Open Conversations: Redefining Human Rights in the Digital Age (Shady El Damaty & Nanak Nihal)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 3:50
Shady El Damaty of Holonym Foundation describes turning abstract rights such as privacy, liberty and property into something robust that cannot be taken away, using zero knowledge identity proofs and human keys derived from human attributes rather than randomness. The conversation then turns to a Funding the Commons residency in Thailand centred on the Myanmar refugee population, who lost civic status and could not take part in the economy. The argument is that crypto was built for settings with no working banking system or stable currency.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
Transcript
how do you provide digital rights that are inable how do you grant personhood to any individual anywhere hi my name is Shadi ald deari and I'm a founder of holim foundation the problem we're seeking to solve at hollam Foundation revolves around human rights revolves around the idea of taking an abstract concept such as your right to privacy your right to Liberty your right to property and instantiating that in something real in something robust and resilient that can't be taken away we have a couple products one is zero knowledge identity proofs so zero knowledge identity proofs let you prove facts about yourself without revealing who you are at hollam Foundation the way
we make this real the way that we make human rights uh digital human rights real is through a technology we call human Keys human keys are based off of the same technology that secures the internet cryptographic keys but instead of deriving cryptographic keys from Randomness we derive them from Human attributes what you are what you have what you know I really think that we're at the precipice of a bifurcation in human history on one side technology becomes an open- Source utility it's some sort of Public Service protocol that can supplement or even possibly replace the Civic infrastructure that we depend on humans to run today that's option A that's the good option
option b is the inverse where there is an illusion that technology serves us but in reality technology has been hyper optimized to drive human behavior and human decisions and we're actually serving the Technologies it's rare to find a group of people that that focus on solving actual use cases with impact on Humanity in the rest of crypto it's kind of become very cynical I should say it's all a casino like all let's just like build infrastructure and like launch tokens and nothing else matters whereas here I don't see the use case of crypto outside of developing countries or outside of like you know these things like people are just really focused on actually helping people have Financial
sovereignty and it's very rare to find that it feels like we're so close to blockchain having an impact on the world outside of our bubble these people are in the trenches at refugee camps you know actually getting people to use crypto for either nonprofit work or for aid for you know paying each other when they don't have the stable currency the funding the commons residency here uh in Thailand centers around a humanitarian crisis around the Myanmar Refugee uh population one huge issue there is you have a group of people that suddenly overnight didn't have Civic status they weren't able to
participate in the economy in Civic Society unless they um you know met a certain checklist mandated by the government what I want people to know is blockchain started for these very use cases and it's still perfect for these use cases when you have no banking system that works for the people you don't have a government that works for the people you don't have Financial sovereignty you don't have a stable currency this is what Bitcoin and crypto were made for and somehow don't hear about this in the west but it's it's very real it's very real and it's a human rights issue [Music]