[00:02.660 --> 00:03.980]  I'm Alex Urbellis.
[00:04.200 --> 00:07.080]  I'm a long-term attendee at HOPE.
[00:07.180 --> 00:08.980]  I was at the first HOPE in 1994.
[00:09.520 --> 00:11.400]  I was 15 years old at that point.
[00:11.500 --> 00:16.700]  I've been to almost every single one thereafter, except when I was living abroad or something like that.
[00:16.820 --> 00:19.980]  But I've been part of 2600, really, since I was about 15 years old.
[00:20.500 --> 00:23.480]  And started out as a hacker.
[00:23.740 --> 00:28.740]  And then, according to my mother, I went from bad to worse and became a lawyer.
[00:29.360 --> 00:32.980]  And so, yes, I'm glad somebody liked that joke.
[00:33.120 --> 00:33.460]  There we go.
[00:33.600 --> 00:34.100]  Thank you for that.
[00:34.240 --> 00:34.980]  I'll be here all week.
[00:35.280 --> 00:35.660]  Yeah.
[00:37.640 --> 00:44.420]  And so, you know, it's been kind of a weird through line for me in terms of this career that I've had.
[00:44.520 --> 00:56.180]  But mostly everything that I've done in my legal career, from working in defense and intelligence to private practice to now in my role as the general counsel of the Ethereum name service.
[00:56.180 --> 01:11.880]  And prior to that, it being CISO of the NFL has really all been driven by the fact that I have these hacker roots and this kind of philosophy about how to approach life and how to learn things that really has just propelled me throughout the rest of my career.
[01:12.020 --> 01:13.600]  So for that, I'm extraordinarily thankful.
[01:13.840 --> 01:17.860]  And I'll hand it over to my colleague, Phil Dyan, to talk about his path.
[01:17.860 --> 01:18.820]  Hey, everyone.
[01:19.060 --> 01:19.960]  My name is Phil.
[01:20.280 --> 01:23.140]  And currently, I am a steward at the Flash Boss Project.
[01:23.600 --> 01:26.480]  It is a kind of crypto project.
[01:26.580 --> 01:30.680]  That's a research and development initiative for what we call MEV.
[01:31.220 --> 01:36.760]  And that's basically, like, how do we, like, kind of fairly and securely move value in cryptocurrency?
[01:38.560 --> 01:43.660]  Hacktivism-wise, like, I have a long background of wearing many different kinds of hats in my youth.
[01:43.660 --> 01:56.880]  I went to then school for computer science, was an early kind of employee at a small startup that did software security using formal methods for kind of cars and spacecraft and stuff like that.
[01:57.220 --> 02:03.000]  And then found my way into crypto and decentralization, which is something I've been passionate about for a long time.
[02:03.480 --> 02:06.020]  I'm also passionate about anonymous communication.
[02:06.300 --> 02:07.860]  Maybe that's something we're going to touch on today.
[02:07.860 --> 02:10.500]  Kind of my second love, other than cryptocurrency.
[02:11.280 --> 02:17.940]  And today, I'm doing a lot of work kind of uniting the two and seeing if there's any real intersection there for us to explore.
[02:20.040 --> 02:22.000]  Yeah, so I'm Harry.
[02:22.480 --> 02:30.280]  I co-founded a project, which, if you're around, tomorrow at 2 p.m., you can hear about, called NIM, N-Y-M, like anonymous.
[02:31.160 --> 02:43.940]  And it's a mixed net, so it's an anonymous communication protocol, similar to TOR, but more focused on global adversaries that can watch the entire network and preventing statistical attacks.
[02:46.480 --> 02:54.140]  And we incentivize it using cryptocurrency, which is a controversial move, but I believe the right one.
[02:54.140 --> 02:56.920]  I'm happy to debate that afterwards.
[02:56.920 --> 03:06.840]  For my misspent youth, I did somehow miss the whole, like, fed to hacker or hacker to fed pipeline that I've seen be very popular here.
[03:08.260 --> 03:14.940]  So I've always just been an anarchist that believes in the destruction of the state.
[03:15.820 --> 03:18.460]  And ideally, the abolishment of money, but it's going to take a while.
[03:18.460 --> 03:22.780]  And that's what I've been doing my whole life.
[03:23.080 --> 03:31.180]  I worked a bit for W3C on federated social web protocols, which I'm seeing some folks here that I know, which is great.
[03:32.980 --> 03:54.440]  And, yeah, the reason I guess I got interested in blockchain technology was because I have always been interested in decentralization, because decentralization has always been a fundamental part of the anarchist ethos that we need to decentralize power to the smallest possible components.
[03:54.960 --> 03:57.340]  So I'm not surprised.
[03:57.680 --> 04:01.000]  Did you also not become a fed because you wouldn't pass the background check?
[04:02.160 --> 04:04.800]  Yeah, yeah, I probably...
[04:04.800 --> 04:27.000]  Well, I didn't become a fed primarily because I think the feds were very interested in throwing anarchists in jail for most of the late 90s and early 2000s, not for computer hacking, but for like, you know, good old, good old fashioned police, fighting the police and that sort of thing and protest.
[04:27.000 --> 04:28.280]  So, I miss it.
[04:28.300 --> 04:31.520]  You shouldn't have such spicy cookbooks and maybe things would work out better.
[04:31.720 --> 04:33.360]  Yeah, the cookbook was always kind of a joke.
[04:33.560 --> 04:35.980]  I actually never read it or even saw a copy.
[04:36.900 --> 04:48.160]  But there is a great do-it-yourself cookbook full of anarchist recipes called Recipes for Disaster by Crimethink, which I believe is at the anarchist table, which I would recommend people take a look at.
[04:48.540 --> 04:53.940]  Possibly more useful than the anarchist cookbook, which I've heard you can only kind of blow yourself up with.
[04:54.840 --> 04:57.740]  Yeah, it was a great text file, way back in the day.
[04:58.000 --> 05:03.640]  And that's, weirdly enough, I think a pretty wonderful transition into going back into the 90s here.
[05:03.760 --> 05:17.680]  And that's basically the promise of the 90s in this world of text files and BBSs, which really is one of the things that had laid the groundwork for the Ethereum culture that we have today that we want to teach you about and try to demystify in certain ways.
[05:18.220 --> 05:19.820]  I'm going to step back here for a second, too.
[05:20.140 --> 05:27.700]  I don't know if a lot of you have seen some of the presentations that I do in the past, but one of the things that I'd like to say at the outset is that I absolutely hate clip art.
[05:27.860 --> 05:28.660]  I can't stand it.
[05:28.740 --> 05:32.500]  And so for all of the presentations that I do, you're always going to see real art.
[05:32.760 --> 05:33.760]  So this is real art.
[05:33.880 --> 05:35.360]  It's all in the Saatchi Gallery in London.
[05:35.580 --> 05:43.220]  If you're thoroughly bored by anything that we're saying, at least you've got something interesting and aesthetically pleasing to look at while we're droning on here.
[05:44.000 --> 05:49.100]  So, back to this issue with the anarchist cookbook and text files and experimentation.
[05:49.520 --> 05:52.680]  These are the things that we were all up to in the 90s.
[05:53.780 --> 05:56.780]  Show of hands here, how many people this is their first HOPE conference?
[05:58.380 --> 05:58.780]  Wow.
[05:59.020 --> 06:00.060]  Okay, so quite a few of you.
[06:00.180 --> 06:00.640]  So quite a few.
[06:00.740 --> 06:01.100]  That's great.
[06:01.260 --> 06:02.000]  Welcome to HOPE.
[06:02.060 --> 06:02.900]  I think this is wonderful.
[06:03.300 --> 06:05.720]  So the first HOPE happened back in 1994.
[06:06.040 --> 06:16.240]  This was really kind of the heyday of when people were trying to figure out how to get full Internet access, mostly without having to pay long distance fees or anything like that.
[06:16.420 --> 06:21.340]  And so there were only a few real spots where you could get full Internet access.
[06:21.480 --> 06:25.720]  Most people were still calling BBSs with their modems at that time and exchanging information.
[06:25.960 --> 06:33.680]  Which, if you think about it in a way, I'd like to get your thoughts on this, it's kind of a decentralized way of communicating as well, going from BBS to BBS.
[06:33.680 --> 06:37.140]  You know, there wasn't one consistent way of communicating with everybody.
[06:37.360 --> 06:46.160]  But breaking these boundaries and accessing bigger computers that had more and more power that you wouldn't necessarily be able to afford yourself.
[06:46.480 --> 06:47.560]  You know, UNIX systems.
[06:47.680 --> 06:55.520]  Hacking a large UNIX system, getting an access, and getting an account on a large UNIX system was, you know, that was on the forefront of everybody's mind.
[06:55.620 --> 06:59.120]  And then gaining root on a UNIX system basically made you like a god, right?
[06:59.740 --> 07:00.960]  So, we did this.
[07:01.100 --> 07:02.660]  We showed up at the 2600 meetings.
[07:02.860 --> 07:05.060]  We hung out at 53rd and Lex in the city.
[07:05.320 --> 07:06.220]  And we met all these people.
[07:06.320 --> 07:09.200]  And people would call into the payphones in the lobby of the city group building.
[07:09.440 --> 07:19.900]  And we had a great time sharing knowledge, being collaborative, being open, not making money from the information that we were sharing with each other, from the secret knowledge that we had.
[07:20.300 --> 07:25.900]  And it was at that time, too, that PGP started to be developed by Phil Zimmerman.
[07:25.900 --> 07:30.480]  And this whole idea of public key cryptography was coming into the zeitgeist.
[07:30.640 --> 07:38.160]  And it was at that time, too, that the government started to have a very healthy mistrust of strong privacy-enhancing technologies.
[07:38.500 --> 07:49.200]  They did not like to see privacy-enhancing technologies or any kind of privacy technology that allowed people to prevent the government from peering into their communications.
[07:49.200 --> 07:51.920]  And this is where the cypherpunks came into play.
[07:52.100 --> 07:54.680]  And in particular, something called the clipper chip.
[07:55.400 --> 07:58.740]  How many people here, by a show of hands, know what the clipper chip is?
[07:58.840 --> 07:59.420]  Or have heard of it?
[07:59.520 --> 07:59.680]  Okay.
[07:59.840 --> 08:00.980]  So, a lot of people have heard of it.
[08:01.800 --> 08:06.600]  And a lot of people here are young, too, so you may not actually remember this fight from the clipper chip.
[08:06.700 --> 08:21.700]  So, in essence, it's a chip that was supposed to be installed in all these different types of communication devices that would enable very strong encryption, so that your voice could be encrypted, your communications could be encrypted in any way.
[08:21.700 --> 08:23.900]  And it worked on lots of different types of technologies.
[08:25.200 --> 08:26.740]  And that sounds great, right?
[08:26.800 --> 08:28.400]  That sounds like, wow, this is great.
[08:28.500 --> 08:33.580]  The problem was, the key to holding all of...
[08:33.580 --> 08:37.640]  the key to unlocking all of your communications was held by the government.
[08:38.000 --> 08:41.380]  It was a backdoor key escrow that the government had proposed.
[08:41.780 --> 08:46.340]  And it was at that point that the cypherpunk movement, I think, really rose into action.
[08:46.480 --> 08:48.540]  And I want to hand it over to you, Harry, to talk about this.
[08:49.020 --> 08:58.220]  But there was a really ground-roots effort opposing the clipper chip, and it came out of the cypherpunk subculture, and it came out of the hacker culture.
[08:59.040 --> 09:01.900]  And, you know, so Harry, I want to pass it over to you to talk about it.
[09:01.900 --> 09:06.140]  So, I mean, I was obviously a little bit too young to miss all of this.
[09:06.260 --> 09:21.220]  However, if you are at HOPE, and you are walking around, and you see an older man next to some signs of the QR code, that's Lee Fesselstein, who was, I believe, more or less one of the original hackers.
[09:22.260 --> 09:30.400]  And he has an absolutely fascinating story about how, you know, at the time, in the 60s, you know, computers were the province only of the military and government.
[09:30.940 --> 09:42.180]  And as, through their friends, as the university was throwing these old computers out, they found these older computers, and they put them in essentially community spaces.
[09:42.680 --> 09:46.440]  They call one, for example, I think, the People's Resource Center.
[09:46.440 --> 09:49.240]  And the computer was called community memory.
[09:49.740 --> 09:58.480]  And they discovered that ordinary people really wanted to communicate using computers, leaving messages for each other, so forth and so on.
[09:58.580 --> 10:00.340]  And they were used by social movements.
[10:00.500 --> 10:04.960]  So, while I am not an OG hacker, the true OG hackers are indeed at this conference.
[10:04.960 --> 10:06.200]  You should speak to them.
[10:06.620 --> 10:09.400]  I mean, in terms of the crypto wars in the 90s, yeah, of course.
[10:09.580 --> 10:21.080]  You know, the cryptography was primarily, particularly symmetric key cryptography, was primarily developed by governments for military-sensitive communication.
[10:21.080 --> 10:38.680]  And they were not supposed to be used by ordinary people because that shifts the entire realm of sovereignty away from the centralized state apparatus to ordinary people who could then have secret communication between themselves.
[10:38.680 --> 10:44.240]  And that was obviously viewed as a threat to state sovereignty and power, and still is.
[10:44.520 --> 10:47.220]  And the attempts to make key escrow systems.
[10:47.220 --> 10:54.120]  There's a great paper called Keys Under Doormats by Ron Rivest and friends, which explains why this is a terrible idea.
[10:54.400 --> 10:56.560]  Technically, I think I do not need to convince people here.
[10:56.600 --> 11:04.200]  But I would suggest looking at some of this history and some of these people, not just superficially, but kind of going a little bit deeper.
[11:04.200 --> 11:19.620]  There are lots of parallels and the governments fundamentally have not changed and they are still trying to backdoor encryption under the, you know, trying to save children or prevent domestic extremism or whatever the latest ridiculous excuse is.
[11:20.880 --> 11:26.840]  And Phil, you want to talk about the, you know, the promise of the 90s, what you were up to at any point there?
[11:26.840 --> 11:30.240]  Well, I was actually born in 94, which is a year you mentioned.
[11:30.460 --> 11:33.200]  And I had kind of an interesting life story.
[11:33.480 --> 11:41.640]  Like, my dad, he was in kind of the IT industry, and he was a part of a bunch of kind of very early broadband Internet deployments.
[11:42.020 --> 11:43.080]  So I was very lucky.
[11:43.120 --> 11:54.300]  I was actually born with no dial-up and having, like, broadband Internet and, like, several phone lines for even higher speeds and, like, all sorts of ridiculous things like that in my household.
[11:55.400 --> 12:07.180]  I think the promise of the 90s, like you said, was kind of this fight over communication and, like, basically freedom of communication as these communication systems were leaving state control.
[12:07.360 --> 12:10.720]  There was this question of where would the government actually draw the line?
[12:11.440 --> 12:25.820]  The first thing that I was kind of passionate about from a hacktivism point of view was actually copyright, which is kind of a slightly weaker version of this, but it's kind of more the corporate cartelization of power against the people with regards to information,
[12:25.820 --> 12:30.340]  whereas these kind of back doors are kind of the government cartel against the people.
[12:31.120 --> 12:46.640]  And I think, at least from my perspective, what the government has done, and this is kind of one of my more controversial theses probably for this conference, is kind of accept that they're not going to control much of the core substrate and the core primitives of the things we use for
[12:46.640 --> 12:47.240]  communication.
[12:47.500 --> 12:49.220]  Things like PGP clearly are legal.
[12:49.780 --> 12:54.200]  That being said, they can still control the edges, and that's basically functionally equivalent.
[12:54.420 --> 12:58.920]  Things like metadata and network surveillance and endpoint control.
[13:00.620 --> 13:05.060]  And, yeah, that's something I've been thinking about basically my whole life, is how to play with that balance.
[13:05.620 --> 13:13.360]  Mostly for me, it's in kind of the same way as Harry working for kind of smaller entities at the...
[13:14.020 --> 13:23.040]  empowering smaller entities against larger ones, because my kind of belief is that large entities, including corporations and governments, have too much power today.
[13:24.280 --> 13:24.760]  Yep.
[13:24.920 --> 13:25.460]  Amen to that.
[13:25.600 --> 13:25.940]  Absolutely.
[13:26.380 --> 13:27.360]  So, part of that, too.
[13:27.420 --> 13:34.880]  So, going back to you, Harry, this whole ethos of decentralization here about resisting centralized control.
[13:34.880 --> 13:35.960]  Mistrust of authority.
[13:36.140 --> 13:37.160]  Empowering individuals, right?
[13:37.380 --> 13:44.940]  This is where we get the things that are outgross of that, that are, I think, precursors to what we see right now on the Ethereum blockchain.
[13:45.420 --> 13:46.800]  We see things like Tor.
[13:47.020 --> 13:48.660]  We see things like Freenet being born.
[13:49.360 --> 14:03.360]  We see open-source and open access to systems really being this philosophy that underpins not only the hacker culture, but on which the entire Ethereum culture is really built and is continuing to be built.
[14:03.360 --> 14:07.740]  And so, I want to talk... I want to hand it over to you first, Harry, to talk about the cypherpunks.
[14:07.940 --> 14:08.020]  Yeah.
[14:08.020 --> 14:16.300]  And then over to you, Phil, to talk about Ethereum nodes, you know, and why this type of technology is built on the hacker ethos.
[14:16.580 --> 14:16.740]  Yeah.
[14:16.860 --> 14:21.700]  So, I'm not an expert in Ethereum, so I'll leave that for everyone else.
[14:21.700 --> 14:38.240]  But I would say that decentralization as a goal of redistributing power has been an effective kind of counter-thesis to the centralization of the nation states since its inception.
[14:39.640 --> 14:45.000]  Particularly, I believe, the first kind of self-declared, as they always like to call us, anarchist, was Pierre Proudhon.
[14:45.000 --> 14:55.460]  And he argued that we should resist the formation of state centralization via federations and decentralized communication.
[14:55.680 --> 14:57.940]  And this was before... way before the Internet.
[14:59.460 --> 15:02.340]  The... however, it did... it does splinter, right?
[15:02.340 --> 15:08.980]  So, the critique of what was called, you know, essentially the socialist calculation problem.
[15:09.200 --> 15:12.120]  Could we somehow create a planned economy?
[15:12.780 --> 15:18.100]  That critique was effectively the critique of Hayek and what was called the Austrian school.
[15:18.820 --> 15:26.120]  And they considered that decentralization, that the market is essentially a decentralized information-gathering mechanism.
[15:26.300 --> 15:31.920]  On the other hand, so you have the... what you would call maybe right anarchists descending from Proudhon.
[15:31.920 --> 15:35.140]  On the other hand, Proudhon himself defended markets.
[15:35.140 --> 15:49.700]  And from... you had the left anarchist tradition through, you know, Bakunin and Kropakin, who basically argued for the abolishment of market structures, but the decentralization of power to local communities, although how that would happen was left a bit vague.
[15:50.080 --> 16:01.700]  And then, you know, these kind of concepts are in the air, and they've always kind of come from skilled archisons and people that had technical power.
[16:01.700 --> 16:03.060]  engineers, in particular.
[16:03.620 --> 16:06.720]  And this is the case before digital technology.
[16:06.860 --> 16:09.080]  And digital technology continued that trend.
[16:09.400 --> 16:29.060]  So, when people discovered, particularly the work of David Chalm around mix nets, anonymous credentials, and you have these privacy-enhancing technologies, folks of all stripes, everyone from Jude Milhoun to Tim May, the early crypto-anarchists and cypherpunks did believe that these... the technology cryptography would...
[16:31.180 --> 16:33.560]  fundamentally reconfigure power.
[16:33.800 --> 16:44.900]  Now, exactly how that would play out was, again, somewhat vague, but was considered a... and still is, I think, a enticing vision, a very practical way of changing the world.
[16:46.520 --> 16:46.940]  Great.
[16:47.100 --> 16:47.940]  Now, over to you, Phil.
[16:48.280 --> 16:50.980]  This... this whole philosophy and building on it.
[16:51.100 --> 16:53.220]  Let's talk about how the Ethereum nodes work.
[16:54.260 --> 16:54.680]  Yeah.
[16:54.900 --> 17:01.140]  So, I think I can... I can kind of talk about this through a practical example that, for me, connects many of these threads.
[17:01.360 --> 17:03.180]  So, why do I work on cryptocurrency?
[17:03.640 --> 17:14.020]  I kind of decided in 2012, when I first read the Bitcoin white paper, to drop all of the side projects and security things I was working on and eventually make my way into doing this professionally.
[17:14.580 --> 17:15.380]  Why is that?
[17:15.520 --> 17:18.480]  For me, it was, like, kind of the confluence of a few different things.
[17:19.160 --> 17:23.040]  Number one is just the kind of aesthetic properties of cryptocurrency.
[17:23.180 --> 17:24.960]  Like, the protocols are very elegant.
[17:24.960 --> 17:25.880]  They're very secure.
[17:26.020 --> 17:26.700]  They're very robust.
[17:26.840 --> 17:27.860]  They're very hard to break.
[17:28.400 --> 17:31.740]  As technologists, you know, it's like a very satisfying technical object.
[17:31.980 --> 17:39.280]  But more than that, I was... there were kind of two things that brought me to Bitcoin and really gave me that, like, holy crap, this is going to be really important.
[17:39.980 --> 17:45.580]  One of them was that I had a background in, like, kind of more social activism, specifically Occupy Wall Street.
[17:45.800 --> 17:53.780]  And we had been obsessed for a long time of, like, is there a way we could kind of not use the banks to do a lot of these things that we rely on them for day-to-day?
[17:54.160 --> 17:56.740]  And had given that up, kind of, for many years.
[17:56.880 --> 17:58.460]  So this provided a path to that.
[17:59.060 --> 18:03.520]  But kind of more interestingly was I was trying to work on this decentralized WikiLeaks.
[18:03.740 --> 18:07.220]  This is kind of speaking to what Harry was talking about with decentralization.
[18:07.220 --> 18:09.980]  I really believed in the ethos of WikiLeaks.
[18:10.280 --> 18:19.920]  That kind of, by encouraging leaking and having transparency be the default, we kind of impose a penalty for secret conspiracies and secret organizations.
[18:20.720 --> 18:24.620]  But I also, you know, was not a huge personal fan of Julian Assange.
[18:24.820 --> 18:26.180]  That is my personal assessment.
[18:26.300 --> 18:27.000]  Make it what you may.
[18:27.000 --> 18:33.920]  And I was, like, wondering why does this person actually need to be at the center of, like, all of this drama and all of this stuff?
[18:33.920 --> 18:35.900]  And also all these lawsuits, right?
[18:36.020 --> 18:39.540]  Shouldn't this just be a network that people can access and share information on?
[18:40.680 --> 18:49.900]  And running into the architecture of Bitcoin, which basically runs a blockchain where all of these nodes replicate kind of this sequential log of transactions.
[18:49.900 --> 18:52.700]  You can think of them as database state updates, essentially.
[18:53.160 --> 18:56.040]  It solved a lot of the problems I was having with running this...
[18:56.040 --> 18:57.900]  building this decentralized WikiLeaks.
[18:58.080 --> 19:00.720]  Like, originally I was building it on top of Freenet.
[19:00.860 --> 19:06.760]  And there was a problem of, like, okay, how do you know if you get two pieces of data which one was actually authentic?
[19:06.940 --> 19:07.920]  Which one was first, right?
[19:08.020 --> 19:15.460]  Because maybe I put a document on the network, and then someone else, an evil adversary of the government, puts, like, a totally different version of that document.
[19:15.920 --> 19:17.620]  How can we authenticate documents?
[19:17.780 --> 19:19.900]  How can we timestamp them to when they were released?
[19:20.280 --> 19:24.220]  How can we moderate these things without requiring these kind of sets of people?
[19:24.640 --> 19:27.380]  That, to me, was very much, like, decentralization of power.
[19:28.040 --> 19:34.560]  And so all an ethnote is, is really taking that idea and generalizing it to let you write, really, any piece of software on top of this blockchain.
[19:34.900 --> 19:46.900]  So I would have been basically able to write my WikiLeaks as, like, a very simple script that would then run, replicate it across these thousands of different blockchain nodes in a way that was kind of unstoppable, is, like, the meme for it.
[19:47.580 --> 19:51.120]  So, yeah, that's kind of the very high level of an ethnode.
[19:51.440 --> 19:52.800]  Yeah, I love it.
[19:52.860 --> 19:53.220]  Very good.
[19:53.380 --> 19:58.780]  And I think going through that, right, is this notion of this, everything is open-source, right?
[19:58.900 --> 20:00.400]  You mentioned the strength of the protocol.
[20:00.720 --> 20:07.480]  A lot of the strength of the protocol is derived from the fact that it's transparent, that it's auditable, that everybody can see how this type of thing works.
[20:07.580 --> 20:14.180]  I mean, all of these principles should sound extraordinarily familiar because they are basically the bedrock of the hacker ethos here.
[20:14.360 --> 20:20.160]  We talk about GNU Linux as precursors here to what we're building within Ethereum right now.
[20:20.340 --> 20:29.320]  All of these values about building out in the open, building out in public, and building accountable systems really come from the hacker culture.
[20:29.500 --> 20:35.800]  They start back in the 80s and the 90s, and there's this very clear through line into what's being built right now.
[20:35.800 --> 20:41.240]  And unfortunately, though, it does seem like there has been this historical divide.
[20:41.460 --> 20:57.420]  Perhaps this divide originated maybe around 2016, 2017, when there were a whole bunch of initial coin offerings and lots of scam type coins going on, and people making massive amounts of money out of thin air, presumably.
[20:58.420 --> 21:05.260]  And all kinds of crazy projects that just collapsed and left people, some of them, some of them were in financial ruin.
[21:05.480 --> 21:12.700]  And so I think that left a really, really bad taste in so many people's mouths about what blockchain culture is, what is Ethereum.
[21:13.560 --> 21:20.440]  And unfortunately, I think that that bad taste remains in a lot of people's mouths these days as well.
[21:20.440 --> 21:32.320]  And that's what we're really trying to hear to distill, is that, you know, there are these fundamental bedrock principles that underlie both of these cultures, and that both of these cultures should be working together.
[21:32.600 --> 21:36.820]  And so, Harry, I'll pass it over to you if you have anything further to add on the open-source.
[21:37.040 --> 21:55.140]  Yeah, I would say it is interesting, historically, because, obviously, Bitcoin was released as open-source software, and most of the blockchain software is either free software or some version of open-source, that there is this parallel kind of branch off, I think, the hacker community.
[21:57.840 --> 21:59.760]  And it solves a real problem.
[21:59.860 --> 22:02.820]  I don't know how many people here have had to deal with Richard Stallman.
[22:02.980 --> 22:03.980]  He's a...
[22:04.660 --> 22:12.260]  But, you know, what Richard does is he, like, gives a talk about free software, and everyone gives him cash, because he doesn't, you know, take non-cash, really.
[22:12.260 --> 22:19.300]  And then he, like, carries it back to the Free Software Foundation office in, like, a bag.
[22:19.600 --> 22:21.860]  And, like, he then releases the cash in the office.
[22:22.140 --> 22:26.200]  And this is, you know, not a particularly efficient way to move money around.
[22:26.200 --> 22:28.040]  I paid him in Bitcoin once, side note.
[22:28.040 --> 22:29.020]  Did he actually take it?
[22:29.080 --> 22:30.860]  Yeah, he did, but he didn't check that.
[22:30.940 --> 22:33.520]  He's like, here's the address, like, and he didn't know how to check that.
[22:33.720 --> 22:34.560]  So he trusted me.
[22:34.940 --> 22:35.760]  Anyway, side note.
[22:35.780 --> 22:37.980]  I tried to get you to go to Gnu Taler, I'm sure.
[22:37.980 --> 22:48.240]  So, you know, I think it is a real, you know, the transfer of value is a real problem.
[22:49.060 --> 22:54.100]  And ignoring it has not been, will not work forever.
[22:54.600 --> 23:00.840]  I mean, obviously, the financial blockade of WikiLeaks was, to my knowledge, the first large-scale use of Bitcoin.
[23:01.940 --> 23:08.580]  And then, there, I do think there are also non-financial uses.
[23:08.880 --> 23:10.140]  So, we've seen a lot of work.
[23:10.140 --> 23:13.160]  I used to work on decentralized social web standards.
[23:13.720 --> 23:31.860]  And there was, there's this real problem if you ever use Mastodon, or Blue Sky, or God help you, Noster, is that, you know, it's like, Noster, I am sending out a tweet, but I don't know if anyone has seen it, and I'm not sure how many followers I have, because, essentially, they cannot distribute and synchronize their events.
[23:36.060 --> 23:39.140]  There's no log of status updates.
[23:39.400 --> 23:50.140]  Likewise, in Mastodon, you're stuck in these little islands of status updates, but you can't get a kind of global index that you can search, and that you can discover other people easily.
[23:50.140 --> 23:59.840]  And you can do that via Blue Sky, but they do it via, essentially, an inherent bias towards centralization, therefore making it just kind of like a slightly leftier version of X.
[24:00.820 --> 24:02.320]  And, or God help you, threads.
[24:02.380 --> 24:04.380]  I'm not even sure what's going on there, but I'm sure it's bad.
[24:04.960 --> 24:08.380]  And so, therefore, there are...
[24:08.380 --> 24:15.300]  And to me, I was like, well, that's a really obvious use of blog technology, similar to the fact that WikiLeaks never really got the Wiki part of the leaks working.
[24:15.460 --> 24:21.600]  Like, these technology platforms, particularly if they're under nation-state adversarial attack, need to be decentralized.
[24:23.140 --> 24:26.720]  And I don't see another real game in town.
[24:27.200 --> 24:44.620]  I mean, there are other ways, slightly other ways of doing it, but you do need some sort of authenticated series of data structure, which can be, via some sort of consensus algorithm, allow a shared global state.
[24:45.080 --> 24:49.420]  And I think that's actually quite useful primitive for many, many different problems.
[24:49.500 --> 24:52.080]  Not all problems, but a large class of problems.
[24:53.280 --> 24:53.720]  Yeah.
[24:53.940 --> 24:55.700]  I have a kind of spicy take here.
[24:55.760 --> 25:00.060]  I like to be controversial on panels, so maybe I don't even believe this, but I will say it.
[25:00.860 --> 25:09.140]  So I agree with you, Harry, that like, yes, these non-financial use cases do exist, and they're super meaningful and important for the future.
[25:09.320 --> 25:20.900]  I also think that, at least in like the hacker and open-source and free software community, oftentimes like the financial use cases are kind of just as important, or should be just as important to those people.
[25:20.900 --> 25:24.140]  I think it's often a dirty word because like we're all hippies.
[25:24.280 --> 25:30.860]  We all like really wish that money didn't exist and that we could just contribute based on ideas and have access to all the software.
[25:31.100 --> 25:36.900]  But at the same time, if you care about something like privacy, you can make like everything in the world private, all your communications.
[25:37.040 --> 25:47.460]  If like your financial transactions aren't private, you're still leaking like everything about who you are as a person and all of your kind of metadata and where you go and who you talk to and all these other things.
[25:48.360 --> 25:52.980]  So I don't think it's like so cleanly separable because we live in like a financial world.
[25:52.980 --> 25:59.500]  And I think actually we should kind of play with it more in like a more playful way, rather than just saying like, ooh, that's commercial.
[25:59.500 --> 26:00.200]  It's like bad.
[26:00.300 --> 26:00.780]  That's financial.
[26:00.780 --> 26:01.540]  It's like bad.
[26:01.660 --> 26:06.900]  It's like, okay, how can we kind of use this to align and leverage our existing goals?
[26:07.040 --> 26:22.260]  So like if we care about something like communication privacy and code privacy, maybe we package that as financial privacy in certain contexts because that's something that even regulators and institutions and larger entities can get behind and not try to kill the way they did PGP.
[26:22.460 --> 26:28.120]  And maybe that kind of teaches people the importance and the technology for other kinds of privacy as well.
[26:28.280 --> 26:30.440]  So this is all to say, like, I agree.
[26:30.440 --> 26:41.940]  There's like super cool and important non-financial use cases in blockchain, including consistency, which is one of the three problems it solved for my WikiLeaks thing in 2012, so long ago.
[26:41.940 --> 26:54.120]  But there's also, I think, really important financial use cases for just the whole world to kind of bring privacy into the conversation in a lot of places where right now we have a lot of surveillance actually.
[26:54.900 --> 27:06.660]  Yeah, I think that's a great segue then over into talking about the privacy-preserving technologies that we have been building with respect to the Ethereum blockchain and other blockchains as well.
[27:06.880 --> 27:14.240]  And also a great segue into the fights that are going on about this right now, fights specifically about financial privacy that Phil just mentioned.
[27:14.360 --> 27:36.340]  I mean, it was two weeks ago that we had a verdict in the Tornado Cash case where a developer, a U.S.-based developer, who took venture capital money through a U.S. company and developed a financial privacy protocol for the blockchain that basically allowed you to send currency in a way that you couldn't tell exactly what you were doing with it.
[27:39.080 --> 27:42.360]  It would go into a pool and you didn't know where it came out on the other side, right?
[27:42.360 --> 27:43.420]  It was called Tornado Cash.
[27:43.520 --> 27:45.460]  How many people here have heard of Tornado Cash?
[27:45.460 --> 27:47.500]  Wow, okay, a lot of you have heard.
[27:47.720 --> 27:50.260]  Okay, so I'm preaching to the choir here to a certain extent.
[27:50.400 --> 27:51.280]  Free Roman storm.
[27:51.880 --> 27:52.660]  Yeah, I know.
[27:53.020 --> 27:54.880]  How many people have used Tornado Cash here?
[27:56.200 --> 27:56.980]  Far fewer.
[27:57.320 --> 27:59.620]  How many people don't want to admit it but have used it?
[28:00.000 --> 28:02.180]  Okay, I almost got you there in the back.
[28:02.380 --> 28:03.300]  All right, there we are.
[28:04.420 --> 28:11.260]  So Tornado Cash obviously has its really very, very strong use cases here, right?
[28:11.260 --> 28:12.940]  It's privacy-preserving technology.
[28:13.160 --> 28:22.340]  If all of your transactions is field noted or just out there on a public ledger for all to view, you're going to always have some kind of limited utility with respect to the blockchain.
[28:22.680 --> 28:25.440]  So solving that was a big problem.
[28:25.620 --> 28:38.620]  And in fact, in the opening statements that the defense made at the trial, they mentioned specifically that Vitalik, one of the founders of Ethereum, had told Roman Storm, the developer here, that he should, for his next project, work on solving financial privacy.
[28:38.880 --> 28:42.520]  And that's how he came up with the whole idea of Tornado Cash.
[28:42.740 --> 28:45.480]  I didn't know that story and it was really, it was quite interesting.
[28:45.840 --> 28:48.640]  So there were three charges in that particular case.
[28:48.860 --> 28:52.180]  One was conspiracy to avoid sanctions.
[28:52.680 --> 28:57.400]  Namely, allowing threat actors like North Korea to use Tornado Cash.
[28:58.060 --> 29:03.240]  The other charge was money laundering and a conspiracy to launder money.
[29:03.480 --> 29:07.400]  And then the third charge was operation of an unlicensed money transmission business.
[29:08.100 --> 29:12.740]  And the jury came back hung on the first of those two charges.
[29:12.920 --> 29:16.560]  The sanctions violation, which I thought actually was probably the strongest charge.
[29:17.300 --> 29:20.080]  And the money laundering charge both hung juries.
[29:20.240 --> 29:22.320]  They could not come to a decision no matter what.
[29:22.320 --> 29:23.900]  They delivered for about a week.
[29:24.100 --> 29:26.020]  I mean, this jury didn't work all day.
[29:26.360 --> 29:28.520]  Some of them had toothaches and had to go home early.
[29:28.640 --> 29:32.000]  It was a big mess throughout the entire week that they were deliberating.
[29:32.140 --> 29:37.280]  But at the end of it, they decided he operated an unlicensed money transmission business.
[29:37.440 --> 29:42.660]  Which is a very weird charge for a jury to find a guilty verdict about.
[29:42.660 --> 29:46.840]  Especially since in the defense's closing argument there, too.
[29:47.800 --> 29:53.060]  They made the very clear distinction about Tornado Cash being non-custodial.
[29:53.440 --> 29:59.800]  And I think also this is part of the problem with Ethereum culture and with blockchain culture in general.
[30:00.040 --> 30:04.300]  Where we use a lot of weird words that people are not necessarily familiar with.
[30:04.300 --> 30:07.040]  Like permissionless and non-custodial.
[30:08.820 --> 30:13.580]  They're not exactly self-evident in terms of what they mean.
[30:13.720 --> 30:17.120]  So non-custodial means like you didn't have custody of it.
[30:17.160 --> 30:18.720]  I guess that's somewhat self-evident, right?
[30:19.600 --> 30:22.120]  But Tornado Cash never touched the actual funds.
[30:22.460 --> 30:28.480]  So how can you be guilty of transmitting money when you're not in possession of any money?
[30:28.480 --> 30:33.000]  So it was a weird verdict for the jury to reach.
[30:33.160 --> 30:36.100]  And I think it is attackable legally on appeal.
[30:37.120 --> 30:42.880]  And there's other motions that are going to be made to try to overturn the verdict at the district court level.
[30:42.960 --> 30:45.020]  But I think it will ultimately go to the second circuit.
[30:45.200 --> 30:49.380]  And I think there's a real vector of attack on this particular verdict.
[30:49.500 --> 30:51.120]  And maybe that's why the jury found it.
[30:51.220 --> 30:52.880]  Maybe they said, you know, we got to get them on something.
[30:53.000 --> 30:54.120]  Let's get them on this weak charge.
[30:54.440 --> 30:56.080]  Maybe it'll even be overturned.
[30:56.080 --> 30:59.380]  So that's a real battle here.
[30:59.440 --> 31:01.200]  And it's a very, very dangerous precedent.
[31:01.420 --> 31:09.240]  And, in fact, there is a through line from that case that goes back to 2000 and a case called Universal Studios v. Ramirez.
[31:10.140 --> 31:14.600]  And that's a case about a young guy.
[31:14.600 --> 31:16.360]  I think he was 12 or 13 or something.
[31:16.460 --> 31:18.740]  He might have been even younger or maybe a year older.
[31:18.740 --> 31:19.200]  I'm not sure.
[31:19.340 --> 31:20.460]  But I believe he was from Norway.
[31:20.460 --> 31:25.200]  And he created a bit of software called DCSS.
[31:25.540 --> 31:28.580]  And CSS stood for the content scrambling system.
[31:28.740 --> 31:34.180]  The content scrambling system was the encryption system that was used to make DVDs uncopyable.
[31:34.460 --> 31:40.300]  And, apparently, this content scrambling system was like a monument to stupidity in many ways.
[31:40.340 --> 31:42.360]  And it was so incredibly easy to crack.
[31:42.360 --> 31:46.420]  And some crazy hacker magazine called 2600.
[31:46.480 --> 31:47.920]  Has anybody ever heard of that in a show of hands?
[31:48.800 --> 31:49.320]  Okay.
[31:49.640 --> 31:49.740]  Yeah.
[31:50.120 --> 31:52.480]  Well, they published the source code for DCSS.
[31:52.660 --> 31:55.240]  And then they were sued by the Motion Picture Association of America.
[31:56.220 --> 32:03.580]  And that case was about whether the publication of source code could equate to a speech act.
[32:03.740 --> 32:06.420]  Could it be freedom of speech to publish source code?
[32:06.420 --> 32:08.980]  That went up to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
[32:09.200 --> 32:16.620]  We actually had Kathleen Sullivan, who became the Dean of Stanford Law School, come over and argue the case pro bono before the Second Circuit.
[32:17.860 --> 32:20.320]  And 2600 lost that case.
[32:20.500 --> 32:27.020]  Because they found that the primary purpose was to avoid copyright restrictions on DVDs.
[32:27.020 --> 32:31.380]  And that exact case came up again in the tornado cash trial.
[32:31.500 --> 32:34.440]  When they tried to dismiss the indictment against Roman Storm initially.
[32:34.800 --> 32:41.320]  And again, the judge cited back to that case and said, No, I find that the primary purpose of tornado cash is to...
[32:42.500 --> 32:44.500]  is potentially for unlawful purposes.
[32:44.500 --> 32:47.660]  So we're not going to afford it, this type of protection.
[32:48.240 --> 32:56.840]  So, I'll tell you an interesting story about what the government said on their opening statement.
[32:56.840 --> 32:58.680]  And their opening statement is they're very effective.
[32:58.800 --> 32:59.360]  Remember the U.S.
[32:59.580 --> 33:04.760]  Attorney's Office in Southern District of New York, just across the river here in downtown a little bit.
[33:04.880 --> 33:08.100]  They are extraordinarily talented, very bright attorneys and very aggressive.
[33:08.460 --> 33:10.420]  And they made the analogy to the jury.
[33:10.600 --> 33:14.820]  They said, imagine you are... you're watching an action movie.
[33:15.080 --> 33:18.000]  And the cops are chasing a bad guy through an alley.
[33:18.000 --> 33:23.100]  Everybody, and he is... he's making a right turn here and a left turn there.
[33:23.900 --> 33:25.400]  And the camera is shaking.
[33:25.820 --> 33:29.200]  And you can't, you know, really quite see him, and you... but you...
[33:29.200 --> 33:31.380]  you catch a glimpse of him and he's going around that next corner.
[33:31.500 --> 33:33.700]  And you run around that next corner and then, you know...
[33:33.700 --> 33:36.120]  And the bad guys wearing this black hat and a green hoodie.
[33:36.340 --> 33:38.660]  And then you go around that next corner, and then boom!
[33:38.660 --> 33:43.120]  Assume you find that there's just a sea of people wearing black hats and green hoodies.
[33:43.420 --> 33:45.200]  So that's what Tornado Cash does.
[33:45.520 --> 33:49.320]  It prevents you from finding the bad guys by mixing it all in over here.
[33:49.920 --> 34:04.180]  And, you know, we thought about this, you know, over lunch with a couple of people that were watching the trial, like I was, and talked about it and said, you know, the best way to combat that would probably be...
[34:04.180 --> 34:13.320]  And this is how I would have come back and fallen back at it, would be to say, hey, you know what, what the government just told you about that analogy where you're chasing the bad guy back and through the alley.
[34:13.720 --> 34:15.020]  That's exactly right.
[34:15.240 --> 34:18.060]  That is exactly how Tornado Cash works.
[34:18.400 --> 34:23.080]  And I want you to remember that throughout the course of this trial because I couldn't have come up with a better analogy myself.
[34:23.080 --> 34:34.400]  But what the government didn't tell you was that all those people that are wearing the black hats and the green hoodies that he ran into, that sea of people, well, those are the legitimate users of Tornado Cash that are looking for financial privacy.
[34:34.800 --> 34:40.940]  Those are the... because Tornado Cash does not work if you have bad guys using it all the time.
[34:40.940 --> 34:42.260]  You need real people.
[34:42.420 --> 34:44.000]  And we're real people using this.
[34:44.020 --> 34:45.160]  There are real people using it.
[34:45.240 --> 34:46.660]  It's no longer subject to sanctions.
[34:47.840 --> 34:51.980]  TornadoCash.eth is, I believe, still a lot... it was, once again, a live site.
[34:52.820 --> 34:56.160]  And so you have these very real and important use cases.
[34:56.920 --> 35:11.000]  And, you know, after my diatribe here about Tornado Cash, I want to hand it over to you, Harry and Phil, and talk about these decentralized and private communications channels, you know, zero-knowledge roll-ups, these types of other privacy-enhancing technologies that we see,
[35:11.060 --> 35:14.080]  you know, with respect to the Ethereum blockchain and others.
[35:14.080 --> 35:16.420]  Yeah, I'll just be brief.
[35:16.580 --> 35:23.100]  But, you know, obviously, there has been a lot of repression against computer hackers.
[35:23.100 --> 35:26.600]  And some of them are indeed working on blockchain technologies.
[35:27.060 --> 35:33.920]  And blockchain technologies are not directly used by all the tech mentioned on the slide.
[35:34.920 --> 35:50.040]  But nonetheless, what's happened is that the explosion of interest, particularly, I would say, among younger programmers and hackers, who now actually are funded and don't have to work for, like, Google and do open-source and free software on the side, has been tremendously effective.
[35:52.020 --> 35:59.380]  Also, it's allowed academics to actually get funding for work that would be outside of, like, you know, government purview.
[35:59.720 --> 36:05.220]  And so you've seen developments of technologies that the cypherpunks really wanted but didn't really quite have working.
[36:06.000 --> 36:19.280]  I'll describe a lot of these tomorrow, too, but this includes Mixnets, which is a kind of anonymous communication channel that does sort of like spam, is, you know, it does what it says on the 10, mixes messages up to make statistical correlation very hard.
[36:20.680 --> 36:31.120]  Anonymous credentials, which are a way to do identity without giving a permanent and trackable identifier to people, making that identification more anonymous and zero-knowledge proof.
[36:31.300 --> 36:40.200]  You can prove really arbitrary statements without revealing anything other than the fact that you know the statement.
[36:40.480 --> 36:45.320]  And these things, you know, these technologies were all considered kind of more academic.
[36:46.360 --> 36:49.400]  And they were inspirational of a lot of the cypherpunks.
[36:49.940 --> 36:54.980]  But now we're seeing real code that could be deployed with libraries across most programming languages.
[36:55.140 --> 36:57.600]  And I think that's... we haven't seen the end of that yet.
[36:59.880 --> 37:02.380]  Yeah, I think there's a few aspects to this.
[37:02.480 --> 37:03.820]  One is what you said, Harry.
[37:04.060 --> 37:10.020]  It's like people in the cryptocurrency community genuinely want privacy and cryptography innovations.
[37:10.280 --> 37:16.080]  Like, I've talked to so many cryptographers that are like, oh my God, people are actually using our stuff, they're paying attention.
[37:16.080 --> 37:22.800]  We don't have to lobby for 20 years to get them to adopt a simple encryption scheme because no one actually wants to buy security.
[37:23.320 --> 37:27.600]  In the cryptocurrency community, people not only want to buy security, they want to buy privacy.
[37:28.320 --> 37:34.720]  They want to buy kind of decentralization and horizontality and a lot of these things that these schemes can kind of achieve.
[37:35.200 --> 37:38.360]  So I think Mixnet's definitely one exciting technology.
[37:38.620 --> 37:39.440]  There's many others.
[37:40.100 --> 37:49.800]  One we're particularly excited about at Flashbots is kind of combining in trusted hardware and trusted execution environments, which as a hacker you immediately cringe and you're like, wow, that's broken.
[37:50.000 --> 37:59.860]  But not in ways that the entire system is relying on it, but rather in ways that kind of let you do creative things with defense in depth that you then get your security properties from like other places.
[37:59.860 --> 38:06.780]  So new kind of hybrid systems like that that are actually much more private and secure are something we're thinking a lot about.
[38:07.020 --> 38:09.680]  But I think everyone in crypto kind of this is what you do.
[38:09.820 --> 38:14.080]  You kind of have to take these Legos of primitives and build kind of an interesting machine.
[38:14.500 --> 38:18.020]  And the machine is very... there's a very immediate feedback loop on value.
[38:18.560 --> 38:24.440]  And I think that's great for open-source people, free software people, academics, and hackers as well.
[38:25.820 --> 38:28.900]  I love the Lego analogy there, Phil, for sure.
[38:29.120 --> 38:29.220]  Yeah.
[38:29.720 --> 38:36.360]  You know, one of the things that Harry mentioned was, you know, these non-financial use cases with respect to the blockchain and Ethereum.
[38:36.820 --> 38:41.340]  As I mentioned at the outset, I'm the general counsel of ENS or the Ethereum name service here.
[38:42.240 --> 38:46.660]  Just to very briefly talk about that, we are a non-financial use case on Ethereum.
[38:47.140 --> 38:51.780]  We are often touted as the most successful non-financial use case on the Ethereum blockchain.
[38:51.780 --> 38:56.200]  We are considered to be a public good and really kind of infrastructure that exists on Ethereum.
[38:56.480 --> 39:04.960]  And what we created with the .ETH TLD, which is not a TLD that ICANN has sanctioned, but it is in compliance with ICANN's rules.
[39:05.500 --> 39:07.440]  It's a domain system.
[39:07.760 --> 39:10.760]  It's kind of like the DNS, except it's an evolution of the DNS.
[39:11.000 --> 39:12.480]  D is the fourth letter of the alphabet.
[39:12.620 --> 39:13.180]  E is the fifth.
[39:13.260 --> 39:14.900]  I guess that's somewhat coincidental.
[39:14.900 --> 39:16.880]  So we're kind of this evolution.
[39:17.100 --> 39:22.680]  And we've created a decentralized domain name system for user-controlled digital identities.
[39:23.080 --> 39:25.380]  You know, these are entirely self-sovereign.
[39:25.460 --> 39:33.440]  And as part of our constitution for the Ethereum name service, we have put users' rights as paramount to anything else.
[39:33.600 --> 39:41.200]  Nothing we can do in any kind of governance capacity can ever infringe upon the rights of the users to hold these particular names.
[39:41.200 --> 39:42.680]  We cannot take them from you.
[39:42.760 --> 39:43.820]  We cannot rug them in any way.
[39:43.940 --> 39:45.580]  And nobody else can either.
[39:45.840 --> 39:57.920]  So these are evolutions and enhancements to the DNS that are very, very much founded on the hacker ethos of owning your identity, owning your data, securing your data, and being very censorship resistant.
[39:58.440 --> 40:07.960]  In terms of hosting, we have things like IPFS or the Interplanetary File System that .ETH domains allow and make much more accessible.
[40:07.960 --> 40:14.400]  So it's very hard to remove content that you put onto a .ETH domain and connect it through IPFS.
[40:14.640 --> 40:17.660]  And we're fully open and totally transparent in our governance.
[40:17.840 --> 40:24.540]  We have a DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, that has its own benefits and drawbacks, just like any sort of governance system.
[40:24.800 --> 40:28.460]  But it would really, I think, be...
[40:28.460 --> 40:33.040]  We'd be missing out if we didn't talk about some of these non-financial use cases.
[40:33.040 --> 40:35.740]  And I think ENS is a really critical example of it.
[40:36.440 --> 40:43.620]  I also want to, in the last couple of minutes that we have here, just talk about the confluence and the convergence and the cultures here.
[40:43.780 --> 40:50.720]  I mean, I went to my first DEFCON, which is the biggest Ethereum conference that happens every other year.
[40:50.720 --> 40:52.660]  And it was in Bangkok this past year.
[40:52.660 --> 40:55.240]  That's actually where I met Phil and Harry, actually.
[40:56.400 --> 40:56.760]  And...
[40:56.760 --> 40:58.660]  No, actually, you know, we met on the stock exchange.
[40:58.840 --> 41:01.320]  I met Harry in Bangkok, and we hung out in Bangkok for a little bit.
[41:01.440 --> 41:03.000]  But, you know...
[41:03.000 --> 41:03.600]  But...
[41:03.600 --> 41:04.800]  I thought that was after, wow.
[41:05.140 --> 41:05.880]  Yeah, it might...
[41:05.880 --> 41:06.440]  Oh, yeah.
[41:06.660 --> 41:07.440]  No, it was before.
[41:07.660 --> 41:08.480]  Yeah, but...
[41:09.240 --> 41:10.380]  Yeah, time, right?
[41:10.900 --> 41:13.440]  But when I was at DEFCON, there was...
[41:13.440 --> 41:15.400]  There was a hacker's cove over there.
[41:15.520 --> 41:16.920]  There was a hacktivism center.
[41:16.920 --> 41:21.700]  There, you know, there is this drawing on the hacker ethos and the hacker culture.
[41:21.880 --> 41:24.360]  And they really, you know, try to channel it over there.
[41:24.480 --> 41:27.860]  And for some reason, we keep pushing this culture away.
[41:28.060 --> 41:31.820]  When I was at DEFCON, I was so excited to be there.
[41:31.980 --> 41:36.260]  Because, to me, it felt like there was this world of promise that was being built all around me.
[41:36.540 --> 41:39.420]  And the people that were at DEFCON, that was our army.
[41:39.740 --> 41:42.660]  That was the army that was building this new future of the Internet.
[41:42.860 --> 41:44.140]  And I believed in it then.
[41:44.140 --> 41:48.840]  And it felt to me like hope felt in 1994, that first one.
[41:49.040 --> 41:52.820]  Where there was just so much promise and there were so many people doing really interesting things.
[41:53.040 --> 41:56.200]  And this is that really stark contrast with this crypto bro image.
[41:56.320 --> 41:58.860]  When you think about hacker culture, there's all different types of people here.
[41:59.300 --> 42:02.000]  You've got APT groups, kind of bad guys.
[42:02.220 --> 42:07.000]  We don't necessarily like the Lazarus group or North Korea or, you know, Fancy Bear.
[42:07.380 --> 42:10.020]  You know, they were not the guys that show up at HOPE, right?
[42:10.200 --> 42:13.180]  You have the NSA, on the other hand, with the tailored access group.
[42:13.560 --> 42:15.060]  Yeah, maybe they're here at HOPE.
[42:15.320 --> 42:16.380]  But is anybody here from the NSA?
[42:17.160 --> 42:18.960]  Oh, that guy, the same guy raised his hand.
[42:19.100 --> 42:19.840]  Okay, there we go.
[42:19.980 --> 42:20.580]  Okay, yeah.
[42:22.460 --> 42:30.440]  You know, so, every culture is going to have, you know, its fledgling subcultures that don't necessarily mesh with the entire ethos of it.
[42:30.440 --> 42:39.480]  But what I think is totally wrong is that some hacker conferences are actively discouraging submissions that have anything to do with blockchain.
[42:39.740 --> 42:40.620]  They don't want to hear about it.
[42:40.660 --> 42:41.320]  They don't want to see it.
[42:41.420 --> 42:41.800]  They don't want to hear it.
[42:41.880 --> 42:55.760]  They just want to plug their ears, close their eyes, and not let anybody speak their mind about this technology that is underpinned by the same ethos, by the same people, and the same tech that we fought for, and a lot of people went to prison for, back in the 90s and throughout that.
[42:55.760 --> 43:05.120]  So, I'll get off my soapbox on that and kind of move into this bit of user sovereignty and shared goals here.
[43:06.400 --> 43:13.960]  And here's where I think we really want to wrap it up here, because what we are building together, the hacker ethos, believes in censorship resistance.
[43:14.180 --> 43:15.380]  It believes in user sovereignty.
[43:15.820 --> 43:18.140]  Privacy is paramount to almost everything else.
[43:18.260 --> 43:21.320]  We all believe in the rejection of surveillance capitalism.
[43:21.320 --> 43:27.760]  We think that's a horrible business model that has eroded privacy and privacy protections for the last couple of decades now.
[43:28.140 --> 43:33.780]  And the way that we're fighting this, through so many different talks that I've heard here, is about decentralizing technologies.
[43:34.360 --> 43:42.520]  Now, what we're doing, and the Ethereum world, and other blockchains as well, is building on this very same type of ethos.
[43:42.640 --> 43:44.340]  We shouldn't be shut out from these conferences.
[43:44.340 --> 43:46.600]  I think that's wrong and wrong-headed from the outset.
[43:47.420 --> 43:49.860]  We need you guys to come together with us.
[43:49.860 --> 43:50.900]  We need to be here.
[43:51.120 --> 43:57.360]  Maybe we shouldn't schedule hope at the same time as ETH Global, happening in the same city in New York, maybe next year.
[43:57.720 --> 44:01.160]  But I think what we need to do is converge our efforts.
[44:01.300 --> 44:03.040]  We shouldn't be building in separate lanes.
[44:03.240 --> 44:12.940]  We should be coming together and converging these efforts to do the things in a values-aligned way that we all believe in, because we have these shared beliefs and these shared values.
[44:12.940 --> 44:14.620]  Let's come together and let's build together.
[44:14.980 --> 44:18.600]  I want to pass it over to you guys for some final words on that front, too.
[44:18.600 --> 44:22.020]  I would say, I mean, to all the...
[44:22.020 --> 44:34.520]  I mean, it is really transparent that about, you know, 99%, let's say, of blockchain technologies are, you know, I would say scams of various kinds.
[44:34.520 --> 44:43.140]  And the largest use case, which I am somewhat surprised of blockchain technologies, is, like, transparently bribing the President of the United States.
[44:43.280 --> 44:46.560]  I was like a... I didn't really see that one coming.
[44:47.660 --> 44:51.540]  I doubt Nakamoto did or Vitalik did, but, indeed, that is what happened.
[44:52.400 --> 44:53.640]  You know, we...
[44:53.640 --> 44:56.980]  Nonetheless, may not be... that's what we have.
[44:57.880 --> 45:11.280]  Nonetheless, I would say, you know, 1% or so of those technologies are going to be exceedingly important in the future, particularly with the collapse of the American empire, which we're watching in real time on our phones.
[45:13.260 --> 45:21.400]  And in any evolutionary process, there is always a lot of garbage has to be thrown out.
[45:21.660 --> 45:31.300]  And hopefully, we can only hope and work such that the things which are positive and beneficial for the human species do survive.
[45:31.300 --> 45:39.560]  So I do want to... I do think that we are in a critical period, and we just have to take our historic role very seriously.
[45:40.620 --> 45:41.980]  Any final thoughts, Phil?
[45:42.320 --> 45:42.880]  Yeah.
[45:43.200 --> 45:50.060]  So my final thoughts will be kind of the same final thoughts as I had for Gary Gensler on Twitter before Elon bought it.
[45:50.620 --> 45:54.460]  So if you're... if you're still a skeptic, if you're still not convinced, well, so is Gary Gensler.
[45:54.640 --> 46:04.380]  He actually gave a speech saying, basically, everything crypto is promising, we already have in traditional finance, and it works much better, and it's regulated, and it's way more safe, and there's less scams, and it's cleaner.
[46:04.620 --> 46:06.020]  So what is the point of all this?
[46:06.980 --> 46:19.740]  And I kind of retweeted that, and I said, well, I think the point is that if you're a 12-year-old kid with the laptop, you can't make change to, like, the code base of the New York Stock Exchange, but you can make a change in a pull request to the code base of Ethereum, or Solana, or Bitcoin, or any of these other systems.
[46:23.060 --> 46:33.320]  And I think, as hackers, we know kind of what a big difference that level of open information, open access, and horizontality can make to the seats people get at different tables of power.
[46:34.160 --> 46:44.080]  So I would say, come code with us, and throw in some pull requests, or come to a conference, or just say hi to people whenever you see them, and be open-minded to their values.
[46:44.340 --> 46:49.200]  And I think we, in the blockchain world, can kind of do the same for everyone outside.
[46:50.760 --> 46:52.020]  And that's it for us, folks.
[46:52.160 --> 46:54.600]  Thank you guys for listening and hearing us out.
[46:54.800 --> 46:55.960]  We very much appreciate it.
[47:00.630 --> 47:03.690]  I don't know if we have, we might have time for very brief questions.
[47:03.690 --> 47:06.850]  We have, we have two minutes for questions.
[47:06.930 --> 47:09.710]  If we could do this lightning round style, that would be lovely.
[47:10.110 --> 47:13.530]  If I could get two lines here, that would be great.
[47:15.170 --> 47:15.730]  Hi.
[47:16.170 --> 47:34.510]  What do you think about the openness of the transactions on any blockchain ledger as a feature, rather than a drawback, in terms of abandoning the idea of one dollar equals one dollar, and one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, and introducing, like, a semantic feature to the currency,
[47:34.510 --> 47:41.070]  so that if I pull out a dollar in my pocket, you actually know where this dollar came from, and you can track its entire progress?
[47:42.370 --> 47:45.750]  Yeah, so by default, like in Bitcoin, that is kind of how it works.
[47:45.750 --> 47:47.230]  You have this full traceability.
[47:47.230 --> 47:53.290]  There are other projects like Zcash, where it essentially works in, like, a zero knowledge proof receipt model.
[47:53.450 --> 48:00.110]  So you prove that you're able to spend some funds, but you don't prove anything about, kind of, what funds you're spending, or who gets what balance increase.
[48:00.490 --> 48:02.470]  So I think there's, like, a lot to be said there.
[48:02.790 --> 48:08.870]  I also have many thoughts on this for smart contracts, because smart contracts, you sort of want them to be public and verifiable.
[48:09.010 --> 48:09.550]  That's the point.
[48:10.110 --> 48:18.070]  But then maybe having everything be public and verifiable means that, like, people get adversely selected, or they get spied on, or all these other kind of bad outcomes.
[48:18.230 --> 48:21.070]  So how do you balance those needs, I think, is the hard part.
[48:21.290 --> 48:23.230]  I'll be around tomorrow, happy to jam on it.
[48:25.370 --> 48:32.250]  So, Ethereum and other projects, they necessarily rely on incentive design, or incentive alignment mechanism design.
[48:32.510 --> 48:36.550]  And that kind of assumes the goodness of free market's individual liberty.
[48:37.690 --> 48:44.610]  And that's fine if you buy into, like, Austrian economics, or sort of, like, a very particular ideology.
[48:44.930 --> 48:47.490]  On the other hand, the hacker community is way more diverse.
[48:48.050 --> 48:52.290]  Some people value freedom a lot, but others value justice or equality.
[48:53.410 --> 48:59.970]  And, you know, like, ENS is not... the values of ENS are not necessarily the same or identical as the values of DNS.
[49:01.030 --> 49:06.130]  Or Flashbots assumes the sort of existence and goodness of markets.
[49:06.470 --> 49:16.910]  So, is there space in the Ethereum ecosystem for not just people that believe in liberty, but also those that believe in equality or justice or any similar values?
[49:17.450 --> 49:18.490]  Oh, I think so.
[49:18.670 --> 49:19.030]  Absolutely.
[49:19.350 --> 49:23.890]  And I would say, why don't you come to DevCon or DevConnect, and you'll find very like-minded people.
[49:23.890 --> 49:25.810]  You'll find projects that are about this.
[49:25.910 --> 49:30.110]  And that's why I think this crossover and this cross-pollination of the cultures is so important.
[49:30.430 --> 49:38.370]  Because I think that's a misconception that those aspects are missing from the Ethereum culture or the subcultures of any types of blockchain.
[49:38.610 --> 49:39.770]  But I think they're there.
[49:39.990 --> 49:42.450]  And I think they're going to be burgeoning.
[49:42.550 --> 49:44.310]  And we'd love to have people like you join.
[49:44.310 --> 49:49.530]  Yeah, I would say, like, purely technically speaking, I mean, he is right, obviously, or you are right.
[49:49.770 --> 49:54.330]  You know, there is a level of financial incentives in most of these protocols.
[49:54.330 --> 50:01.950]  And if you assume kind of people will act rationally, and obviously adversaries could attack those incentive structures as well.
[50:02.290 --> 50:04.850]  We worry quite a lot about that at NEM.
[50:06.170 --> 50:10.470]  That being said, I would say the problem is kind of what's the other game in town, right?
[50:11.290 --> 50:16.390]  So, DNN... I mean, I say this as a former W3C employee and ICANN liaison of various stripes.
[50:16.670 --> 50:27.030]  I mean, the domain name system is like a centralized 70s database that's ran fundamentally in a hierarchical manner where nonprofits are given, like, a few chairs and ignored.
[50:27.810 --> 50:32.350]  And random people are, like, self-declared leaders of, you know, whatever.
[50:32.730 --> 50:34.810]  I mean, it's ridiculous the way that...
[50:34.810 --> 50:40.190]  And it's a really huge centralizing flaw, the current domain name system in the Internet itself.
[50:40.470 --> 50:44.590]  So, the problem is often, like, what's the alternative?
[50:45.030 --> 50:50.330]  And the alternatives are often reliant on the U.S.
[50:50.450 --> 50:55.290]  government or the goodwill of Google or Cloudflare.
[50:55.770 --> 50:58.410]  And these may not always be good actors.
[50:58.650 --> 50:59.370]  Obviously, U.S.
[50:59.450 --> 51:03.090]  government's become a somewhat hostile actor to most of the rest of the planet.
[51:05.270 --> 51:07.250]  Yeah, I think there's lots of room for it.
[51:07.590 --> 51:11.170]  I'm happy to chat more about it since I think those are both amazing answers.
[51:11.410 --> 51:14.310]  But, yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, lots to explore.
[51:14.950 --> 51:15.630]  All right, got you guys around.
[51:15.730 --> 51:15.970]  Thank you.
[51:16.190 --> 51:16.490]  Thank you.
[51:17.430 --> 51:18.630]  Can we squeeze one more in?
[51:19.030 --> 51:20.490]  Yeah, this is going to be our last question.
[51:20.610 --> 51:20.950]  All right.
[51:21.730 --> 51:22.350]  Thanks.
[51:24.250 --> 51:24.870]  Hi.
[51:25.310 --> 51:31.970]  I got into, like, hacking subculture stuff in middle and high school because I was, like, a vegetarian.
[51:35.010 --> 51:36.130]  And, like, yeah.
[51:36.370 --> 51:42.050]  And I feel like a lot is a lot of, like, permacomputing and, like, Solarpunk LARPing stuff.
[51:42.190 --> 51:48.950]  And all of the vegetarians told me about cryptocurrency that it was a scam and that also it would, like, kill the environment.
[51:50.610 --> 52:00.070]  And I don't necessarily take it at face value that either of those things are true, especially, like, the first, considering what was shared.
[52:00.070 --> 52:07.230]  But I feel like that's, like, a large critique that I hear in, like, the public sphere of, like, what about the environmental impacts?
[52:07.230 --> 52:07.750]  Mm-hmm.
[52:07.910 --> 52:24.630]  And I know for things like ChatGPT, even though there are problems with artificial intelligence that have to do with energy usage that, like, what the public thinks is, like, an appropriate amount of water to spend on a prompt versus, like, water you spend on sending an email.
[52:24.910 --> 52:26.790]  It's, like, there's not enough literacy around that.
[52:26.790 --> 52:38.450]  And so, yeah, I'm curious what you guys as people who, like, are involved in these communities actually have, like, an estimate of, like, their place in, like, our general energy infrastructure, what that feels like.
[52:38.610 --> 52:41.490]  I'll respond to that really briefly and then just pass it over.
[52:41.590 --> 52:47.010]  I mean, I think that the environmental impact of any type of technology is definitely a very valid concern.
[52:47.710 --> 52:50.730]  And it's been a valid concern specifically with respect to Ethereum.
[52:50.770 --> 52:55.370]  And that's why there was a shift from proof of work over to proof of stake, which was much more environmentally friendly.
[52:55.370 --> 53:05.470]  But I think we also have to think about, you know, the environmental impact of things like golf courses, too, are pretty goddamn terrible, you know, in terms of the water that we expend on all these various things.
[53:05.570 --> 53:09.610]  And so I think this is just the latest target as a new technology.
[53:09.930 --> 53:20.810]  The environmental impact of massive data centers that require ginous amounts of cooling for all these AI systems and large language models that are being powered right now are also pretty goddamn terrible.
[53:20.810 --> 53:29.910]  But it's this is something that I think that within, in particular, the Ethereum culture, we take extraordinarily seriously and are taking steps to mitigate.
[53:30.170 --> 53:32.930]  And so, you know, we're paying attention to that very, very much.
[53:33.070 --> 53:33.690]  I'll pass it over.
[53:34.970 --> 53:40.670]  Yeah, I mean, I think I broadly agree pretty much every technology has this conversation.
[53:41.010 --> 53:51.510]  I think the interesting example with AI to me was like Elon spinning up a bunch of LNG turbines to power his latest data center because they couldn't actually build the capacity in the grid fast enough.
[53:51.510 --> 53:56.890]  I think generally what destroys the environment is these kind of degenerate hyper-financialized arms races.
[53:57.250 --> 53:59.490]  And I think sometimes crypto does create those.
[53:59.830 --> 54:04.870]  It's a question of like how to redirect them into kind of a way that doesn't destroy the environment.
[54:05.330 --> 54:08.550]  I think ETH is pretty conscious of that and has iterated the protocol.
[54:08.730 --> 54:13.770]  Okay, we're going to point these games in ways that people can play them without, you know, using all the water and stuff.
[54:13.930 --> 54:15.150]  But it is a valid critique.
[54:15.170 --> 54:19.170]  And I think one that the crypto community actually does need to engage with more.
[54:19.170 --> 54:21.910]  I mean, I'll just say something, I mean, I used to live in a tree.
[54:22.090 --> 54:26.950]  I'm pretty ecologically aware of the issues.
[54:26.950 --> 54:35.850]  And I think one of the problems that when the technology came out, what is correct is that Bitcoin does rely on a thing called proof of work.
[54:36.150 --> 54:37.970]  We basically mint Bitcoin.
[54:38.210 --> 54:45.870]  This is the Bitcoin mining via the discovery of a certain kind of leading number of zeros from a result of a hash function.
[54:45.870 --> 54:49.170]  So you have to run a pointless hash function like over and over and over again.
[54:49.290 --> 54:50.490]  And that was not...
[54:52.150 --> 54:54.390]  I mean, it comes from mixed nets, that technology.
[54:54.750 --> 54:56.770]  And it was meant as a spam prevention technology.
[54:56.770 --> 54:58.970]  It was never meant to like scale a currency system.
[55:00.290 --> 55:03.030]  And obviously that does have ecological impacts.
[55:03.290 --> 55:11.290]  And I think it is interesting to see that projects like ETH, Ethereum did move consciously because of the ecological cost of that away from proof of works.
[55:11.290 --> 55:22.950]  I think most of the ecological cost of cryptocurrency comes from this particular choice that Bitcoin made, which other cryptocurrencies are going away from because of those ecological reasons.
[55:22.950 --> 55:43.590]  That being said, obviously, the wider question is, is what is the long term sustainability of computing technology itself, particularly in an era of like resource wars, lack of resources and ecological collapse, which I mean, we're obviously seeing look at the weather in New York right now.
[55:43.590 --> 55:47.630]  It's really hot and it's in the floods and the fires in California.
[55:48.310 --> 55:50.250]  And this is a really important question.
[55:50.390 --> 55:56.750]  I have not seen like too much serious work from anyone on this, and it's absolutely vital.
[55:57.630 --> 55:59.270]  We we take it.
[55:59.350 --> 56:03.090]  I'm actually quite surprised and have been for a long time.
[56:03.250 --> 56:09.770]  There is not more general when in the 90s, when I was kind of coming in age, you had the Unabomber.
[56:09.770 --> 56:22.850]  You had a rash of ecological actions basically around climate change and the destruction of technical infrastructure that obviously, you know, I don't support killing random people.
[56:23.430 --> 56:26.750]  That's obviously not going to be effective.
[56:27.550 --> 56:39.470]  I still don't think we have an effective way both of conceiving a universe which gives us the benefits of technology, particularly computational digital technology in ecologically sustainable manner.
[56:39.470 --> 56:40.870]  So that's like a research topic.
[56:41.070 --> 56:45.470]  And there's the political problem of how we force our society to move in that direction.
[56:45.470 --> 56:51.810]  And I'm and we are running out of time, so to speak, slowly but surely, maybe quickly at this point.
[56:52.530 --> 56:55.410]  Speaking of speaking of, yeah, I think so.
[56:56.150 --> 56:57.510]  Thank you guys very much.
[56:57.670 --> 56:58.230]  Appreciate it.
[56:58.230 --> 56:58.670]  Thank you.
[56:58.710 --> 56:59.270]  Thank you very much.
[56:59.710 --> 57:00.330]  Thank you.
[57:00.390 --> 57:00.910]  Thank you, everyone.