Ameen Soleimani [0xbow] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

um I I'll take the a moment here to introduce our next speaker uh and that is uh Amin uh Amin solman is a a pretty great dude uh he's arguably one of the loudest privacy Advocates that exist and uh one of the greatest supporters of the tornado cach developers uh in fact uh he does a great job of putting his money where his mouth is donated I think it was 50 eth today was that today uh and is going to be matching another 50 eth uh of support to them as well uh for people who donate alongside of him um yeah he's a sick dude thank you uh I didn't prepare slides today sorry um going to talk about a couple things um thank you for having me uh if you haven't already checked this out there's like a nice little hallway Museum thing uh has a bunch of like dank privacy memes and history check it out um things I'm going to talk about today are the brief update on the tornado cash case uh I'm going to talk about privacy pools and Oxo and I'll talk about some other privacy projects that I think are really cool uh who here show of hands has heard of tornado cash yeah right uh how many of you guys are familiar with the details of the legal action against uh Roman and Alexi it's like half okay uh I'll explain a little bit about it so about two years ago on August 8th uh 2022 the US government sanctioned the tornado cash contracts and two days later they arrested Alexi perv uh in the Netherlands uh he was one of the developers and a year after that uh they arrested Roman storm who is another one of the developers who lived uh in um the US uh the reason why they did this is because uh North Korea had been allegedly using the tornado cash contracts and the they had funneled something like a couple hundred million dollars that they' hacked from a video game which is its own story but they uh started using tornado cache and so the US government got mad sanctioned it Arrested the devs uh well the Netherlands arrested the dev us followed suit later Lexi lost his trial uh it was uh I think I forget what month it was it was this early this year uh and he is facing 5 years in prison uh we are and I say we his lawyers are working on appealing his case uh and the cool thing about uh Netherlands appeals is that they reintroduce the facts into the case so it's almost like a full retrial uh and it's really important that the verdict that you know led to the the Judgment you know the the justifications are reeval valuated because one of the things that the judge said in their verdict was uh they chose how this was designed and they CH they they they if if they had been able to anticipate that people might use this for crime and they didn't build a system to prevent it they are now liable for the criminal usage of the platform and this is a very dangerous thing even people who like hate us uh in etherum like I don't know there's just like Girl Molly web 3 hater or something and she was also like this is outrageous you know um and and it is and I could see a similar argument being made for example for ethereum cevs uh one day they say hey uh you know you guys talk about this censorship resistance thing a lot we really like censoring criminals so if you're preventing us from censoring criminals uh we're going to now hold you liable for the crimes uh that you're preventing us or making it hard for us to uh prevent so you know I I think it's that like on its face you know when when people in America looked at that we're like that's insane like if if I sell somebody a hammer and they use it to bash someone's face in like it's not my fault uh but uh that is actually what was said in the courtroom and so we're going to take another look at that um the another positive factor about this is that Roman's trial uh got pushed back to April which means it'll be after uh Trump inauguration and so hopefully uh there's you know some positive uh impact there where crypto is not like a bad word uh in DC the same way it was you know last couple years after SPF gave them all money and then they decided that crypto is the worst thing that ever happened so um optimistic about Roman's case uh us freedom of speech laws are are you know uh better the uh allegations are money laundering uh conspiracy to violate International sanctions and uh operating unlicensed Money Services business total of like 45 years uh it's not great um one one also sad uh event that happened recently is Roman Sterling of I don't I don't know why these guys are all named Roman uh but Roman Sterling of uh who was the developer of Bitcoin fog which was a mixer uh got sentenced to 12 and a half years on moneya laundering uh charges and unlicensed Money Services businesses uh and so even in the case that Roman storm is charged uh we want to get the best outcome possible which means beat as many of the charges as possible and if we can beat uh some of those charges then Alexi will have a better chance at uh his trial as well uh so uh I did uh donate 50 eth today uh to Alexis's fundraiser um you can check out the different fun fundraisers on wew want justice.org um and I'm also willing to match up to 50 eth for anybody who wants to join this week you know uh and one push to fund his appeal we already had some fundraising for these guys but we didn't anticipate you know how much the appeal would cost and how long it would be ongoing so uh we want to raise some more money for Alexi to be able to see it through all right so that's tornado cache um who here has heard of privacy pools all right uh a little more than half about half okay so tornado cach uh was actually originally funded by a project called mikow and here's another one who's heard of mikow nice actually more people than privacy pools so uh mow is like a punk rock nonprofit uh to fund ethereum open source projects uh it helped fund uh the open source you know public goods tornado cash grants um you know the problem was that Americans can't use this thing anymore it's actually odd like in Europe they said all this stuff about Alexi but like technically as a Dutch citizen you can still use tornado cach it's not illegal they didn't pass any laws that make it illegal but uh I as a US citizen cannot use it um and what we're trying to do the the regulatory outcome of tornado cache you know we we have all these conversations we're like trying to talk to regulators and the regulatory outcome was essentially they banned anybody in the US from using it that is a form of Regulation it's not a great form of Regulation um and we're trying to get better policies uh ped you know we live in a society so uh there is a group a professor named Fabian Shar who wrote uh the paper about tornado cach uh and analyzing it and and explaining how it worked he's a blockchain professor at uh University of bosel Switzerland and so uh after the tornado cache sanctions happened valal and I got together uh he you know had this he had this idea for uh trying to make an updated version of tornado cache that allowed the users to prove that they were not some of the depositors and Fabian uh you know in his paper had made this policy recommendation and this got published in the St Louis Federal Reserve which was shocking to me but the policy recommendation was uh to mandate the use of the tornado cach compliance tool so tornado cach had this tool that the team built themselves and you could basically prove which deposit belonged to you that's why it's actually inaccurate to call tornado cache a mixer because it doesn't actually mix your money if it mixed your money you wouldn't be able to prove which specific deposit belong to you it's a nitpick that uh the world's not ready for this yet uh in terms of terminology but um the the the paper that Fabian wrote suggested the use of this compliance tool for regulating tornado cach they wanted to say hey privacy is good people should have this uh you know you don't when you send venmo you don't put it on public right make fun of people who do that um but in blockchain land everything is public so we all actually are doing exactly that um so they they mandated they want to say let's let's give people privacy but let's mandate that have to give the proof of which specific Deposit they are essentially doxing themselves to some financial institution uh and that would be the way that they would use it and vitalik's idea was to kind of make this a lot easier by allowing people to publicly publish proofs that say I am not some of the users of the system uh or I am specifically this subset of the users of the system of the depositors and so that way you can create a separation between people who deposit that are criminals or hacked your friends defi protocols uh and so forth and everybody else and so privacy pools is an attempt to make privacy for the good guys obviously people have different definitions of good guys as an American uh I'm going to build this for the American good guys you know if you deposit the money in the Privacy pool we accept you into our association set of deposits that we think are legit not criminal uh and then you turn around and send all the rest of money to Hamas we will take you off the list uh you know that's how that works so um the uh the company that we started is called Oxo and Oxo is building the first Association set for privacy pools we are monitoring all the deposits that go in we're tracing back all the funds and we're uh determining if they are legitimate to associate with or not and so uh if they are then when you withdraw you can submit a zero knowledge proof that your deposit was one of the ones on our list and that allows you to you know show uh you know publicly that you were not associated with any of the potentially criminal uh deposits into the system so uh we're you know worked with Fabi and Sh uh to basically publish a paper about this concept and Oxo is implementing it and you'll be able to see it soon I've been saying that for a while one day I will not live in the shame of uh not having this shipped uh at the conference when I come to present it but uh one day soon uh you'll be able to do it and then you'll all be like man they didn't let me onto the list and it's like well you brought your money from tornado cash or something you know uh we can have that debate in the future so privacy pools is also uh working with a couple other protocols uh we announced a partnership with Labyrinth recently uh they have a novel approach to to compliance as well and we want to help monitor their protocol so if you're a privacy protocol and you you know want to figure out how to be compliant and help your users protect themselves by also allowing your users to dissociate from uh people that they don't want to associate with while still having privacy on your protocol we'd love to talk to you uh and figure out if we can help you out um and if you're a developer that's interested in working with us we're also happy to to hire um help get this thing shipped so third topic is other cool things in privacy um who thinks uh private voting is cool show of fans a lot of people like you know who likes democracy it's like like do you do you think all the votes should be public in a democracy you know uh how about that election fraud so I actually think you know elon's like paper ballots one day counting and it's like the Nerds are watching this and we're like we can do so much better than this uh it's it's taken taken some time Andrew Yang a couple years ago proposed blockchain voting uh and we all freaked out and we're like this is the worst idea anybody has ever had uh don't do this and so but recently there have been advances and uh I spent uh little over a week in Ukraine I went to eth Kev and met some of the cool Ukrainian devs from raro they made this thing called Freedom tool it's very cool uh I'm going to shill lasha's talk it's happening like right now uh and so I and you know at the risk of doing whoever is next here a great disservice uh I'm encouraging you all to go see lha's talk uh from rimo uh about Freedom tool and uh when we were in Ukraine we basically realized these guys had made this thing where you can scan a passport and upload a proof that the passport is legitimate because there's a signing uh the signing keys from like the Russian government so they were doing this to troll the Russian uh elections so they they built a system that allows you to scan Russian passports and then prove that you have a valid Russian passport without revealing any information about yourself and then uh vote using that in a parallel election that's like against Putin so that they can have a legitimate more legitimate election it's pretty funny when we got there we thought it was F I was there with one of my Iranian activist friends and we realized that this technology works out of the box for Iranian passports as well and the Iranian elections were in a week so we decided to Fork it all uh make our own app called Iranians do vote uh you hijack the passport infrastructure of Iran and the public key signing system and uh have a you know Anonymous way to prove that you have a valid Iranian passport and vote in a parallel election and it was great because it was basically a vote of no confidence you could only vote no right so uh that was fun we taught some people about zero knowledge proofs uh and yeah uh you know had some other ideas around that U we're like oh this we could use this for survey you know and it's like what we could you could actually prove things about yourself uh you know on your ID without revealing anything so you can be like Oh I'm over the age of 30 or uh I am a woman uh and and then you can you know airdrop onto people uh who who answer it but then we realize we have a problem which is uh there's a lot of sanctions uh against Iranians and so how do we know that it's not you know ali uh answering our survey and getting paid like a quarter so uh apparently you know this is a privacy comp not many of you guys are fans of sanctions I'm not the biggest fan of sanctions I think they go overboard a lot I think it's atrocious that Roman seminov one of the developers of tornado cash is on the sanctions list I don't think it's atrocious that Ali K the supreme leader Ayatollah of Iran or the Islamic Republic of Iran is on the sanctions list I think that's legit but uh you can you can prove privately that you are not on the sanctions list when you submit your poll so you can answer the survey and you can be like hello I my name is not on uh this list of names uh I'm not telling you which name I have but uh this is it you can also match with birthdays and um just want give a shout out to the Ukrainian team because uh they actually wrote a paper about this it'll get published pretty soon so um generally speaking I'm bullish on the use of uh zero knowledge proofs on and blockchains together for democracies I think it's a great field you shall figure out how to do that and then um also the use of uh zero knowledge proofs for compliance so uh check out Oxo uh check out the fundraiser for Alexi donate if you can uh try and keep your friends out of jail thank you guys