like plug in um the blockchain but you could also just use the contracts on another chain which maybe that's what the day we're working on now will do as we don't have the blockchain yet and similarly you can just so the things ideally are like separate tools that can be composed together in a very flexible way that's really cool that's like awesome to see that you know i think i think yeah i agree like it seems like cosmos is sort of becoming this like spot where a lot of like cool privacy stuff is being built you guys should also check out anoma they're like another really cool project that's doing a lot of cool stuff with uh you know zero knowledge um also built on cosmos um yeah so you know amir you you were also mentioning earlier about this like free

assange dao that uh your you want to help create what are your plans with that i'm working with a sanji's brother who they've actually been planning to release an nft for a while now and then the free ross style happens which was set up to bid on the russell bricks nfc and actually raised um i think it was four and a half k e uh and it made a bid of of 1k which it won the auction with so all of that money that it raises 14 million which

is a is a pretty big victory for kind of russell briggs who um was one of the initial heroes of krypto um has done done so much for the space and now he's in prison for life um and uh yeah and then assange's brother uh he's been for ages trying to find a way to because assange is essentially broke he spent all the bitcoins that he got in a long time ago and now he's just relying on uh lawyers helping him for free which you know essentially you get what you pay for and his extradition now has just been approved

to the us um so he's facing imminent extradition it just needs the foreign secretary of the us pretty patel to sign the order essentially um and he just literally had a stroke a few days ago on the right side of his face um so nasty nasty stuff um so i think yeah we have a very solid chance there to raise you know 20 million in this dow to give to us assange the dao is uh it's very interesting because um a lot of big names i know in tech

have joined the kind of telegram group and there's a lot of enthusiasm for it you know people are very very active and then you know we're kind of setting up that down now and the initial version would literally just be you know put something out on if uh on ethereum um you know so that the family when they list the nfts there's a way for people to pull capital to fractionalize the nfts to bid on them so the dow will like then give shares of the nfts that it is won back to the people who have invested in the dow which is the same model that the free rostal made so um dallas are very interesting

politically um the you know uh and maybe rose can say more about this but a few years ago um there was a lot of talk about dolls as as this like political formation which you know was just talk but it's we've seen in like literally the last year or so the like now thousand sites are gained like a lot of traction and also the original conception of dallas was that be it this autonomous organization in the internet that would be like hiring people and be like uh running running like by itself and autonomous

uh but the the dollars have actually shifted in in nature to be more focused around uh ways for people to organize in this post-corporate kind of democratic squad tribal structure and you know diffuse liability and and act as a collective so that's an interesting evolution of the dow concept um which is coincided with like the kind of takeoff of dallas and the interesting thing about assange is like okay that now like dials which have been mainly confined to like financial project now this is kind of like strong convergence of kind of cypherpunks

uh using their kind of like knowledge and their means to free like the original cypherpunk who was like assange and uh yeah so that's that's i i think uh a signal in the noise of like what's coming yeah i completely agree with amir and i'll just add i i think his point about the does is interesting like how the earliest kind of dies like we saw the day on ethereum it was very much this kind of um this old zabowian language of uh like unstoppable uh glacial code you know like this this code is all kind of stuff and and the the dow's in the early days there

were visions as they were envisioned as these kind of um uh almost like sentient ai kind of actors you know um that were like inhuman and uh and autonomous and it was it was kind of scary almost the way that they were described but now we've seen in the past years so um actually this shift to set down is you know emerging and and much more of a social phenomena than i think people had expected and increasingly you know we're seeing now with the with the free ross and the fear uh a really interesting tool for uh coordinated activism yeah very bullish on the dave's face i can imagine that this is also

something somewhere where like the zero knowledge and privacy is important where it's like you know especially for something like you know the assange dao where it would be like you know i don't want maybe i don't want my government to know that i'm like contributing to like to this kind of thing but like this is something i want to do regardless right and i think that's important but you know on the flip side though you know i guess wrapping it all the way back around to the beginning like you know there's the what about like is are there cases where you know over privacy is an issue where let's say like the ability to contribute to these like um you know

movement uh is good in in certain cases like this but like if we're talking about like political funding for example like you know it would be i think people appreciate a level of transparency in knowing where you know certain people in power get their um donations from and like who so you know if if bribery is a inherent part of the world we live in it's at least nice to be able to see where the strings are who and what's pulling the strings rather than not even having any visibility into that at all yep i completely agree with you and if you read a lot of the literature on

those um there is a big emphasis on you know transparency you know at the level of like uh corporations and and governments and that kind of thing um and i i do think that uh transparency in some cases is okay and actually you can make those which combine you know things like anonymity for the users with transparency of the finances for example and so it's not to say that building uh anonymous tooling and necessarily means that every single aspect has to be anonymous although in some cases it should be and you know for some of these days like say it's a day operating a city or something you might actually want that that the expenditures are public and but

the people might be might be hidden or you might have other ways of customizing that and you can but i it's it's the problem with the current kind of transparency maximalism that we have is basically um everything is exposed but the most sensitive thing is is i think probably that the users are exposed um and yeah that that's that's probably the most important thing to solve yeah i would add as well the um uh during the uh russian war they they put our competition for people to like design the next gun for the for the russian army and there were a lot of uh

really well funded you know big names scientific engineering teams they were like designing these guns and uh kalashnikov he was just like um a guy that that what you call it like the people who know about like math using the tools to make to do things with metal um and he was in the hospital bed and he was thinking about his experience in the war like about the guns like everything that he he found that he saw was wrong with them and he was thinking like if only there was like a tour that was like this and like this and he started to design it and he went around everywhere trying to

get people uh to to form his team so that he could go in this the competition and win the competition and nobody wanted to give him resources and and uh but he he found like a few allies and some guy and gave him a corner of the factory and he produced the the kalashnikov and he won the competition and then the the kalashnikov it's like it's no coincidence that it's it's like the symbol on if you look at many flags of liberation movements or flags of you know of even nations uh they have a picture of a kalashnikov because it was a tool that like tipped

the balance uh in favor or which which allowed many different like rebel movements to kind of exist and and to like uh uh fight for their interests that would not otherwise be able to exist you know so yeah so the kalashnikov kind of it ushered in this um you know and i talked before about uh automated weapons um which i think is like the real kind of danger to humanity which is this scenario where you know the human soul is completely subjugated and

you know we lose our ability to we lose our free speech we lose our ability as as um as consumers in a market you know they're talking about cbdc's central bank digital currencies centralization of the financial infrastructure and social credit scoring which the the western states we are trying to copy with the cbdc's they're inspired by the china model uh the courts you know like i was reading an article where it was saying you know when you go to a local court it's good to have someone who has like a local lawyer because they know how to talk to the local judges which the local judge my

my might judge you uh badly because you don't know the decorum so what kind of what kind of legal system is that which is which has become so detached from notions of justice you know and i talked about censorship uh you know the the cause for facebook for you know the media to tolera line um uh so what is the last avenue of defense of human freedom like you know and at what cost and even that freedom is being taken away from us now so um so i i think that

you know we need we need the the means to preserve ourselves as human beings as you know human uh individuals in a society uh because um that's being encouraged on now um the outcome is i don't i don't believe this uh the the so i like the the there is all this uh public goods focus in ethereum you know i love the whole kind of ideas around uh collective ownership dolls um you know people power that's incredible but the other side of if which is you

know making this alliance with regulators you know they they've really tried to kind of bring the wef into kind of bed with them uh but then gary gensler like turned on them so they kind of got done uh that that's a huge mistake that's like literally clearing up your competitor i i don't i don't believe this uh kind of optimism of power that they they kind of have um i think like there is like this tension that's like irresolvable and actually the the ultimately the the swing of history is like in favor of our side um and

you know it's uh and it's and it's it's healthy that we kind of uh push to like realize you know the the realization of these tools to their fullest extent um like those of us there there is there is gonna be this kind of choppy period you know i liken it to there's a storm coming and we we have a lifeboat and like crypto is our lifeboat to like cross the storm uh you know people are gonna like fall off of their lifeboat you know people are gonna fall in the sea but ultimately like the place that we get to is is gonna be something very special we're gonna go somewhere we're going to

arrive somewhere which is going to like the the people that escaped persecution in europe you know okay maybe that's not a great example you know of everybody going to the u.s but you know um they went there they got given land you know they they they got ownership for the first time in their lives and what i see around me happening now is people everybody is becoming so poor and when i say that to crypto people go what are you talking about everybody's becoming rich and like yeah in crypto everyone is becoming rich but in the real world everybody is becoming really really poor so it's like yeah it's it's kind of it's

kind of frightening that you see happening [Music] and um also during the coronavirus uh i watched uh a lot of sci-fi like a lot a lot of sci-fi and the interesting thing is the movies from the 90s um they have uh you know uh what the the white house being blown up by aliens in independence day you have godzilla destroying new york you have the the tsunami uh uh washing everything away and day after tomorrow and it was like it's like okay the soviet union it's gone like we're we're supreme now we're on top okay what do we want like and people started imagining like you know the apocalypse coming and then

we got 911 like the twin towers and it was like it was like we were so fascinated by that vision of the future that the al qaeda saw it as a great marketing opportunity and they were like cool like that's something that and it was in terms of like damage done like people killed it like it wasn't it wasn't like a huge number of people i mean i don't want to say but compared to the population of the us it wasn't something that crippled the us but we can see now like visible to be be seen like that it had a huge impact on politics you know massive is like it was a victory for the islamists and it's the same thing now with the movies that we're seeing come

out now the sci-fi movies they're so brooding they're so apocalyptic like there's there's always like in most of them i see in the future there's been some kind of disaster of them you know and it's like everybody is like expecting something to happen like in in in the next five years or so everybody feels you know there's there's gonna be this big we don't know what it is there's going to be like a major political economic event something's going to happen you know and it's like and so you know that's where crypto is situated you know and it's crypto's job is to like i mean those of us are building with crypto is to be on the

right side of history because ultimately that's what it is and and you know trying to fly under the radar those elements of crypto will eventually they would just get stamped out of existence by the state you know because it always happens like this in history you know the the there's a feedback loop of rhetoric you know things reach fever pitch you know and the more that the the state is going to this this is actually rose's thesis i'm saying but the more that the state quick tracks down with crypto the more radicalizes people and so it creates this loop and that's the inevitable tendency i'll just like add to what he said about i'll just

summarize a little quickly my thesis which which is basically like we have this super cycle and super cycle is a bet on reg fi you know so it's like the idea of the super cycle is everyone's got really rich because pepsi is going to have nfts and you know the us government is going to use bitcoin or something and so that's like the supercycle thesis uh simplified so it entails the existence of reg fight but the thing about rag fight is that reg fight also necessitates dark fight because reg fi is uh like a heavily policed restricted area where you can only enter if you have the right nationality and everything you do within there is contained and you're you have to pay tax on everything and so liquidity is going to spill out

into the technology which offers something closer to what we're used to in crypto now which will be you know we call it dark fight um and then we have this split like that's happened between the cryptocurrent industry it's basically split in the middle we have the reg fine and dark fight and so what happens next is this kind of this cycle where you know the state tries to restrict dark fire it tries to crack down on darfy um but that is simultaneously reinforcing it's it's it's justifying its ex it's it's existence so the people that have been restricted to this zone of dark phy are increasingly radicalized and increasingly alienated from this regular system so it's not actually the catalyst for their uh political autonomy and

self-determination process to occur and so i'm quite bullish on you know this this differentiation between uh dark fire and and the kind of current paradigm of surveillance and i think it's really important process and i think it's um it's ultimately very positive um for society one topic i was also curious about um [Applause] so you know it's dark phy now right but of course amir has had previous projects before there was dark wallet and then there was this thing called dark market dark market was this kind of you know anonymous ebay style thing in a hackathon and then

there was actually some people's and it seemed like okay obviously the use case would be something like a decentralized silk road and then you had a bunch of people who basically then started this open bazaar right which was kind of the same idea but i think at least on the surface targeting more this use case of you know some sort of global ebay and you know people would sell like mocks and stuff like that but still in a way it all seems kind of weird because you had in 2011 already right silk wrote there was a lot of usage of so-called like people really

like wanted a product like that and even when bitcoin was you know obscure people actually use that you know more than anything else and so in a way it's like the it seemed like a dark market idea of like okay decentralizing these marketplaces for like you know physical goods and physical shipments such an obvious thing to do and seemed like okay there would be a huge demand for this kind of stuff and i'm curious like yeah what are your thoughts on this do you still think this is like an important problem uh what is the state of this kind of world i'll address both parts of what you said

but let's start with the second part um dark market which is originally announced in toronto several years ago was a prototype i was working on dark wallet so you know we we made the prototype in one night for the hackathon and and you know we we put it out and then i forgot about the project and there was a petition in the community at the time so if people look at the dark wallet video um the original dark wallet video where we

crowdfunded 60k to fund dark wallet development oh yeah brilliant and um not many people realize but at the time we were the minority voice now it's trendy now it's like everybody's like yeah cypherpunks cypherpunk is right but the time there was a lot of people in the [ __ ] in the bitcoin community going ah we need mass adoption we need big banks and like why is amir bringing so much heat and i was like the fly in the pudding because um you know journalists would would love me and i'd go ah blah blah and i'd i'd be like ruining i'd be spoiling the whole kind of corporate

kind of uh co-option process the the this kind of the people were trying to assemble or construct around bitcoin was that on purpose like were you purposely trying to destroy that yes because the bitcoin foundation uh so i was so the initial uh bitcoin.org website there was a list of five names i was one of the original five that was on there but it was gavin andreessen who was afraid of like of of up-and-coming young devs like myself who were like vying for his position he tried to like push those kind of people out and i became i was like the

first to suffer from that and so i kind of saw like that there was this cabal of developers that were trying to like kind of seize control of bitcoin and that's why we made the the vip process was to kind of put brakes because the way because i came from uh open source background i was also a professional poker player for two years and um and so inside of open source world i understood about uh community like where ivan comes from as well we were part of the whole anarcho you know hacker free software you know guys working on linux like hardcore for many years

so um we kind of um we understood software development in in terms of in terms of that idea which is like the way that you build your software has to be uh modular it has you have to you know expose the inner parts of the technology um you know it favors like elegance and simplicity of design because you want the whole whole technology stack to be transparent whereas gavin andreessen and those kind of guys they came from like a corporate background so in the corporate background about making products and users for consumers so they want to integrate the entire technology stack they don't want to like

defuse it and the emphasis is not on simplicity it's on perfection it's on completeness so there was this clash of ideology inside of bitcoin and um and and and so that's why i i [ __ ] off and i started working on lip bitcoin but uh and and and that's why i also you know we saw what was happening with um the bitcoin thing and we were like no this is like why bitcoin was invented because there was a big shift in bitcoin from 2010 2011 where you would go on the forums and there would be everybody all day long talking about austrian economics sound money you know uh the scent the evil central bank uh

agarism you know uh overthrow the state it was like that was literally the bitcoin talk forums and then you know these guys tried to come along and you'd see them there first and i'd see i'd even meet them in real life and people would go to me um they would say to me something like you know you are an expert on creating software i am an expert on marketing and in the way that we do marketing blah blah blah and they're like trying to school me on how i should talk to the media and you know it's not good what you say because you might scare people away from the project it's like dude like you know people use bitcoin because bitcoin is cool because that's like you know ultimately like i don't care about

like passive consumers you know i've heard the argument we could hide in the noise i don't buy it i think you're simply just like you're simply just opening you're opening the door to allow takeover you know the the type of people you surround yourself is is critical it's key and the reason people who want to do things in life people who have like ambition and sense of purpose they see something that has like has its ability to you know strike paths or like to create new paths you know like when you're walking through through nature and you know you want to get to somewhere and the path hasn't been tread on and you have to tread the grass and then and then other people do that and it creates a

new path you know so that was what was happening to bitcoin development and uh the dark market uh there was a petition on the reddit if you search petition dark market you'll find people made a petition they were saying this is a community petition for emir to rename dark market to open to open bazaar you know that we just that we as a community disagree with how this one developer has created a software like with uh a branding that is against our will so there was there was that attitude in the community like it's it's different now like i can safely say now

that defy is cyberpunk like d5 is like the original will of crypto that's why i'm i'm not long ethereum foundation i'm long defy and dials like that's that's where the future lies you know and um so yeah uh dark market got rebranded to open bazaar you know also um you know they wanted to change the like the license from gpl i'm a gpl guy you know like [ __ ] the corporates if they want to use my [ __ ] like they have to also publish their source code open source as well you know a lot of uh open source devs think it's a victory when they write free software and it gets used by like google or apple

for and and they get nothing back i think that's just like a victim mindset like stockholm syndrome so anyway they they got me they are they they got me to change the lot they sent me a letter saying can you change the license i said all right yeah i don't care here it's mit whatever and then the next thing they did after that is they went to andreessen horowitz and they started to get vc funding from a16z the people who don't know a16z there's like two groups of vcs in crypto world there's like cool vcs which are like young people which are crypto native we know we all come from like you know either the the early bitcoin generation or the later one doesn't matter you know but they we embody like

the same my deal and then there's like the the the silicon valley guys who they're friends with other people in silicon valley and and their friends with people in the banks and they get cheap money you know the money that's printed by the central banks it doesn't go to the hands of people it goes to other big banks who give it to their buddies and so there are and then the bodies in silicon valley they get this this dollars which they got for cheap and then they give it to crypto projects and crypto projects give pieces of their work so the hard-working developer he works hard and you know you know like marx marx came along and he said look this is how much money you're making you know uh this is how much you get

this is how much you know the capitalists get but let's organize and take that that thing over let's let's run it ourselves and that's my proposal to developers now it's like you know let's let's take that over like why are we giving ourselves pieces of our work to the big guys and uh so andreessen so all these big vc firms you know they they all talk in a certain way because they're connected to the state they will act in a certain way and the interesting thing is you see a lot of projects especially in the bull market phase um where there's a lot of like money flying into the crypto ethos and have very bland uh branding they're very generic they're very safe looking you know they're not like stepping on anyone's toes

and um the interesting thing is that pressure that conformity pressure it doesn't come from the market the market actually desires cool stuff like the market like desires like you know disruption and and like you know differentiation and diversity like that's why we watch movies about heroes prevailing against all arts you know david and goliath it's like thousands of years old like something that speaks to us internally um but this this this pressure it's coming from this network in this largely based in the u.s to conform and so that's what happened to open bazaar you know they started to

add all this censorship tech to like censor pages and stuff and uh you know they they start the way that they were like orientating their phrasing was going oh you know it's like it's like um ebay but you know we make uh kind of predilections about the spheres of activity that are enabled or not enabled so for example uh ethereum ethereum when it came up they said let's just make tooling for developers the developers will use it in any way that they see fit and that was the power of if the the kind of turned into a a generative ecosystem

so in terms of uh generative ecosystems if you're there and you are are constraining this like emergent life form that's like exploring you know into what what rose was talking about this this dark space with its kind of tendrils and you're like cutting them off and you're saying no there is a path that has already been created and you can only go this way and then essentially you're you're pre-ordaining the destiny of that technology you know um and that ties into what you started saying which is um

you know the the whole uh uh philosophy of the agarists which the agaris were saying and it comes down to this concept of economic simulation which is you know we are the economic simulations as a form of uh as a form of of this of organization of um you know like quantifying the unquantifiable which existed before for example i used to be an open source developer for many years we created tremendous amounts of value for society the problem was was that we had no way to capture back some of that value that we created and then and the power of

tokenization which a lot of people are strangely in ethereum foundation they seem against like d fire markets they seem like anti-markets we're pro markets we think like this is a hugely generative tool it's like there for us to to explore and to use you know we can create simula these we can create these simulations the the participants in dals in d5 protocols can themselves uh prefigure their own destinies like destiny is the that we as the that then like not me as a boss but as everybody else that we can

cr through our through this intellectual culture that we have through the the ideas the memes the means um the images the symbols the stories the narratives that we can the we direct our energies you know and the whole thing was is the crypto anarchists in origin they said uh cryptography is this new tool which we can use to make parallel societies where um the the oppressed where you know anybody who is marginalized uh people on the fringes they can they can start to meet and they can

start to organize and they can start to realize their visions of the future and the not only that the code the dna of this of these new forms of organization it's it's immune by default to all forms of um totalitarianism that it's it's like um for example well you know like some organisms that they they they're like naturally antibacterial just because of their biological makeup that this kind of organizations are like anti-totalitarian and that these form the seed of of the new type of civilization just to

interject briefly what makes those types of organization anti-totalitarian we have to think the the reason why people use uh bitcoin the reason why people use uh cryptocurrency is because um there they have some will they have some intent of what they want to do and crypto is kind of the path of least resistance so for example um you know uh crypto it's not easy to use right now yeah

you know i went to for example lebanon recently and in lebanon they have lots of small exchange shops trading tron usdt they're like literally and and we talk about mass adoption of bitcoin but turns out maybe it's trum that actually realized that and i was talking about these these paths through the wilderness that we create so you know going off the beaten path into the wilderness you know there's like brambles there's like bits there's like nature around you it's you have to like you know push out the way you have to crush it down you know it's not convenient yet here we are there are people that are

are choosing to walk through the brambles to get caught because there is some reason that bring them to crypto and i ask to you like to look and think to yourself like why specifically crypto why it's not because you know they can buy coffee with cryptocurrency and say oh it's cheaper to buy a coffee there's some reason there and that that's that that reasoning is what we should explore further i wanted to address brian's question a little bit so i think crypto definitely has the capacity for totalitarianism you know as does any technology um but technology contains like two

potentialities basically there's like an authoritarian strand uh within technology but there's also this kind of democratic strand um so like we will see probably both authoritarian uh crypto systems like china style uh social credit uh uh scoring combined with non-authoritarian democratic techniques um you know as we're seeing like emerging in the dow space and so this is kind of joint and history of technology amir he mentioned earlier on that you know we we have this analysis where we look back in history and we see there was two types of civilization there was the democratic

civilization the state-based one and these have been in conflict throughout history and well there's another philosopher lewis mumford who looks at that history and he says that's not a war between politics or forms of organization it's actually a technological war that's playing out between two forms of technology one that he calls uh or mono techniques and the other which he calls polytechnics democratic techniques so you can have both things um but you know the legacy that we're coming from is is one of user empowerment and and so the characteristics of like democratic technology is uh it's owned and operated uh by people

in service of their needs uh instead of uh in the case of mega technics uh users being uh exploited as tools within this kind of inhuman uh apparatus uh so one the other example would be like something like facebook where the users are essentially enslaved within the system uh everything about the software is is is is built to capture their attention and their time uh and they're literally being harvested like farmed for for their data and their attention um and they have no voice or control over that system so this is like the same um hierarchy and like

uh enslavement relation that richard stallman talked about um so many years ago in his critique of proprietary software when he first like um spoke of free software introduced free software you know he noticed that um that if you have a system where there's the users and then there's the developers that's an abusive uh relation uh because you have a class of people on top who are making decisions based off of these this user base which is locked out of the code and so we have that now brought to you unprecedented unimaginable extremes in this surveillance uh paradigm exemplified by these web 2

kind of technologies whereas you know cryptos is offering an alternative at the moment it's still transparent but at least in crypto you know people uh control their own destiny and and and users control their own data and their own activities so that's a that's a fundamental shift in the way of thinking about technology i think orientating towards more democratic as opposed to authoritarian lines um so amir you mentioned that you see that the ethereum foundation is starting to become more anti-market and so you know for listeners who might not be i think many people might not be aware of like sort of your role you know you were quite involved with sort of the early stages of

ethereum and not like actively in the project but like if i remember correctly were you i think someone told me that you were the one that actually introduced uh vitalik to gavin um i don't know if that's correct or not but like you know you were very involved and you know very you know i guess part of that like initial movement that helped create ethereum what what is it about you know the theorem foundation that you see is starting to maybe diverge from the view the original visions that you may have aligned with okay so yeah you're the only person who really knows about that but most people don't know much about crypto's early history

um so ethereum as it started was it started it started off as um [Music] you know socially conscious technically minded people who uh saw the potential to generalize bitcoin a lot further honestly i when i was hearing about if in the early days um [Music] i didn't really understand like what it could be used for like nobody could give me practical examples so that is a very good example of the kind of

intuitive mindset winning over the observant i'm like a bit maybe too observant sometimes which is the jungian kind of thing so uh yeah but as if has kind of developed um it it never really had a strong vision of what it wanted to be it was kind of like oh you know like here you just kind of you people just kind of make whatever we just give like a a base layer and yes that was was good but like where we can see that heading now is the the uh the community is becoming immensely

fragmented uh if if community is still i think the most interesting or you know powerful kind of crypto community you know uh bitcoin has lost its edge completely all the smart people have left um you know solana it's it's very it's very inorganic vc led and if you look at solana breakpoint the types of people that were there but if community it's like um you know a lot of very smart interesting people but where i see it heading now is um the there's fragmentation that's happening

especially there is a lot of l2s that are popping up and all of these l2s are kind of vying to become the next ethereum essentially um and and then also polka dot is also a branch of the eth community so ethereum is essentially um there are many different groups now that are emerging defy as an entire phenomena is um emerging outside of the influence of ethereum foundation ethereum foundation has kind of lost a lot of his soft power so um yeah so

if really doesn't have like a strong sense of like what it wants to be where it wants to go they tried to kind of um because i for example like um if you look at vitalik's blog or you or you like look at his his talks he will talk about a lot of different things like oh there's this voting mechanism or there's this thing that's interesting but they're just it's just like trivia there's no like overarching theme that kind of tie these pieces together into like a coherent kind of you know uh direction that can like pull people in and that's actually the role the

ethereum foundation should be playing the ethereum foundation should not be like actually directly involved in you know like shaping the projects you know or you know like uh managing the development of the software actually it should be like kind of steering the overarching direction and you know inviting in uh people to collaborate on the philosophy and developing the intellectual culture but that dimension it's largely missing from ethereum they tried to fill it in with this uh uh radical market stuff but the guy glenn wile he's um

he's completely from the system like he was educated at stanford i met him twice actually he doesn't remember meeting me the first time but i asked him both times if he knew about rajava which is the most interesting political experiment in the world right now and if you're a political scientist you should know about that but you've never heard of it so the only people who never heard about rajava that are into politics are essentially people that are like so embedded in the system into like liberalism and it's also a guy that he goes to like the wef he speaks at davos so this was like kind of the tilt that ethereum were trying to position itself

as was going oh we're the more kind of like friendly uh version to bitcoin which bitcoin is like anti-regulator we're like willing to work with the regulators but then it didn't work out because you know gary gensler like flipped on them and they kind of got cucked so then there's this been this vacuum and the d5 kind of phenomena has like emerged out of that and as i said it started off with like animal animal coins and scam projects and all kinds of crazy crazy stuff uh but then uh it's it's like slowly finding its way um the interest and it's interesting

because you know there's this tendency towards because like rose said there's these two visions of technology that are at play and you can kind of see it in um you know the or the like surveillance apparatus on the one side but then the other side like all the kind of like uh you know like the arab spring and the color revolutions where you know people organized through the internet as a swarm and it was like you know um people moving together using these modern technologies to to change the the world that they exist in around them and and and that's like that's like the human empowerment vision of technology but the

other one is the top-down vision of technology which if is or especially if from eve core is very much still like integrated into this mindset so for example uh claros uh the talk in ifcc um by federico uh he's actually talking about how uh you know foucault when he spoke about the panopticon uh he misrepresented the panopticon because the panopticon was good as originally envisioned it was like a decentralized form of surveillance and that entire movement come out of like and they they actually came up to

me and i posted about this on twitter in the claros guys they came up to me in lisbon and they said like oh hey like you misunderstood like what we were saying you know the i was like i was like guys like i didn't misunderstand anything that you were saying i come from england where that movement started like the whole garden cities movement industrial system of education decentralized you know public surveillance but that's something that if developers are talking about like vitalik himself was pumping claros you know like the decentralized core system so it's the there's this like ideology that's like deeply inside of eth core

which is disconnected from the like kind of cypherpunk will of the community and that's why i kind of see the community kind of pulling away and like killing its old old master but it's it's still kind of very mixed up these trends like because there's that the solar punk imaginary which rose can talk more about which is is is very much based around this authoritarian vision of the future where you know where you still have like mega cities except this is like more trees you know we use solar panels but it's still like the same apparatus that we live in and like and and the problem is is that the the technology as it's being conceptualized now is is dominantly

first world and uh you know people who they kind of like they like live in the system um you know they just want maybe want to tweak the system a bit but they don't fundamentally want to like change the system they're like actually they think it's pretty okay but the flip side of that is a system where you know two million people were killed in iraq and syria over the last like 10 years to to fund like our oil extraction so that we can we can continue the industrial society where um you know people common people now even it used to be brown people now it's

actually and then it was the greeks and the spanish but now it's actually like people in the u.s themselves like you know the the hyper inflation event that we're all expecting to come it's like it's like now it's like they've extracted all the resources from all the world but now the only resource left is there is the is the people directly under them and so their position of power is getting more unstable and the only kind of flip side they have today is to authoritarianism as rose alluded to the problem of capture of the technology is where blockchain actually becomes the means for this this new authoritarian technology which you know uh cbd cbdc's they're trying to give incentive for people to move over

and one of the main ethereum projects now people keep talking about is ubi universal basic income the only way to make universal basic income work is if we have identity on the blockchain and that's why everybody keeps talking about identity you know quadratic voting so this is idea that everybody and is identified on the blockchain and managed by this central system which drops credit to people and ubi is a is a centralized [ __ ] coin fiat airdrop to incentivize people to move to cbdc's which you know before we used to have this this network of local community banks and now community banks are being pushed out of existence and that that

financial infrastructure is being centralized for a few in england we only have five high street banks you know lloyd's barclays nat west etc but now they want to get rid of those banks so now the only person who issue credit will be the central bank literally just be a website your bank account would be a web of like literally an account on the on the web server running the european central bank and they would just go beep issue more credit and you know they're they're deeply inspired by the chinese model which they're like you know they're like they we brought china into wf in the 90s because they're like oh the chinese will become more democratic they've become more peace

loving and free freedom loving it didn't happen china is like just doing china like yeah china authoritarianism it's cool capitalism is cool and then and but then now they're creating this social credit system where they like incentivize people who have good behaviors if you're like not late to meetings if you only associate with good people you know you get like incentives you get benefits through their system and allow you to get like cheaper train tickets or or better rent the the western states they're looking they're looking at the chinese system and they go cool that is a that's a really interesting idea we should copy that that's that's what the whole ubi cbdc thing is about and the problem is that if as an intellectual

culture a lot of this elite now that they're trying to conceptualize oh yeah how do we create this court system how do we create this uh identity how do we create this form this vision of the future the using blockchain so it's decentralized so it's like harder for people to like attack it you know so but then the other vision of technology is the stuff that we've been talking about this whole kind of episode and it's and it's all the d5 and dao stuff you know like raising 20 million to free assange from prison you know to fight the system you know to uh give to the russell bricks campaign you know cypherpunks freeing cypherpunks it's

like we've become a power like we have negotiating power now we have and you know the biggest hedge fund in the world renaissance technologies you know uh robert mercer robert mercer he's the guy that funded cambridge analytica he's the guy that funded uh uh brexit he funded trump he put trump in touch with bannon that was robert mercer who is the chairman of the biggest hedge fund in the world renaissance technologies they they figured out how to use their financial power for political power and now steve bannon is leading a coup supported by cambridge analytica on on europe essentially all these like european states like vox and

austria and so on they're going towards right-wing neo-feudalism they're doing that with on the under this uh fed federation that bannon's created and that's all funded and supported by robert mercer so like as so we are the cypher punks we are a new new economic class we you know like the amount of money that's been moved through asia through asian markets every single day like capital flight going through usd teva all the crypto organizations like the level of sophistication in this market compared to 2013 is like on a whole other level like you know we have people are using law now people using tech we have so much tech tools the

people like also everybody is so mobile and they're like going to africa they're going to uh really dodgy places like el salvador that was started because a guy just started setting up atm machines so this is like a community with vitality which with entrepreneurialism you know with drive and ambition that's exploring and so that's that's the vision of tech that we see like let's you know that's like our our power that we have that we have leveraged to be a new class to enact this this economic political vision that we have you know with technologists you know with we're finance people with the intersection of philosophy economics and technology the three big movers of human history

yeah i was going to let rose uh talk about um what was what i was saying earlier about the uh solar punk and lunapunk imaginaries so uh amir alluded to um you know the importance of that solar problem cause for a lot of people in ethereum um you know and he described it as authoritarian i think it definitely has authoritarian tendencies although if you speak with solar punks um many of them are not um many of them aren't aware of that and they they see themselves as being more this kind of like um neo

socialist kind of paradigm but by virtue of their um transparency and their um insistence on identity and they basically integrated authoritarianism into their systems um so quadratic voting and git coin is a perfect example of this git coin is a project which is openly solar punk they talk about solar pump all the time um but they in order to do quadratic voting needed to have identity so for that they use github as we know and just recently um they blocked all grant proposals from people speaking farsi because of u.s sanctions against iran um so this is the logic of surveillance and authoritarianism

playing out like um in like the immediate present uh but the but the but the downstream of that is potentially worse um so dark fries is you know is proposing a kind of counter proposal which we call lunar punk um which is um correcting um the authoritarian tendencies in solarpunk essentially through anonymity um but also through an insistence on uh ideology um and uh and philosophy um instead of this kind of absence of ideas which you know typically is just a backdoor for uh from for the liberal ideology um uh which you know i think ethereum has

fallen victim to so lunar punk you know it's it's its symbols are things more like forests as opposed to the solar punk deserts which you know its central symbol is the sun and which is again this kind of dual meaning of both a symbol of nature but also one of tyranny and surveillance so so lunar punks uh you know inhabit these kind of more liminal dark spaces um which are more like a forest you know that protect inhabitants and uh offer sanctuary then to to people who are persecuted and also provide a line of defense um which is which is really um critical um and this kind of this vision that we're talking

about uh you can see it in the solar pump imagery if you just google solar pump on on google images i mean it's maybe kind of a simplified version of what i think some of the people in ether talking about it's very dubai-esque so you basically have these mega structures the the um which have no grass around them so the implication is we have a future where capitalism and in industry have been preserved basically intact but we now also have trees and grasses etc which uh you know imply that we've corrected the climate crisis through um planting trees or something and but the fundamental issue at hand here you know which is uh through our analysis you

know industry itself like hasn't been addressed um it's it's remained intact the reason why i think solar punk is attractive to many people uh and to people in ethereum is because it is optimistic but also because it offers a vision of the future uh in it at a time where the future feels increasingly closed off um at a time where you know apocalyptic narratives are the most dominant and so solar punk is refreshing to people because it says actually we can you can use technology to solve these problems so we can have a better future etc you know so that's not it's not bad that people are wanting to to see the future they're wanting to to imagine a better

outcome and so so with lunar pumpkin with darkfire we're also trying to not offer people a way to like envision the future like to to speculate on other futures which are better than this one um but without falling into the trap of like tyrannical systems as solar punk does cool well i would say let's let's wrap up at this point uh we've gone like super long but this was like really amazing i really enjoyed this conversation i think we like covered so many different things yeah but so thanks so much everyone for coming on i'm sure there will be people who are like interested in getting involved in uh in the community say i wish i could just listen to amir

talk about history like just for hours on end because i think that was just the best part yeah then thanks so much everyone it was it was a pleasure to have you on yeah thank you and apologies we didn't talk more about tech but we have an elements channel we're going to put on more documentation you know over time so you know we also have a lot of to say about technology stuff it's our life yeah absolutely thank you thanks so much guys real pleasure really enjoyed it thank you