DAPPCON 2025: Ethereum Privacy Roadmaps - Paul Dylan-Ennis, Alan Scott

Transcript

We're like, so okay, how where should we start? Where should we go? And I would ask you first where we are with with privacy. What's the point of like uh of the progress? Um Paul um where are we? Uh not very far I guess. Um especially if you look at the the demands of both of those say documents the two privacy road maps. You have a P a Pav Versaceio which is not easy to say. I'm going to call him Pav maybe from now on. Um but his uh road map is extremely detailed. It's five phases beginning with foundational transaction privacy and all the way up

to like quantum resistance, right? It's a really complicated document and essentially according to his unconditional privacy road map, we're actually not even on stage one. We haven't even begun to contemplate the basics. And then in Vitalik's simplified road map, which is essentially just, you know, okay, we can see uh Pav's road map is quite complicated and I'm going to try to say is there an accommodation somewhere in the middle? Um and even then uh from Vitalik's perspective in the maximally simple privacy road map which is also aiming to be unconditional we are also essentially uh we essentially haven't started. So the the privacy road map hasn't begun I would say. Alan what do you think where where's Ethereum privacy at the moment?

Um it's a it's a mess. Uh it's really hard to do right because we're basically trying to take a a decentralized immutable public ledger and like shoehorn privacy into it. uh and from personal experience it's a big challenge. Um and so like we we've sort of like built it uh you know with with rail gun at a very rudimentary level but you know a lot of the research that's happening now is like how do we get it to do interactions with other contracts and as like the complexity of DeFi enhances I mean like in in 21 it was really simple you know approve tokens for spending send tokens out get tokens back and that a bit of a I don't know oversimplification if you will but it was it was really sort of easy and now

there's a lot of uh complex DeFi interactions that are sort of uh weren't really considered at the time even for us and so like uh as it evolves I think it's only getting more and more complex and like more difficult to uh get to stage one if you will. Oh that's nice. Uh Paul um how do you think uh there are lots of talking about technicalities behind the privacy road map uh but um clearly we see some social aspects or communal aspects so-called social layer behind it. Um can just share like if we're going to reach a decent privacy or this holy grail of privacy what should should be a combination of different things like

political thought like um solidarity movements collaboration movements the certain culture behind privacy that's called these days cypher punk yeah um so like the real politic of it I think is important because if you think about who supports privacy in Ethereum it's actually all very very powerful people. So, Vitalik has his own privacy roadmap. Yet, he struggles to get that to be um you know, part of the Ethereum Foundation's, let's say, uh core long-term roadmap development. Um civil culture, pretty much everybody who's a civil culture member is a pro privacy advocate. Uh Shawe, I think, would represent the OG cipher punk uh

position. So her DeFi punt criteria, the recent um argument that the Ethereum Foundation would only really back projects if they, you know, were willing to uh be permissionless, etc. Although interestingly, privacy was last even on Shawi's list. Um and then also even Tamas. So Tomas uses the uh privacy, security, censorship, resistance uh tagline which comes from the uh the privacy road map. That's that's the tree list that uh uh the three uh principles that are in Pav's uh paper. So like that's uh so he is channeling that whether it's conscious or not. I don't know maybe he just picked it up by people using it elsewhere. So it's it's a strange situation where everybody

supports it but at the same time the idea that privacy would be a flagship in the new all core devs reconfiguration. So we know that the uh the all core devs um let's say the the core governance process is now opening up to a wider stakeholder set and yet it still seems almost unimaginable that the flagship would be say one of the let's say foundational privacy transaction as outlined in both of those those uh manifestos or privacy road maps. So yeah it's a curious paradox. Why is it that we can't seem to get privacy to be anything but an afterthought? And I think that maybe comes down to the current climate of pragmatism. So everybody's obsessed with scaling L1, scaling blobs, improve UX, uh, and privacy is seen as something which maybe

would slow that map down. And so we're willing to kind of throw it away in order to achieve these more, uh, to beat Salana essentially is what really going on. It's a pretty admirable goal though, I guess, from my take actually. So Alan, how this uh recent changes with like Ethereum Foundation in powerful people around Ethereum preaching on privacy affect rail gun? Um because for many years you were really neglected only Vitalik and a few other folks were like supporting it but no. Yeah. So um I have a bit of a different take you know um you know we've sort of started getting like inbound like you know rail gun contributors have been getting inbound from like EF and uh you

know people who built uh and consulted on and built or advised on 4337 coming and saying like hey how do we do pay masters for rail gun and you know doing some research together with people who are in the EF. um you know, we've we've sort of gotten a little bit of u uh PSE um love as of late, too. And so, um I guess like we're probably at I tend to agree, right? We're not really there yet, but I feel like we're sort of on the precipice of it. And so, like a lot of people have like made noise and like this momentum will take like some time. Um but, uh I could also be like a very naive optimist.

There's no bad no bad thing, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I would I would rather be positive than negative about it. I suppose but um yeah I think I think I think there's momentum there you know there's people like us here in this room listening to the talk that care about it and so um yeah just just to follow on that like in like it's worth stressing that Vitalik's first recommendation for like the near-term privacy road map is to integrate rail gun in like the very very first thing is to integrate rail gun into pre-existing wallets so that people can then opt in very easily shield their transactions. So yeah I think that's worth worth stressing.

Yeah. And it's been we've sort of done some of that uh rail gun contributors like we shoehorned rail gun into uh Ravi uh which was a [ __ ] nightmare. Um and then you know we shoehorned it into a snap uh for fun and research and none of this code is out there in the world in public. Don't go looking for it because it's not great. Um and the the short answer is that like it's possible but it's very very hard. Um, and uh, there's a lot of like security assumptions and compromises that you make whenever you do that because um, I mean we all know who Ravi is owned by and there's a ton of analytics roped all through that codebase that make it really uh, sort of anti- privacy. Um, so so maybe in this case Vitalik is the naive optimist, but yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I still think

it's it's possible, right? I mean we tore all that stuff out, but it would be like, "Dear Rabby, please uh, you know, shoot yourself in the foot with all you know, take all this analytics out." And so yeah it might be a compromise a a bridge too far but actually I would ask you Alan uh about the road map in terms of uh timing because no one talks about timing but for you to reach any product market fit related metrics it took three years and here we are talking about way more complex privacy in that should involve so many different organizations and no one says like oh in 20 years because you know it can really uh kill optimism that you were referring to how many years uh it could take for example to integrate rail gun into wallets by

default. Oh, I mean I think like you know that is a matter of you know short years. U but if we want to get like more grand with the question and think about like how long like true adoption takes. I mean I think it could be a decade or more right? Um at least because the stuff's really difficult to to to get traction on. But um you can look at things like I don't know uh credit cards. uh Diner Club was uh founded in in 1950 uh I think it was and even in like 1990 40 years later people were still like you're gonna buy a cheeseburger with a credit card like that's dumb you know um and so like even like traditional finance stuff took a very very long time and uh I think we

got to really look at other marketplaces and say like this can be a very very long haul um and people who say moon soon should appreciate that soon is probably years and years and years away. Well, your reflection on practicality behind the timing. Um, yeah. I mean, so my my view on this is uh where I become a little bit like anti- um success or something almost, you know, like I I believe crypto culture and Ethereum uh culture, let's say, is a subculture that can't accept it's a subculture, right? So, it's always imagining some kind of like mainstream success and maybe it does come, but like it'll be a very very long time. Uh, and if we accepted our subcultural status that we're essentially like, you know,

furries with money, everybody hates us, we go to conferences all the time, uh, we have this like weird ideas about how things should work. Uh, we would like have a better chance of integrating uh, privacy. So, uh, as soon as we we we come to accept our subcultural status, I think we're in a better situation. Um, and that would allow for that long-term timeline because we'd be more like a movement. But we're always chasing this idea of the uh, the retail who I think is like a fabrication. It's like some sort of psychoanalytic uh hallucination that we have of the average Joe who's going to use uh our obscure privacy kind of tech, you know. Yeah. Alan, are there billions moving for real gun? Remind me.

Is is there what are there billions moving for real gun? Yeah, it's about um Yeah, it's in that tune. Um I I just can't get over the whole like furries with money thing. Still kind of hung up on that comment. I love that. So it's funny because there people keep asking where the privacy and then releg is coming like but we have billions here and you're saying no no but that's still subculture. Uh what's it definitely is you got to zoom out to like the broader market of finance right? Um it's definitely uh a rounding error uh for capital flows uh globally. Um not even a rounding error it's a speck on a fleas on an elephant's ass. I mean it's really really small. So then what's your projection for example five years as I was asking you where do you want to be

in terms of measurements um I mean ideally not blown up I mean I think like one of the biggest challenges for projects like this is like don't die right it's a war of attrition um and so making sure that you don't get killed by a bug or like um I don't know I mean just thinking about things like you know is uh BN going to be cool enough in 5 years to not be broken and maybe we need to go to BLS or like how do we deal with architecture that you know allows us to be modular in cryptography because uh we all know that that's an arms race. Um so uh to to me you know I don't really think about numbers as much as it is like how do we get these sort of things to survive.

Um and then uh there's this um if you closely pay attention to EF you would see that suddenly they're starting to shield privacy apps uh fluid key and and I think and the others uh um the question is like what kind of other apps you would love to see um each of you that are maybe neglected in terms of privacy or attention but still needed to kind of like have this tangible um Ethereum pricing system moving forward. Yeah. I'm I'm a I think like many people probably in this room, but if you went to another room, they wouldn't be uh this wouldn't be as likely. But a fileverse pill kind of person, I think that that's um a classic example of an app that we should all completely be be

using. Uh sort of like using Google Docs, but not having that icky feeling that you're being observed and like everything that you're doing is being sort of like, you know, stored forever. Uh Rocky would be another one like uh which um I know that Left Terrace works on this in a very kind of passionate way. he's always being pressured to monetize it and he refuses to do so. So I think that's a project we should be backing. I'm also an advocate that we should be using our social media. We should be using um Lens and Farcaster. So the the great paradox as uh Naomi mentioned earlier on today that if we're not using these apps then why would anybody else? That's like the great paradox of crypto culture. So yeah, and a Rocky Fileverse and then maybe a Farcaster type.

Yeah, that ditto on all those above. Um, you know, some of the things that just thinking I can't help but think about stuff. I I don't know. I wake up and think about rail gun stuff, but a bit louder. Um, I I I think that like um I I would love to see things uh like uh invoicing. Um I I think about the things that people are doing with Rogon now. U people don't really have a good way to do invoices uh privately. So like taking and doing like uh invoicing is probably a really good lowhanging fruit in the in the world of privacy.

And if we were talking about the culture, there are lots of talks about cypher punk. And I um I was referring to this kind like notion that once Vitalik wrote the blog the next big event was if Denver and I was really like I was interested like who will be the one who will be like okay we're with Vitalic we understand what cyber punk is and it was only Peter van Wenberg from coin center which is ironic sort of like on a legal side or like lobbying side you would say while the fancy privacy protocols were a bit puzzled I guess like they didn't want to associate themselves with Assange with Wikileaks was like uh privacy radicals from 30 years uh ago. How would you define uh the role of this cyberpunk transition

within Ethereum and where it could lead us? Yeah. Um interestingly both the both the foundational cyberpunk documents are both authored by the two privacy roadmap people. So make Ethereum Cipher Punk again is Vitalic and then he's got his maximally simple privacy road map and then PCAV as he's now known for for from me uh is the author of the Ethereum Cippher punk manifesto and the more detailed privacy road map uh which then seems to be filtering up into the Ethereum foundation is probably why Tomas is like uh feels like to you know be promoting these these privacy apps at least I think that's why it's in the air and so I mean I've always been on the position this perhaps not surprisingly for anyone who knows me that we've been searching for a narrative We're

searching for who we are uh since the beginning and uh to me it's always been cippher punk. It's not a great case of um make Ethereum cippher punk again is in like it doesn't like it doesn't even make sense to think of Ethereum without cipher punk. To me it's inelimable. It's the the core. It's the whole point. It's possible for there to be an Ethereum that exists say five or 10 years down the line where the culture evolves, the social layer evolves and it's no longer recognizably cyberpunk. But I think for everybody in this room and maybe for people like at Protocolberg and Dapcon that that would no longer be ethereum spiritually it would be like a kind of shipia situation you know like all the all the important parts have disappeared. So uh yes so cippher punk is is the the the whole point the

rationale uh there is an appetite for it but people are afraid to to use it they're afraid to use uh the terminology increasingly because I guess it's seen as overly complicated you know to introduce on crypto Twitter as people were talking about earlier decentralization permissionlessness censorship resistance incredible neutrality not easy easy things to talk about uh but if we don't talk about them like nobody else is going to do them do it for us like we are very much going to have to uh keep the cypher punk language alive and not demote it in order to be more pragmatist.

Yeah, it's sort of like the the the spearhead of the ethos, right? Uh I also see it uh beyond that as like the people who are going to be willing to like uh experiment with the tech uh a lot earlier. Uh we'll find like the the really hyper um nerdy types will be the people that that have a go at it first. Um and so like whenever Waku came around, we were like, "Oh, cool." like this is like this weird lib P2P thing and like we were going to talk to broadcasters over like HTTP but we'll do it over a mixet. Why not? We'll see what happens. Uh and so you I think that uh one of the best things about the whole like cipher punk culture is that like people will experiment with like new technology and like there's a really cool like uh interesting community of

people who like um sort of like feedback to each other. Um, and so like, uh, we broke Wahoo in all sorts of weird ways, uh, and struggled with it for a long time, but they were really, um, they took in a lot of really great feedback, um, and now it works great. And so I sort of see us as like the the guinea pigs, if you will. Paul, how you would pitch cyber punk to a newcomer? U, let's say, let's say from crypto, but um, who has been just around like familiar with crypto more or less?

Um yeah yeah yeah I don't think you need to convince everybody. Uh so like let's say trying to think of my um so like I'm an academic and I teach crypto to undergrads and postgrads and every year you get a room of say 50 people and these days often uh a lot of Salana kids you know they're they're sort of a they've got like a pragmatist attitude toward toward crypto. Um, and then there are, I guess, just general cryptonatives, people who know the way around, say Poly Market, stable coins. Um, cryptonatives, I guess, right? That would be the the term that's used uh more and more. But, uh, within a class like that, you're only ever going to get, say, a handful of people who listen to the cipher punk part and become uh, deeply interested in it. And I always think you're not trying to convince

everybody. You're just trying to find people who are temperamentally cyberpunk. as long as there's a a uh like cypher punk is a minority sport in Ethereum, but it can be it tends to have outside influence because the people who are cipher punk are often very passionate. And so that's what I think you just need to do is you don't need to convince everybody, but as soon as you see someone who seems a little bit cippy punky, someone who may went to the web tree privacy hackathon, it's like those are the people uh the vanguard I guess the foundation uh that that's all you need to do and it won't be difficult to uh cipher punk pill because they're already probably radicals uh in spirit.

I don't know how we would pitch. Oh man, I don't know. I think that's pretty well said. Um, they sort of like show themselves frankly. You know, the people who are like it's like a bug light, you know, you sort of just kind of go to it. And there's one hilarious B2B cyber punk and we talk about this in during Prague and then it was like a joke like a meme and then I'm like but wait me is B2B cypher punk fund raise from A6 is in crypto Binance whatever but I know that they're legit activists and this project do exist it's just that it's not fancy to say that we're building here here a business of sustainability uh or that some of our allies maybe not that radical

um or although Mark Andre if you go on Wikipedia he's there as the OG cyber punk which is makes it much more uh complex in terms of narratives and how you will um talk with people but I'm interesting like uh Paul and would you deny the existence existence of uh B2B cyber punk in terms of B2B protocols or like protocols that serve uh enterprises um like should they even go there and use the narrative or just super antagonistic. So, uh I'll take a crack at this. Like I think it it becomes a bit whitewashed uh occasionally. Uh you got to like pick your audience, you know what I mean? Um and so like you know the rail gun

privacy project, you know, has a really big player in there from I guess 2022. Um, and DCG had come along and put uh a couple million dollars into the rail gun treasury and put up a governance vote to um sort of be part of the DAO. Um, and a lot of that conversation wasn't really um cipher punky, but you know, they really care about a lot of the ideals of censorship resistance and uh immutability and privacy. Um, a lot of those dudes are are are really cracked about that stuff. Um, I don't think we give those people a lot of credit, you know, but it's really kind of funny whenever I see Barry, he's like, "Oh, rail god. Love rail god." And like, you know, he's really excited about privacy and we talk about it all the time. And so, I think that like maybe the

nomenclature is different, but I think some of the substrates the same. Yeah. I call this the the am mean to a mirror spectrum, right? You can be a kind of like you can be in the mean sort of like a proof of innocence kind of person then you can be like an amir lunar punk uh like hardcore person and as long as they're um expanding the agora as long as they're keeping the counter economy a little bit open. Uh maybe they're doing it in their different ways but um the important thing is to to to ensure that that um agorous sort of enclave expands as much as possible so that it can contaminate the traditional world and different people are going to do it in different ways. You just have to accept that as latestage factionism within mature um cipher punk movement.

Um we're running out of time and before we're going to the to eat wonderful German food uh do questions on how do we reach uh yeah please I will I will go. Hello. Um, so with rail gun there's this concept of filters where if you like get filtered you can't necessarily use the system in a kind of a privacy pools way as I understand it on Ethereum L1 there's been some talk of having like onchain privacy natively if we were to have onchain privacy natively should it be more in a yeah like I guess air versus a mean way like should it be like a Zcash versus rail gun like the

anonymity set is for everybody or is it just for who decides what's criminal or not criminal on the chain. Should Is that like something personally that you feel like as a cipher punk value should be all or nothing? Um I I think that like the talk about these things is like mutually exclusive would be a miss, right? Because a mirror and a mean exist both inact weird harmony, right? Um and I think that that's really great. And so I I don't think that they're like a binary in that way. Um you know, so the way that rail gun works is it is permissionless. anyone can call the contracts and the way that the list provider works today is really such as you expressed that if you aren't you know considered to be within the uh uh the the list of dogooders it's really

difficult to to use rail gun uh the SDK is sort of locked up that way but you know in reality it could go that way right it is permissionless as a contract it does exist to be so but um I I tend to lean more towards the am mean side of things um and you know be able be able to I The way that proof of innocence is is built from a tech perspective really is um such that you could have a a multitude of lists and make a lot of different assert, you know, assertations about yourself. You can assert uh I like long walks on the beach and hold this balance. Um and so it's sort of arbitrary what you prove against. And so uh where does it go from here? I don't know. But um yeah, I don't I don't think that it's um mutually exclusive at all.

I think we could have both. Hi, I have another question that's going to be blasphemous. So, should we as cipher punks team up with big enterprises that um want to move some operations on chain, but they don't want this to be fully transparent. So, they may be also looking for some privacy solutions that Ethereum community maybe can provide them and in meanwhile they could get money, they could get tech to be a bit more mature and this could be like a stepping stone in the privacy road map. So my question is what do you think about this proposal? Yeah, I mean I think like one of the I think one of the things that we really have to appreciate at least from my two cents and background in finance is that like people need privacy in finance. Uh a lot

of like capital markets sort of erode away without like peer-to-p peer blinding. Um auction mechanics don't really work. Um we have a really great example of that a couple of years ago in Constitution Dow. Who remembers Constitution Dow? Right. So, for anybody who remembers, they raised up a How much was it? A couple million. 42. Thank you. $42 million. Really? $42 million. [ __ ] Um, yeah. So, they raised up $42 million and magically the bid went slightly above that, right? Um, and that's sort of like a microcosm example of what happens to like traditional markets when you don't have that actor blinding. But even beyond that, you see things like u people touting they know where people are going to be liquidated and things like that on crypto Twitter. So, if we want to like lure that kind of capital

into crypto, it's going to have to have privacy. Um, and it's certainly going to be the people who know it the best, cipher punks that pulled it. Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm very much on the I don't really have an opinion on it because um or maybe it's more like a Marinho meme, you know, I better not say anything. Um, but I'm more of a I'm more interested in the the pri uh the individual privacy and then maybe extending also into kind of cooperatives and smaller kind of groups that that's the when I think of uh the Ethereum privacy road map, it's the individual that I'm mo mostly focused on. So or mostly interested in so privacy for the weak and then not even paying attention to like transparency for the powerful.

That question I think is too complicated uh for the moment. But both of the um like both of the the road maps that we have at the moment are oriented toward the question of privacy for the individual and I think that's the uh important focus for now. So enterprise could be uh something for I guess yeah more business-minded folks to look at but I think uh it's the individual that I would personally be uh that that that needs in the more immediate sense. Agreed. Thank you. Um, on topic for privacy for day-to-day use when it comes to payments, um, and in relation to the road map, I was curious what's planned to scale down fees.

Um, you got anything there? No. Okay. Um, so to scale down fees, um, you know, so just from like a direct rail gun perspective. Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. I mean, both fronts, right? I mean, yeah. pay less is what people want to do, right? Uh or drive towards zero. Um so, um I think that one of the one of the things that costs the most relevant transaction as it exists is about a million gas, right? 1.2 if you're doing something complex. Um and the most expensive bit of that is state update for the contract. Um you know, so whenever you take and you do a DeFi transaction, let's say, right? Uh you unshield from the contract, update state, do some [ __ ] and then come back

and update state again. And uh those state update transaction uh bits of computation are really in expensive. Uh and so one of the biggest things that we're working on is like how do we figure out how to push uh that state update all the way to the end so there's only one bit of state update. Uh and if the earth and moon and sun and stars all align and that's uh able to be done in a secure way, we should be able to cut gas by about half. Um and uh we're also sort of trying to figure out different ways to use more optimal curves. You know, when rail gun got started, you know, four or five years ago, uh there wasn't a new plot derivative every day, but now there is and maybe there's something out there that, you know, is is a little bit

more gas efficient, but we're trying to weigh that against like proving times and UX. So, uh but really the the the lowhanging fruit there is on state update for the contract. uh one cultural question to wrap things up. We spent few days ago a time with Isabelle, executive director from tour and she's a wonderful positive individual um originally from Brazil and and she's really like radiating this kind of like let's get [ __ ] done u sort of culture as in a position to gloom and doom that privacy is under attack. Big brother is watching us. Uh world coin is stealing our souls. uh and iris and stuff like that. How you would approach

that sort of positivistic take on privacy that can lead to empowerment the communities of mutual support um when we will celebrate privacy instead of just have these panels of mourning like lacking of something special and precious. Yeah. Um so well I mean worldcoin is stealing our souls. I think that's that's something we should probably accept. But um it's yeah it's probably a bigger problem. I think Nick is going to deal with that uh later on today. Um but the yeah so I do think that it's let's say if you go to an event like the your the hackathon the web privacy type hackathon a few years ago uh maybe even 10 years ago the culture would be a more paranoid surveillanceoriented it would

be very like kind of critical of the system um and so on and all these things are are fine but they they can get very insular and they can get very nhilistic in a in a strange uh kind of way and also you get lots of like personal impersonal sorry uh uh infighting like personality infighting over time because the same people are involved in the same micro politics after a while. So I don't think that's uh a situation you want to be in. It's much better to have that that optimistic uh take uh and it's much better to I think to have that uh demonstrative take. So we take like Joshua's talk of showing like the the bread uh cooperative that you know these things can be done which tends to have a positive effect. at the the scale of Ethereum, it's much more complicated

because we've essentially had the OG cipher punk uh faction, let's say, has faced a coup from the the pragmatists. So, we've we've seen this pragmatist shakeup of Ethereum culture. Um, and then there's also uh another group which is worth mentioning which is the post ideological pragmatist, the blockworked extended universe, what I call the CTVC podcast industrial complex. Um so there there are groups that are there is like something like a debate in Ethereum which is which is about that about whether we should be still focused on you know remembering those core values that Ethereum is defending but also what it's opposed to uh or should we just be more pragmatist minded and like not

spend so much time thinking about the values. I think the ideal situation is a hybrid culture. you need basically both and that you put the people who are strategically minded in terms of uh near-term tactics, let them do what they want to do, give them the two-year road map, and then you also have your OG cipher punks thinking of the long term. Uh and probably don't put them together too often because they'll just sort of bicker. Alan, one of the things why we have Alan also around us because just a wonderful positive human beings who just drops uh jokes all around and nice to be with those people. I think it's important to be positive, right? You know, you have to have a positive outlook, otherwise it's [ __ ] sad, right? Um I think that

I don't know, man. I I I think it's a generally positive community, right? And we have a lot of different stuff coming together. Like this is great. Uh whenever like I think when did we meet each other, Mika? Was it in Rome? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. It was whenever you guys were starting to really put this together. And I thought that was really sick. You know, it's like, oh, we're going to put a little collective together to research a lot of this different stuff, like it's involved in something really cool. And I think that only comes from like a a really cool collective of people who are passionate about stuff and generally positive. Um, I think if you're like a a negative and a a bear about everything, you sort of just like camp out in the woods and don't associate with anyone,

right? So, I think that these sort of like communal events happen because of positivity. But that's my opinion. just on on that like one of the things that I was going to end one of my my previous talk uh on this but I removed it because I I lacked the confidence to kind of try to pull it off but I was going to basically argue uh what if everything is okay at the social layer. What if we do have this robust hybrid pragmatic and OG cyberpunk culture I think the mood like the atmosphere uh events is much more positive uh much more confident than I've seen for a very long time. And you'll al also notice that privacy of uh privacy in cyberpunk is now much more embedded in events than the has ever been. It's never been like this except maybe in the very early beginning. So

yeah, what if everything is okay, which is a horrifying thing to think, you know, everything's fine. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for this panel, Jens. Uh just small announcement uh before the break. Uh it's like almost one hour break and then there's like almost every speaker is wonderful. I really invite you to listen to Christopher Go from Anoma really. high-end thinker Nick Almont will roast worldcoin uh there's a bunch of people from zika singing and polygon maiden it's nice to hear B2B privacy take and also the crossover between cyber punks bolansky infrastructure hardware privacy that sometimes is neglected and we sort of like forgetting that we should run our own infra and how it's costly uh then

there will be lots of like will Scott OG hacker also kind of contributed to the scene and we also forgetting that haptivism M as in activism is a part part of the culture and the movement. And last but not least also Ying Tong, an applied cryptographer who really uh knows how to put cryptography in play and now she works a lot within identity framework and for example they're trying to implement it with in Taiwan and she's like walking through this maze of bureaucratic labins. Uh and all those things are our own privacy road map.

Have a nice food and return after the break. Thank you.