DAPPCON 2025: Shapphirepunk - Wassim Z. Alsindi

Transcript

Hey everybody, is the mic on? Can you hear me? Am I amplified? Yes, I am. Wonderful. Okay, slides will be Aha. Slides over there. Great. Okay, so maybe a bit different than some of the things we've heard in the last last moment. Um so we're here thinking about uh privacy and the presence or absence of it in a practical sense but I wanted to also like open it up to a bit more of a open circuits of inquiry and um so I gave a talk at the cyberpunk congress in Thailand in early November and that was titled cifher punk. So this is a linguistic split exploring a a break or a possible new way forwards for the

concept of cipher punk. And today's talk further explores this idea of an epistemic break. Um but now it lays out um let's say a underformed but more coherent alternative proposal or at least a direction than I had six months ago. And uh first of all because we're in a in a place we're on some land uh it's very fashionable these days to do a land acknowledgement and uh so in Berlin we are standing on the grounds of former crusader territory in the 13th century Shernburgg and Croitzburg were both uh Knights Templar lands. So I want us to honor and remember the Christtofascists

from a thousand years ago that gave rise to the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany. So and that's a joke that I'm making possibly mixed taste that's based on some land acknowledgements that are actually happening here in Germany in the middle of this insane genocide and the German response to that. So okay, silence. Perhaps I didn't read the room. So uh I want to recap what I spoke about in Bangkok on cifer punk. And so uh I couched the talk back then in a disclaimer which I'm going to repeat to you again. This is a provocation exploring an extremely specific purist opinion that I don't wholly share but I

think it's at least an interesting area to explore. Many might find these ideas objectionable and that's kind of the point. I don't hold these opinions strongly and I would not die on these hills. No. Okay. Can I get a GM? I know it's not morning anymore, but GM GM. Good morning, GM. GM. Mornings are good. This is a reference to a greeting among Bitcoin and blockchain enthusiasts and followers of social media. The joke sausage is refers to the value of getting involved in a given crypto finance proposition early and the expectation of a bright future. And that's why we're all here, right?

But maybe it was different in the past. Okay. So I want to give you like a historical slip um and the story of where the word cipher punk came from. So cipher punk initially was a twist on cyberpunk. We all know this Judah Milono uh is credited with that particular word play. And the idea of the cipher itself comes like you know let's say very like a few steps from the east. And so we can trace cipher most clearly back to the Arabic word cphr which is zero in the Arabic language. And indeed the Arabs borrowed the concept of numericals which you can compute on from their misadventures and adventures in uh southern Asia particular uh what we call

India today. And then this traveled eastwards. Um indeed Fibonacci or Fibonacci sequence golden ratio kind of fame is credited with uh bringing cipher uh via zephirus into Latin and western language. Uhhuh. And but I wanted us to think about the root of this word that both zero and cipher come from this Arabic word for the void, for nothing, for concealment, for maybe even censorship.

Okay. And here's a paper I dug out on the eve of the conference in Thailand in November around the census burden. This is kind of like some of the epistemic grapplings we have when we talk about information particularly in a frame of information theory and what the sensor must know in order to be a just sensor shall we say and this paper argues it's basically impossible because of the limits to knowledge what can be known at a particular time. Okay. Meme break. Here's a meme. Financial growth.

Exponential financial growth. Exponential financial growth on a planet with finite resources. And hands up who knows Universal Paper Clips. I feel like there must be at least a few in the audience. Okay, just quick recap if you haven't played it yet. And in advance, I'm sorry if you waste an afternoon playing it. You probably should. You will learn a lot or like it will reiterate a lot about the way the world is today. So this is how I see our modern market-based necrotic capitalist present. And so, Universal Paper Clips is a simple web game where you control.

You're a humble paperclip merchant. You click a button, you turn strips of metal into paper clips. Then after a while, you start getting tools and you're there clicking away linearly. You start getting tools. This scales, this gives you scale and gives you automation. And you end up before too long controlling the squadron of hyperdimensional intelligences, stripping the universe for all available material. And that's market-based capitalism. That's what we live in. But we have to live in that universe as well, right? Um I often root the conversations through some of Bodriar's earlier work. Many of us are familiar with the idea of the similacrim and the simulation. The idea that the abstracted kind of fake can out outsurpass the real. But in his prior work, especially in the book

symbolic exchange and death, Bojar lays out uh a schema for mimemetic economies, economies that play on cool codes of capital that don't have any real underlying them. I'll give you a quote because I think it's worth remembering. We now live in a world dominated by the free play of the monetary sign that is beyond reference to any real of production or even a monetary reference in the form of a gold standard. In this world the idea of real value of equities of commodities of houses of anything is meaningless as what matters instead is not value per se but infinite speculation. This new world is marked by the emergence of a brothel

of capital not for prostitution but for substitution and commutation. Does that remind you of anything? And bodar has this kind of three-stage genealogy. I guess almost kind of like in a Marxist frame where we start from raw commodities, lumps of coal, sacks of wheat, whatever. We refine those using social value uh into steel or bread or whatever. But really the third the final form of value is this cold semiotic forms symbolic codes. And I look at around first it was coins tokens then memecoins defi Dows whatever we even had things on the trady side like GameStop. We've now

got crypto things which are starting to eat the stock market like strategy and all these companies building uh Bitcoin and Ethereum um treasuries. So I think Bodri's work warrants a reappraisal in the present day. Okay, I'm not going to talk about Raymond and his cathedrals and bizaars or the price of anarchy today. Uh here was me gatekeeping the Ethereum infinite garden in Bangkok. Found that across the road from the venue. Um, and then like, okay, so last time what I said was Ethereum can't be cipher punk actually because of that terrible thing that you did at the start of it that we never talk about again.

And that is the DAO exploit in 2016. I'm not going to litigate it in depth again here, but I will just like show you some of the promises and warnings that came up at the time. Uh, some of the criticisms that especially the Bitcoiners have made. The Bitcoiners don't take this web 3 movement seriously because they think you can just delete [ __ ] at will. And what's the [ __ ] point if you don't mind my French? There's been some movements and attempts including this one to rehabilitate the image of Ethereum in terms of cipher punk. Make Ethereum cipher punk again.

And I will just note that in this article uh which Vitalic wrote and which uh somebody over there fact checked. I can see according to the um uh acknowledgements there's an awful lot of valor being stolen from Bitcoin if I'm being unkind. It almost seems like all of the virtuous examples of cypher punk are being borrowed from Bitcoin and we're kind of like not talking too much about the other stuff like irregular state transitions and deleting attackers balances and whatever. Can you guys stop trading all of that stuff? Anyway, there's this thing called code law. Maybe some of you will still remember this. I think it's in the graveyard now.

We put it to death after the the Dow hack. Uh but there was a group of people in the 90s onwards, Bill Mitchell and Lawrence Lesig most notably in those early days hypothesizing that we could inscribe and embed our values into technologies and they would kind of outlast those moments. In the 90s that sounded very cute. The internet was barely a thing. Uh but now we have persistent programmatic crypto cryptographic substrates like blockchains where we can embed these values and they could potentially last for very long periods of time. I won't say forever because a lot of things got marketed as being forever and they already started to decommission them. So like I don't know for a while let's say okay and then the Dow hack happened and

there was a chain split in Ethereum. Ethereum forked off, broke the rules, forked off. And there was a group of people in that community that said, "No, we're not going to fork off. We believe in cod's law. We believe in like if rules aren't broken, we're going to keep doing this." And that became the Ethereum Classic community. And they derived their identity from this concept of cod's law. Here's the one of the logos at the time, which was a phoenix arising from the flames of the whatever thing, the bad thing that happened, the catastrophe. And by the way, I was writing about forks. That was where I started doing my uh first uh field specific research in 2017 and 18 and I ended up speaking at the Ethereum Classic Summit in Korea in 2018 because they read my work and it was more charitable about them than most other

people's at the time. But what was interesting was at that point I made a predict series of predictions about what was going to happen to their network the longer that Ethereum would delay the move to proof of work. And indeed one by one very sadly they all came true ending with an enormous 51% attack on the network. six week six six weeks worth of transactions got reorgked as I remember and the exchanges got cleaned out and so paying attention and being inside this little movement trying to understand it as a community or as something like you know the principle the the um how can I say it conscientious objectors to the situation in 2016 was very interesting but there wasn't much of a community there if I'm I'm honest all right so I would say code law is a good example of what you might call algorithmic

formalism like we set the rules And then we can't change the thing in the future. And we see these kinds of ideas all over the place and they're responsible for a lot of uh ills in the world. Let's say just by the way if I can go back. Yes, code is law. What about the law bit of code is law? Does the law change? Yes, the law changes because the world changes, technologies change, jurisdictions change, facts change, realities change. So what is the law part of code is law if we're not referring to the law? Natural laws maybe. Well, you should read my epistemology work about how the natural laws aren't laws.

Okay? And then the one of the things I did very briefly in Bangkok is I talked about suffer punk, which is Bitcoin, proof of work. Um, like we give the machine all the power and all the agency. So, here's a little bit of poetry. The church and the network, zeal and time, death and money, all sides of the same coin. All right. So, Bitcoin, it looks like it's pretty cippher punk. It looks like it's pretty decentralized. Looks like it's pretty permissionless. There's no gods, no masters to a first approximation. But this comes at possibly the ultimate cost. So, we've built a system which has no sensory capabilities beyond its environments.

All it knows is it needs energy and every two weeks the probability of a hash finding a block gets recomputed. This lottery ticket kind of mechanism. uh so that the block clock, the real innovation of Bitcoin, the decentralized temporal regime that is Bitcoin can keep ticking regularly at the possible expense of boiling the oceans. And obviously much ink and hot air has already been spilled on that. Okay, so he said this, it's indifferent to us, maybe even insufferable.

Okay, well that's all well and good. People always say yes, thank you very much for all the criticism. Do you have any constructive ideas about how we might actually fix this garbage heap of a situation? Well, here's something called Sappine. Sapphire Sapphire Punk that I've been working on with a few other people. And I would say it's a work in progress um provisional uh uh uh I'd say provisionally articulated proposal on a wave beyond uh some of the dead ends of this kind of like techniquitarian dream which became associated with the word cipher punk. So first of all I will just note that there was this very famous document which most of you are probably aware of from 1993

Eric Hughes ah hackers manifesto sorry a cipher punks manifesto. What I really want to point out here like you know we'll get to the rest of it in a minute. What I really want to point out here is like in the title the way it's laid out a cipher punks manifesto. A is an individual cippher punks is a possessive. So we've already in the title prefigured the worldview from which this is being uh espoused and through which you will receive it. Okay. Sapphire Punk is a onchain technology ench.

And here are the co-authors of this document. Uh some of them anon some of them aren't. Oh and that QR code you'll be able to read a preview of this document. It's about three and a half thousand words long. I'll also show it at the end. So don't worry if you don't catch it right now. Okay? And then I'm going to start reading you stuff. This is a conference where I the person on stage gets to advertise to you. Right? I don't have anything to sell, but I've got some concepts. So I'm going to ram them down your throat for the next eight minutes. The world cannot be protected by cryptography alone. We are the Sapphire Punks. We inherit the tools of cryptographic resistance and invoke them not for escape but for togetherness.

Privacy is not a bunker. It's a commons. Sovereignty is never in isolation. It's always in relation. Sapphire punk is a call for a reformation. Not a rejection of the original cipher punk ideals, but a reckoning for today's world. We summon forth a new poetic and political imaginaries that expand beyond the sovereign individual into the plural and the planetary. We demand the crafting of technologies that nurture meaning, resilience, and communal flourishing. We will not passively receive the futures we deserve. We must collectively bring them into being. We reimagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communion, not ali alienation.

To act as a sapphire punk is to believe that privacy is a necessary starting condition for imagination, resistance, and community, not the end point. We envision technologies that uplift the collective, not merely cloak the self. We wish to create tools that serve not only the technologically fluent or the economically privileged but also those most at risk from state violence, political oppression, corporate surveillance and technofascism. Okay, you can read these uh offline another time. I will get to the good bits because we only have a few minutes left together. The collective promise of cryptography. Today we are all cyborgs, not just interfacing with cryptographic

systems, but co-poetically bringing their meanings and consequences into being. The tools we build reflect the worlds we wish to inhabit. The self, like aworked node, only experiences meaning through its edges. There is no cryptographic truth without a handshake, no key without an other to unlock, no privacy without shared trust. Worse still, the more secure the more secure the enclave, the lonier the architect. The myth of the ungoverned self forget to that to exist at all is to be born into a web of care, memory, and responsibility. As Har Hannah Aren reminds us, freedom is born not in isolation, but in the spaces in between.

In the web of human relations where action, speech, and remembrance take shape. A politics of privacy. Oh, I can't read the rest. Okay, I'm going to skip that. This is important. Like we can we can have our eyes glaze over as we sit in these post-launch talks, but I think this is the most important part of this document. I want to read it carefully with you. Feel free to frontr run me and take a look at it while I take a sip of uh this matter. recuperating the humiliated technological subject. The emotional substrate of cipher punk despite its technological rationalism is affectly sha a effectively shaped by shame, paranoia and fear.

Shame in particular plays a central yet disavowed role. The shame of being seen, the shame of being known, the shame of exposure. It is a fantasy of purity and control. A dream of a self-s sovereign subject who never has to depend. reveal or negotiate. Shame is fundamentally an individualizing a narcissistic emotion. It centers the self as a failed or contaminated object and in doing so isolates rather than connects. The cipher punk reacts to vulnerability by retreating into technical mastery, encrypting everything, trusting no one.

But this dream leaves little space for cooperation, solidarity, or repair. When privacy is grounded in shame, the ideal becomes to disappear, not to relate. Trust is seen as a bug, not a feature. Dependence is weakness. Vulnerability is flaw. What emerges is a social I can't read that. Whatever. Okay. There is no security through insecurity. That's the punch line. Okay. And I want to wrap this little kind of whistle stop tour of this new document uh with the with the final thoughts in it.

Endings and beginnings. The old cipher punk dream is dead. Cryptographic armors wielded in isolation have now been co-opted as the weaponry of the very hedgemony the cipher punks sought to resist. Privacy auctioned, freedom commodified, solidarity fractured by market logics. This is the cost of mistaking encryption for emancipation. We refuse this hollow future. living in the ruins of technoc capital exploitation. Technology alone cannot heal broken trust, nourish our commons, nor honor the web of life. Now that the master's house is also a casino exploiting both their tools and ours, we

must regroup and build new architectures rooted not in fear but in radical care and community. Okay, that's it. Thank you. If you want to download it, it's uh scan that code. [Applause] Oops. Uh, more questions. We can have one, two, to a team. Go ahead. Come at me. Paul. Paul, do you have one?

Where there wasn't really much crusader material. I was kind of I was kind of disappointed. What's how did the Crusades fit into the this new sapphire punk? Um well, if you look at the Crusades from the Eastern perspective, Paul, which is something that I know you're not that keen on doing, you you will notice that uh jewelry as well as other kinds of material riches is often given by the Eastern victims of the Crusades as the real motivation for the Westerners coming over to [ __ ] their [ __ ] up. not so much this like god whatever holy stuff more the take our land and jewels stuff so that's how it's suff sapphire punk uh more questions

I I would give you one uh because when you were saying safari punk I was thinking oh it's a plurality of punks here and there like defy punk gear punk sav punk are you accepting personally the notion that there there will be plurality of different just playgrounds and people trying to go their own subcultural of punks that I usually refer that there's only K punk and it's I mean like these are memes these are like little ideas that might you know justate and germinate into ideologies or movements so they're going to bloom they're well at least they're going to be planted and people will discuss them and see if they resonate with them and see if they germinate and turn into to movements

ultimately I think like you can be your own punk Yeah, we don't there's no um monopoly on uh the memes of ideiation, let's say. Uh and also I saw that there's a poet on your cap and I was thinking there's a poetry in there and there's a Julio from poetic technologies there. What's the role of the poetry have you seen with this um industry and the potential? Uhhuh. Well, I just uh for full disclosure, there is a subunit of the Zerox salon platform which I uh helped to run called the cryptographic poetics researchers union. So I would argue that the poet um especially in the you know uh business of cryptography, the poet is

himself themselves encrypting and uh decryptting or let's say transforming and mutating meanings. The poets have the sharpest knives much like the satists. So they can go to places with the creative uh license that others can't. And the other thing is that poets aren't working in web 3 and they aren't funded by web3 treasuries. So they can say what the [ __ ] they like. They're not going to get sacked by their cifer punk bosses.