Plurality x Progcrypto | Oskar, Independent Researcher | ETHTaipei 2025

Transcript

[Music] All right. So, I'm going to be talking about sense making at the frontier. Uh, a few things I'm not going to talk to you about. So, I'm not going to talk about the vacuum, which is a peer-to-peer privacy preserving protocol with a focus on sensor persistence and running in restricted environments. I'm not going to talk about MORO, which is kind of a tool for client side seek approving. Although there was a workshop uh just now maybe some of you were in it. I'm also not going to talk about the CK intro which is a book I'm writing on Moropro as on CK. What I'm going to talk to you about is kind of taking a step back and looking at sort of what I see kind of going on in the space. So I've

been going to these like conferences and public cities and whatnot for a few years. And one thing I found kind of interesting is that you see all these like philosophies pop up. So like starting off with the cyber punks then you have things like solar punk and lunar punk and diaak and plurality and like in the bitcoin spaces things like bronze age mindset and all these kind of things and it's sort of coinciding with these rise of technologies with cryptocurrencies and programming cryptography and biodefense and and all of these things in addition to that there all these sort of social experiments right that people are doing so there's like dows and network states and public cities and citadels and and whatnot right and there's obviously like just like a subset of things going on And there's many ways to slice a cake.

But it's kind of interesting to see that when you have this kind of impactful technologies uh rising, then with that people are trying to make sense of the world and how they would like to see things develop. And sort of we get all these philosophies, right? And just like a super brief summary like one way like cypher punk kind of privacy first, Luna Punk, you kind of creating these mystical privacy enclaves and like hiding in the forest. DAK about sort of accelerating defensive and democratic technology. plurality I look at it a bit like it's a big tent of sort of diverse viewpoints and then bronze age mindset BAM is kind of this like vitalist enclaves like the strongest sh survive kind of

thing and the question I have is like are these philosophies are in opposition right because they're different but they're also the same in some ways so there's obviously lot like a lot of conflict right so if you look at for example BAM versus solar punk you have kind of this heroic elitism versus kind of some more communal optimism uh you have kind of the OG romantic cyberpunk and then you have sort of recent movements that are have a bit more tempered trans transparency and some kind of nuance to to sort of that original vision. Um another conflict that I see is that there are certain philosophies that are about uh reforming institutions and trying to improve them and others they reject on institutions completely and want to reinvent things from scratch. Right? So that's another

conflict but I would say there's like a lot of overlap between a lot of these philosophies. So this generally skepticism of central authorities um and it's kind of this pursuit of new forms of coordination or at least not being happy with how things are currently being coordinated. Um and generally one way to look at it is kind of summing it up as like new world versus old world where this new world is what this new technology that we're all working on is enabling. So there's some shared problems when it comes to things like trust. So how do we trust at scale? How do we deal with like authenticity and privacy and integrity? Uh and without any kind of centralized top- down control and it's gen so some intersection here in terms of sort of

exiting broken systems or building new ones. So how to trust at scale? This is obviously a bit glib but like cyber punk you kind of you trust in the math. Luna punk you go and hide in the dark anity forest. DAC you're building defensive technology. plurality building these plural systems and BAM is basically the strongest social vibe. So one way to look at it is kind of what is the overlap between these philosophies right and obviously some of these uh there's like a lot of overlap others there's some and then for some philosophies there's like maybe there's a tiny sliver of overlap in terms of what they care about or how they look at the world and how things should be and then in certain topics there might be no overlap at

all. So just briefly on tribalism. So I don't think you can read this but it's like two anecdotes. The first one is like a joke about religion where someone is asking like oh are you Christian or a Jew and it's like oh Christian and it's like Protestant or or Catholic and then they go down and they keep dividing and eventually they get to like northern conservative Baptist or like eastern or whatever. So basically they are dividing and then they find like one thing that they disagree on and that makes them hate each other, right? Um another one is from Gulves travels which is about sort of how to break an egg before before eating it. So do you start with the big end or the the small end first and that leads into this big conflict and I think we see sort of both

in the space in the crypto space there's like a lot of tribalism and polarization but also in the world at large um and I think in general uh there's like a lot of similarities and makes a lot of sense to focus on that and all Tang has this concept of like finding on common ground. So even though there sort of you might disagree with with with certain things or there's a moment this you can usually find something that you both agree on that's sort of important and this leads me sort of plurality uh which is what I'll use as a vehicle uh for sort of exploring some of these ideas and the intersection with programming cryptography. Uh I've given some talks that are similar to this. If you've seen that will be very similar.

uh polarity it's kind of this vision and in a book by uh audit glen wild vitalik and larger community and Chinese way and it's both sort of digital and plural and it can be used both as a noun and a verb and generally it's kind of this vision for d democracy in 21st uh century so it's kind of neither mountain man nor king tyrant so neither sort of some imagine like a bitcoin maxi in the mountains with like their own water supply it's not that but it's also not sort of the Facebook, Zuckerberg, internet that everyone is sort of under but sort of something in between. And generally the goal is sort of build this better technology for collaborating across social differences. Uh and this is like a short part of the book. I recommend you read

it if you're interested in these type of videos. Uh but one way to look at polarity is that it's kind of a big tent. So accepting these different viewpoints and basically encouraging parallel enclaves uh to develop. Um this is a famous book from a while ago uh called open society and its enemies by call Pupper um and he's talking about for example the paradox of tolerance right so you want to have a tolerant and open society but there are some extremes that sort of threaten the system and in order for the system or society to survive you have to sort of be intolerant towards this intolerance otherwise sort of things collapse and that's what the paradox is so what does this have to do with technology you might ask like this is just other stuff well I get to that now.

So, programmable cryptography, what's the connection? Well, cryptography is about securing digital information and with signatures and encryption and so on. And the modern intent relies on it for everything from like bank transfers to online shopping or private messaging or what have you. And then what programraphy adds on top of that? It adds some form computation. So, it's sort of a family of tools and things like CK, MPC, FH and IO. So, synofs, multi-party computation, fullorphificate encryption and indistinguishable offiscation. And we saw some from the previous speaker about MPC and CK and so on. And one example of this, the most basic one is that like with CK you can prove that you're above the sort of age of 18 using your passport and that's like the only thing you reveal. So it

kind of gives you this selective uh reveal and these privacy properties where you can sort of choose which information that you actually want to share with others and a proof of that. And it's also succinct, right? So you can have short proofs of like a big uh problem. Uh and a very very high level if CK is single player then NPC and FC is is multiplayer and IO kind of the new kid on block. It's basically like god mode. And basically what this does it gives you these like flexible Lego blocks and allows us to solve these trust issue issues with cryptography. And going back to polarity, there's this vision of uh enshrining these plural freedoms and rights as a foundation for data democracy. And they have this metaphor they they compare it to like an

operating system and applications on top. So you have kind of a kernel space and then user space. And the idea is that sort of the the fundamentals like rule of law, sound of money or hard cryptography or whatnot. That's kind of foundations and then on top of that you build sort of institutions and companies and so on. uh and they identify various dimensions uh sort of as as fundamental here. So notions of identity and then on top of that association, commerce, contract and then access. Um and this is not just sort of democracy in the sort of nation state way but also in terms of how we govern online platforms if it's Twitter or something like that, right?

Um and what I want to do is I want to go through like a few case studies and and a few examples and see how they fit into this framework. Um so for identity we'll look at raro for association we'll look at cursive commerce we'll look at privacy pools and rail gun and for access we'll look at secp and sec email so the problem with identity like the challenge is kind of between total anonymity and centralized top down control so in the on the left here you see like no one knows your dog on internet and this is a big problem in terms of fake accounts and so on but you don't want to go the other extreme with sort of this central notion of identity that sort of controls and and can surveil you everywhere, right? U but you do need some notion or multiple notions

of secure identity for sort of deal democracy systems to work. So there's this product called Aaro which is a seek identity product uh and they basically building on top of passports and then allowing you to have some notion of identity on top of it. So you can do things like voting that's sort of disconnected from your passport and it's used live now in Ukraine, Russia and Georgia. And like if you're a fan of geopolitics, you know that these regions are very different. Uh and in the case of Russia, it's kind of very adversarial circumstances obviously, but they can have some form of shadow election if you will, which quite interesting. And then in Jordan, they're doing experiments with things like liquid democracy when it comes to association.

So you can think of it as like um you need association in order to have like a free society and you can think of it as like you have public space and then private space. But often times most interesting things are happening in between there. So like for example this room is a specific context. If you have a private group chat that's a specific context. And what we want to do is we want to sort of establish and protect these context. Um and it's it's not trivial, right? Like if you have a private group chat for example, there might be one person in that chat that's like unilaterally oversharing and there's all these things we have to think about. So there's more nuance than just like encrypt everything and it's for your eyes only because you actually want to engage with other people, right?

So this is product called cursive. Uh and if you ever been to any of the like pop-up cities or whatnot, you might have used this and it's basically this application that allows you to say so let's say that you one example is you can sort of say your interest and maybe you have some embarrassing music taste then you could put that up and then someone else does the same and if you happen to share the same embarrassing music taste then you would sort of match and reveal it to both. Um, and this is cryptographically secured. So, it's not that you're trusting some third party for this, but it's something that's actually happening with MPC and so on.

Um, and this obviously just like a toy example. You could use it for a lot more sensitive circumstances. But it's an interesting idea, I think, because it's allowing these new types of affordances that makes people more comfortable to share certain things they wouldn't otherwise. And it's like an alternative to more current uh social networks and so on. And they talk about this idea of like digital pherommones uh where basically you give up some kind of smell and then if someone else has the right receptors they will sort of pick up on it and you can connect. So that's like an example of like a new affordance that this type of technology allows. So for commerce you have sort of cash CBDC and crypto and cash is kind of dumb but it works really well. Like if I go and buy a coffee with some cash uh

the person there they don't see sort of my my income history or all my assets. So it's kind of funible and and privacy preserving and it works everywhere. But obviously we want things in digital world because it allows a lot more things right that's why we are using crypto and so on. Um, and when it comes to CBDC, there's like a lot of control and surveillance and so on that we want to get away from. But for public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, a a big problem is obviously is transparent, right? So you can see the entire transaction graph. And with this technology with proofs and so on, we can hide this transaction graph. So I can send money to someone uh and sort of other people can't see the amount or that I'm sending it to that person or my previous transaction history. uh but I'm

sure as as a lot of you guys are familiar with uh so in Ethereum there was this product called tornado cashache or there still is actually uh that was allowing for these kind of primate payments um it's still a live case and there's lots of things going on in terms of the sanctions that the US put on them and and so on u but one big problem with tin cash is that in practice there's all these D5 protocols and exchanges that get hacked and when they do they want to sort of launder the money somehow and they often end up using cash. So you as a user, you just want some basic form of privacy. You don't necessarily want to have anything to do with North Korea cuz they're like bad guys, right? So there's these new examples of technologies of the second generation here. Things like

privacy pools and rail gun. Uh privacy pools was just released like live like yesterday or something like that. And what's interesting about that is it allows sort of privacy at the base layer, but then they have this concept of proof of innocence. So basically you can say my funds you can prove that my funds had nothing to do with this other source of funds. So you can basically say I had I had nothing to do with this hack and prove that cryptographically. So you can still maintain sort of privacy while disassociating from these like criminal actions. That's kind of an interesting affordance when it comes to access. So if you think of access to sort of information and free speech and so on as a fundamental right, what you want is you want something something that's sort of available, but also you want to have information integrity,

right? So you do want to have an open society and and freedom and so on, but you also want to be able to trust information. So information integrity is a big problem nowadays with deep fakes and so on. And one way that cryptography can help with that is in terms of having signatures of content. So either like that you can prove that a certain photo came from a real camera or alternative that you can prove that it was AI generated. uh and we see that it's a kind of a general trend that we have a lot of signed data and we want to have more signed data and uh for example there was a CK email workshop maybe some of you guys were in um and with that as a building block we can sort of um prove valid operations and build a new trustworthy

systems and generally what we want is we want to kind of have a system that's both open but also trustworthy so you don't want to sort of censor things but you still want something that that that people can trust. Uh so an example of that is CK email and CQP2P and and what's cool with CK email um is basically you can prove that you have access to certain email um either like an account or the contents of any email and it's an extremely powerful building block right um and it's used in for example CQPDP and what CPDP allows allows you to do is it's basically like a if you imagine like a DEX like unis swap but it's between fiat and crypto So basically if you use a system like uh

Venmo or Revolute or something like that, you can send uh funds and then you can email a receipt from them and you can use that as a proof to then claim crypto. And this allows sort of onboarding and off off ramping fiat in like less than a minute with no KYC or security risk associated with using centralized exchanges and so on. And this is one example of the kind of marketplace that you can do with SQP. And obviously you can do a lot of things with see email. If you just imagine the wealth of information like confirmation to tickets or or whatever that exists in your email that you can use to to build on build other systems. So one way I like to think of program cryptography in general as we've seen with some of these case case

studies is it's kind of hard and flexible a bit like bamboo or carbon fiber. So it's hard in the sense that like we have this cryptographic hardness that you can trust that is built on math and not humans, but it's also flexible in in a way that it can sort of adapt to the real world that we live in. So actually using passport information that already exists and and things like emails and so on. Another way to look at it is kind of it's anchored in the old uh like like bamboo like you have things like emails and passports that already exist but it's also sort of more futuristic like carbon fiber and giving new effortes uh like with things like cursive doing things that weren't possible before at all and plenty they have this quote which is that is about developing tools that allow greater

cooperation and consensus while making space for greater diversity and I think they sort of fit very nicely together uh but consensus and so one uh there are instances where there's no intersection going back to the beginning of my talk in terms of these philosophies uh either they're completely incompatible or maybe they are incompatible in a specific area right uh I would say often surprisingly there's like you can always find some or almost always find some uncommon ground right if you if you try u but one example of where there's no intersection is imagine like a bitcoin maxi versus someone who believes in sort of multi-chain world um obviously that's like an incompatible vision, but the desire for privacy stays the same,

right? In both of these scenarios and also things like ban enclaves like the bitcoin maxi archetype stype versus kind of more egalitarian norms, they're kind of incompatible on a social layer, but maybe these are just like different public cities, right? uh and most of these flaws I would say are nonviolent and people can coexist in in different uh circumstances on and I think a key question to ask is like what do people have in common and focus on that uh so when there's no overlap at all uh one concept that I think is kind of interesting and useful here is the the idea of intolerant minority so this is from Nasim Talib and it's basically an

observation that often an intolerant minority ity uh will often decide outcome especially if the majority doesn't care about a certain thing. Uh and just like a specific personal example like if I I have a preference for end to end uh encrypted communications and what I did like many years ago is basically I said I'm on signal to my family and and close friends and so on and basically if you want to talk to me you have to use signal and and that works right because presumably some of these people want to talk to me and and they can install signal and I would help them with that and so on. So that is a useful technique that can be used sometimes but you have to pick wisely cuz like if you're intolerant about like a lot of things then people won't want to be around you

right so you have to sort of pick your battles I think one thing we're seeing here uh recently is this kind of attack on end to end encryption um uh in EU so there's like France UK Sweden EU wide and also Switzerland where basically they want to have kind of top down mandated uh back doors um And going back a bit to Popper's uh paradox uh I guess one question that people can ask themselves is like are we okay with government imposed uh back doors and do we think this is sort of good for free society I would argue it's not I would say it's like undermining sort of the core values of a free society and I think this example of this fight is kind of emblematic of this old world versus

new world right where a lot of these philosophies have more in common than not um and maybe this is up to each individual and societies is this something to be intolerant uh about and figure out solutions for. So some key takeaways. So we're seeing sort of this big technological shift obviously and with that comes a lot of like an explosion of these philosophies trying to make sense of the world and where we want to go. Uh pro programmable cryptography is this kind of hard and flexible family of tools. Uh plurality of allowing for these different viewpoints to coexist. And basically that we want to focus on recognizing uncommon ground because the world is big and people have different priorities and goals and views on life and generally being tolerant but also

thinking wisely about what things we are intolerant about and picking that just brief shout out. So I'm writing a book on CK. I'm giving out these booklets if anyone's interested to learn more about this technology. I'm basically trying to bridge the seek pill world that looks at things this way with like the more normal world. So, just come up to me after if that's instinct to you. And uh here's some links. Thank you. Any questions? Okay.

Hey, how do you feel about uh all of these um new cryptographic self- sustainable autonomous communities fit into um this institutional vision? Um basically from one side we can say they want to have an end like end to end encryption backd doorors but on the other side you can have like bottomup communities uh self forming and um do we actually need to have a central elections anymore in 10 years from now?

That's a fair question. I think that's the kind of thing where it's like an like an emergent behavior like it will probably look different in different parts of the world. And I think this goes back to like is it about reforming or rejecting institutions and I think every choice for each individual and community will look different. Uh and some people are really leaning into this like the death of the nation state and whatever whereas other people like to prefer to work within the confines of the struct institutions we have and there's a lot of products in between and then things will evolve naturally and then we'll see where things end up right and if you have a strong preference one or other that's sort of where you put your efforts on that's how I would look at that.

Yeah. Um that's a good talk. And can you talk can you talk a little bit about the intersection between um philosophy social and technology for example uh crypto punk and programmable crytography. Yeah. I like to hear your voice. Uh like like Cypher Punk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh well, so Cypher Punk came from this mailing list, right? And at the time there was all this dreaming of like self-s sovereign uh digital money and like I mean the crypto punk or something you um I mean the the intersection between

philosophy and technology like in general or what do you mean by crypto punk specifically? Um um Crypto Punk um so so Crypto Punk originate in um I think Crypto originate in in 8 1980. Do you mean like the cypher punks basically? No, not cyber punk. Cy Cyberpunk is different from crypto punk. Crypto punk they um is it's a small group of US people.

they um you know they they value piracy and most of them are cryptography cryptographer. Yeah. So yeah I I must admit I I I kind of lumped that into the cyber punks but you're right they're strictly speaking kind of separate. I wouldn't be able to give an answer right now about separation because I think philosophically they are basically the same as cypher punks to me anyway. Uh, so I can talk about cypher punks first because that's kind of my mental model if that's what would you say is the most biggest difference between cipher punks and crypto punks.

Um, there's a large difference but but it's a it's a big topic. We can Okay, we can talk after maybe. Yeah. Yeah. But I I would say generally that like people have a specific view of how they want to the world to look and and philosophies are a way sort of reinforcing that and sort of create I guess both having a vision but then also taking technology and seeing if we take this to extreme it's extreme where does that lead us right so they always like this feedback loop and I guess that's also why we've seen this explosion as the technology becomes possible um but we can talk more after yeah yeah yeah thanks Okay. So, thank Oh, there's one more.

Yeah, maybe one more here. Uh I'm just wondering that um as you mentioned before, uh the programmable cryptography is hard but flexible. And I'm just wondering that um if a startup or a small project uh that is just doing some hard and flexible uh for example ZK's normal project and is it worth to uh focus on the uh hard but flexible goal but it will it will take a bit longer time to realize this or just uh

maybe implement some small PC that is compromise uh the part of the core component uh core component that is uh some part of centralized and I just wondering that it is worth to stick into the the the the original goal. Uh I think it's a fair question. I mean depends on how you look at it like in general the technology is flexible right but any given product will obviously have something to focus on so maybe that specific thing won't be flexible if you talk about compromising on the core affordances like for example it not being privacy serving or whatever

I mean I guess it depends on the specifics of of what that looks like cuz like it could also become like this decentralization theater where actually you're not you think you're doing something but it's not doing something it's like a can speak but it could also be like on the path to something else and that's Maybe what we're seeing with things like TE and and things like that where there could be design choices that sort of make sense and are are on the right path in terms of giving stronger guarantees and like every product will do that differently. Whether they have ultimately an impact I guess is something we'll have to see. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you Oscars. Let's give Oscar a round of applause. Thank

you. [Music]