Lunarpunk vs Solarpunk | Panel | ETHDam 2024

[Music] all right cool we've got our next presentation I got to have a little or get a sneak peek a little bit of this conversation last night at the web 3 privacy event um and so I want to welcome PG on stage to introduce the rest of our panel here thank you hello everyone good evening and welcome to this International Friendly competition of unicorns stabing unicorns W no joking probably happening around closing party I guess I hope uh please welcome stage am inani and sinko to join me and and here for this panel on solar Punk versus lunar Punk um yo oh eggs I like it so I'm quite Trill to be on stage with these guys uh being for me a Well Spring of uh inspiration and knowledge for a long time and um I would love to kick this off uh asking you to quickly introduce yourself as well as giving to the crowd a short uh take on what's your angle in developing privacy preserving Technologies my name is uh Kieran uh mosqu I'm the CTO of real gun um I'm I'm mean solman uh working on privacy pools and and Oxo now and uh my take on privacy That's Unique is that uh I think privacy is great for good people and I would try to not associate with the people I don't want to associate with uh while I keep privacy and I want to help other projects also do that if they're interested hi um I'm actually Kieran mosquito um yeah I I think for me privacy personally is just um I I want to like I personally just want to empower people to like be able to choose what sort of information they they reveal to people um not be forced into uh revealing everything by default good afternoon I'm Sereno uh developer relations at name uh that's a privacy lives company and uh Community contributor of some privacy research in lunard and other projects my take on privacy is that privacy is just um it's a step it's a tactic at best a strategy to get us towards Freedom it's not a goal on itself and I think this is very important to to realize that we not striving for privacy privacy and anonymity is for us a a pathway um a shield for the environment and for for who we are in order to live the way we want to live cool um before we were talking about what kind of definition or image can we give or values we can attribute to these kind of categories so solar Punk lunar Punk and a punk even so I would love you to ask how do you see these kind of figures and ideals um uh how can we Define them or explain them to the people so Punk to me generally is like a form of moral entrepreneurship uh it's a risky strategy uh being a punk means you're promoting something that is like not societally accepted but you believe in strongly enough that you are trying to make it mainstream and so there's different you know generations of punks but uh ultimately you're trying to like create some sort of you know value and embody that value through your own culture and then uh finally end up and so uh in the context of like you know privacy and software and blockchains and stuff we have these like two sort of bigger categories lunar Punk and solar Punk and lunar Punk is typically like defensive technology you know for for people who have to operate by night because you know there's surveillance or you know oppression and and uh maintaining their privacy is uh a tool for keeping their security whereas solar Punk is more for like higher trust societies uh where you can operate in the open and you know coordinate and work together and uh I think I'll stop there and give let you guys answer too yeah I think for me this is not a model in which the entire Society should operate it's rather a helpful way of imagination science fiction culture uh within a scope of U you know Hardware software especially software development and then of course web 3 because that kind of comes comes with that um we can measure through different boxes of um how these different punks um approach Utopia versus dystopia approach uh individual versus Collective um and sometimes these dichotomies are helpful for us to understand um different group different School of thoughts or different groups of people who represent in these School of thoughts but also they are not black and white so how I see Cypher Punk is there is a strong critique of the surveillance and it's very useful in that and the tooling which comes out of that what might be maybe not really fitting for me is the dystopian take on that because I think to teach and therefore learn about all these threats is important but becomes bit difficult when it creates fear what is about solar Punk nice is that they try to battle that fear with bringing very utopistic view what for me is not working then there is that it might be naive because the utopistic view might be not really taken account the threats enough that doesn't mean that it propagates them itself a lot of people told me you and the crew around dark fire and whole lunard da you you proposing that solar Punk is actually prostatitis no solar Punk's ever said we are prostatitis well it's not a necessarily a question Pro or against but it's more like to which narrative what narrative you create to which another narrative can take advantage of that and like is it like a space for liberalism or for actually like any more um deeper changes of the society so I think lunar Punk rather than be you know above or better kind of takes a bit of both but it's neither so I'm not saying it's a mix but it inherence and learns from both of those from one to have positive visions and build towards something not just against something but while keeping um the critique and the tooling of The Cypher punks against the surveillence um that what I find powerful into into this particular narrative and what I like about it however again as I beginning I don't think that's a solution for entire Society it's rather a useful uh you know within within this crowd used for category to answer some of these questions where we stand about Utopia surveillance dystopia State and all these questions in kind of shorter and more SC SciFi imaginary kind of way yeah um I think the um so with with solar punks it's um you know a very idealistic and and utopian uh worldview um and then uh Luna Punk is is really just a a tempering of that um with a bit of Def ESS let's say um and I think the the the tempering of like the the solo Punk worldie really is is you know we it's great that that we want to go and build um for this ideal right um we want to build for a better world um I don't think anyone would would disagree with that um but we can't really be like naive in um you know the way we build things and and just assume that no one's ever going to uh try and attack it or or or breake or exploit um or take advantage whatever um of of you know the the systems that we that we put out there um and so in in building for a better world um we also need to make sure that these systems that we're building um are resilient to um forms of attack I just want to give like a concrete example here so like gitcoin is like your sort of shining star of like uh solar Punk values right it's all transparent you know they do quadratic funding uh you could sign up with the gitcoin passport you know identify yourself maybe there's some proof of humanity uh so you can prove you're real human and there's like a whole stack of tools that allow people to coordinate but it's sort of like when there's no adversaries right and so it's like the minute I'm like okay so now I want to use this to help Iranian activists uh and it's like well hm uh we're going to need an entirely different stack for this uh and that stack is going to be like Anonymous privacy preserving like you know uses a bunch of different systems like half of the things that Kieran just pitched on his last uh talk uh you know uh like note taking needs to be private like you can't have leak anything right it's like and that's not the kind of thing that like getcoin as solar punks are like concerned about uh because they're not thinking in particularly adversarial uh model versus like that that's where the lunar Punk uh tools and ethos thrives because you are dealing with adversaries that you're going to take you know realistic uh realist like yeah um my take on this is that um like I fear that as we in the past and in the present we have right and left and polarization dualism and extremism we kind of bring people focusing on what they disagree on rather than on the Common Ground they can find to pursue a common objective so how do you feel we can actually overcome this disagreement and competition where a common ground can be founded and uh I mean as privacy is a human right it's not just a and should be normal it's not just a bizarre claim of lunar punk people open question one answer well um I think I think that the um thing is it's just there's a a very strong um uh bias towards like the default right um so if if we have systems that are uh strongly private and those are the ones that are used um then you know that's just the way it is and and um we we end up having a lot of like resistance towards um you know weakening or or breaking that privacy um but you know on the converse we have something that's like completely transparent and like Al open and um maybe is just published to a distributed Ledger that is going to be available till the end of time maybe um you know um and we try to like say oh well we got to make this private um then there's a there's a lot of resistance to that right and so I think it's just you know whenever you start building a system um if you want privacy to just be accepted as like privacy is normal you um yep privacy is normal um I I think like you just sort of have to build privacy in from the start make it what's make it what's normal I think we live in a society which is um you know is a new there is new religion in the west that that's that's science that's positivism in in in a way and it makes a lot of sense and helps us to answer a lot of questions however the problem of positivism is that it brings this subject object oriented point of view so when we ask about who is Extreme who is terrorist or right and left like it almost sounds like um General objective thing while it's highly relative who is asking who is answering right um we going to have a look on Bernie Sanders the the the left kind of candidate for you know then you're going to tr a few kilometers to Cuba and you're like is he really the leftist you're going to ask the Cubans you know like they might have a different opinion um who's extremist you know like asking east of Ukraine and then go bit more East what is already taken by Russians and ask who is terrorist then you going have completely different answers do that in Jerusalem and just cross the street so I think these categories might be sometimes useful but they are not really um you know normal not normal So I myself am not that really stuck on what's normal and what's not but to be able to hold contradictions and bring examples into real life and things how we use them um I was building argument that we use like privacy means also so voluntary disclosure right privacy doesn't mean that I don't want anyone to know anything about me only what it means is that each of you just as in real life you choose what about you present to different people and you do that to when you going to ask to a job for a first time you present something a bit different than if you go to your psychotherapist it presentent something different than if you talk about your partner's family for the first time uh is that normal or not I don't know but it seems kind of natural to me you know and now we liveing in time when now D to me online offline like what does that really mean in these places especially in a conference like the people who come here are very interested in Tech so this nature versus Tech online offline I think we also beyond that so how comes that on the internet all of a sudden I'll be talking about it tomorrow a lot being I'll go deep about metadata and all that type of stuff on a presentation upstairs how comes then then we go to the Internet side of things and everything by protocol by default is completely transparent that is that's up you know that's excuse my French but that is problem like it's it's basically like you go to ask for a job for the first time and you are standing there in front of whoever might be your boss naked like if you go to the doctor with your soul open like if you go to psychotherapist with the same things you shared to your best for 20 years in in that to that person that's being on the internet today um so not to give these boxes right or wrong normal not normal well let's you know this question my ask this uh my answer that that question by itself um there's some jobs that you you might actually want to show up naked for I mean if it's like a nude modeling job for example uh but again you you choose to disclose that um just messing with but uh I there's there's we don't do that name there yeah well uh there's there's other companies out there um so the uh one thing I'll say is that uh you know we have this like solar Punk lunar Punk and it's not like like different people will find themselves in these different categories at different parts of their lives uh there's a saying that like decentralization Maxis are not born they are made right like uh I got started with Bitcoin and then lost all my money in Mount Gau uh and then I learned the value of decentralization right many people start out solar Punk and then they get rugged or they get hacked or some service that they trusted reveals their info uh and and after that you realize oh well maybe we should engineer systems to be more resilient to take into account adversaries and so there's like a pipeline of you know solar Punk to lunar Punk uh that exists out there uh and and in a similar way like he's talking about having systems that can manage contradictions right like uh the US Constitution is cool it's it's a result of uh people fleeing religious suppression and uh tyranny in the United Kingdom and and stuff and they made it to America and they were like all right we're going to have a Bill of Rights we're going to you know encode minority protections into our system because they were thinking very adversarially about their own government and the limits of power of our own government and that's what allows multiple contradictory you know viewpoints to thrive within the same country uh and so far you know that's benefited America in some ways it hurts America in other ways but uh that's that's what we have and uh yeah I think I I think it's like you know you want to tap into the energy of both the solar Punk and the lunar Punk and uh be able to promote what's useful in the context I would maybe add that the things we sometimes might say or might be understood or portrayed by adversaries speaking about privacy might sound like very tense like you always need to be on Lookout well in fact is that if anonym and privacy is set by default you can be much more relaxed and it's not to be tense I'm also not talking only about that's the difference between Cipher Punk and lunar Punk perhaps is the only individual only which is somewhere hidden with a black hoodie versus like communities squats uh decentralized uh autonomous organizations and what have you meaning if you build that shield around you I was living in places in real life where there is a threat for entire Community to be just wiped off by an adversary but then once people realize how to defend that surrounding then within that they thriving and they relax much more and in fact there is in the end like you don't need to have that tension that like hey what that person knows about me no like you become all of a sudden within the people you have chosen to be with with your trap with your kind with your squad with your family who who is that in fact if you don't have that by default you're going to start to look at everyone as a possible threat but I think The Narrative of privacy means that you are constantly scared is twisting that in order for people to not believe that and see that as like some like few bad sheep want privacy because they want to hide their bad malicious things which is exactly the opposite of what we actually talking about I was talking with a friend some days ago and he was asking the like most common question like why would you need privacy if you not have anything to you know hide and I was just answering why would you need free will it just should be by Design I mean um uh how how how do you feel to be like a lunar Punk future or a solar Punk future to be and what's more idealistic uh considering the present state of the art in the market and you our crazy systems sinko I'm not sure I've understood a question very well but I just spoke now so I can be the the easier one to like hide behind a corner now but if you can repeat once again but hey he knows what to say yeah I I think I think I mean well this is a crypto conference right um and I think specifically in crypto um we have a lot of people that are um uh basically building for a um very optimistic very like solar Punk future um either that or you know that's a mask or something else but uh that's beside the point um you know but but but on the whole uh the things that are being built in in crypto are very solar Punk and um you know while that's admirable I think we we sort of see um a lot of cases where like oh well um someone shipped a def5 protocol and then like stuff happened and and people lost their coins right or um oh yeah you know like we can we can like trust in the in the Goodwill of of whatever actor and then it turns out that you can't right um and so we don't really have this like I think we're building for a very solar Punk future um but we don't have the like sort of immune system to like uh defend against threats and like a lot of those threats are actually internal as well which makes it so much worse um and and so I I think you know as um as we start to get um more mature I guess and and a little bit less naive and um we are going to just end up what we have to if we're going to survive um build for a more Luna Punk more defensive um still optimistic but um not naive uh future yeah I just want to add to that in a couple more examples uh cuz I brought this up in the talk I gave but the you know Nazis were really happy to discover how good the Dutch kyc was when they took over in World War II and then exterminate all the Jews here uh a lot of Jews became lunar Punk uh after that um and that's like one of those things where it's like oh who would ever abuse this system we're building it because we're the good guys and this is for security and you know tracking blah blah and it's like yeah but you you didn't really consider the potential adversarial you know takeover of the system uh and and similarly today uh we have um you know the two areas of zero knowledge proof uh applications that I'm most interested in which is finance and and voting for democracies you have both those types of threats right uh where governments are leaning toward Wards building Central Bank digital currencies cbdcs that are essentially full surveillance systems that are giant honeypots of everybody's financial data that if they leak you know could uh sacrifice the safety of everybody involved uh and likewise democ Democratic systems you know it's very interesting for the government to know exactly how everybody voted uh especially if the government is becoming more oppressive and so being able to uh both you know vote in a digital way like okay we need to get off the ballot stuff and somebody manually types into database like that can all be abused but if we want to be able to properly digitize these systems having privacy uh baked in would be really helpful and and also a non- coer ability so you can't like bribe somebody to vote a specific way and they can prove they voted that way because they can you know flip their vote halfway through and that way they could prove they voted either way valal has a post on this called on collusion resistance but uh th those are just two applications where you know it'll be really helpful to uh bring some of the lunar Punk ethos uh to the development well I think there'll always be somebody or a group of people who try to take an advantage of another group of people um and if we say no now it's happen not happening now we liveing in peace and everything's fine well that's only because we are not seen by the group of people who's taking advantage of another group of people as those being taken advantage of over um that simple as it is there might be terrible things happening there might be not you know I don't want to be predicting future whether it's Alien Invasion and nuclear warfare co25 uh AI robotic Warfare any of these little nuances blockers for freedom but free life is going to happen yes or yes there is no question about it right it's about up to us today and from from this very minute onwards like this is this is the first day of the rest of our lives as I always joke every morning that's that that place every day of course except the day you die but what I'm trying to say in these scenarios doomed they sound they also have always been reality and people always survive and thrive through those and it's really about see that I'm putting the most Doom of stuff up there because that creates like oh that's that's terrific yes that creates very irregular situation irregular warfare which everyday person had always been in be that example Amin was just saying during the 40s in Europe which were a terrible part of the history in Europe but only because it was that terrible we forgot about many of different things which were happening before be that Inquisition be the whole other you know histories of up things that means that for people to figure out how to thrive in these repetitive events and what tools are needed to live as freely and as autonomously away from this oppression have an alternative way to sustain life in in a culture and in like you know actually like developing self and not just like surviving in in intention is very important and I think when we don't break in real life and online because large part of our Lives is digital we realize that yes indeed cryptography is an incredible tool for managing or leveraging ourselves in this irregularity in the fact that there is a crazy Empire sinko was talking about Invasion Alliance nuclear bomb Bank well yeah some of these things just wipe us out and we don't have to worry about but what I'm what I'm saying is that there are quite some things in which you can leverage using zero knowledge proofs using cryptography the fact that there is always going to be much more funding and much more of whatever on a site which is maybe not the side on which you currently sitting on and that's fine because we got another skills and we got each other and that is in the end you know the will and the hope and Imagination put in practice is usually what what cuts the edge not necessarily um the terrible threat or like U fear of something because if if we give up on that that's that's done I mean I would love you to ask how you feel about this transition you're going through right about from going through from Hardcore privacy to compliance it's not so easy now so now jokes apart how can we envision a favorable outcome uh in balancing privacy by Design and need for Regulatory Compliance and what kind of what would you say to someone who would like to commit for privacy uh but fears the possible consequences uh yes so as I mentioned earlier I'm transitioning into a compliance guy uh you know as a person who helped with you know tornado cache with privacy first uh ethos um we've we've learned a lot in the couple years that we've been working on this stuff and we try to learn uh from you know what's in front of us and what we've experienced and been through and uh the reality is that we're no longer in like 201 18 19 where uh there wasn't threats and uh there was a lot of hacks right like my friends defi protocols have gotten robbed left and right and we can't just ignore that as a category of thing and sort of try to uh hope that someone else deals with it like uh we are responsible for the world that we try to build and we it's up to us to make it what we want to live in and so in terms of compliance you know I'm I'm also doing this because I don't want someone else to do it who's more of a bootlicker uh and would you know make a system that is easier to exploit um I'm trying to do it in a way that is the least uh exploitable and so like for example you know the the first version of privacy pools that we're trying to launch is still going to be an immutable permissionless contract uh that doesn't have like a back door uh there's other ways to try and you know potentially dissociate good guys from bad guys but I much prefer the versions that don't have a back door that can be exploited and so I think um uh it's it's also up to us to build the the narratives that we want to promote and so one of the things that uh we are faced with is regul leers or Jud you know governments or whatever saying this is only for bad guys uh and I think it's really important that we build things that have legitimate use cases for everybody you know your mom and pop your payrolls your uh you know just making it normal uh and so being a compliance guy is not just saying I want to bend you know the knee to every rule you know in existence it's also trying to build for the uh compliance use cases where it's it's uh easiest to take off so like for example Switzerland has a more enlightened view on privacy and building tools for Switzerland could help legitimize it elsewhere because if you go to America they say oh it's all just for criminals we'll say no and Switzerland uh which you know isn't the best thing but it might be better than just criminals uh in their in their in their View and and you can build on that and and so think uh I I don't want to say like you know you should just compromise out the gate but I do want to say that you should try to find the compromises that make sense I think you've said a lot I also see the time up there so I'll be no well we all said a lot but I I'm trying to say I'm not going to repeat what you said I I also know quite a little on on a side of compliance however for example I work for nim nim is a fully compliant company but what we do we're not going to try to promise you once the F going to knock the door we're not going to give your data don't trust anyone who's going to tell you that in the first place it's on a level of code on a level of how the software is written how it's audited open source free software and distributed on the different operators that no one can actually have access to those data and if you create it on a level of a protocol then you can be compliant on a level of uh whatever legal legal level of things that's one approach I did some Community contribution as just like writing some you know how to use whatever app uh for this Dow uh lunar down past they they have another approach all the all the core people there are fully un on well that's another way how to approach compliance you choose your way I think have a have a code which is bullet proof in um you know you can prove it you don't have to trust and have Unown development seems like a good option to go for me but I understand it's not always possible in fact I work in place where it's that's not the approach and it's not possible and maybe even better for what n tries to achieve that the company is fully compliant I don't know the future will show whether this this is a good choice or not but I it everything has its own place there are these different Avenues what people um can choose but however having code which you would have to trust and is a close source and a company which is fully compliant and liable on like few people that seems like a terrible ision so you always have to have at least some of these um stones in place to you know to to use some software in my opinion you quick take yeah um I I think well I think specifically I mean you you brought PG you brought this the statement um up you know if if I have nothing decide why do I need privacy right um and I think that statement specifically comes from you know for like most people if you want to normalize privacy right that's probably like the the main um the main argument against privacy that gets brought up right and I think that specific statement just comes from the fact that you know you know okay you think about privacy and you just immediately go to the extreme right it's like okay well I've got nothing to hide yeah you do um like how many people in here have a door on their bathroom like yeah everyone um Okay cool so the entire room here you're all like heroin addicts right like that that's the only reason you have a door like why terrorists um right why why do we go to these extremes right um you know it's it's like yeah of course you've got something to hide it's not a bad thing um and I I think the response to that also is just not helpful right you know you go and you're like okay well that's the that's oh okay privacy bad because extreme right and then the response is like ah well you know if you don't have privacy here's all the other extreme things that could happen and you know maybe some of them are true but like it's just not being realistic in the conversation um so um yeah I'd just like to see a little bit more realism when it comes to uh this conversation around privacy well I think time's up thanks a lot for coming and sharing and uh see you around yes thank you thank you so much I feel like that was a perfect note to end on um [Music]