# The Future of Privacy | ETHDam 2023

- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 33:09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-BMVutN5OUwE
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMVutN5OUwE

## Description

Adam Gogol is a co-founder of Aleph Zero.
https://twitter.com/GagolAdam

Kieran Mesquita a contributor to RAILGUN DAO. 
https://twitter.com/mesquka

Lefteris Karapetsas is a founder of rotki.
https://twitter.com/LefterisJP

Serinko is a privacy & anonymity researcher, and Lunarpunk (LunarDAO). 
https://twitter.com/serinko13

Moderated by Eleonore Blanc, founder of CryptoCanal. 
https://twitter.com/blockblanc

ETHDam is a Hackathon & Conference that gathered over 500 DeFi and Privacy builders on the 20th and 21st of May 2023 in Amsterdam. 

Privacy is normal. Following the arrest of Alex Pertsev, a Tornado Cash developer in the Netherlands, ETHDam 2023 is determined to counter the chilling effects of the lawsuit and bridge worlds to discuss the future of privacy and encourage to build on the shoulders of cypherpunk giants.

ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, - a blockchain education and events platform growing in Amsterdam, spreading its roots to Rotterdam and Zurich. ETHDam 2024 is on the map already! Keep up with us to see updates: 

CryptoCanal https://www.cryptocanal.org/
CryptoCanal Twitter https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal
Join CryptoCanal Community https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity 

We would like to thank our partners and sponsors that made this event possible. 🌷
Our BFF 1inch https://1inch.io/

Our Frens: 
Sismo https://www.sismo.io/
Aleph Zero https://alephzero.org/
Scroll https://scroll.io/
RAILGUN https://railgun.org/#/

And our Sisters:
oasis.app https://oasis.app/#earn
Maven11 https://www.maven11.com/
bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en
Lido https://lido.fi/
Spankchain https://spankchain.com/
API3 https://api3.org/
Gelato https://www.gelato.network/
VanEck https://www.vaneck.com/nl/en/crypto-etn
Marlin Protocol https://www.marlin.org/
Silent Protocol https://www.silentprotocol.org/
Cyber Capital https://cyber.capital/
… and Proto https://twitter.com/protolambda 🍍

## Transcript

foreign next up we have a another panel on the future of privacy well I say another that's not strictly tourists another panel on privacy but we haven't spoken too much about the future yet so I'd like to welcome the host of this event and also the moderator for this panel Eleanor who will take it from here [Applause] I wanted to make sure that we would wrap this event um by talking about privacy I know we talked a lot about it over the last few days but I think it was important to gather all of us one last time so please welcome to the stage sirinko from lunar Dao Lefteris from Radke Adam from lf0 and Kieran from railgun [Applause] we actually have more privacy content this afternoon which was kind of a uh uh a last-minute add-up considering what happened last night with tornado cash so at 3 pm we'll have a tornado cash exploit presentation so the schedule has been updated but in the meantime we will still talk about the future of privacy with all of you privacy Builders um yeah please introduce yourself maybe in and share what you're working on today hello hey I'm cerenko I come from lunar Dao quick lunar Dao is like this double-edged sword when one side is um an investment Fund in the Privacy Solutions and that's not something I will be talking about so much no Financial advice in here and the double side the second side is education slash research which you can find on wiki.lonidow.net and that will be the part I'll be focusing on and coming from more than the The Venture part I just want to say disclaimer lunar Dao is a daoist the name says so I cannot represent the decentralized community neither I'm not the founder of the Dao I'm a researcher which is helping the community find some of the Primitives and solutions and from that positions I'll be speaking on that stage hey hello so I'm Lefteris I'm the founder of rotkey we are a portfolio trading and accounting tool that is built with a privacy in mind and the main thing that we the finest privacy for this is a local application that stores all your data locally and doesn't share it with any centralized servers I will be speaking with my co-panelists about privacy and how we see it as a something that should be used in building any kind of application um nowadays hi I'm uh Kai I'm a co-founder of railgun uh Dao railgun is a protocol for adding privacy features to Wallets on ethereum and other evm chains a long time privacy Advocate a bit pragmatic about the present but optimized optimistic about the future hey Adam I'm cryptographer and co-founder of rf0 we're layer one blockchain focusing on privacy framework and building private defy and I guess I'll try to talk about user experience of privacy protocols yeah thank you all for being here and for being part of this of this event Gathering privacy Builders before we dive into the future what is the current state of privacy in crypto I know we've mentioned that we're in a phase now where we have to fight do you agree with this statement um where are we at right now faster yeah um yeah so the current state of privacy in crypto it's a it's a mess uh people don't think about privacy at all I I believe um we have some tools they're being criminalized and hunted there are ways around this but I think that the biggest thing that we have to fight for is user education and explaining that privacy is not a given and that just by using crypto it's like you are showing your entire transaction history to uh well everybody in the world especially like this this crypto Twitter things like oh you know drop your ens here or drop your address here it's like thanks thanks I'm going to scatter all of that and put it in my nice script and then I have a nice graph of all of your transactions and anybody that you have interacted with but my companies are actually working on tools that will help with that and I think that they can speak better to to you yeah that was literally the panel before us right this data this web3 data Gold Rush and we're now following this with a privacy panel I think it's a good contradiction here where all of this data that you mentioned is being formed and being used um what can we do better you're all Builders privacy Builders um what does it look like in the future or is this just how it's going to continue I think one of the things was already touch upon and there's a lack of Education in a space uh generally there's like a people who've been having deep expertise and it's really difficult to ever get to that level or the level of understanding as the space is also growing but it's not only education Bank experts but educational understanding generally what we are what we are doing I think crypto is the Privacy problem is just like a part of General problem and the problem is that crypto is by large becoming corrupted it's it's becoming we more and more trying as an industry being just like a copy of of the threat fire thing we can never go whatever we can never win that way it's like it's like running against the wall and I think so education needs to be also on a side of understanding why script out there and in which things is actually distinct different from the threat file and that's fine we shouldn't be better in what tretify is doing we should be better alternative to threat Phi and I think that understanding is missing as well as what full privacy stock means we talked about it before and how to you know for for like new users how to protect themselves and why to protect themselves um I think these are like some important of challenges which we have to even begin with to start to go deeper into um or like side by side by making like more people being like experts and and leaders in industry and not like and actually decentralize that by decentralizing knowledge and not only have a name of decentralized something decentralized change decentralized organization or something you mentioned the full stack full stack privacy what does that look like yeah um I I think so we've got a number of of privacy protocols um building in in the crypto space and I think they're all kind of uh targeting different aspects or different uh areas of the crypto space where usages um and you know the vast majority of usage in crypto is fully public and the stuff that is private kind of just uses maybe one or two of maybe like the favorite privacy protocols or something but that doesn't necessarily think about um you know like end-to-end uh privacy I think that might actually be a failure of us here as Builders um myself included right I'll own it um you know that we're not working together to to kind of uh build the stuff out um so that you know okay sure maybe someone uses a private wallet but that's useless if they go and use um some like accounting software that just cracks all of their wallet data and like you know sells that off like that the the the fact that they're using a private wallet is useless right and so you know we've got rock key here and I think I think it we need to do better as Builders to to work together um to enable all of these individual solutions that we're building um to kind of work more harmoniously and so um even the people that are trying to use privacy tools and you know trying to be responsible um and just failing for lack of a good ecosystem right we can we can start to enable privacy for them and then hopefully um for The Wider user base of crypto as a whole okay so I'm hearing more education better building so will the future of privacy be more resilient what does it look like I think I would like to relate to what was said before about both education and the need to educate people whether they need privacy so I don't think I agree with that less education less privacy yeah more privacy I don't agree with the fact that users don't want very privacy for example I know I know multiple users that are concerned about backtracking on their transfers or ethereum and by far the most popular solution they use is ascending transfers from centralized exchanges because it's simple everyone have accounts on one of them and well at least your friends cannot track you back them and this is horrible uh I mean I hope that's not the future because we failed if that's the future but it shows one interesting thing which is that people do care about privacy and the problem is not that uh they absolutely don't care about it the problem is that the current privacy the actual privacy Protocols are really hard to use you need to download a lot of data from chain to actually even be able to make a transaction you need to compute some expensive proof on your machine it takes longer time it takes way way more space and you need to synchronize with blockchain every time you you kind of like log in this is very very cumbersome so uh but I'm not like surprised that people right now um are using more centralized exchanges than uh than well like proper proper anonymizers I hope that future like will change something in this very basic way of like how simple can it be to to make a private transaction and unfortunately academically like this are very hard cryptographic problems to be solved so I hope the future is where we can easily have a smartphone applications which doesn't like bloat our entire machine and just make connections do you think that can be done it seems like there's a lot of hurdles right now to be fully private or do you think it's actually pretty easy or should we alleviate a little bit the burden on the users um yeah so I don't think that we need to be fully private like the Privacy is not a black or white thing uh um so Adam mentioned the exchanges that you can use to well anonymize sort of intersection even that unfortunately has become difficult because many exchanges have closed the creation of new deposit addresses and they have done it also some in a sneaky way in that so I have actually um docked the wallet by mistake because I I didn't realize that the deposit address was old or something like that um so if I can make a mistake doing something like that then I I really think that we're we are screwed like um but we I really think that having even that as a tool and asking exchange is like really pressing them to have this as a right you should never force me to reuse an address for a deposit even that is a really really big step because uh I I don't make privacy infrastructure I cannot speak to that but having the options is what really should be there and again education education education because if user doesn't know what they may do by just depositing from a different like it's so easy like you just make a mistake you just deposit yeah I will deposit I don't know if I die to Kraken from this address and it's like wait isn't this the same address that I used with my public one oh yeah so that means that I'm dogs and this is very very easy to to happen perhaps we need better better tools for that I think the question whether privacy um should be full or not maybe can be driven a little bit towards like where are we starting from are we starting from here we want to reach privacy or actually I mean if dumb we speak about ethereum but perhaps isn't a solution to find a place when privacy is not 100 and for sure always but it's by default and it's optional and this anonymity and privacy being optional by default can be by user chosen whether that's going to be disclosed the data is going to be disclosed or not or some information metadata or what have you and I think that change of Paradigm not only on transaction like everything's transparent and then we hide sometimes like we make some transactions but on uh on a level of communication where communities where we're chatting what kind of tools we're using um there was a new presentation yesterday when connecting to the internet itself when you know when like Bing online and in crypto space so I think that is like a completely new paradigm and that's I think misconception on lunar Punk is like oh we want just like a privacy and anonymity only and we all have to like wear masks when we meet each other that's not about it right it's about what's the default and what options the user have in their hands rather who decides there for them and or how much they have to do in order to get to that Anonymous level because if we have here a death a cryptographer who struggles with that then we have a wrong default you know that's that's the problem there so I think we should turn around the Paradigm and where we're starting from and also not have the misconception of like oh you want privacy online and always and for everyone we're gonna like lose the human part of that that's that's not about that in fact when we have that protection around us we can be much more human to each other just like you are with your family or with your close ones when you are in you know those setups because you know that you're actually not sitting um in a TV right now you know I mean yeah um I I guess like the the kind of user experience issues um with privacy or at least being able to do it right um is sure like uh privacy tools exist right like we have a panel here building it um but the I I think a lot of the um the issues with the user experience um and actually trying to stay properly private is um you're you're using these tools in um isolation in an environment that is actively hostile to privacy and so um you know you've got this one aspect where you are able to maintain privacy uh but you know everything else that you interact with from there is just working to erode away at that little um you know quoting of privacy that you have um and you know that extends out from you know not just the crypto space right like a lot more um in in Life or just you know technology um uh We've we've kind of built uh a lot of the systems that we use like the internet um the um kind of platforms um that we post on and and communicate on um these all these things are kind of built as actively hostile to privacy um and and so I think we need to start thinking about um how do we um kind of bring these other um or other platforms uh maybe not you know force them to become privacy tools um in themselves but um you know not not be like kind of designed around um destroying privacy if you will so on the on the data panel just earlier they mentioned that the few that web3 today has a large part of it is centralized um is that something that we should call out more uh uh call them call them out and because maybe if if we know talk more about it then users can also know more about it what's what's missing right now and and how can we work towards that okay you seem very passionate yeah so um that um and history availability in um web 3 basically in mostly ethereum that's where I can speak to so um yeah that's a very very very very very big problem we we are designing towards um a crypto history that is going to end up completely centralized under um huge indexes there is no good way around this and the protocol is unfortunately not thinking about this error like um I mean Peter from from git was speaking the other day in Twitter saying who would mind if we just remove archive mode from from gif so there is a big boost towards taking all data outside I can speak to that as someone who is building an app trying to gather this data and process it for um individual addresses for a user and having started with the idea okay I'm a user that has his own node I run it and I will pull all of the data from my own node an archive node say that is impossible and that is getting worse and worse like now with the withdrawals for example they are not there's something special you need an indexer like be contain only can give that together Bitcoin say dot i n um someone who does a lot of work towards this is a they sitting right there he's building true blocks so true blocks is um an indexer that can run locally on your um on your machine along with the node and actually answer the one question that we unfortunately in Indian indexer for so this is my address give me all of my transaction houses the fact that by running a node we still can't do that uh it's it's to me it's it's crazy and if you take this and um push it towards the future imagine that there is no true blocks that there is only centralized indexers then they become Gatekeepers and in the beginning they are free it's like oh they're obviously funded all like really well free you say okay we get used to this is how the protocol works and then suddenly up they close it and they say well I mean how much data do you consume how much do you need this is like you know you don't need to pay for this data but I'm running my own node I I should be able to get this data no no no no we are now The Gatekeepers you can pay by credit card uh so it's easy don't worry and this is a future that I'm really afraid of and I would really like to actively fight against for those that are watching the stream uh Thomas from True blocks actually did a workshop this morning which is available as well to re-watch and learn from so thank you for for bringing that up I think you wanted to react as well yeah so what he's missing in my opinion is a business case right now the probably most popular business model in the internet is running ads and to run good ads you need to Target them well and to Target them well you need a lot of user data so if we would make internet private I guess there would be people who would be happy about it although like all the major Services would lose and almost entire business model and like unfortunately it seems to me at least that majority of general internet crowd is used to things in the internet being for free in the sense that well there is no direct payment for Facebook and other other big platforms so it would be very hard to change this particular ad model into like prescription model in in case of of regular popular services so um what's the solution I'm not sure I guess maybe it may sound stupid but some kind of ZK ads where like data are not directly uh gathered but there is some way of of targeting advertisement to some users which gives some permissions uh well sounds sounds very futuristic although yeah I think this is one of the biggest problems for web 2 like why why web 2 is not more not private more than when it is so like that's why well I wanted to make sure that web 3 we would I keep having this conversation at meetups where people are like oh web3 is well it's you know it's same as web 2 but you know it's with crypto I'm like no it's also about these fundamentals right it's web3 but it's also it's this cypherpunk future where we own our data where it's decentralized and where it's censorship resistance it's not just sort of a decentralized Facebook I I want I want more than that and it's on you guys here on this to build it work together build better projects or products where we can seamlessly go from one to the next from what I understand have a full privacy stack have more education I'll handle a little bit of that but how can you work more towards towards this together not just on crypto Twitter like do you think that events like this help actually to build this better yeah thanks for putting this event on um [Applause] yeah um no I I think um okay I I have noticed um you know in interactions with people um on on Twitter or just generally online tend to be uh very different to interactions in person anything um I think that's a couple of um reasons for that so um you know one of them is you know maybe like the the limitations on like the length of the content and ease of communication but um I think a lot of it actually is uh just the fact that uh communication on on Twitter is um so um open right that um it's very difficult to keep um keep discussions um you know on track because anyone can jump in and just derail it um you know post some some meme coin and whatever I don't know uh but so I I think um events like this just in person um you know having people that are that are just oh sorry a kitty cat just showed up in the front row thank you yeah I I think just having these kind of events in person and and having this opportunity for um people that are are building these tools and um you know trying to better the ecosystem uh just to have a space to um you know just step back from the computer for a while um talk to other people right share frustrations um uh problem solved together and uh you know go back and um uh be more excited about about uh about building things uh yeah thank you yeah I mean it's to get people more excited about building but also without scaring them into a chilling effect and jailing them so it's like that cusp where we're at where it's like private work on privacy build on privacy but then of course here in the Netherlands we've had you know 10 months of a terrible chilling effect um maybe you'd like to talk on that yeah maybe I'll touch on that a little bit um we talk we talk over with McCullough of the record before I would like to bring that in connection to yesterday's discussions which was going on here and connects to the Future um Leonardo runs this thing um there's two other space is called lunar Bank future but no bun there um but check it out um there's been a talk about the fear and how the scaring strategy is not working and how it's needed more of like put privacy into this um unicornish kinda Vibes and stuff I think it touches more like on not only on privacy but also in general like what is privacy for and what we want right like we Inland are at least like building towards like tools structures and culture especially towards more freedom right privacy is just part of that and I think that's large part of like why cryptos there create more freedom and more Autumn and more um super native for people and that that drives back when you look on a Cypher Punk um there are some solutions and there is this like the world's burning is the dystopia about you know individuals have their Solutions how to like arm themselves in this General dystopia and then they have solar Punk when um you see a lot of this like glittery very careful colorful um but sometimes almost like um naive approach to Utopia in my opinion so I don't think it's neither or the two and I think it is important to understand the critics The Cypher punks were bringing and the reality because we live in a reality like if we look and only here on Alex better self case or 100 and what 15 countries of from like working on cbdc's that's an dystopia Nightmare and that's a reality so I don't think we should hide people from the reality neither we shouldn't see it as the way we scaring them I think it's given the information because with that information we are much more armed towards creating the world we want based on those analyzes and I think that's the important part as well to actually bring that hope through actual Solutions and through actual proposals so we know ending up on total dystopian and fear but because they didn't work let's not talk about it at all and we're just gonna be a naive kind of like utopian that's where lunar prank comes into play where we bring in analysis of reality and critic to how things actually work while not falling into like a dystopian nightmare but bringing you know like a a positive imagination and real solutions to that and I think uh whether we go gonna call it one way or the other I don't think we should like box um not Iran has to March under like Luna Bank umbrella but the approach I think is important to not to always like have you know one or the other but understand that they inform each other and we should build the words by the future while keeping the users and the community informed about what's actually happening thank you we're reaching towards the end of this panel if you guys have any questions that you want to ask you can use slido but maybe a final remark on the future of privacy um yeah so for my point of view like from the point of view of someone building a tool that also that is on privacy we we are not a privacy tooler we're not building something that is completely uh focusing on privacy I think that um you should say that privacy is um giving the option to the user so it's not um either full paranoia like completely offline somehow you calculate everything and you I don't know like bring on the data with a USB stick but it's to give the user the option to maintain their privacy on very various different levels like um keep your your history locally um do not connect only to one centralized RPC connect to multiple um connect to your own node so all of these are different um options that you can give to a user in order to maintain their privacy so what I would like people at home to to think of what privacy is is it's not a black or white thing so for example when they say there are people out there who say yeah you know like there is there is there is portfolio trackers follow trackers there is zero in there is upper there is debunk and well if you care about privacy you can just use a road key this is a silly way of looking at things um everyone should make privacy a part of their application so Roti has a lot more things other than privacy but we have this Focus only two but every app should be focusing on privacy shouldn't be okay we have private apps and non-private apps privacy should be something that every developer works on is what my message would be maybe they'll talk about it in the next panel coming up I'm looking at you three UI ux over there we'll see okay yeah um I guess just I I my thoughts are kind of similar to um uh to lifters as well um you know not not everyone can or should be a privacy uh developer I mean I get it it it's a difficult thing to build right the technology is difficult um and it's it's time consuming and you know like you're not like your your use case isn't privacy it's whatever your use cases right um but yeah uh you know there are um people building good privacy infrastructure um and and so just um be mindful of your choices um on you know how you build your application what rpcs you use um you know what wallets are you using um what networks are using um and and you know if you if you have the option to use uh something that's more private um please use it Adam oh I think uh optimistic enough and still realistic vision of where we could end up with privacy is similar to what happened with Messengers like online so by far it's not a standard that's that common population is using private Messengers we're using usually like Facebook Messenger or some other public applications but I think majority of population is aware of signals so in case they actually need it they can relatively easily send a private message so like my hope would be that privacy and crypto will look this way so I I'm not optimistic enough to believe that like really everyone will be using private word no that's not going to happen or like that's not going to happen anytime soon like realistically optimistic vision is that everyone will be able to quickly Google what's the easy to use privacy like wallet fake and download and like in case they need that they can just do it all right I guess time will tell I hope the future for myself our children and the rest of the world actually lives up to The Cypher Punk values um thank you so much for this conversation shout out to this kitty cat in the front row uh wow um thank you everyone and thank you [Applause]