The Coup That Made Me a Cypherpunk. Loring Harkness - Brainbot / Shutter Network | Privacy Academy

Uh, my name is Lauren Harkness. I'm head of commercial at Brainbot, a crypto venture builder based in Mines, Germany. And Brainbot is one of the core contributors to the Shutter network, um, which focuses on commit and reveal threshold encryption. Before I got into crypto, I focused on financial inclusion in emerging markets, particularly in Southeast Asia. And I was uh for a while based in Singapore and then in Yanggon, Myamma.

And I was living in Yanggon in 2021 when there was a military coup. And um uh overnight um kind of the political situation unraveled. the economy collapsed um and the new dictator ended up uh basically mining the telco and the trady banking data in order to identify people who were participating in pro-democracy activities and then um either uh confiscating assets or arresting those people. And so as a result, a lot of people in Myanmar um basically turn to crypto in order to um protect their assets or protect themselves um or to move assets out of Myamma as they were fleeing for safety. And so I got into crypto around the same time.

Um, and I started collaborating with Brainbot on a community currency project for internally displaced people in northern Myamma. Um, we enjoyed working together so much that I was lucky enough for them to invite me to Germany and uh, join the team full-time. So I've been working with Brainbot for the past uh three and a half four years now and I've worked with them on a range of different projects. Uh as I mentioned earlier, Brainbot is a crypto venture builder. Um and so I've worked on a range of topics including um under collateralized lending platforms uh payment channels uh roll up to rollup bridges and then most recently on shutter network which um is encryption as a service specializing in commit and reveal threshold encryption.

I can um I can speak about my own experiences. I obviously can't speak for My people. Um, but the coup in February 2021 in Myamma um triggered both an extraordinarily difficult period, but also um in the early days of protest, there was something really beautiful. Um people flooded out onto the streets of Yangon and other major cities. Um, and they brought with them their real identities.

So you saw nurses in O scrubs and you saw engineers in their high viz clothing. You saw teachers in their green lunges. Um, and you saw drag queens um, you know, in full drag. And it was wonderful to see um everyone uh going out into the streets and um uh celebrating the democratic period uh that they had just enjoyed and experienced and all of the freedoms which uh they valued so much. Um unfortunately that kind of beautiful period of colorful um protest didn't last long.

Um the military dictatorship um introduced violence um uh sniping um some protesters and killing them and um arresting a large number of pro-democracy activists. And this is really where people turned to cryptocurrencies for the properties of um self-s sovereignty and um being able to make pseudonymous uh transactions. Um there is um someone I am aware of who uh was a very prominent um activist um and um media personality who advocated strongly against the new military dictatorship and he learned that um his name was on one of the arrest lists. And so what he did as a result um was he basically converted all of his life savings into cryptocurrency and then um together with his seed phrase tked through the jungle from Myamma into Thailand. And when he arrived in Thailand, he declared um uh refugee status and was ultimately um granted refugee status by another country.

and he was able to move to that country and then um use his crypto seed phrase to um access his life savings and really start building a new life for himself overseas. And he wouldn't have been able to do that without cryptocurrency because if he had um sought to make an international uh transfer from his bank account to his new bank account overseas that obviously would have been blocked by the military dictatorship. Um so that's just one of many examples. Uh but there were also people uh in Myanmar at that time who used um the pseudonymous nature of crypto accounts um in order to collect funds and distribute funds for pro-democracy activities. And so, um, I think that, um, you know, often times today, um, people are concerned about, uh, crypto becoming the world's largest casino or merely becoming a a playground for dens.

Um, but I think in many ways what we're doing is we're building the tools which uh, everyone uh can use. uh if they need it. Uh hopefully um we will never need to protect ourselves against uh authoritarian violent uh dictatorships like people in Myamma recently uh have to. Um but if that day ever comes, you know, for us, um it's the crypto and cipher punks um which are building those tools um and teaching people those skills. today.

I got into crypto because of that very personal experience in Myanmar. Um I haven't always been a privacy advocate. Um and I have not um had a long history in terms of uh developing or advocating for privacy preserving technologies. But I think that it's a good example uh in many ways. Uh the cliche is that people don't value privacy until the exact moment when they need it.

And that was certainly true for myself and I think it's true for many other people. Um the world is going through radical changes and we do see increasing authoritarianism um in many places we never expected to see it. So I think um we should continue building and not lose heart because many people who don't value privacy preserving technologies today um may suddenly value them very highly um at some point in the near future when circumstances change. Um, I also think that it's worth noting that privacy is not a singular monolithic concept. Privacy does not mean one thing to all people and in all situations.

Um, often times when people hear about privacy, they think about it uh in terms of secrecy. um taking some information information and hiding it away from everyone for ever and always. And that's not how I think about privacy. Um I think about privacy as being able to selectively reveal information to whom and um when and in what context I view as desirable or advantageous. And so um privacy preserving technology um you know can be used in a wide variety of applications for a wide variety of goals.

Yeah,

I'm not a builder. So, um maybe it's hard for me to give advice to builders, but as an entrepreneur, as someone who um promotes privacy preserving technologies um and their many use cases, uh I guess I would say that um the cliche is the focal point of any um useful technology is not the technology itself. It's the builders uh sorry uh it's the users um it's their goals, their aspirations, their experience and then um working backwards uh to in uh build technology which um which serves those purposes. Uh sometimes I feel that developers let the tail wag the dog. In other words, they become so obsessed with the technology itself um and with making sure that the technology conforms to some philosophical construct construct or abstract theory that they forget the user experience and whether that technology is actually proven uh useful or valuable.

And so I would encourage developers uh to always keep the users in mind um and build for users. One of the challenges that we have uh faced at Shutter in terms of uh promoting commit and reveal threshold encryption is that we have a very pragmatic view about privacy. uh commit and reveal threshold encryption can be applied to a wide variety of different use cases, many of which people don't naturally think of as being uh privacy promoting or privacy preserving. And just to give you kind of an idea of the wide spectrum, our moonshot at Shudder is to implement encrypted mempools on Ethereum mainet, the L1. And the benefit of doing that is that it prevents uh malicious MEV and real-time censorship.

And it does so by allowing users to encrypt transactions before they go into the public mempool. And because their transaction is encrypted, it means that malicious MEV bots are blind to the contents of the transaction. And as a result, the malicious MEV bots cannot place transactions before or before and after their transaction. In other words, they can't frontr run or sandwich attack your transaction. Um, after that transaction has been uh ordered in the block, then it's decrypted and processed as normal.

So, you can see from this example that uh when we talk about encrypted mempools, we're not talking about encrypting a transaction and making it fully private and keeping it fully private. The transaction itself is not secret. Um, it's merely encrypted for a specific period of time before it goes into the public meool until it's ordered in the block. And it's encrypted for a very specific purpose to prevent malicious MEV bots from manipulating that transaction or to prevent validators from doing real-time censorship and excluding that transaction. And so I think um when explaining this to people you know we can explain it to them from a number of different perspectives.

We can say um you know this is privacy uh technology but the way that we often explain it to people is um we're keeping your money safe. um shutddter encrypted mem pools uh basically keeps malicious me bots from stealing money from you and that's um a message which resonates with a lot of people um but it's not something which people naturally think of as being related to privacy. Um on the other end of the spectrum, we do a lot of fun things. Um like uh in February this year, we released um something called Shudder Hong Bao. Um and for those of you who are familiar with, uh East Asian customs.

Hongbao are these red envelopes which are often filled with cash and given to young people um during the Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year. And so Shudder created um a digital version of this using commit and reveal threshold encryption. And um so basically you could create a red envelope, fill it with an ERC20 token and then the contents of that red envelope would be encrypted until uh Chinese New Year and then it would be decrypted and um the recipient of that red envelope could see the the gift that was inside. Um again that is not it's a privacy application um but it's not um something which a lot of people think of as privacy because it doesn't have to do with secrecy. Again it's privacy for a specific purpose and for a specific period of time.

And then um so we talked about you know encrypted mempools as the most serious application and shutter hungba as the most uh fun and trivial application. Well there's lots of applications uh somewhere in the middle. Uh commit and reveal threshold encryption can be used and is extremely powerful for implementing a wide variety of use cases. everything from uh making sure that onchain games are fair and credibly neutral, uh making sure that DAO votes are of high integrity, uh ensuring that uh RFP procurement processes um are not subject to corruption. um and running auctions which actually yield um more satisfying outcomes both for participants and for auction hosts.

I probably am not the best person to give advice about um a uh personal privacy stack. Uh I loved the um web 3 privacy now um profiles of privacy advocates and the tools which they use. Um I use some of those tools but I probably don't use enough. Um and the reason why is um probably two reasons. uh number one just the general inconvenience of using um some privacy preserving tools and number two network effects.

Um a good example of that is that everyone in crypto is on Telegram and uses that as a way to connect. Um we as a movement, as a community uh collectively need to choose uh better tools um and do so in mass in order to become effective uh not just for everyone but for individual users staying uh positive um during the process of building and going to market. Um I think I have two ideas here and one of them is um uh kind of small vision and the other is big picture. So on a small vision, I think it's really important to um iterate extremely quickly to always be in motion and always be uh releasing products or services into the market, getting feedback from real users um and then making changes based on those um uh feedback. And I think, well, as an aside, on the wall of my office, uh, just off camera, I actually have this big sign and it says, "If you're not embarrassed, you should be embarrassed."

And for me that's really grounding because I know that whenever we create an MVP um we always have this uh struggle um a lot of angst about whether we should release it into the market even though it's unfinished or whether we should make some additional uh features uh to make it a little bit more robust or a little bit easier to use. And that sign reminds me that we should always put things out into the market as soon as possible and we should always um you know get user feedback as soon as possible. Um and and I think we need to respect people who do that as well. Um after we released Shudder Hong Bao um in a very rough form like an alpha version uh I actually shared it in a private telegram group um with some people who are focused on privacy and uh one guy was extremely critical and he uh wrote back uh this is why privacy is failing and he um I think was uh kind of uh offended in some sense that someone would release an alpha version of a uh product. Um instead he expected everything to have kind of a slick UX um and you know snazzy marketing behind it.

But um if we only if we build things

until we think they're perfect and then release them, we're actually going to be missing a very valuable conversation with our users. Um because creating something amazing is not something we can do uh as individuals or even as a siloed team. It's something that we always do in collaboration with our users. Um but then on the the big picture side of things, um I always keep in mind that uh as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of people who come to crypto because of the casino, because of the speculation and the DGEN games. And actually, um if you know me, I love those onchain games as well.

Um, but I also recognize that a lot of those people who only care about financial speculation are actually learning about tools and um skills which may protect them in the future. They're learning about concepts like self- sovereignty, about censorship resistance, about um permissionlessness, about anti- fra fragility. and they may not be valuing those concepts or using them on a day-to-day basis uh right now, but I'm comforted by knowing that if the hits the fan and if they are put in a situation where they need to utilize those uh tools and those skills for their own um survival or their own well-being, um the dgens today will um be able to use those skills for themselves tomorrow.