Web3Privacy Now | A new Cypherpunk generation - mf | ETHDam III - 2025

Welcome to East to E to E to E to E. Hello, hello, hello. Good morning for those who went out on Friday. Um, thank you all for being here. My name is MF Miel.

Um, I work together with Web3 Privacy Now, which is a nonprofit that is working mainly to try to help us bring, let's say, more care in our world to people about privacy itself. Um, you probably all know uh already or have heard about the word cipher punk, cyberpunk manifesto or encryption and privacy. I hope so at least. We're at a privacy conference. Uh but just for my context, is there anybody here who has not heard about uh cypher punk or the word itself?

Fantastic. So um this is not going to be a technical talk at all. I am more trying to showcase a bit of a new future and a past future. I like to say we've already had back in 1946 1945 we had the publishment of the book called Big Brother uh which was not the book but the the actor state actor within George Orwell's 1984 big brother which was also one of the first times we humans started being in a social economical environment where we actually had the time and space to care about our privacy. Privacy laws started happening in about 1960s and becoming a digital rights, becoming a right for you, for me, for the people downstairs, for the people in the car who are not caring about privacy either.

Um it became a very important thing for people as the cold war was becoming bigger as we had uh in Germany the eastern wall falling away the KGB as well just as well the CIA as well as all the other government agencies without needing to necessarily look at a specific point in time. Um we had all these feelings coming more and more present in people and how people were feeling regarding being secure within their own world. Um it starts from you know having secure communications where we are were before to being able to use curtains in your house. back in uh during the first second world war in the Netherlands when they were occupied by Germany. One of the big reasons you often see in the streets here having these very very huge windows was because people were forced to let the occupiers look inside their house give away the right of privacy so they would know that there's no revolution or all the kind of a planning happening also they like to show off their big houses but in the end I think that's a side Dutch result that happened from that eventually um luckily the the big wars passed away um the cold war was happening very heavily specifically after the moon landing where we started going more in digital espionage.

Um 1993 was a very big year for both uh Europeans, Americans. Um the cyberpunk manifesto got written and published. It's actually quite a small manifesto. Um but it really represents a very big cultural switch we had back then. Not only did people started pushing more and more to give us accessibility to encryption tools, PGP was one of the main enforcement back here.

Um, at the same time on the Russian side, um, the Soviet Union started to follow up. people started to actually see the fruits of being able to take care of their own information, not needing to be scared where you would, let's say, be picked up and sent away to a camp or prison for having beliefs that are different to an authorative regime. Of course, the internet was also kicking off. So, people were using privacy for way more than, you know, just hiding from authorative regimes. One of the main keys that is coming back a lot today in the cyberpunk manifesto goes about cyberpunks right code.

If you look deeper into the cultural environment when this was written alongside the technosical technological social environment where this was written um it actually doesn't really aim that much purely anymore at only writing code. 1993 only people who had access and understand the computer or were working with computers were let's say wealthy of individuals academics university peoples uh big companies that had access to main already not mainframes anymore but still um to be able to write code was a privilege to be able to understand the iners of an electronic machine that could cost more than a monthly salary of certain fe family and people and be able to manipulate this taking the time to learn, to use, to grow, and to actually build a level of cryptographic tooling we are relying on today. It was not a cheap endeavor either, both in time, effort, and the resources needed. I believe that the main ideology behind this is to build and practicalize the ideas we have. Cyber Punks write code as a manifest for being able to create things and share them with people who might know or not know that they need.

Main focus were on private communications uh anonymity and being able to have absurdon anti-censorship and being able to hide the hiding. Um these are still present in today's world. These were present in the world of the Romans and the Greeks too. Uh these will probably be present uh in the very far future no matter which tools we will be able to use. The core concepts revolve around being able to be who you are, experiment with what you want to experiment and choose to share what you want to share within this world.

So within this world, it is getting more and more important to be able to create your own lock system and care about your privacy itself. to take the tools in your own hands. It's not only a technological problem anymore. We having policy, law, legal problems, problems that are not dealing only with having a good laptop and setting up the right open-source repository to hold your keys. Just as much not having the risk where governments can come in and potentially say, "Oh, we'll implement a backdoor as they probably try every year, every other year with one of the digital privacy acts with privacy So I don't say anymore that cyber punks write code and I don't really believe in that anymore either.

They also write code but it doesn't define them to who they are and especially not in a future generation. I aim more for a world where we believe in a vision where cyber punks are builders. Builders can build anything. builders does not necessarily mean they need to build only encryption tools or try to export only encryption tools itself. Builders can mean you push and lobby on a political level to give people access to these tools or not restrict them.

building means you design the flyers for activists who are trying to push their ideology and make sure that you're not necessarily um contributing to the surveillance capitalistic system that you're fighting against. Building also means for event organizers who are trying to create a space like this where we are today where we can meet and talk and discuss these kind of a topics without the fear of getting arrested or ideology that we are doing something illegal building just as much means to help the people around you to be involved with something that is also important to this business development can be just as building in these times as the importance of writing code. Even though it's not always as practical, the importance is that we should generalize people who built can be cyber punks too. If we want to make a difference in the future, if we want to keep having the right side of the law on our side, if we want to be able to make a difference, we cannot be filtering out people who would like to help. We cannot say no to people who are wanting to contribute and put in their often free time or volunteer all time and say, "No, I'm sorry.

You can't help. You could you don't code." So I'm aiming more towards a world and a future generation where we focus on Cyber Punk's built. Now obviously the tools we build as a societal environment no matter how and what we build can also be used on the bad side from pedophiles using Thor and the dark web to terrorists using signal or whisper or the old wicker to communicate and plan ideologies. just as much at the same time um all of these other reasons why the bad guys can use the tools we try to build with a good morality.

Nonetheless, on the same side, we also have the people who are doing the exact opposite. We have um journalists, we have politicians. Only recently a huge amount of censorship has happened in Turkey where the main mayor of Istanbul got arrested based on some of the privacy claims where his university degree was not valid. Censorship resistant tools could avoid that. If this was a public information that was shared with tools and databases that could not be hidden by specific governments, this would not have been able to happen in the public eye.

tools where politicians can suddenly say or go retaliate behind their let's say political enemies suddenly become not valid anymore for the main reason that we have the tools built. Just as much as you can use a hammer to build a house, you can use a hammer to smash somebody's skull in. Does that mean we should not sell hammers? Does that mean we should not buy a hammer? Does that mean that we should restrict hammers to only those who are qualified to have a hammer?

Um in a in a general summary note of how I would like to conclude also my talk here today with you know a new future generation I would aim all of you to have a look at what you do how you do and try to see how you can get the opposite kind of a skill set to help you with what you do. If you are a engineer, try to be open to non-engineers and how they can push further your encryption model. If you're a business developer, go talk to an engineer to figure out what are the actual things that could be useful to have happened. If you do politics, try to figure out somebody who is an activist and understand the roots of the problems and as an activist try to understand how politics will affect our future too. Thank you very much.

[Applause] Thank you so much. Um, so we have time for some questions if anyone Perfect. We've got one over here. Thank you. So my question is that um in the past I think year or something there have been a lot of talks about cyber punks and how to build cyberpunk 2.

0 if you want. So what are the values that you think we should carry on and what is that we should live in 1993? I would say in the main values of you know being able to hide the hiding censorship resistant tools private communications and being able to have a synonym whenever you would like to will remain. Um I think what will mainly change is how we protect these or how people try to breach through these in one way or another. If we would be back in 1993, I would be positively surprised if all of us even knew what encryptions would be at this point.

um where you're live staying here in Europe, we were not leading that much and unless you were working in a defense or specific sector, blockchain itself was let's say in the very very very early stage. Shom wrote his paper on eCash in 85 and only from there on it started growing into uh an actual culture and in 1993 in wired the coin cyber punks got uh the term cyber punks got coined itself. Um, I think the the Word 2.0, Cyberpunk 3.0 or whatever the next version of this ideology is, um, it's going to fight for the same principles, maybe under a different name.

Is it a good or a bad thing? I would not know. As long as people have an eye and marketing and vision on that this is something that we need people to help with. Uh, as long as they keep up to those values, I think it will also be a positive thing. Cool.

Thank you. We've got another question over here. Oh, you recommended that we go out and meet people different to us. How do you recommend we go about doing that? Um I I don't know you personally, but let's assume you are a developer just for the sake of the conference as well.

Um places like this is a great environment. Hackathons approach and connect to people who are not only purely technical. Uh there are people running here down who are volunteering. They don't know much about blockchain. Talk to them.

Try to figure out what do you do? What brings interest? Try to see what's their perspective on life based on these things. Not sure if they always can help you directly. But maybe you can help them and then they carry it forward.

If you are talking to people about what kind of a work you do, having just the ability to conversate back and try to figure out what they do and ask questions that follow up into, you know, meeting more of those kind of a people if that's the kind of people you search are always working too. Going out to a bar, talking with people there, going outside of the blockchain bubble where we are here right now and all the other events are happening too. being able to, you know, if you go to a gym or if you do sports, there's a all of these environments where people are normally not that caring about the nice things we do on a laptop or on a computer. Um, I think the it's not an easy thing to start doing either, especially not if people are not used to doing this, but it is really trying to, you know, push yourself outside of the comfort bubble in which you normally move and being open for the conversations with people you would normally not be professionally interested in. I I hope that at least helps a bit.

Thanks. So, I think we have time for one more question. So, Hello, thanks. Uh, actually I've been uh in cryptography for 13 years and u so before crypto became a trend it was like hippo compliance in US GPR here and etc. Many developers tried to build encryption using different algorithms and what we see right now we have lots of compliance stuff which is actually required for business to to be transparent and etc.

what's your vision actually on the future of cy pranks actually um yeah according to this uh compliance stuff because I believe yeah soon maybe Canada maybe US will have more and more around this so usually we know that we do business for money and etc of course as you mentioned volunteers they did some revolution and they trying to do at the moment as well but yeah what's your vision I don't think the legal system is efficient enough to be faster than the speed people are building at. I don't think that they have the tools available to pre break through the encryption tree setup unless they have a conscious backdoor implemented in them which is a whole different problem. What I'm mainly aiming at here is that um there's a big difference between policies and reality. Policies needs to get enforced. Policies need to be drawn up and understood.

Um to give an example with specifically blockchain uh the mika in Europe took about two three years almost to be there and we had a lot of chaos and lot of environments happening. It wasn't purely encryption but more to give a metaphor to that. Um, I think especially having the right on absurd name and being able to self enforce that also severely limit the accountabilities that they can retrace back to you in case you use certain encryptions. Hide the hiding is another aspect of that as well. We have all these tools currently, you know, on our phones if you want it to be on your laptops where you can create your private sandbox and work from within if needed.

It's the beautiful thing about uh privacy and security technology in this retrospect is that uh you're not actually attacking somebody. You're not actually if you are using at least to be private yourself or whatever you are doing. Maybe the act that you could be doing next to you know making yourself private could be an illegal thing according to the laws but the act itself of hiding is not illegal per se or defending yourself from uh data inquiries in you know in a vision there. I think the law will keep trying to get an edge because as a a state you want to have control over for organization reasons both good and bad reasons. I think we as um the people building in this will keep having the ability to build it the way we want it or keep creating the way we want it because they cannot go as fast and it's our only advantage in a system where we're I don't want to say fighting but competing almost against a system that has limitless resources.

They are very slow. They need to move through a lot of hoops. They need to wire up a lot of things. uh if they hit it will be definitely a big hit and will restrict a lot of things. But this is also the beautiful thing about at least our systems in the western world.

I'm sorry for our friends not having those is that we have the ability to vote on things and have different courts to get judgments retraced just as like what happened with the tornado cash case as well. There always be a party that wants to know what they shouldn't know. It's in our you know we are we all are curious beings. We all would love to know um little secrets from people not even because we want to do something with it. There's something in our you know human nature that we enjoy knowing something that we're not supposed to know.

And people in government and power will push this probably even further and try to provide a blanket coverage on the other people to try to have a system they claim for a greater good. And even if it is with a true intention for a greater good, often there's technological flows that would let other people abuse this very system that was supposed to help. So I think we need to stay with our own sovereignity in our own hands in that sense. And I actually think we're doing quite well on this. We still need to keep doing it.

It's not kind of a moment where we said, "Oh, we done it once, now it's always good." But looking at the amount of open- source protocols we have, open source security systems, opensource privacy systems, um the only thing lacking somebody nowadays to enforce it themselves is time and the will to do it. And as long as that is there, I believe people will be able to keep let's say rebelling with a cause. Cool. Thank you so much.

Uh so once again, thank you so much for the talk.