Ethereum Privacy Roadmaps

It's okay, how, where should we start, where should we go? And I would ask you first where we are with privacy. What's the point of the progress? Paul? Where are we?

Not very far, I guess. Especially if you look at the demands of both of those, say, documents, the two privacy roadmaps. You have a PCAV Versatio, which is not easy to say. I'm gonna call him PCAV, maybe from now on. But his roadmap is extremely detailed.

It's five phases, beginning with foundational transaction privacy, and all the way up to quantum resistance, so it's really complicated documents. And essentially, according to his unconditional privacy roadmap, we're actually not even on stage one. We haven't even begun to contemplate the basics. And then in Vitalik's simplified roadmap, which is essentially just, you know, okay, we can see PCAV's roadmap is quite complicated, and I'm gonna try to say it's an accommodation somewhere in the middle. Even then, from Vitalik's perspective, in the maximally simple privacy roadmap, which is also aiming to be unconditional, we are also essentially, we essentially haven't started.

So the privacy roadmap hasn't begun, I would say. Alan, what do you think? Where's Ethereum privacy at the moment? Um, it's a mess. It's really hard to do, right?

Because we're basically trying to take a decentralized immutable public ledger and like shoehorn privacy into it. And from personal experience, it's a big challenge. And so like, we sort of like built it, you know, with Railgun at a very rudimentary level, but you know, a lot of the research that's happening now is like, how do we get it to do interactions with other contracts, and as like, the complexity of DeFi enhances. I mean, like in 21, it was really simple, you know, approve tokens for spending, send tokens out, get tokens back, and that, a bit of a, I don't know, oversimplification, if you will, but it was really sort of easy, and now there's a lot of really complex DeFi interactions that are sort of, weren't really considered at the time, even for us, and so like, as it evolves, I think it's only getting more and more complex and like, more difficult to get to stage one, if you will. Oh, nice, nice.

Paul, how do you think, they're also talking about technicalities behind the privacy roadmap, but clearly we see some of the social aspects, communal aspects, so-called social layer behind it. Can you just share like, if we're going to reach a decent privacy, or this holy grail of privacy, what should, should be a combination of different things, like political thought, like solidarity movements, collaboration movements, the certain culture behind privacy that's called, these days, cypherpunk? Yeah, so like, the real politic of it, I think is important, because if you think about who supports privacy in Ethereum, it's actually all very, very powerful people. So Vitalik has his own privacy roadmap, yeah, he struggles to get that to be, part of the Ethereum Foundation's, let's say, core long-term roadmap development. Civil culture, pretty much everybody who's a civil culture member is a pro-privacy advocate.

Xiaowei, I think, would represent the OG cypherpunk position, so with her DeFi punk criteria, that the recent argument that the Ethereum Foundation would only really back projects if they were willing to be permissionless, et cetera, although, interestingly, privacy was last, even on Xiaowei's list. And then, also, even Tomas, so Tomas uses the privacy, security, censorship, resistance tagline, which comes from the privacy roadmap, that's the tree list that, the tree principles that are in PKalv's papers, so like, that's, so he is channeling that, whether it's conscious or not, I don't know, maybe he just picked it up by people using it elsewhere. So it's a strange situation where everybody supports it, but at the same time, the idea that privacy would be a flagship in the new all-core devs reconfiguration, so we know that the all-core devs, I'd say the core governance process is now opening up to a wider stakeholder set, and yet, it still seems almost unimaginable that the flagship would be, say, one of the, let's say, foundational privacy transaction, as outlined in both of those manifestos or privacy roadmaps. So yeah, it's a curious paradox, why is it that we can't seem to get privacy to be anything but an afterthought? And I think that maybe comes down to the current climate of pragmatism, so everybody's obsessed with scaling L1, scaling GloVe's improved UX, and privacy is seen as something which maybe would slow that map down, and so we're willing to kind of throw it away in order to achieve these more, to beat Solana, essentially, is what really is going on.

So, pretty admirable goal, though, I guess, from my take. Actually, Alan, how these recent changes with Ethereum Foundation and powerful people around Ethereum preaching on privacy affect Railgun? For many years, you were really neglected, only Vitalik and a few other folks were supporting it, but, nah. Yeah, so, I have a bit of a different take, you know? We've sort of started getting inbound, Railgun contributors have been getting inbound from EF, and people who built and consulted on, and built, or advised on 4337, coming and saying, hey, how do we do paymasters for Railgun, and doing some research together with people who are in the EF.

We've sort of gotten a little bit of a PSE love, as of late, too, and so, I guess, we're probably, I tend to agree, right? We're not really there yet, but I feel like we're sort of on the precipice of it, and so, a lot of people have made noise, and this momentum will take some time, but I could also be a very naive optimist, so, like. Which is no bad thing, I think. Yeah, I would rather be positive than negative about it, I suppose, but, yeah, I think there's momentum there. You know, there's people like us here in this room listening to the talk that care about it, and so, yeah.

Just to follow on that, in, like, it's worth stressing that Vitalik's first recommendation for the near-term privacy roadmap is to integrate Railgun, like, the very, very first thing is to integrate Railgun into pre-existing wallets, so that people can then opt in very easily, shield their transactions, so, yeah, I think that's worth stressing. Yeah, and it's been, we've sort of done some of that, Railgun contributors, like, we shoehorned Railgun into Ravi, which was a fucking nightmare, and then, you know, we shoehorned it into a snap for fun and research, and none of this code is out there in the world in public, don't go looking for it, because it's not great, and the short answer is that, like, it's possible, but it's very, very hard, and there's a lot of, like, security assumptions and compromises that you make whenever you do that, because, I mean, we all know who Ravi's owned by, and there's a ton of analytics roped all through that code base that make it really sort of anti-privacy. So maybe, in this case, Vitalik is the naive optimist. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I still think it's possible, right? I mean, we tore all that stuff out, but it would be like, dear Ravi, please, you know, shoot yourself in the foot, with all, you know, take all this analytics out, and so, yeah, it might be a compromise, a bridge too far, but.

Actually, I would ask Alan about the roadmap in terms of timing, because no one talks about timing, but for you to reach any product market hits related metrics, it took three years, and here, we are talking about way more complex privacy that should involve so many different organizations, and no one says, like, oh, in 20 years, because, you know, it can really kill optimism that you're referring to. How many years it could take, for example, to integrate Railgun into Wallet by default? Oh, I mean, I think, like, you know, that is a matter of, you know, short years, but if we want to get, like, more grand with the question and think about, like, how long, like, true adoption takes, I mean, I think it could be a decade or more, right, at least, because this stuff's really difficult to get traction on, but you can look at things like, I don't know, credit cards. Diners Club was founded in 1950, I think it was, and even in, like, 1990, 40 years later, people were still like, you're gonna buy a cheeseburger with a credit card? Like, that's dumb, you know, and so, like, even, like, traditional finance stuff took a very, very long time, and I think we've gotta really look at other marketplaces and say, like, this can be a very, very long haul, and people who say moon soon should appreciate that soon is probably years and years and years away.

Well, your reflection on practicality behind the timing? Yeah, I mean, so my view on this is, right, it's become a little bit, like, anti-success or something, almost, you know, like, I believe crypto culture, and Ethereum culture, let's say, is a subculture that can't accept it's a subculture, right, so it's always imagining some kind of, like, mainstream success, and maybe it does come, but, like, it'll be a very long time, and if we accepted our subcultural status that we're essentially, like, you know, furries with money, everybody hates us, we go to conferences all the time, we have just, like, weird ideas about how things should work, we would, like, have a better chance of integrating privacy, so as soon as we come to accept our subcultural status, I think we're in a better situation, and that would allow for that long-term timeline, because we'd be more, like, in movement, but we're always chasing this idea of the retail, who I think is, like, a fabrication, it's, like, some sort of psychoanalytic hallucination that we have of the average Joe who's gonna use our obscure privacy kind of tech, you know, yeah. Hold on, are there billions moving for Railgun? Remind me. Is there what?

Are there billions moving for Railgun? Yeah, it's not, yeah, it's in that tune. I just can't get over the whole, like, furries with money thing. I'm still kind of hung up on that comment, I love that. So it's funny, because people keep asking where's the privacy, and then Railgun is coming, like, but we have billions here, and you're saying, no, no, but that's still subculture.

It definitely is, you gotta zoom out to, like, the broader market of finance, right? It's definitely a rounding error for capital flows globally. Not even a rounding error, it's a speck on a flea's, on an elephant's ass, I mean, it's really, really small, so. Then what's your projection, for example, five years, as I was asking you, where do you wanna be in terms of measurements? I mean, ideally not blown up.

I mean, I think, like, one of the biggest challenges for projects like this is, like, don't die, right? It's a war of attrition. And so making sure that you don't get killed by a bug, or, like, I don't know, I mean, just thinking about things like, you know, is VN gonna be cool enough in five years to not be broken, and maybe we need to go to BLS, or, like, how do we deal with architecture that, you know, allows us to be modular in cryptography, because we all know that that's an arms race. So, to me, you know, I don't really think about numbers as much as it is, like, how do we get these sort of things to survive? And then there's this, if you closely pay attention to EF, you would see that suddenly they're starting to show privacy apps, FluidKey and the others.

The question is, like, what kind of other apps you would love to see, each of you, that are maybe neglected in terms of privacy or attention, but still needed to kind of, like, have this tangible Ethereum privacy system moving forward? Yeah, I'm, I think, like many people, probably in this room, but if you went to another room, they wouldn't be, this wouldn't be as likely, but a file-verse-kill kind of person, I think that that's a classic example of an app that we should all completely be using, sort of like using Google Docs, but not having that icky feeling that you're being observed and, like, everything that you're doing is being sort of, like, you know, stored forever. Rocky would be another one, like, which I know that Lev Paris works on this in a very kind of passionate way. He's always being pressured to monetize it, and he refuses to do so, so I think that's a project we should be backing. I'm also an advocate that we should be using our social media, we should be using Lens and Firecaster, so the great paradox, as Naomi mentioned earlier on today, that if we're not using these apps, then why would anybody else?

That's, like, the great paradox of cryptoculture. So yeah, I'm a Rocky, file-verse, and then maybe a Firecaster type. Yeah, ditto on all of those above. You know, some of the things that, just thinking, I can't help but think about stuff, I don't know, I wake up and think about Railgun stuff. And bit louder.

I think that, like, I would love to see things like invoicing. I think about the things that people are doing with Railgun now. People don't really have a good way to do invoices privately, so, like, taking and doing, like, the invoicing is probably a really good, low-hanging fruit in the world of privacy. And if we're talking about the culture, there are lots of talks about cypherpunk, and I was referring to this kind of, like, notion that once Vitalik wrote the blog, the next big event was IF Denver, and I was really, like, I was interested, like, who will be the one who will be, like, okay, where is Vitalik, we understand what cypherpunk is. And it was only Peter Van Valkenburgh from Coin Center, which is ironic.

So it's, like, on a legal side, or, like, lobbying side, if you would say. While the fancy privacy protocols were a bit puzzled, I guess, like, they didn't want to associate themselves with Assange, with Wikileaks, with, like, privacy radicals from 30 years ago. How would you define the role of this cypherpunk transition within Ethereum, and where it could lead us? Yeah, interestingly, both the foundational cypherpunk documents are both authored by the two privacy roadmap people. So MakeEthereumCypherpunk, again, is Vitalik, and then he's got his Maximally Simple Privacy Roadmap, and then P-Cav, as he's now known from me, is the author of the Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto and the more detailed privacy roadmap, which then seems to be filtering up into the Ethereum Foundation, and it's probably why Tomas is, like, feels like to, you know, be promoting these documents with these privacy apps.

At least, I think that's why it's in the air. And so, I mean, I've always been in a position, perhaps not surprisingly for anyone who knows me, that we've been searching for a narrative, we're searching for who we are since the beginning, and to me, it's always been cypherpunk. It's not a great case of MakeEthereumCypherpunk, again, it's like, it doesn't even make sense to think of Ethereum without cypherpunk. To me, it's ineliminable, it's the core, it's the whole point. It's possible for there to be an Ethereum that exists, say, five or 10 years down the line, where the culture evolves, the social layer evolves, and it's no longer recognized as cypherpunk.

I think for everybody in this room, and maybe for people like at Protocol Berg and Vafcon, that that would no longer be Ethereum spiritually, it would be like a kind of shipheteusia situation, you know, like all the important parts have disappeared. So yeah, so cypherpunk is the whole point, the rationale. There is an appetite for it, but people are afraid to use it, they're afraid to use the terminology increasingly because I guess it's seen as overly complicated to introduce on crypto Twitter, as people were talking about earlier, decentralization, permissionlessness, censorship resistance, incredible neutrality, not easy things to talk about, but if we don't talk about them, nobody else is going to do it for us. We are very much going to have to keep the cypherpunk language alive and not demote it in order to be more pragmatist. Yeah, it's sort of like the spearhead of the ethos, right?

I also see it beyond that as like the people who are going to be willing to experiment with the tech a lot earlier. We'll find like the really hyper nerdy types will be the people that have a go at it first. And so like whenever Waku came around, we were like, oh cool, like this is like this weird libp2p thing, and like we were going to talk to broadcasters over like HTTP, but we'll do it over a mixed net, why not? We'll see what happens. And so I think that one of the best things about the whole like cypherpunk culture is that like people will experiment with like new technology and like there's a really cool, like interesting community of people who like sort of like feedback to each other.

And so like we broke Waku in all sorts of weird ways and struggled with it for a long time, but they're really, they took in a lot of really great feedback and now it works great. And so I sort of see us as like the guinea pigs, if you will. Paul, how we would pitch cyberpunk to a newcomer? Yeah, let's say from crypto, but who has been just aroundish, like familiar with crypto more or less. Yeah, I don't think you need to convince everybody.

So like let's say trying to think of my, so like I'm an academic and I teach crypto to undergrads and postgrads. And every year you get a room of say 50 people. And these days often a lot of Solana kids, you know, they're sort of a, they've got like a pragmatist attitude toward crypto. And then there are, I guess, just general crypto natives, people who know the way around, say poly markets, stable coins. Crypto natives, I guess, right?

That would be the term that's used more and more. But within a class like that, you're only ever gonna get say a handful of people who listen to the cypherpunk part and become deeply interested in it. And I always think you're not trying to convince everybody. You're just trying to find people who are temperamentally cypherpunk. As long as there's a, like cypherpunk is a minority sport in Ethereum, but it can be, it tends to have outside influence because the people who are cypherpunk are often very passionate.

And so that's what I think you just need to do. It's you don't need to convince everybody, but as soon as you see someone who seems a little bit cypherpunky, someone who may have went to the Web3 privacy hackathon, it's like, those are the people, the Vanguard, I guess, the foundation, that's all you need to do. And it won't be difficult to cypherpunk kill them because they're already probably radicals in spirit. I don't know how we would pitch. Oh man, I don't know.

I think that's pretty well said. They sort of like show themselves, frankly. You know, the people who are like, it's like a bug light. You know, you sort of just kind of go to it. Yeah.

And there's one hilarious B2B cypherpunk, and we talked about this during Prague, and then it was like a joke, a meme, and then I'm like, but wait, meme is B2B cypherpunk. Fundraise from ASICs is in crypto, Binance, whatever, but I know that they're legit activists. And this project do exist. It's just that it's not fancy to say that we're building here a business of sustainability. Or that some of our allies may be not that radical, or although Mark Andreessen, if you go on Wikipedia, he's there as the OG cypherpunk, which makes it much more complex in terms of narratives and how you will talk with people.

But an interesting, like, Paul and Alan, would you deny the existence of B2B cypherpunk in terms of B2B protocols, or like protocols that serve enterprises? Like, should they even go there and use the narrative, or is it just super antagonistic? So, I'll take a crack at this. Like, I think it becomes a bit whitewashed occasionally. You gotta like pick your audience, you know what I mean?

And so like, you know, the Railgun Privacy Project, you know, that has a really big player, and they're from, I guess, 2022. And DCG had come along and put a couple million dollars into the Railgun Treasury and put up a governance vote to sort of be part of the DAO. And a lot of that conversation wasn't really cypherpunk-y, but, you know, they really care about a lot of the ideals of censorship resistance and immutability and privacy. A lot of those dudes are really cracked about that stuff. I don't think we give those people a lot of credit, you know, but it's really kind of funny whenever I see Barry, he's like, oh, Railgun, love Railgun.

And like, you know, he's really excited about privacy, and we talk about it all the time. And so, I think that like, maybe the nomenclature is different, but I think some of the substrate's the same. Yeah, I call this the, the immune to a mirror spectrum. Right, so you can be a kind of like, you can be in the mean, sort of like a proof of innocence kind of person, then you can be like in the mirror, lunar punk, like hardcore person. And as long as they're expanding the agora, as long as they're keeping the counter-economy a little bit open, maybe they're doing it in their different ways, but the important thing is to ensure that that agoras sort of enclave expands as much as possible so that it can contaminate the traditional world, and different people are going to do it in different ways.

You just have to accept that as late-stage factionalism within mature cypherpunk movement. We're running out of time, and before we are going to the sweet, wonderful German food, there are questions on how do we reach, yeah, please. I will go. Hello. So with Railgun, there's this concept of filters, where if you like, get filtered, you can't necessarily use the system, in kind of a privacy pools way, as I understand it.

On Ethereum L1, there's been some talk of having like on-chain privacy natively. If we were to have on-chain privacy natively, should it be more in a, yeah, like I guess Amir versus Amin way, like should it be like a Zcash versus Railgun, like the anonymity set is for everybody, or is it just for who decides what's criminal or not criminal on the chain? Is that like something personally that you feel like, as a Cypherpunk value, should be all or nothing? I think that like the talk about these things as like mutually exclusive would be a mess, right? Because Amir and Amin exist both in some weird harmony, right?

And I think that that's really great. And so I don't think that they're like a binary in that way. You know, so the way that Railgun works is it is permissionless. Anyone can call the contracts, and the way that the list provider works today is really such, as you expressed, that if you aren't, you know, the list of do-gooders, it's really difficult to use Railgun. The SDK is sort of locked up that way, but, you know, in reality, it could go that way, right?

It is permissionless. As a contract, it doesn't exist to be so, but I tend to lean more towards the Amin side of things and, you know, be able to, the way that Proof of Innocence is built from a tech perspective really is such that you could have a multitude of lists and make a lot of different, you know, assertations about yourself. You can assert, I like long walks on the beach and hold this balance. And so it's sort of arbitrary what you prove against. And so where does it go from here?

I don't know, but yeah, I don't think that it's mutually exclusive at all. I think we could have both. Hi, I have another question that's gonna be blessed from us. So should we, at Cypherpunks, team up with big enterprises that want to move some operations on chain, but they don't want this to be fully transparent. So they may be also looking for some privacy solutions that Ethereum community maybe can provide them.

And meanwhile, they could get money, they could get tech to be a bit more mature. And this could be like a stepping stone in the privacy roadmap. So my question is, what do you think about this proposal? Yeah, I mean, I think like one of the, I think one of the things we really have to appreciate, at least from my two cents and the background in finance is that like people need privacy in finance. A lot of like capital markets sort of erode away without like peer to peer blinding.

Auction mechanics don't really work. We have a really great example of that a couple of years ago in Constitution Dow. Who remembers Constitution Dow? Right, so for anybody who remembers, they raised up a, how much was it? A couple of million?

Thank you, $42 million. Really? $42 million? Shit. Yeah, so they raised up $42 million and magically the bid went slightly above that, right?

And that's sort of like a microcosm example of what happens to like traditional markets when you don't have that actor blinding. But even beyond that, you see things like people touting they know where people are gonna be liquidated and things like that on crypto Twitter. And so if we want to like lure that kind of capital into crypto, it's gonna have to have privacy. And it's certainly gonna be the people who know it the best, cypherpunks that build it. I mean, I'm very much on the, I don't really have an opinion on it because, or maybe it's more like a Mourinho meme, you know, I better not say anything.

But I'm more interested in the individual privacy and then maybe extending also into kind of cooperatives and smaller kind of groups. That's the, when I think of the Ethereum privacy roadmap, it's the individual that I'm mostly focused on, so, or mostly interested in. So privacy for the weak and then not even paying attention to like transparency for the powerful. That question I think is too complicated for the moment. But both of the, like both of the roadmaps that we have at the moment are oriented toward the question of privacy for the individual.

I think that's the important focus for now. So enterprise could be something for, I guess, yeah, more business minded folks to look at. But I think it's the individual that I would personally be, that needs in the more immediate sense. Mm, agreed. Thank you.

On topic for privacy for day-to-day use when it comes to payments, and in relation to the roadmap, I was curious what's planned to scale down the fees? You got anything there? No, okay. So to scale down fees, you know, so just from like a direct Railgun perspective. More like a gas fee.

Yeah, no, totally, yeah. I mean, both fronts, right? I mean, yeah, pay less. That's what people wanna do, right? We'll drive towards zero.

So I think that one of the things that costs the most, the Railgun transaction as it exists is about a million gas, right? 1.2 if you're doing something complex. And the most expensive bit of that is state update for the contract. You know, so whenever you take and you do a DeFi transaction, let's say, right?

You unshield from the contract, update state, do some shit, and then come back and update state again. And those state update transaction bits of computation are really expensive. And so one of the biggest things that we're working on is like how do we figure out how to push that state update all the way to the end so there's only one bit of state update? And if the Earth and Moon and Sun and Stars all align and that's able to be done in a secure way, we should be able to cut gas by about half. And we're also sort of trying to figure out different ways to use more optimal curves.

You know, when Railgun got started four or five years ago, there wasn't a new Planck derivative every day, but now there is, and maybe there's something out there that is a little bit more gas efficient, but we're trying to weigh that against proving times in UX. But really, the low-hanging fruit there is on state update for the contract. One cultural question to wrap things up. We spent a few days ago at Time with Isabella, Executive Director of Fontore, and she's a wonderful, positive individual originally from Brazil. And she's really like radiating this kind of like, let's get shit done sort of culture as in a position to gloom and doom, that privacy is under attack, Big Brother is watching us, WorldCoin is stealing our souls, and Iris and stuff like that.

How you would approach that sort of prejudicialistic take on privacy that can lead to empowerment, the communities of mutual support, when we will celebrate privacy instead of just have these panels of mourning, like lacking of something special and precious? Yeah, so, well, I mean, WorldCoin is stealing our souls. I think that's something we should probably accept. But yeah, it's probably a bigger problem. I think Nick is going to deal with that later on today.

But yeah, so I do think that it's, let's say if you go to an event like the hackathon, the Web3 Privacy-type hackathon a few years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, the culture will be a more paranoid, surveillance-oriented, will be very kind of critical of the system, and so on, and all these things are fine, but they can get very insular, and they can get very nihilistic in a strange kind of way, and also you get lots of impersonal, sorry, infighting, like personality infighting over time because the same people are involved in the same micro-politics after a while. So I don't think that's a situation you want to be in. It's much better to have that optimistic take, and it's much better, I think, to have that demonstrative take. So we take Joshua's talk of showing the bread cooperative, that these things can be done, which tends to have a positive effect. At the scale of Ethereum, it's much more complicated because we've essentially had the OG cypherpunk faction, let's say, has faced a coup from the pragmatists, so we've seen this pragmatist shakeup of Ethereum culture, and then there's also another group which is worth mentioning, which is the post-ideological pragmatists, the BlockWorks Extended Universe, what I call the CTVC, Podcast Industrial Complex.

So there are groups that are, there is something like a debate in Ethereum which is about that, about whether we should be still focused on remembering those core values that Ethereum is defending, but also what it's opposed to, or should we just be more pragmatist-minded and not spend so much time thinking about the values? I think the ideal situation is a hybrid culture. You need basically both, and that you put the people who are strategically-minded in terms of near-term tactics, let them do what they want to do, give them the two-year roadmap, and then you also have your OG cypherpunks taking up the long-term, and probably don't put them together too often because they'll just sort of dicker. Alan? One of the things why we have Alan also around us because he's a wonderful, positive human being who just drops jokes all around, and it's nice to be with those people.

I think it's important to be positive, right? You have to have a positive outlook, otherwise it's fucking sad, right? I think that... I don't know, man. I think it's a generally positive community, right?

We have a lot of different stuff coming together. Like, this is great. Whenever, like, I think, when did we meet each other? Nikola, was it in Rome? Man, maybe, maybe, maybe.

I don't know. Whenever you guys are starting to really put this together, I thought that was really sick. You know, it's like, oh, we're gonna put a little collective together to research a lot of this different stuff. And if it evolves into something really cool. I think that only comes from, like, a really cool collective of people who are passionate about stuff and generally positive.

I think if you're, like, a negative and a bear about everything, you sort of just, like, camp out in the woods and don't associate with anyone, right? So, I think that these sort of, like, communal events happen because of positivity, but that's my opinion. On that, like, one of the things that... I was gonna end one of my previous talk on this, but I removed it because I lacked the confidence to kind of try to pull it off. I was gonna basically argue, what if everything is okay at the social layer?

What if we do have this robust, hybrid, pragmatic, and OG cyberpunk culture? I think the mood, like, the atmosphere at events is much more positive, much more confident than I've seen for a very long time. And you'll also notice that privacy and cyberpunk is now much more embedded in events than there has ever been. It's never been like this, except maybe in the very early beginning. So, yeah, what if everything is okay, which is a horrifying thing to think, you know, everything's fine.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for this panel, James. Just a small announcement before the break. It's, like, almost one hour break, and then there's, like, almost every speaker is wonderful. I really invite you to listen to Christopher Goetz from Anoma, a really high-end thinker.

Nick Almont-Willrost, WorldCoin. There's a bunch of people from ZippySync and PolygonMiden. It's nice to hear B2B privacy take, and also the crossover between cyberpunks, Polanski, infrastructure, hardware privacy that sometimes is neglected, and we're sort of, like, forgetting that we should run our own infra and how it's costly. Then there will be also, like, Will Scott, OG hacker, also kind of contributed to the scene, and we're also forgetting that hacktivism, as in activism, is a part of the cultural movement. And last but not least, also Ying Tong, an applied cryptographer who really knows how to put cryptography in play, and now she works a lot within identity framework, and, for example, is trying to implement it with EF in Taiwan, and she's, like, working for this maze of bureaucratic labyrinths, and all those things are our own privacy roadmap.

Have a nice food, and return after the break. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.