Nick Almond [FactoryDAO] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

hello everyone I'm actually not going to roast World coin today I've done rather a lot of that um and actually like one of the things I wanted to do is kind of move beyond that kind of like moaning about the bad stuff and it is bad stuff um but yeah I'm kind of interested in how we can kind of make more of a movement out of this so this talk is about assembling the cyper punks of the future how can we turn this into a real Revolution if you like um I'm going to start with a bit of a retrospective um the cipher Punk Manifesto was created a long time ago now 1993 um and the world has changed quite a bit um and I also wanted to sort of you know take stock of what um what the industry is like at the moment and um whether we're living up to the punk name so I thought it might be interesting to look a bit back of the uh where the name comes from uh and look at the subcultural movement of the punks and see how we can be inspired by that and then maybe looking at the kind of what it means to be a cipher punk in the sort of Modern Age so um well done everyone you survived another bare Market most of you um it was pretty horrible wasn't it um it's a this industry is not easy to work in right because periodically every few years it washes out um um and you can't find a user or money unless you uh suck up to VCS for love the money and it's really really difficult and yeah we're in a world now where some of our current adversaries have just been foiled so uh Gary Gensler here um is about to be looking for a job um and that's good news for crypto and things have changed quite a lot um and the cipher punks were right if you look back at the original Cipher Punk Manifesto it very clearly say says that um Tech cryptographic technologies will take over the world they will be everywhere and they were right um and we'll be right again but this is a very interesting moment in time and it's about to get very real I think so let's like dig into the words a little bit and see what they mean um in 1993 was basically the dawn of the internet I was quite surprised by this I looked up last night in 1993 there was 2,000 websites in the world uh and today there's 1.8 billion websites so this movement originated at a time when the internet was very very young uh and we understood what it was going to be like these people were Visionaries and they could see where it was going to go uh and the cipher punks were worried about sort of creeping surveillance um and but they had a knowing that cryptography was and will always be important so this is the first line of Punk Manifesto privacy will always be necessary um for an open Society in the electronic age necessary being the operative word um I've sort of thought about this a lot and I don't think we have a possibility of a free and open Society uh unless there is cryptography um the power um of centralized power will always want to control and privacy is a very real and necessary function of a society that works um so as I go through this talk I'm going to sort of drop a few statements and then Grumble at them if you don't believe them to be uh accurate because I'm going to try and dig out of the cipher Punk Manifesto A bunch of statements and see if we believe in them um this one should be relatively uncontroversial Cipher punks believe in privacy no grumbles about that one um so back in 1993 again this was the year of the Clipper chip um so the NSA decided to build a uh physical device a physical chip that would put in all devices which would give the um essentially the intelligence agencies the ability to backd door every uh cryptographic transaction so it had an escro system that allowed them to say yeah okay you can have cryptography unless we want to see what's inside it um and the movement was very much started out of a rebellion against that um and actually Phil Zimmerman here this cool guy on the right um uh got nearly got into a lot of trouble so Phil was in investigated criminally for violating export laws of um cryptography as Munitions and was in potentially in very serious trouble like this this was scary stuff to be involved in um and he did something incredibly Brave and he basically he released something called The pgp Source Code and internals and it was all the stuff you needed to do to build pgp yourself anywhere in the world and it proliferated all over the internet everywhere and in the cipher Punk Manifesto it says Cipher Punk's right code um we publish our code so that other fellow Cipher punks can practice and play with it our code is free so Cipher punks open source their code again do we agree with that just about all right so um again 1993 this is what a modem looked like um obviously very different to where it is now and the crypto Cipher punks were were anti-regulation it's and um they believed that regulation on cryptographic software was um anti-human uh and they believed that we had a TR a right to transact anonymously and they were defiant um do we agree with this one Cipher punks deplore regulations on cryptography um and again this is um not necessarily the Zeitgeist in crypto at the moment we're all talking about um regulatory clarity um and we want systems of Regulation and it's worth being worth mindful of who's doing the lobbying um people are lobbying for regulations from within crypto that aren't necessarily in aligned with the affordances of the Technologies right so um it's important to remember this one and just to prove I haven't just made that one up that's actually in the cipher Punk Manifesto Cipher punks deplore regulations on cryptography for ENC uh encryption is fundamentally a private Act um so if we call ourselves Cipher punks we should be pretty much on message with that um and they were also quite defyant so they was like because some may disagree with our goals we're not going to change our course um so Cipher punks are rebellious yeah I'll kick it off my is and yeah so I am an applied cryptographer that's been I don't think we are yet I think I've actually been rather disappointed with quite a lot of the um the way the industry is shaped up over the last few years it kind of got pretty the kind of 70s in the UK was a pretty Grim place at the time uh the youth saw no future the economy was poor inflation was high class division was prominent racial tensions were high and the government was disliked um which sounds exactly like the UK right now um so we basically back in this context uh certainly in the UK uh and basically the music was nothing like reality and what the punks did was create a response to the mainstream industry the industry itself the music industry at the time was Bland depressing overproduced and totally didn't reflect any of the culture that was on the ground um and punk emerged out of that context it was a response Society who felt lost and didn't feel like their voices were heard um I think we need to do the same for our industry um the industry is kind of boring I think it's a a wash with kind of greed wear um the biggest app at the is explicitly vaporware driven um and I think we're missing the bite that this industry needs um so Cipher punks are anti-establishment do we agree with that one we're getting there um so the other thing so the punks were all about autonomy and individuality which again I think is rather on message to us they believed in going their own way they pushed uh boundaries on speech um they championed individualism and I think we should not be afraid to do the same as well um this song by The Clash white Riot all the power is in the hands of people Rich enough to buy it white Riot I want a riot white Riot a riot of my own um this was in response to a riot in Notting Hill Notting Hill Carnival uh where um the black community rioted with the police uh and Joe Strummer wrote this song um literally asking for a white Riot um and it could be inter this song right now would get Joe Strummer in jail in the UK uh we've just locked people up for three years for speech online um and you know supposedly inciting to Riot this song is much more of an incitement to Riot than anything that just sent people to jail um so actually a song that was released over 30 years ago um could not be released now it's a it's a regression of uh of speech um so I think Cipher punks believe in free speech um you agree with that one all right um and again this is in the manifesto the freedom of speech even more than privacy which is an interesting statement is fundamental to an open society and we do not seek to restrict it at all so cypherpunk is a freedom of speech movement um and we need to use it uh the other thing that I think we can learn from the punk movement itself it was doit yourself uh the punks didn't have access to record labels they didn't have distribution channels they didn't have marketing teams they didn't have PR teams um and the cyh punks as they are currently now are in a pretty similar situation um we don't have the distribution channels we don't have access to the VCS generally um and and in fact some of the things that they were working on were banned so um the the uh Sex Pistols Al never mind the bollocks which is a naughty word in the UK certainly in the 70s uh they weren't allowed to sell the records in some uh record stores at the time so they hacked um they made Zen and buil their own distribution channels and they created they hacked things together and distributed it themselves um and I think that's what we need to do so Cipher Punk's hack um we do it ourselves we put it together um we don't wait for a $10 million raise in order to get things done um and there was an authenticity in a rawness to this so they found their voice uh this was a shop in London called sex there was two shops uh this one's by uh Mal McLaren and um they only lived for a few years but they sold punk clothing in fashion um and that's all it was but the punk movement went completely Global and there was punks all over the world from so from very small Origins from very small movements big movements can become so Cipher Punk ship culture and this is one of the things that I think we've somewhat been missing I think we're starting to see it in meetings like this um but the crypto at the moment is a bit of a cultural Wasteland um and I think we need to find um our voice and our message that is more than just code so um right now where are we at um um so Eric was Eric Hughes was right in the C Punk Manifesto cryptography will spread all over the world um we're here right there's tens of thousands of people in Bangkok um there's millions of people sling slinging digital signatures all around the world they might be buying meme coins with it but they're still using cryptography and I think the cipher punks would be pretty pleased with the adoption at this point uh but not necessarily sort of culturally um but yeah I think you know if you look back at worth reading the manifesto and thinking about the Privacy context at that time um we don't have galop modems anymore we have uh a surveillance system that is AI powered um and the we need privacy much more than ever and I think it's a big mistake that we could make to think that we've just won um we have not won um there's no guarantee whatsoever that the new context is going to like what we're doing uh crypto is anti-establishment um and it's always worth remembering that whatever um Power structure is in place whatever regime is in place they're not necessarily like the outcomes that this brings um so um one of the things that I think we need to do in order to sort of broaden our base a little bit is start to think of permissionless systems as Cipher Punk which I think is already the case uh vitalic cypherpunk theorum is cipher Punk uh permissionless systems are Cipher Punk and anonymity is not necess necessarily A Hard requirement of these systems um I think sometimes we can come across as a bit hard line uh and I think it can scare some people off uh and I also think just technically I think it creates uh a barrier to entry for our Tooling in the market um I think if we start to look at things around permissionless uh and the affordances of public blockchains the radical transparency that comes around from things like Dows um is one of the biggest superpowers that we could ever release on the World um imagine your Banks if we could see inside it imagine Sam bankman treasury if we could see inside it um we need to be thinking about ways uh where we can leverage radical transparency and think of it as a cipher Punk um and importantly um this is one framing of the Privacy narrative in cyberpunk privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world that's in the first paragraph cyh Punk Manifesto and I think I think we someone get hooked up on that everything needs to be anonymous privacy is about choosing when to be public and when to be private so one of the things that I think we should do is broaden our church a little bit um and I think we should be uniting the tribes if you like under our Cipher Punk Banner um I think so solar Punk philosophy is very much a cryp cipher Punk philosophy and this is almost a Continuum between Luna Punk and solar Punk where we've got hard privacy going into the dark Forest uh on one hand and we've got radical openness and radical transparency on the other um which allows us to do things like revolutionized governance systems um and there's only way we're going to do that is if we build them open first and one of the things I would like to see is is building things and treating privacy as an osificante [Music] perfect ZK code base when actually we can be just shipping and then essentially turning things dark later on um so Cipher punks are radically open when they choose to be how do you feel about that one good all right um so yeah um the other thing to note um everyone's getting very very excited about Trump coming in he's going to pump our bags and all that sort of stuff uh there's absolutely no guarantee that this new regime is going to be comfortable with permissionless systems and if you actually looked at Trump's Ico the man did an Ico in the runup to his presidential election which is absolutely insane sounds great right uh bring back the Ico but Trump's Ico you actually to kyc and this is the future of the internet if we don't defend permissionless uh permissionless you will be asked what region you're from and the internet will be gated and bulcan ised based on your origin this is exactly the horror story of the internet um the Tim burners Lee was worried about 20 30 years ago and we're starting to see it um so this regime does not necessarily do that and that and the token was non-transferable um it wasn't a token at all and that's why given the man is the biggest influencer in the world uh only raised like sold one billion of the 20 billion tokens that he was trying to sell um so treat transparency as practice uh before aify hard privacy systems it's permissionless that we need to defend um that is the first order of business um so Cipher punks believe in permissionless you agree with that one good um so what else I I think that we've got to get into the mindset that VCS are not going to fund this um I know this anything that feels Cipher Punk or a little bit edgy uh the VCS don't really like it um a lot of the tooling stays to one side we're in a market structure which is dominated by Venture Capital um and and in fact it's not really Venture Capital because they they they um no one leads around so everyone just Waits and follows uh and whoever wants to take the risk on something that's a bit edgy doesn't make a move right so we need to go our own way um did anyone see this advert from salana um recently it's it was called build for users and not VCS and a little skit about how hilarious it is is that everything's infrastructure and and there's no apps how funny that is uh sponsored by VCS ironically um so yeah we need to find our way uh of how to do this and we need to get to a point where we need to crowdfund and I think tokens are the answer tokens are the crypto superpower every single part of this industry has been powered by tokens um and we are quite a away um now I know dfire is a non Dows it's very early basic primitive uh we will get PR Dows in the future we will get private crowdfunding but it's going to be a while so I think we should be using what is available to get it done and I want our cyh punks to get some money so they can build and don't have to suffer through the next bare Market which will happen because we'll blow everything up again almost certainly um so Cipher punks launch tokens do we agree with that one a little bit edgy on that one AR you not sure about that one um I think it's the way that we can take off future into our hand um tokens are basically speech uh people are they're now memes are like meme coins are like tokenized thoughts right so the pump. fun is actually quite Cipher Punk no one's setting up an LLC behind each of those tokens um so yeah let's find ways to do it um also writing code is cipher punks write code but writing code just got a lot easier um and now you can do it yourself do it yourself is a very real stratey and actually the ZK is almost like a toolkit cryptographic toolkit uh and we will be able to hack together cryptographic tooling very easily very soon um I will say do not use open AI or anthropic um to do anything Cipher Punk um anthropic has just done a deal with pantia to sell um uh surveillance technology to to the NSA and the NSA is on the board of directors for open AI um this is if you look at these models this is the speech of the establishment um so we need to be moving we need to be shipping we need to be using Ai and we need to be burning our own compute to do it so Cipher bunks burn compute um and we build tools not Empires I really advise you to go and look at these wonderful sort of toolkits that have been um crowdsourced throughout this runup to this uh most of them are not private systems most of them are just open systems that you can run locally yourself um and this is what we need to be heading towards so just to wrap up um Cipher punks don't just write code um we need artists creatives writers thinkers philosophers um all of these people need to be welcomed within this movement um and we need anyone that shares our values to feel like they can join in um we need to gather more people to our cause uh we need to find ways to bring people into the house we need to recruit and we need to go viral um and just leave you with this um song by sham 69 if the kids are united they will never be divided so we need to Cipher punks assemble thank you very much