# Programmable Cryptography in the context of Plurality by Oskarth x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 19:38
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-9RmXxcseMQ8
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RmXxcseMQ8

## Description

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective: https://www.web3privacy.info

Oskarth https://x.com/oskarth
zkintro https://zkintro.com

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web​3privacy.info
X: https://x.com/web3privacy

## Transcript

[Applause] hi everyone uh so I'm going to talk to you today about programable cryptography in the context of plurality uh so just briefly about me uh independent researcher um I'm focus on programing cryptography I'm also writing a book on CK I'm giving it out to some people uh this week uh previously I created mopro which is a tool for uh clients approving on mobile as well as vaku which is a peer-to-peer privacy protocol that's say sort of behind running uh rail gun for example and other users are using it so takeaway I want you to have from this talk is that program cryptography will enable a more plural world so to understand what this means we have to understand what we mean when we talk about program protography as well as polarity so agenda for this talk so we're going to look into what polarity is so maybe show hands how many people are familiar with the concept of plurality few of you right cool uh then we'll look into program cryptography um and look at some problems that polarity is dealing with and see a program cryptography can help solve these and a way to go from here so plurality is this book um that was written by AUD Tang uh Glenn Wild and the community all this year um and it's basically about the future of collaborative technology uh and democracy and it's kind of a vision for deal democracy in 21st century uh it's also so H So it's talking about this concept plurality so it has this a cute little symbol here uh in Chinese it's shway uh and it can be used both as a noun and as a verb and has a meaning it means both s of digital and plural uh and basically is a vision for deal democracy in the 21st century so the way one way I like to think about this is that it's neither sort of mountain man nor King Tyrant so it's not sort of this self- sovereign individual with their Bitcoin oid and V Supply in the mountains nor is it this kind of top- down big Tech kind of Facebook uh technocracy either it's something in between or like a way of live among humans in in a reasonable manner uh and basically it's about creating technology for collaborating across social differences so program cryptography so cryptography right is about securing uh digital information and encryption and signature and so on and the modern internet would not work without it like you wouldn't be able to do any online shopping or secure messaging or anything like that with program cryptography basically had some type of computation on top of it so you have for example uh CK so signal proofs NPC was as was mentioned by the previous speaker n f there's a bunch of other tools as well in this tool box uh the most basic example as we saw with the previous speaker is that you can sort of prove for example that you're above the age of 18 without revealing anything else uh with your passport for example um and it kind of kind of gives you this general purpose privacy and six properties and with if CK is single player then NPC is NF is like multiplayer and we'll look into how these of Applied when it comes to various problems later so first I just want to mention like this all this cryptographic matter that exists everywhere um so we have websites with htps we have digal IDs RSA uh emails and so on um and things like bank statements or government documents or what have you like all of these things are are things that exist that we can sort of Leverage and we don't have to start from scratch um and we can sort of use this to enable priority uh so dig democracy so basically it's about enshrining these plural uh freedoms and rights as a kind of foundation for dat democracy um and and the metaphor they use in this book is kind of it's a bit similar to OS and apps so you have an operating system kind of Kernel space and then you have us space on top of it so you have some kind of hard foundation and then on top of that people make applications and so on um and they identify these various Dimensions that sort of build on each other so you have first identity and personhood uh and it can be multiple identities as well and then some kind of Association in in the sense of like freedom of Association uh then Commerce and trust and on top of that contracts and property and finally access and the general goal right is that you want to have some kind of robust Foundation kind of like you have sound money or rule of law or hard cryptography uh problems and so on and then you you have some kind of flexible foundation on top of that so talking about identity and personhood so you have sort of two extremes here and the core challenge is you don't want to have sort of NE have total anity but you need you don't want to have centralized control so uh there's this image nobody knows your dog on the internet and um like this is a problem it's even more of a problem nowadays with Bots and so on and Cil attacks so uh Twitter for example would not be very useful if anyone can just post anything without any kind of rate limits or what have you uh but on the other side we we don't want this other thing right we don't want this kind of centralized control either top down kind of um dystopia um and we need some kind of secure identity to of without it digital democracy fails and democracy here is not just of of the nation state variety it's also any kind of social coordination so if it's a social network what have you you need some notion of identity whatever it is um so one example here is like seek identity as a kind of building block where we have selected disclosure uh so we talked a little bit about the previous presentation so you have things like anadar and open passport um so who is familiar with Adar a few people okay just briefly this dig identity system that's uh in India and 1 billion people use it and you have this basically signed PF that you send whenever you apply for a job or mortgage or what have you and it's very convenient but obviously you might not want us to give away your full name or address and so so on anytime you need to do some action so there a product called anadar where they basically wrap this in a sec proof and you have similar things with open passport and basically the key idea so you take some sign data and just of selectively reveal certain things and and prove things uh and just the last month or so there's been two new things so in Georgia there's like a kind of um official um seek identity system that's live as well as in Buenos cidus uh so we are starting to see real world adoption and this was only possible like the last year or two is um another way of looking at identity is as a kind of intersection so looking at identity as a sort of in terms of social relationships uh we have verification for multiple context so one one example of this is something like social key recovery where maybe you have multiple factors so uh if you have like maybe a phone and you have like an email address that can also ask act as as a vector or a friend and S of having all of these things of create a more robust system but it can also work in other ways for example cursive uh they using MPC to sort of have this private set intersection uh where basically you have this kind of shared you can make proofs about shared experiences so let's say that you have some embarrassing music taste then you can sort of take your Spotify data and compare to someone else's Spotify data and without revealing the details you only sort of see the intersection um and you can obviously apply it to a lot of other data sources as well um and I think a key Point here when it comes to priority is this idea of polycentrism so you have multiple types of identities and they apply in different context and you can combine them so it's not just like someone takes your eyeballs and run kind of thing uh on top of that uh once you have some sort of notion of identity you want some kind of Association um so freedom to associate and it's not not just sort of private private and public uh usually we live in we live in some kind of common context uh right so we want to protect establish and protect this context uh so how do we how do we create this well cryptography is obviously a useful tool for this in terms of things like secure group chat uh but it's not really enough uh because you have other things you have internal threats in terms of like unilateral disclosure uh and people develop these kind of social norms to deal with that uh but maybe we can do better so examples of that is for example Macy which is a private voting system um that's collus and resistant voting so basically guarding against Bri briber attacks and so on using program cryptography um there's Al other examples of how to deal with Association so creating a private parallel uh universe as we saw with for example the private set intersection that's using f um with cursive there are other things we're going to see this week at Devcon with things like Phantom Zone where people use f to create these kind of new magical spaces and and experimenting in them uh on top of that when you s have freedom of associat you have sort of Commerce and trust and I just start with the most basic one which is kind of payments so you have sort of cash cbdcs and crypto and cash is dumb but it works it's a P2P forms of payment form of payment and it's also privac privac reserving it it's fundable like $1 bill is equal to $1 bill uh but obviously want digital money right uh but there are problems both good and bad things with this right so when we look at something like cbdc uh there very easy to of control and surveil people um and censor but even crypto uh with one Bitcoin is not always equal to one Bitcoin um because sort of if if if it's been used in certain cont context is not necessarily as valuable and same thing is true with one if is not equal to one if um and there like private pay this other methods that you can sort of uh get around that but you need this kind of fundability property but even Beyond just looking at uh cash uh there's also this idea of using social relationship and Trust so kind of community tokens and these types of things so for example how do you value open source contributions uh there's various experiments in that Arena as well as social credit Networks um so towards like private fund fundable money program cograph is a very useful tool uh with things like Monero and ccas as using knowledge proofs to of get those privacy guarantees on top of fum we have tornado cach uh but we saw with tornado cach that in practice there there are some problems with it so even though the contract is still running and you can use it um a hacker group from North Korea used it um and sort of they hacked some defa protocol whatever and then us didn't like that so they had these sanctions and now basically basically it's really hard to use to cat um one good thing about program cryptography is that it's it's very flexible so some people in the community start work on this thing called privacy pools where you can have this kind of proof of Innocence so basically um you can prove that your funds didn't come from from a specific hack um and I want to be a little bit careful here because I do think you want to keep sort of base layer as credibil neutral as possible but the point here is that uh when you have program cryptography thep this design space is quite wide and it's very flexible in terms of the kind systems you can build like this proof of innocense for example so when it comes to contracts and property so obviously this physical uh property but more and more important nowadays is sort of digital property right so it comes to storage and and computer and so on and basically this is kind of underutilized and we need better sharing protocols for this um it's a bit unexplored in general I would say uh and a key point of this is like what if you have two par is a and b what should a learn about B's B's data uh so if you have backups for example maybe it should be ENT encrypted that's like a very basic form of that but it goes beyond that as well um so for example things like CML uh like maybe you want to have LL LM that's private so you can sort of with the with program cograph you can hide either having the input private or having the model be private and so more generally we can do things like taking some signed data and proving some proper on it so this products for example like seek a email whereby you can prove that youed a certain email and just reveal certain parts of that so this sort of enables a a larger uh descience spacee um more examples of this is TS not which is using both CK and NPC where you you can free your data and you you can basically take any website or any web service and uh prove things about it for example you can prove that you have seen certain transactions uh from your bank and so on and we I think we have some people from the TLs notary team in the audience um and that's very Pro that's very so powerful in terms of that this data actually belongs to you and you can sort of prove that and and use it to build systems when it comes to of decentralized um storage networks you obviously have things like ipfs and filecoin but there's a lot of others and most of these you use program protography to some extent s of uh create like a Marketplace and make sure incentives are aligned and so on but the the basic idea we want to of enable this Shar cooporation and maintaining control and and privacy without putting everything in in data sellos that are uh yeah not necessarily in the users's interest so finally access so access is kind of like a fundamental right and it we want to have sort of availability so not censorship but we also want to make sure we have some kind of Integrity uh when I mean Integrity I mean things like uh guarding against things like deep fakes and fake news uh and this is like a hard problem generally especially if you don't just resort to censorship but examples of how to deal with this are things like the these new standards where you can have a you have a camera and it's like a signature in the photo so you can sort of see that this photo was taken at this a specific time and location H and then you can use uh CK to prove certain Transformations that around that so for example Reuters they have these standards where you can grayscale an image and you can crop it and do a few more operations but that's it and you can basically prove that those operations have been done correctly so the aot is not manipulated and also other examples of this these kind of attested data sources uh more generally we have sort of all this sign data out there as I mentioned and you because use CK around that improves sort of valid operations and and data Providence more generally things like seek email where you can take basically any email and prove that you have received it from a a certain party and the design space here is very big and in general what we want is want to have some kind of openness so of not resorting to sensorship and so on but at the same time have systems that we can trust so uh more generally this is a a picture from the book it's a little bit hard to read but uh basically on on the xaxis here we had the breath of diversity so basically from one to a thousand to a million to a billion users and then on Y axis it's kind of it's called depth of collaboration uh so kind of some notion of intimacy so if you sort of just counting people you're just sending transactions you can sort of do that to a million people very easily but when it comes to having some form of intimate relationship or working in a small group together um you can only do that for sort of a few people right so this this kind of um trade-off between intimacy and bamboo if you will and what polarity is trying to do um is basically pushing this Frontier and allowing for sort of more richer interactions um and basically that's what we as humans do we have this thing where we we develop new institutions right we develop whether it's like democracy or rule of law or writing or the internet or various types of Institutions or blockchains or what have you ter of socially coord in various ways and uh the design space for that those types of tools is is quite large and and basically you can try to push this forward and that's kind of what program cryptography is trying to do also um well basically with CK the last few years you can prove more and more things about more and more stuff uh and sort of more conveniently like from your phone for example where that was not possible two years ago um as well as new technologies like MPC and FC you can have sort of more participants so sort of making the things we can prove things and interact on uh richer so they're kind of similar in this this regard so finally like one way I like to think about programm cryptography is kind of hard and flexible a bit like bamboo and carbon fiber so it's hard in terms of this this hard cryptographic uh things um like a hard Foundation um but then it's very flexible in terms of how you apply it right um so another way of looking at this is sort of it's also anchored in Old like something like uh like um bamboo where you can use these new technologies like program cryptography and then interact with passports which is like a nation state concept uh but it can also be used other way like more like carbon fiber more futuristic things so you can create these private parallel universes uh with cursive and so on and create these new imaginary systems that we couldn't dream of before and more generally s programm cograph is a sort of very useful tool for creating these new these types of new institutions uh and systems to hopefully sort of um create a a better deal democracy uh and this is how the book sums up parity so it's about developing tools that allow greater cooporation and consensus at the same time as to make space for greater diversity so summary programing cryptography will enable a more plural World we're moving into a digital and plural world uh programmer cryptography is a useful tool and finally we need to have more conversations between technologist resources policy makers and so on uh that's it uh two quick announcements uh well we're going to have a discussion at Devcon about um polarity and program cryptography and intersections if you're interested in that come up and talk to me uh and yeah any questions okay we have one here yeah so you mentioned to ZK zkp andh and our yeah these kind of stuff has cryp are programmable cryptography but how about the other more advanced or more complex cryptography like uh weakness ention or no indistinguishable notication to too Advan but know what what what's your take on these kind of more complex so yeah I didn't mention them but to me they're definitely part of the family of program cryptography the reason for focus on these is because they are the most of practical so uh in terms of things you can use today is basically like CK and NPC and F for 2 PC uh when you have more participants it gets a bit harder and with this encryption is still kind of a hard problem but definitely uh they're very useful tools and once they are of more usable I we'll definitely see it being used to solve these type of problems I agree thanks so much um yeah thank you and if I might give a recommendation if you're interested in the um human rights portion of the talk um I would recommend it to also check out Alexi rousel adviser at Nim who has been making Publications about this trying to extend the digital human rights as a portion of the physical human rights that we have and get them into a law in Switzerland so very intriguing thank you oscard again thank you