ZKPodcast: Mixnets, Activism and Privacy with Nym’s Harry Halpin

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week i chat with harry halpen the ceo of nim which is a privacy infrastructure project we talk about how his early activism brought him into contact with the privacy sphere and later with the blockchain world and how he understands the evolving tech privacy landscape we

then catch up about nim and how this project aims to solve for privacy at a particular place in the blockchain stack but before we start in i want to highlight our zk podcast grant over on git coin clr matching should be kicking off by the time this episode airs so if you're interested in supporting the show now would be a great time to make a donation over on git coin right now all donations are matched previous git coin donations went towards funding the development of the new zk website and future donations will give us a chance to build even more cool stuff for the zk community so yeah please head over there now i'm adding the link in the show notes and help us grow this thing even more i also want to thank this week's sponsor mina protocol mina is the world's lightest blockchain

powered by participants it's a layer one protocol working to connect crypto to the real world this means developers can leverage private verified real-world data from any website to build decentralized apps mina's decentralized apps called snaps also allow users to access on-chain services without sacrificing personal data privacy mino replaces the traditional blockchain with a zero knowledge proof which ensures a super light chain that stays around 22 kilobytes and allows every participant to act as a full node as an aside i am both an advisor to the project and a validator and i can definitely recommend you check it out especially now as the tools to build snaps are coming online minus mainnet has been live for almost six months and the ecosystem is growing fast so do join

the community and find out more by visiting minaprotocol.com so thank you again mina protocol now here is my interview with harry halpen [Music] so i want to welcome harry halpin to the show he's the ceo of nim a privacy infrastructure project and he used to work on crypto standards in web 2 and at mit welcome to the show hi anna i'm a big fan of the show and uh thanks for inviting me on cool i think it was like over a year ago i had your colleague claudia diaz on the show and in that episode we actually went pretty deep into nim with this episode i'm curious to hear a little bit more about privacy actually have that conversation about

where your thinking sort of comes from and then i definitely want to later on in the episode revisit nim hear what's happened since i had you guys on last and yeah find out how maybe nim is solving some of these concerns or issues that we explore yeah so um from basically my perspective what nim is really doing is trying to solve one smaller part of a kind of larger privacy problem or even you could call it a privacy crisis so nim's focus is on the network level of privacy and i think you know claudia's diaz our chief scientist is a world expert on that particular part of the privacy puzzle and what nim

hopes to do is to enable privacy for essentially other privacy projects but on that network level and so i think it'd be really good though to kind of review and think about what it means to be private in like a more holistic and even social sense because you know privacy is really different from security insofar as it's not so easily i think reducible to essentially mathematical concepts or cryptographic concepts and it's it's a more socially embedded and ultimately holistic concept do you feel like with this idea of privacy is like you either have you have it or you don't have it

or do you feel like there is sort of a spectrum what you were just describing like if you need holistic privacy you need from end to end privacy is that what actual privacy is or are there percentages private i don't know yeah i think it's i think it's a spectrum you know there's no absolute privacy is very hard to even think about properly so for example could it doesn't mean that it's undetectable you're even communicating to someone that it's that's unobservable to an outside party when you're communicating and you know some term some form of absolute anonymity could be considered one kind of extreme on the other hand privacy can also be

thought of as a kind of selective disclosure you know i may want to reveal to someone that i have a you know coveted vaccination or i don't have a covert vaccination or test result but i probably don't want that same person you know a border guard for example uh necessarily knowing what restaurants i've been going to or my entire flight engineering or even my you know name and address maybe they only need the photo to verify that information so i think you know privacy is effectively a spectrum and when i say holistic privacy i say even given a particular kind of privacy that a privacy property that a particular system is attempting to achieve that somehow

maps to the expectations of the users which are often very social expectations when you talk about achieving those privacy properties it's important to achieve them on different levels of the system and so when i talk about holistic privacy i don't mean you have to be absolutely anonymous but i do kind of mean something close to end to end insofar as that the property is upheld on all levels of the protocol because otherwise you know an adversary could easily violate your privacy by kind of looking under the hood for example for example looking at the network traffic in a blockchain transaction or

some other kind of you know level in the system harry i want to keep going into this but i was just thinking before we do that i do want to actually explore your background a little bit more what led you to working even on this topic as sort of mentioned in the in the first line you had been working on crypto standards in web 2. can you share a little bit about like yeah your journey towards this topic were you always into privacy uh yeah i i've i've been into privacy for a very long time but i i always considered it to be honestly up until the snowden revelation is very secondary to whatever else i have to be doing at time so uh as a young person i was

engaged in lots of different kinds of uh activism or even revolutionary activity around the anti-globalization movement uh and around climate change and we had to deal with a lot of very real uh police oppression so for example due to my climate change activism i actually had a personal undercover cop assigned to me at some point so that obviously you know was a kind of eye-opener i'm always interested in computing and like many young people um you know in the kind of late 90s early 2000s the main problem that faced the internet was lack of ability to essentially get information out there

so i worked a lot on open publishing systems including one called uh indie media which was basically to broadcast news of things like police brutality or protests that were otherwise being censored uh by the mainstream media and at a certain point i decided uh to get a phd and i ended up going to scotland the university of edinburgh where i did a phd in artificial intelligence not in cryptography under a fellow called andy clark who is also a philosopher of artificial intelligence and that's when i got into machine learning and after my phd during my phd i realized that um ai this is you know this is a long time because

2010 and 11 was going to allow increasingly powerful big data processing and inference and i said well look we need to create systems that are not just allowing big number crunching and surveillance of actors but we need to create systems which can basically help secure people and so that's when i i took a job with tim berners-lee after i graduated the inventor of the web to look into standardizing crypto across browsers because i was doing very basic stuff compared to what people are doing now in the blockchain space we were trying to understand how we could even do like very standard digital signatures

in the browser because at the time people were programming crazy stuff in javascript and had all sorts of side channel attacks even though i wasn't a cryptographic expert i did you know take some courses under ron rivest and friends at mit we didn't really have a clear path to allow people to even create cryptographically enhanced uh web applications however two things happen that pushed me into privacy uh one is that the snowden revelations happen and the snowden revelations made me realize that effectively my worst nightmares about big data and ai were true that these kinds of surveillance systems could be

used by governments and could be used to target activists and you know i don't think activists who are working on things like climate change or even revolutionaries should be targeted arab spring was a big effect had a large effect on me i had i was visited north africa had friends imprisoned tortured and killed and so this threat of automating these systems of oppression really concerned me and then i got very burnt out on web 2. i was very skeptical of blockchain technology when it first appeared i didn't believe uh honestly that it was a giant breakthrough a

cryptographically verifiable logs seem to be just a sort of great concept but what i misunderstood and it took me a few years to understand is that the tech monopolies had essentially created a disaster and this came home to my job at mit when they asked me you know my organization to work on digital rights management so this is basically taking key material from users and hiding it from them on purpose in order to make them pay for streaming media services yeah and so yeah so i decided well look this isn't really going anywhere

and also you know i started looking very closely at the kind of technology behind master fails i and you know if i felt we needed more and more powerful anonymity tools i wasn't particularly interested in zero knowledge proofs i was looking more at things like tor and signal and it occurred to me that we could build a mixnet so myself and some of my academic friends got together we decided that uh you know aguilos kias who helped eventually launch law of cardano george denises who eventually worked at libra claudia diaz who you've interviewed and now works with me and nym we all got together we basically said let's try to build a real world mix then this could be our contribution to fighting mass surveillance and not

just on the cryptographic level but on the sort of big data surveillance level and that's what we did at the same point we kind of hit a i would say a dead end because ultimately research only takes you so far at some point you really have to implement and we we're essentially an anti-mass surveillance project uh looking for deployment but we didn't have a sustainable economic model and it felt like government research grants ours was funded by the european commission didn't seem like it was really the way forward and so strangely enough i i ran into

uh people from finance and other places and they were really into solving these same kinds of problems and so i was uh pleasantly surprised we were had a lot of support from diverse characters everyone from adam back to vlad zamfir to amir taki a lot of people were very encouraging and so we decided to launch a company and that's how i got here today and i really do believe that at this point even though i was very skeptical and i remember even saying to vitalik i i don't feel like ethereum can can solve all the world's problems and essentially what's essentially what it to me look like the equivalent of python scripts and solidity

i do believe that this a tremendous wave of creativity and innovation that we've seen particularly in the zero knowledge space around uh zero knowledge proofs is something that we that can basically save us from both mass surveillance and create new social and economic models and so that very much excites me and that's kind of what gets me going every morning what year were you talking about building this main this mixnet like what year are we thinking oh i mean mixnets have been uh in the back of our heads for for a while there had been running mix nets people don't really remember them called mixed minion and before that mix master uh that were used by the cypherpunks who were these sort of early

cryptographic revolutionaries to uh to basically escape censorship and to do anonymous email posting so for example there's pretty decent evidence that you know probably nakamoto knew about these technologies uh the cyberpunk's mailing list was had by lynn sasseman who was actually a phd student i think of claudia diaz who worked on the fir one of the first real world mixnets mix master back in 2003 okay so these are like some really old technologies and i uh you know we had friends running email servers for journalists where they really need to disguise their identity from like the mafia or from the police to do uh and and and we were there was old

software called mixed minion that actually came out um before tor again you know 2003 and that people have been running that software for 10 years without an upgrade and so we knew about mixnets but we didn't think really seriously about them because we weren't aware of the threat models the snowden was the breakthrough 2012 and that's when i started talking to george and nieces other people about trying to make mixed nets more practical and more generic and from that line of conversation started our kind of r d work in 2014 and now i think nim kicked off towards the end of 2018.

wow so it's been going on a very long time i mean it's nice what can we say and we feel very lucky because it's just pure historical accident that our work on mixnets and snowden's mass surveillance revelations all occurred right before this huge boom around bitcoin and cryptocurrency which has then led to this whole other wave of energy around zero knowledge proofs and so i i we feel very lucky to be alive at this particular juncture i want to hear you kind of mentioned something just before this idea that like you didn't get it right away or you didn't fully understand the power of a bitcoin or cryptocurrency like system what changed i remember when the the bitcoin white paper first came out

um i have good friends with this fellow called bin laurie who currently works at google running secure enclaves projects but you know was an advisor to wikileaks and generally kind of all-around cool cypherpunk inventor of openssl that little lock in your browser window library and when when the whitepaper first came out i think ben gave me the worst financial advice i've ever received i said well you think this bitcoin thing's you know for real and he was like probably not it seems the mining thing seems sort of wasteful and we know proof of work doesn't work here i wrote a paper on it a few years ago um so i didn't really uh take it too seriously it was just there were so many

weird things being thrown around the internet at the time that it just seemed to be yet another weird concept with some cool code uh but then what started me taking it seriously is i i i went to some conferences in london and i saw all this energy from young people and that while many of us were also very concerned around privacy we saw not just the work of zero zcash but the earlier work on for example coin join and stealth addresses and what all seemed you know a little bit shaky let's say it seemed like there was a whole lot of energy put into dealing with the privacy problems and i think zcash was one kind of breakthrough in so far is that it was i think the first kind of serious academic work or

zero coin and then zero cash after that to apply zero knowledge proofs uh to blockchain-based systems so i think the two criticisms i had one of which is that these economic incentives uh would not work was ameliorated by the fact that indeed it was drawing people to these systems and the second criticism i had which is that there was no privacy even i would say earlier work with zero cash like uh the liquid side chain confidential transactions essentially forms of homomorphic encryption show that their weight there were ways to kind of hack privacy on top of bitcoin and then hold new cryptocurrencies and i was still honestly a bit skeptical but the rate of progress of the

community uh convinced me that it was the right place to be and i think we've seen that play out particularly in the zero knowledge proof space but also in other spaces scalability uh incentives governance and yeah so that's what convinced me it took it took a number of years to be honest yeah me too i'm i was also late to the party i've known about this as a tech i was a tech founder running around lots of conferences there was always a fintech or blockchain track and i knew about it but i definitely had not i didn't jump in until 2017. i was very skeptical of founding companies to be honest you know i considered you know the worldwide web consortium at mit we consider ourselves sort of the

knights the round table trying to work for the common good uh by putting cryptography in browsers we didn't we were very uh skeptical of uh startups in the blockchain space because we had seen so many failed and scammy startups in the web 2 space and we felt that it was unlikely any of these bitcoin or blockchain based starts would even succeed and then what actually i remember really changed my mind was was block stream which at that point was i think it raised a fairly small amount 20 million because i said wow that's that's adam back i i know adam back i've read his papers uh he's a great guy and he's put together as

what looks like a good team and they look like they're serious i think they might actually be able to to get some real work done and then i was also excited uh by the brave token sale and then uh the zcash launch and uh all of this all of a sudden we start seeing i think more and more serious teams and from from the perspective of nem and privacy tech you know we couldn't put up put our software into real code because we just didn't have the funds and we couldn't attract the right people and so we said well look if these other teams can do this for for example zero knowledge proofs like electric coin company which i think is now bootstrap we can do this too for mixnets that's really what led to them

this brings up something kind of interesting though this idea of like startups in an activism space like and i think you pointed this out like blockchain technology is like it's coming from such an activist route and yet there are companies that were founded around this so how do you think about that connection point startups and activism like can they actually coexist yeah i've changed my mind i used to think they were completely antithetical to each other i thought that there was uh startups were essentially get rich quick scams that essentially when i looked at things did not seem very revolutionary uber is kind of interesting i'm you know honestly i'm glad it exists it lets me

get around easily but i didn't i felt it was just ripping off its drivers and i didn't feel like it was even very complicated you know and as a researcher i was very interested in kind of complex hard problems and i didn't feel there was too much going on under the hood i remember visiting moxie and twitter and you know twitter honestly at that point wasn't very complicated there wasn't too much going on from like an r d perspective and all the action was at google and it was clear that actually was very asymmetric in order to get to solve all these hard problems you need big data and only a few companies had that data so i felt it was also pointless to do a startup because your exit would just be bought by a silicon

valley tech company and you couldn't even really be successful because they had asymmetric advantage over you due to their monopoly of big data however you know as an activist i said we should pursue a more uh non-profit route and we were really into this concept that everyone you know should run their own server people should run their own email servers even should run their own at this point jabber servers should run linux and use at this point people are using mostly otr and jabber and pgp and then what happened what really changed my mind uh was actually getting away from like european american circles and going to places like middle east was

clear that no one could use any of these tools and the furthermore the tools that people were relying on you know skype in syria uh gmail were actually often pretty good if they could escape censorship or their you know there was no back doors in them that were targeting these particular activists and so what became clear to me was that usability had to be a big focus and all of the tools that we had built in the last you know 10 20 years that's kind of cypherpunks let's say and activists were unusable we're not only unusable but exceedingly unusable and that this lack of usability was was making these tools not accessible to the people that actually needed them and

in order to make usable tools or to make tools that scale you do need funds and you need talented people and the problem is that the venture capital up until the advent of blockchain was not interested in privacy i remember giving a pitch at even i gave a picture googleplex new york on privacy we couldn't get a single any interest pre-cryptocurrency this was in 2016 from any vc despite winning some mit pitch contest you know 2017 i gave a similar pitch if i remember correctly in california silicon valley very little interest and with cryptocurrency all changed because we saw a unique historical convergence

between capital and cryptography what the goal of making this stuff economically sustainable and usable so that we wouldn't be dependent on government grants which could be perverted so for example the us government was really wanted to resist censorship in places like iran venezuela but was not particularly interested in resisting censorship inside the united states and activist technologies and this to me seems to be an ideal combination that we can make startups that serve not just actress but most of the world is in a situation where they need privacy most of the world does not live under anything resembling a fair democratic

government and most fair democratic governance are not actually so in practice they're slipping more and more towards authoritarianism and if we take this uh as a sort of universal uh principle these are also huge markets and these are mark these are users and that's why i think privacy needs to focus we need to focus get maybe i would say even move a little bit away from abstract research and development and move towards figuring out who our real users are uh what their threat models all are and serving those users i think startups by nature of being lean by nature of being financially autonomous ideally not dependent on outside forces as much

as say non-profits or universities i think are in a better position to do that kind of work and that work i do believe is the only way we can realistically counter mass surveillance do you believe that you are still working with a activist mindset or do you do you feel like that's evolved a little bit the reason i ask this is when you receive funding i get the sense there's going to be some compromises even if there's maybe less compromises than a university or a ngo do you still see yourself in the like full-on in the activist camp well i i had a personal personal police agent so i i i can't know i could no longer really go to climate change manifestations i consider this

just another way of acting i don't really i almost would prefer to say revolutionary than activists because i think what we're trying to aim for is systematic social change um that the problems that are are facing us mass surveillance is a symptom of larger problems of of mass inequality uh social instability um lack of economic opportunity uh that affects most of the world that's what that's what leads to things like the taliban in afghanistan taking over uh or u.s imperialism in in the middle east and we want people to be democratically governed uh autonomous and

uh technologically kind of literate basically and that we think that's a fundamental shift and i don't think the compromise is that i mean there's always compromises but i don't think the compromises we've had to take in terms of venture capital are worse than the compromises that one would have to take at a university or non-profit and even i actually think they're on some level healthy because what venture capital is interested is in growth we built early versions of the mixnet uh which came out as as cats and post the cats and post code base under the panoramics project for the european commission you know there was no real desire by the

programmers to see growth there was a lot of the researchers were more interested in publishing papers than in seeing users uh use the system but if you talk to like funders like polychain who are you know our primary backer right now their main concern is user growth they want to see people running nodes they want to see people actually using the system and that's what excites them and that's also i think a nice corrective to the i would say more insular activist non-profit world and the academic uh paper publishing world and i hope that honestly i hope more more people who are currently in academia non-profit space try try to do startups and

because you we can create the best systems of the world but if no one's using them i i do feel like it's it's not pointless it leaves a foundation for future generations to build possibly used stuff even if no one uses your particular technique so we support all sorts of r d but that being said there's no better r d the r d that's actually used by someone and that can for example save a life or help reshape our economic system and and this is uh i honestly think the the startup venture capital model is currently the only way to do that years ago i went like when i was studying i i did a course on like the dynamics of power i think it was and i remember writing this

very short paper about the reformer versus the revolutionary and the relationship between those two things so the revolutionary is maybe more the activist the protester the one pushing the new ideas and then there's the reformers who are kind of in the system and i wonder what your take is on that do you feel like there needs to be a strong connection between those two or do you feel like it should actually break apart um i i think that the real breaking apart will happen naturally with any within any given system in decline if there's no change and if that change comes more from the inside or outside uh it's hard to predict it may not even matter in the long run

so i think our goal is actually to to prevent breaking apart that harm society and individuals and the kind of traditional pre-internet divide between protesters of the streets versus let's say reformers in the government or in the bank is is falling apart a lot of people who consider themselves maybe more reformist are actually quite revolutionary in what they're doing but i i do i i do appreciate seeing this diverse amount of people looking at different ways to change society and and again our jobs provide tools people from these different groups can use them and the great thing about privacy technology is that the more kinds of different

people that use a system the larger your kind of real privacy is and just as like if your only users of signal were people who were dreadlocked anarchists like moxie or if the only people that use tor uh were middle activists who were under attack this would all be terrible because you need to you have to hide in a crowd but if tor's being used by governments if it's being used by activists from the middle east if it's being used by ethereum and bitcoin transactions uh that makes tour more powerful because everyone's transactions can hide everyone else's transaction and and privacy becomes a kind of common or public good and i think we can see that

that kind of model also with nem where we're hoping to get as many diverse kinds of user bases together and then what people do politically as a technology by design we don't know but we we do i do bet that it will be for the greater good and this is where you've mentioned this a couple times but this idea of usability this is where this comes in to make it as far as i understand it like the reason that these tools the way you you've said it they haven't been used because they're unusable in a way like they're just not usable by most people by making it usable then at least you offer it as a real choice to a majority of people yeah so i think it's good to look at for example uh pgp as an example of an unusable technology

i know if you've ever tried to use it you have to it's awkward yeah it's awkward at best you install these weird plugins there's this key signing ceremony uh there's no authentication so you don't really know who you're sending your key to people have bizarre behavior around signatures people lose their keys most cryptographers i know don't use pgp and the technology stack i have a small paper on this uh essentially unusable and insecure by design and why we notice this more and more is because we started actually we did a study it's published in the uh security standardization research conference in 2019

where we basically did a interview developers uh we interviewed users and we interviewed users in different countries not just the united states and europe but also places like syria and egypt and china and what we found was that you know users actually had pretty well-defined threat models they they understood what threats they were up against often they weren't really confused uh where the confusion was off to the developers who were focusing on things very different than maybe what they wanted their users to be doing and um confusion

confusion essentially in the way that they believe the user was was going to use the tool and the weirdest thing is that for many years um people felt that the very concept of a key in usability studies was the the big problem there's this famous paper by alma witten who i think is currently google called why johnny can't use pgp and the general result that paper is that no one can ever possibly do key management but what you discover is that when you essentially connect money to that key people can be pretty good about keeping that you can figure it out they'll figure it out if there's you

know thousands and hundreds of thousands of of dollars attached to it or millions and i think that's a huge breakthrough and and very non-technical people will will write down their seed phrase and try not to lose it of course a lot of people lose it but i'm sure you've you know the the usage of cryptocurrencies is much higher than the usage of pgp and that's i think something that privacy technologies take to heart we we should we always have thought that people would never use privacy technologies because privacy technologies do fundamental trade-offs between essentially latency computation uh and privacy it's always more expensive and more difficult to

make a privacy enhanced system the non-privacy hand system however users are increasingly motivated to use these kinds of systems and so the question is how do we connect the systems we have the people that need them and that's where i think startups come into play and i think what you what you're tapping into here is this idea of what incentivizes the use so and like i also feel if you look at the privacy space historically it often presents itself as like it will protect you from and not it will bring you towards and the sort of bitcoin blockchain anything cryptocurrency especially focused it's incentivizing you towards something it's like

join this because it will give you benefit that it that takes you from now up whereas with privacy it's often like protect what you have back you know i always got that sense and i do think the combination of the incentives of like blockchain with privacy tech would definitely push people more forward to want it not not only to like try to regain what has been lost but rather go towards something better yeah i completely believe that incentives are the way to go yeah i was shocked we launched nem how many nodes we got just because they were getting a valueless test net token and how global the phenomenon was and it is kind of true you know under the conditions of late capitalism the

one thing that will unite many people across the world is greed it's greed his desire to get rich but that you know let's not it is a very i would say puritan standpoint to say this is necessarily bad there is a there's been a huge tremendous profusion of basic systems administration skills throughout the world and there's not so many jobs available so if you want to work at google and you're from ghana or indonesia it's going to be much harder you have a lot you have a lot of things stacked against you you have language you have credentials location visas and the great thing about cryptocurrencies is it it takes away a lot of that by being permissionless

people who just have some technical knowledge can start a node and then provide services for other people and that's completely amazing that you can have situations where the same technology for example mesh nets which we're seeing projects like helium incentivize i think is useful for both revolutionaries in situations where their internet starts falling apart and can make people a lot of money in countries where they can't otherwise have opportunity so i think this is a real breakthrough and this is a huge breakthrough in particular for privacy tech enhancing technologies which have had a very hard time getting adopted but i do believe that now we're seeing

something which we have never seen before which is despite their recent mistakes with client side scanning if you just look at their advertising apple has now advertised themselves as a privacy privacy yeah they've even created their own kind of version of tor private internet relay so apple you know their user base is not uh activists or revolutionaries or people who are concerned about mass surveillance their their user base is you know somewhat bourgeois richer consumers but they're they believe that these people are interested in privacy and will prefer apple products over say google products if apple has better privacy and so what we're seeing is the mainstreaming of privacy

and this is good for this is a win for everyone it's a win for people that want to make money by producing and maintaining privacy enhanced technologies and it's a win for people who are might get killed if the privacy technology doesn't work what is interesting though and what you described and this is a little sort of off the privacy tip but it's the idea of like capitalism and free market as this engine where i want to kind of go back because like your early story of being a anti-globalist climate change activist like were you at that time pro-capitalism because i remember that time or at least those movements as

being quite anti-capitalist as well so has there been like an evolution for you on that front yeah i mean i'm still anti-capitalist insofar as i don't believe that uh capitalism can sustain itself indefinitely obviously capitalism is not necessarily preordained to solve the climate crisis which is of its own creation you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet and maybe space exploration will work out maybe it won't i'm quite skeptical because the one thing we know about outer space is that out there most things are dead but that being said capitalism is also a tremendous force for growth

and that that is inarguable and so i think the question is is if you really want fundamental social change you have to use any tool that's at your disposal and idealism uh will not help you when it's a sort of do or die moment or when you're trying to build real software and so while i'm skeptical that capitalism is an ideal system i do think there's lots of parts of capitalism markets for example um there's lots of elements of community banking um lots of elements of austrian economics even which are necessary in order to create a new kind of society

and i don't think that uh kind of authoritarian centralized uh societies even if they consider themselves anti-capitalist or socialists for the future in fact i can sort of guarantee they're not what will probably i think be more likely is that we're going to see a fusion between different kinds of more network-based and decentralized uh forms of governance and sustainability and uh society as in society and this is a shift which uh i at this point i believe is almost inevitable uh but there will be a lot of resistance against it from centralized

powerful actors of which many are quite deeply embedded in global capital and this is the our job is should be to kind of level that playing field and level that playing field through technology also a little tangent here but i i've more and more come to think of like climate change action to actually fix these things also through that lens of like how do you incentivize like how basically how do you direct all of those brains at this problem and i think scaring people is one way but i don't know if it's working very well and i think using the carrot in in any way possible to incentivize people towards dealing with that problem and coming up with solutions is better

so yeah i i don't know i used to be much more on the oh i actually used to be more on the all markets are sketchy and dangerous and money is bad and it's going to bring everything down and i yeah say there's been an evolution over my lifetime well i would say collective intelligence is one way to think about it and a lot of these effects are primarily social so there's a wonderful study by alex pintlen where they were looking at climate uh carbon emissions and they they said well you know if you basically give people carbon budget and say you have to stick to that people tend not to stick to it yeah but what people are very interested in is you if you give them access to view their neighbors carbons budgets oh then

they actually uh they kind of are more competitive about being within you know basically being less carbon emitting than their neighbor yeah and that's uh that's was a pretty astounding uh finding and so i think for me it's about using every tool in the toolbox including market-based tools in order to basically solve these huge crisis level basically species level problems uh that are facing the planet and and on some level i consider the fight for privacy and mass surveillance to be a a rear guard battle it's a battle of of self-defense because because if you don't have

privacy uh then it's gonna be very hard to do anything creative it's a bit like if you ever try to do a trade you have no privacy it's pretty easy to get front run if you're a social movement and you want to have an interesting discussion uh or about changing society if you're under total surveillance what if that's flagged for extremism what if you're prevented from having that conversation this this i think would lead society to a place of stasis and a downhill uh stagnation and eventual crisis and in fact to be a healthy society there has to be these private spaces for discussion totally and growth of the exercise of human freedom and creativity

and so privacy enhancing technologies just allow us to build that space in a way that maps to our natural intuitions when i'm having a conversation with someone in a room i don't assume someone a thousand kilometers away is listening i assume that's between you and me there's a whole set of cultural and social and evolutionary assumptions that come into that but also the internet we no longer have those assumptions that all any conversation we're having could be monitored and could be weaponized against us and while it seems paranoid we are seeing that happen in countries which are falling apart

and in countries which will want to stifle internal descent and you need to have internal descent and creativity uh in order to for society to regenerate itself uh and if anything we need more and more of it and we need a truly immense collection of brains that you put it of collective intelligence to deal with these very large problems like climate change so i personally consider climate change to be larger than what i know or maybe even vaguely qualified to deal with but i do think that privacy and history technologies can play a role in preventing the people that are want to tackle this problem from being personally spied and blacklisted and arrested

as i was when i didn't have access to these technologies 10 years ago a few months ago you actually gave a talk at an event that we did with the xero knowledge validator focused on cosmos and in that and i'll link to this in the show notes you had talked in that presentation about a scale of privacy and i kind of want to you i want to dig back into that maybe we can explain it on the show and i also want to understand where nim and the work that you're doing fits into that what part we talked about this earlier in the episode that it like targets a very specific part of the privacy spectrum or privacy stack let's say so yeah let's let's first talk on this spectrum what are the edges of this yeah so i think on some level you can

imagine that privacy is out means to be absolutely anonymous so it is undetectable and unobservable that one is even existing much less communicating and that's a form of absolute anonymity and then on the other side of the spectrum you could imagine total identifiability where every aspect of your very being is recorded and collected as a collection of predicates or collection of statistical approximations uh and that there is no way to communicate without being absolutely

known to anyone and then in between there's this vast spectrum spectrum of what i call privacy uh which is the form of selective disclosure where you say i would like to be known but in this particular way and for these particular purposes and this is a very important concept this allows you to sort of reveal different sides of yourself to different people and prevents the abuse of your data by revealing too much uh to to those who don't really need to know and in between that you can imagine all sorts of gradations for example to be

pseudonymous means that you know you don't need to know my real name but you have an identifier which for example can reappear in a chat or could reappear on twitter so you can sort of see you can see the behavior of this identity but not necessarily know who it's attached to yes and the pseudonym can can achieve its own reputation could have its own personality you know satoshi nakamoto being for example one example of a great pseudonym but it's not exact being pseudonymous is not being anonymous and it's simply a a kind of selective disclosure and so i think the the way to think about this was originally theorized by a absolutely wonderful privacy enhanced

scientist called andreas feitzman who basically tried to in a paper called anonymity unlikability unobservability pseudomoney and ditty management produced what he considered a consolidated proposal for terminology and he essentially bases this on a concept called unlinkability and i think unlinkability is very key to understanding the multi-sided nature privacy so unlikability to quote fights men means that within the system there are you know many possible items from the perspective of an outsider an attacker these items of interest that attackers looking at are no more and no less related after the observation

than they are uh related concerning their a priori knowledge and that's that's important because that basically says that i can't link these two items here i can't link for example an email that i sent with who sent it that's cinderlink ability likewise i might want to send an email but i might not i want to be a whistleblower i want to send an email to all sorts of people but i don't want to know which journalists received it i might endanger them that's another kind of unlikely that's receiver unlinkability and these are different concepts than things like unobservability where uh the state of items of interest are

indistinguishable from any others of the same type so this is like for example what we do in nim where we add fake traffic so it's not clear what your what's your real message and what's your fake message and then there's even a harder uh question which often is addressed by observation technologies where it's undetectable so when you use nem or tor it's usually pretty detectable you're using it your traffic has a particular signature and so undetectability means that it's impossible for to even tell if someone's using a given given system at all so i think this is a good way to think about that that for any given system there's a range of being identified and being private the way you handle that is selective disclosure and the way you maintain

privacy is parts of your activity or your behavior yourself even you want to unlink to d-link from other parts and with nim where does so you sort of mentioned it like can you observe nim action but not link it or can you not see it so what nim is trying to do is this comes back to this notion of holistic privacy where privacy is not reducible to any single layer of abstraction and so a leak at any layer for example the blockchain layer the app level the network layer can eliminate the privacy properties of the system as a whole and we've seen this even with zcash so you know if you just look at the chain if you're a copy of

the zcash chain the shielded pool looks great but if you're observing transactions being sent the wallets as we saw on the uh i think the uh tromer patterson and i think even dan bonnet was involved uh side channel attack they can use these kind of network level timing characteristics to de-anonymize to link in other words particular anonymous transactions and so they're no longer anonymous with the unshielded accounts i guess so that's essentially what a side channel attack is you can see this uh with other kinds of systems have nothing to do with cash like sgx for example has many many different side channel attacks

and then what nim does is them says we don't care or even know what blockchain you're using we're just going to help you defend the network level transactions we're going to help you make sure that those side channels those kinds of attacks that depend on the timing and the volume of packets sent through the peer-to-peer broadcast uh or the communication of your light zcash blog with your full node that those can't be used to de-anonymize you by a powerful attacker and these attackers aren't all that powerful there's not that many z cash full nodes i think there's like four or five hundred and we already know that you know

way back in 2015 chain analysis was doing these kinds of attacks on the bitcoin network we would assume that they were possible uh on the zcash network and so nem basically says we are gonna hope we're not we're not gonna try to replace zcash just as we're not gonna try to replace bitcoin or replace lightning or replace any other blockchain but we're going to provide network level uh privacy for those chains and we hope that they provide some on-chain privacy as well because it's it's equally pointless the other way around if you're using tor to communicate right you may think oh i'm or nim you may think oh i'm hiding my network level transactions no one may know my ip address no one may know when i sent that

transaction but if the blockchain is recording in a transparent way the sender and the receiver the transactions of course you're easily identifiable no matter what you do in the network level like in that side channel attack you just mentioned the zcash one if like the users had also been using nim at the same time would that have prevented it i believe so i i had a okay i think i emailed kenny about this it's in the paper that uh yes the the timing information one thing that nim does uh which tour doesn't do because tour is built for web browsing and it's not built for cryptocurrency transactions so tor has to be kind of high speed while nim can be a bit slower is that nim changes the order of the packets

and changes therefore obviously the time the packets are sent so attacks on z cash or any other blockchain that really rely on timing we would help ameliorate but there's other ways to fix it than using them i think that's what the zcash team did they basically prevented wallets from behaving in certain ways so that also for that particular attack a limited problem now we have future research we're doing uh with the epf epfl university and carmelo troncoso who is mostly well known for doing all the private enhanced cova tracing work but also happens work on mixed nets and machine learning is we're trying to understand how much and how bad these kinds of network level side channel attacks are

on cryptocurrencies like c cash because the time and volume not just the ip address but the timing volume of the packets themselves we think is a pretty uh a pretty powerful signal to dmi's de-anonymized transactions there's been excellent work um by the folks at university of luxembourg uh on this issue but we're gonna keep going with it particularly by seeing what can a mix that help solve these problems sounds good so we are we're a little bit over time but one of the things i definitely wanted to get to in this episode was the update on nim since i last had someone from your team on the show so i think what's so cool is i think we've found through this interview we've

found like ways in which it can be used what it's doing but yeah where where is it at as a project actually yeah so where nem is at is that we are still in what's called the test at mode and the the test net mode effectively means that we do not have all the full functionality of the nim white paper implemented but we do hope to have all that full functionality implemented i i think it's possible by end of the year the parts that nim has implemented is we've implemented the sphinx network packet which is a packet which makes the kind of you want to disguise network traffic you want to make everything sort of the same size we have mix nodes which

kind of as i said earlier mix the packets that obscures timing information that could be very useful for zero knowledge proof syst based blockchains and we also have validators and these decentralized validators maintain the kind of state of the of the nodes the mixed nodes that are in and out of the system and it maintains their reputation and these reputation is currently maintaining a test net token so that if you fail to mix if you go offline or you just don't have a high enough bandwidth connection uh we kind of don't increase your reputation while if you do your reputation increases um and that's where we're at we're in

the test net uh and we expect to basically over the next few months and more decentralized measurement of basically quality of service to make sure that the mixed nodes are mixing properly and the validators are online we're working on anonymous credentials because some people that use our network uh you know if you if you're for example using our network with ethereum and you were moving you know ether around the very movement of eth would probably de-anonymize you so we're kind of we built a lightweight anonymous credential system which uh uses a little bit zero-knowledge proof so they're not full zk snarks

um in order to help systems which are kind of naturally transparent to work with us and i think the real problem we have where we're gonna would like to reach out to folks who are working on zero-knowledge proof-based blockchains is that you know blockchains in terms of privacy are a very odd paradigm which is why things like zero knowledge proofs are so important because traditionally in privacy the government or the chain analysis or the cyber criminal is watching your traffic and making a record of that and using that to identify your transactions and what happens in blockchain systems that we make that record ourselves because it's useful and super public for

everyone for everybody and um so you know we feel at nim quite comfortable network level privacy that's what we've been working on for a number of years that's what we understand and we'd like to work closer with other teams and other projects to really to really make sure that we can offer our users something pretty simple where users can do privacy enhanced transactions out the box and i think that's to go back to usability as you know even before maynet we would like usable wallets uh that really just like you see with signal today that give people

the ability to do private transactions without jumping through too many hoops or thinking too much about privacy and they can kind of rest assured that their transaction is private and we're seeing all the development on very different blockchains you know z cash moving towards halo 2 maybe moving towards proof of stake monero's has pretty brutal attacks but the community's giant and it has expressed long interest in network privacy through other technologies like i2p we're seeing i don't know i mean there's this private smart contract platforms coming there's a lot of stuff coming and we would just like to integrate against it uh and we would like for chains that don't have privacy to add

these technologies for example uh polkadot or see to be honest to see better price enhanced tech build on top of bitcoin um and this is this is but you know we can build the most perfect network level privacy system for cryptocurrency ever or for any message-based traffic but it's pointless unless the blockchain itself has usable wallets that have privacy on the chain level i'm curious like just to understand what nim is right now a little better is it a standalone blockchain or is it built on something like is it going to be its own from the ground up validator it sounds like it's proof of stake you mentioned validators is it proof of

stake yeah so nem is complex and so far it has two kinds of components which are effectively proof of work components but the kind of work we're doing is not the classic work that everyone's concerned about or mostly knowledgeable about which is solving it's not the grinding through computation and burning energy yeah we're not grinding through muscles what we're doing is we mix packets and mixing packets is work it takes a lot of computation not as much as grinding through hash puzzles but it's you know substantial and so we try to reward people uh based on successfully accomplishing that work and that's the

the mixnet itself and that's what actually provisions the privacy now in terms of a mixed network we're not a pure peer-to-peer network because uh there's lots of attacks on peer-to-peer networks uh anya petrovsky has some good work on this from them claudia has done diaz who was on zero knowledge podcast earlier did the truly great work on this uh up you know 10 years ago really showing that in order to really provide strong privacy guarantees a pure peer-to-peer network uh is not good suitable enough but the problem is you have to somehow be able to discover the network and route packets through its topology this is like you know i'm

sending packets to one mix node it's getting mixed i send packets to another mixed node it gets mixed some more i send packets to the third mix that gets mixed a bit more then it gets shipped out and how do i make sure that every packet goes through at least three mix nodes and the packets aren't being routed to for example in circles or to outside the network before they're properly mixed it's kind of like every packet must be treated equally in order to do this historically the answer is a directory authority and this is just simply a group of computers you call and they give you a map of the network that's what tor has we've also decentralized that directory authority and that directory authority is currently built i think on top of tinderment it was built originally on top of liquid but we

needed the ability to do the reward sharing in a more complex fashion than liquid allowed so we moved to the cosmos and tendermint ecosystem for that particular running rust cosmosome for the essentially reward sharing and that being said we're not a pure proof of stake system because these validators are all are rewarded not just by being aligned and having certain amount of stake they also when someone uses the network they have to create what's called a little anonymous credential for the user and that little anonymous credential torah is a centralized version of this that they use with cloudflare we have a sort of decentralized version based on a

system called coconut credentials anonymous credentials like you can consider it like the simplest possible uh zero knowledge proof seam it's just an array of values and one of those values is yes i am i am authorized uses network and we basically measure the validator performance by how many credentials uh they're minting which also is some cryptographic work so we're a bit of an odd system i think um insofar as that we don't want our blockchain to be used for financial transactions there's enough blockchains out there who want to be used for financial transactions uh you know i personally feel like there's too many i'd actually like to see more focus work on you know

improving bitcoin even improving uh zcash improving uh monero improving any of these systems rather than like building a yet another system although there are huge bits of functionality private smart contracts which i'd love to see someone do which are just missing and so we use our blockchain not as a general purpose blockchain like many other chains we use it for a very singular purpose which is just to tell users how to get on board and find those mixed nodes and so it's uh essentially a list of ip addresses and keys which you need to create the sphinx packets and reputations of those mixed nodes but is it going to be a zone then

like it's built using tendermint are you using the cosmos sdk to build it we are using parts the cosmos sdk okay but we have not yet even thought about uh being a zone um that's something i'd be very interested in however to be honest we kind of want to deal with one problem at a time so whatever you whenever you we we kind of currently just want to get our validators fully permissionless fully decentralized and working just to maintain those mixed nodes i don't know if we really want or need different assets coming in and out of our ecosystem um at this point what

we how we would prefer to interact with other ecosystems is we would prefer to do what we want to do which is provide privacy in the network level so we were hoping that other ecosystems can interact with us and they wouldn't use our chain to replace their chain or even transfer assets around different chains but i think it's kind of the zcash strategy where zcash is hoping that user-defined assets from other chains can come in and i think that'd be awesome but that's not what our strategy is our strategy is that you would be using zcash but you'd also want network level privacy and you would be using zcash with us as a network level transport layer for your zcash transactions and there's many different places that

could happen it could happen in the wallet we could make it into full nodes with a light wallet it could happen between the full nodes we think we could also be uh useful for other ecosystems in that way for example liquid is the main other ecosystem we've been working with uh you know we could help defend uh the liquid is used mostly by uh bitcoin trading uh in exchanges and for very large volume it says very sensitive data so we could help defend the network level traffic of exchanges and traders and all of that as well i'm assuming i i did read about the raise that you just did is there a nim token and what does that do in this case yeah so we have a token right now uh we've actually had three from the test

net and we're we probably will have at some point a final nem token and that token does something again it's not a general purpose uh virtual currency let's say it's just to basically figure out the reputation of your node in the system which in mixed nodes is for how much mixing you've done successfully and we do allow delegated staking so people believe you're going to be successful mixing let's say you're eff people really like you that will delegate to your node but then we don't see that as a general purpose financial instrument and that's very different than say z cash where what z cash is trying to be is private money or what cosmos is trying to be is like

staking on the hub with adam and like other people running all these different chains that are doing all sorts of different things and we can we on that level we're in line with the cosmos vision because we're just doing this kind of very small thing that we want to do well uh which is maintain network level privacy but our token essentially is a reputation token got it um and that's uh can kind of be considered a kind of staking token although staking might not be the right word because we're not we're proof of work system and not a proof-of-stake system so these are a little bit different you could also consider a deposit or bond but primarily deposits through bonds are supposed to eventually converge on your actual reputation for mixing for providing privacy

and the real question we have is uh something chris berneski of vc asks once is how much is a privacy enhanced byte worth how much is would for example z cash user would they pay a little privacy transaction fee for greater network level privacy and could that transaction fee then be used to reward mixed nodes convert it over to nim and given to mixed nodes and we don't know but that's why over the next few months we hope to be working closer with wallets and doing usability uh usability studies now what we're seeing to be honest makes us think that's possible people pay lots for transactions uh i i'm shocked at how much people pay for ethereum transaction fees for

example uh and those transaction fees you know or business businessly paid to speed up your traffic now with them it's a bit more complicated we're gonna slow your traffic down a little bit so maybe we're not particularly good for like high frequency trading uh but at the same point there are users that would want a bit of privacy and maybe those users would pay a bit more and we haven't really figured out the economics totally but we are currently working out some of those that will all be public with by the end of the year and we're submitting them to various wonderful conferences like financial cryptography cool but yeah is there a value attached to it like this is the part i still don't fully get like is it is the nim token going to be valuable in a trading sense

like would people be able to move it somewhere to sell it or is it really just this internal utility thing well currently it's an internal uh utility token now the problem blockchains is very hard to prevent people from trading things okay um and we would be shocked i mean we're already seeing we keep telling people they're valueless please don't trade them and we see people trying to trade them already it's just what people are used to in this space the nim token though should have a value so the way to think about how nim works from a technical effect this is all new stuff since i think you've talked to claudia is that in the beginning of every

round or epoch amount of time let's say a week a month a day the nim network runs a kind of bandwidth auction an auction for privacy enhanced bandwidth where various mix known and say i can provide this much and the users say i would like this much and that then chooses the highest quality mixed nodes to the to be part of the mix net for that epoch and if those mixed nodes do their job right they're rewarded and nim tokens and if they don't do that job right they're kicked off but you still need those nim tokens to have some value in a monetary sense to let you kind of get in this game and that's really important because in an early version of our test net that was

pre-cosmos we just gave tokens to anyone that did their job right but what we found is that they were truly tremendous we got we literally got sybil attacked and we went from like a thousand nodes like 12 000 nodes in uh like a few hours and okay that's what kind of actually drove us more and more towards using this more complex kind of bonding technique that's enabled by cosmos because essentially we're saying well you know one really good good way to prevent civil tax i mean it won't work with governments but it'll work with a lot of ordinary people say well in order to jump into the network

you need a thousand or ten thousand uh swiss franc uh worth of nym tokens so that naturally makes it harder to do these like 10 000 nodes on aws kind of civil tax now we have other techniques which we think will also make it harder for even government government-level advertising i've just mentioned three of them really quickly because they're all really cool so there's three kinds of technologies that will help us prevent civil attacks uh that don't require pure money uh one is verifiable locations which we already have implemented and this uses a verifiable random function to select a set of nodes that then ping other nodes record the time of that ping based on the speed of light

and then could use that to tell what the actual location of that server node is and that makes it harder for everyone to kind of cluster civil attacks on a few servers and also could basically make sure network is decentralized not just the number of nodes but across different geographical locations does that matter if they're just using aws servers from like the three centers the three main centers in the world well we can not reward those three centers okay okay we could say hey we want some servers and you know africa we want some servers in tunisia which has actually a great ixp we want some servers in amsterdam we can we can disincentivize and incentivize particular locations and servers and

verify locations make it hard to fake that but you know powerful adversary can still produce a lot of servers in different locations a second technique we used is the technique which is published by george denises uh nym advisor called sybil quorum and this technique is really cool it's based on a previous technique called civil infer which basically uses a social network analysis between who's delegating to who to figure out their civil attacks going on and it's highly effective and we think this technique could also be used by other blockchains and then uh the last technique we use of course is the very basic kind of formation of steak pools

uh or as we call them mixed pools where we actually interestingly enough took technology that was inspired by the work of cardano where we said you know civil attacks work to some extent if there's you're keeping the same reward no matter how many nodes there are but we sort of say well if you have too big of mixed nodes and you have too many mixed nodes we're going to lower your rewards so the bigger you are necessarily the more rewards you get that's very different than bitcoin and but also the smaller you are we might not want nodes which are low quality so we might also lower those rewards so we try to aim for like kind of a median size oh

interesting so it's not like quadratic it's not like small equals more but it's like middle middle equals ideal yeah and then we fine-tune that middle using that auction mechanism that we described earlier so i think these three kinds of techniques we use but they're also kind of general purpose and while they have nothing to do with zero knowledge proofs or privacy per se uh i do think other blockchains look at these uh these papers they're all online and our rest code is in our github people can check out our code and use that as well so i'm overall really excited and and i honestly the way i feel about nem uh is that we are just one part of a a smaller puzzle from a revolutionary perspective you

consider us that we are a finger that is part of a a large uh fist we're just one finger but we need to work more closely with privacy enhancing technologies on the blockchain level and we've seen all this wonderful progress in zero knowledge proofs we've seen planck turbo planck halo 2 and uh we just want to work more with researchers in that space in order to so we can provide network level privacy and they can provide blockchain level privacy and then the last thing we all really need together is we need privacy enhanced apps because it's great to have blockchains it's great now wallets but there's a whole space of web browsers

messaging apps calendars uh video conferencing teleconferencing where we need not just the network packets the tcpi udp pack it's not just the blockchain but we need the actual app itself to be privacy preserving we think that's the next kind of big frontier for all the people out there and i really can't wait to see people starting building these new kinds of privacy enhanced apps very cool i think they're on their way i i feel like there's rumblings about things like this being built but they do need the sort of underlying infrastructure in place in a way to be able to be successful but we're still in infrastructure mode we're like the web you know in the in the late 90s and uh

you know once i think the infrastructure's in place we're going to see the big kickoff so the way we look at ourselves is similar to open ssl right where openssl just allowed people to encrypt connections to web servers and then after open ssl you got paypal ebay all sorts of wonderful stuff and i think that's what's going to happen uh next uh with privacy enhancing technologies very cool harry thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this sort of journey through privacy why it's important we got to explore quite a lot through that i appreciate it and also where nym fits into the stack okay thank you so much and i look forward to uh talking to you again it's

been a great show and i i keep i i do listen to these podcasts regularly so it's definitely honorable oh i'm so happy to hear that cool so i want to say thank you to the podcast producer andre the podcast editor henrik and to our listeners thanks for listening [Music]