The Cryptopunk Ethos and the Future of Freedom

Transcript

great to be here in lisbon uh my new hometown um i moved here about a year ago and uh everyone else is here which is fantastic welcome to lisbon it's exciting to have so many people here so many friendly faces um a bit about me i uh been doing this crypto thing for about nine years now i started pantera capital back in 2013 and then orchid labs in 2017 still running orchid labs and then also a partner at fabric ventures so i'm here to talk about a bit of an antagonistic concept i'm trying to get everyone a little bit worked up you guys are pretty quiet but we're trying to get you worked up a bit

um crypto punks i'm wearing a punk this is my punk um this is not about nfts what is about is punks like what is what does it mean to be punk i'm a bit older than some people here so i actually remember the punk movement and iconoclasm which is really the destruction of icons the destruction of symbols things that represent the status quo so as we as we kind of like all rise up and everyone's going to make it in the space we tend to forget a little bit these spaces when we get mainstream we kind of forget and this happened in the punk movement too punk started a revolutionary idea and then it became kind of mainstream um so the internet itself was very much

rooted in this idea of a revolutionary concept the idea of taking centralized systems um publishing uh you know kind of through freedom of expression and communication and transfer of information and moving that into a decentralized concept and yet these ideas these kind of like openness the concept of really trying to change the way that people communicate and people express themselves was very radical at the time and through the all the way through then to like the sort of mid-2000s this concept was still holding true and the idea that the internet could be something that would really change the world for a better place was very much there now that's definitely happened like the internet

has been a very powerful force in changing things i mean look at where we are now and also has made a lot of people's lives better but at the same time it's very much like a failed utopia there's this kind of very dystopian nature to it now so the work i do most of the time in running orchid we're focusing on surveillance we're focusing on censorship and our system allows people to express themselves differently by adding in just i'll talk about it later but it's kind of like a new mechanism for avoiding surveillance so in this work where i've had to look a lot at this idea of surveillance and you know how do we get to this point it's it's it's not like someone designed in the current internet and said hey i'm gonna

put in lots of surveillance i can put ad tracking i'm gonna do all these things and i'm gonna really like try and control everybody it was very accidental it was like small steps taken in certain directions and very much based upon the technological architecture that was possible at the time so ad tech really rose from the very earliest advertising banner ads and then text ads and and then all of a sudden you've got facebook you've got google now web 2 came along uh in the sort of early 2000s as an idea to try to open things up more try to make interconnected open systems and yet what we ended up with google and facebook and a whole bunch of other people who are the only ones using it now

how did that happen how do we get from this one thing we're trying to be open the next thing you know it's super centralized and we hate it well it's pretty accidental in the end it's just very small choices that are made by a group of people that then economically people drive towards that thing because people tend to always do what's in their economic interests so with web 3 we kind of have another chance at this so we've got like super open decentralized systems we've got situations where we don't see one company in my work at fabric we don't always see like one company dominating a space we see multiple companies emerging cooperating with one another actually wanting to operate with one another wanting to build an interconnected fabric of systems that

have a very different flavor now how how is this happening well a lot of it is happening because the economic incentives that are built in and i think it's very important back when uh back when we were raising money at pantera in the early days we often bump into bankers after a year or two and they'd say we believe in the technology we don't like the currencies i was like well these kind of things go together that's how it works like yeah yeah but this idea of like this one thing doesn't work for another and i still see that conversation today people are like well yeah this isn't really going to work but the technology's going to make it one day and i want to kind of the punk aspect here the punk part of this talk is really can we get back to as we go and build these new systems

really back to the idea of decentralization why does that matter like why why do people care about decentralization why do you see ogs like me saying i don't like that project because it's not decentralized and the answer is is because if you don't someone's going to control it and that's the reason why i do this stuff is like you you are really creating technologies that can be used in a very bad way if you're not careful i'll give you some examples so you've got banks right we've got um central bank digital currencies one of the things that people talk about quite a bit right now and i've been on panels of people sort of more like on the fintech um crossover to defy space and they say

things like just relax regulation's gonna happen you just need to not get in the way don't worry about it and when i hear these things people say especially because we've learned a lot of stuff in the regulatory space rawkid one thing they say is why are you regulating what regulations should be here to protect people you have things like um the fda right the fda was established literally to stop snake oil being sold so snake oil was something that people sold back in the wild west and it was supposed to cure all ills you know you take this sip and everything's fine um you know parallels to modern modern medicine modern alternative medicine also but and so the fda came in and said no you've got to actually tell people what's in it you've got to do a bit of testing and you've got to try and you

know prove at least there's some benefit so those regulations were you know by and large useful so when we look at regulation and crypto who are we protecting well first of all defy anyone who's doing deeper out here i think you probably know what you're doing if you're using metamask or trouser or ledger you've already gone like a very long way along this idea of like i kind of know what i'm doing so the sec or other people are here to protect you from what exactly well you know you've got smart contract groups you've got all these things but if you don't understand those things you're you shouldn't be doing this stuff and so this thing that starts to become this parallel world between who are we really trying to protect in this space and i would posit that really what's happening is the governments are pushing

at these angles whether it's the scams or we're looking for another bad story in the space as really just trying to control a system that is ultimately threatening their ability to control and their ability to centralize that power so when you get into centralized bank digital currencies you're dealing with very powerful things so one of the most interesting things to me about this technology the whole space at the beginning and since then is that it's not just money it's programmable money you can take this currency you can program things especially with the smart contracts that we're all here to talk about so if i can program money well if i'm handing out a central bank digital currency and you're getting a

digital dollar digital euro then i can decide well that's too many drinks or actually you can't buy that pharmaceutical even if you're buying it for someone else you can't buy that today because you're not allowed to or you're diabetic so there's no more sugar for you today even though you're buying candy for your kid and these kind of controls which you know a lot of social estates would say oh this is good we're protecting the people it's very dangerous because you get the wrong person in power you know we've been flip-flopping around in the west and different different uh populist governments and suddenly you have perfect control you've got a currency which you can control currency you can decide who gets what and my prediction is is cdbc's will most likely come with

universal basic income so the two things are going to go hand in hand is like the cherry and the stick and we're really inviting a future that could be a lot worse than the one we've got already so kind of like take a step back when we're all kind of making it and remember that the things you're building and the technology you're creating could not just be used for all these good powerful things we're doing they can also be used to really bad things this is the scary talk right get you all wound up a bit um and i'm kind of running ahead of time quite a bit here but maybe i'll just ramble for a second at the end but kind of the most revolutionary thing you

can do if you just do one thing and most of you already own crypto but go tell somebody invest in the things that you care about not just that but build the things you care about like support these projects tell people about them and try and explain to them why you know you can ask me later or anytime like this is like get a conversation going why do you believe in the principles you believe in in this space it can't just be about making money because you know it's like you're the usual problem you make some money and now what do you do but it's like once you're making it or even if you're not making it or whatever you're doing try and get into this stuff and understand the principles and argue with each other about why it matters because the next centralized currency

the next centralized digital currency could be the last one could be the thing that really screws up the world so a little bit about what we've been doing at orkid um this is not my usual sort of pitch orchids slide deck i was trying to get a bit of a different conversation going the thing we've been focusing on is communication so most people are focusing on focusing on finance or currencies we decided to attack the idea of communication um the network we've built is kind of a bit more like on the lines of web threes like decentralized services we've got an application today you can download in the app store on ios and android um it's basically think of it as like a decentralized vpn it's like an onion routing network incentivized by crypto

we built up our own vpn stack and uh you're able to string together multiple different circuits together and get a lot more protection from regular uh vpn companies because if you've taken a look at the vpn space you realize that that is also consolidating we have cape buying a whole series of companies and having slightly dubious track records on the way they've been behaving so that's been the space we do know i live here and you can find me today tomorrow i'm giving another talk on a side stage tomorrow afternoon and that's my telegram handle and twitter handle and other coordinates thanks