# Panel | Cypherpunks | ETHDam III - 2025 - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 37:07 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-BwKHLhStwqY - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwKHLhStwqY ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Panel | Cypherpunks | ETHDam III - 2025 πŸŽ™ Panelists: Sal Mayweather - Agoristics - Sal the Agorist / https://x.com/SallyMayweather http://saltheagorist.com/ Justin Bons - Cyber Capital - Founder / https://x.com/Justin_Bons https://www.cyber.capital/ JoΓ«l Valenzuela - Dash - Growth Lead / https://x.com/TheDesertLynx https://www.dash.org/ Ameen Soleimani - 0xbow - Advisor / https://x.com/ameensol https://0xbow.io/ Vlad Costea - Bitcoin Takeover Podcast / https://x.com/TheVladCostea https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 – Intro 1:38 – What is a cypherpunk? 4:53 – Privacy vs compliance 7:03 – Is privacy becoming default? 10:02 – Negotiation between extremes 13:02 – Privacy and UX for mass adoption 16:01 – Base layer privacy debate 18:06 – Protocol vs programmability 20:26 – Fungibility and social norms 24:01 – Anarchy, state, and practical paths ## Transcript Welcome to East to Ethan to Isa to East to East. Uh we're going to be going a little bit more back to uh how can I even describe this? How can I describe you lot? Do you guys have like a crew name? I don't know. Joel's going no. Um, we're going to be they're going to be talking about cyberpunks and I'm going to introduce Vlad onto the stage who can bring up the other speakers and introduce them one by one or do it in whatever way that you want. You have the slido I'll give you in a second and your timer is up there and when there's 5 minutes left maybe you can take audience questions. Okay, good luck. Thank you very much. So, first of all, I would like to invite on stage Sal Diagarist. It's really a miracle that you woke up this morning. We partied hard last night. Then we have Justin Bonds. Yeah, please. Applause. And I'm just trying to get the order right. Then we have Joel Valenzuela from Dash. Also, he has a pretty good podcast. Only when I'm on it. That's what he said. We also have Amin Solmani. [Applause] I do. And you get to choose your seat. I'll take the last one available. Okay. This is the cippher punk panel. And I think the first question which I'm going to ask all of you and we're going to go around I guess in this order. disorder not disorder is. So the question is what is cippher punk? How do you define that? And would you call yourself a cipher punk? So I think we go in order, right? Um so I think the definition that I like of cipher punk is the advocacy of the widespread use of privacy preserving and uh liberty promoting technologies. Are you one or would you call yourself one? I would call myself a cipher punk, even though I suspect a lot of people wouldn't think that of me, but I I I do. I'm I'm a Salana cipher punk. There you are, just the troll of the room right now. Yes. Um I would describe myself as a freedom maximalist in general and uh decentralized tech is kind of what um I you think is the most effective way of achieving this. I guess that probably makes me a cipher punk, but I don't really get too much into those titles. And honestly, um I would be feel a lot better about the title of cipher punk if people weren't constantly calling Adam back that over and over and over again. And now I just anytime I hear that name, I see his his face and I just think about that's not what I want to represent. But he's the inventor of proof of work, right? Listen, you're not going to get any points from Justin for saying that. He he was the inventor of the hash function not of proof of work itself I think right but even in the white paper it's mentioned that moni der ner I think I I I just I just to us like if if if cryptocurrency stands for the widespread use of privacy preserving and liberty promoting technology then you know guys like us would look at Adam back as the guy that stopped Bitcoin from being widely used right that that's why I think me and Joel don't see Adam back as much of a cipher punk cuz he went directly against the initial goals and uh vision of the Bitcoin project. So to us at least, Adam Bag very much goes against the cipher punk movement for that reason. So to be more precise with the allegory, I would say Adam Beck is a cipher punk in the same way that Darth Vader is a Jedi Knight. That's a good one. Okay. I mean, are you a cipher punk? Yeah. Uh cipher means code encryption. punk uh represents a form of moral entrepreneurship. So if you're a punk, you believe in some values that society does not necessarily agree with and you believe enough that you are willing to stake your reputation uh on promoting those values. Uh and so cipher punks are people who decided that encryption was meaningfully important to propagate and were willing to essentially eat [ __ ] uh for years from society until they eventually won and uh encryption became you know widespread and mandated and um more uh approved. So yeah, I think I'm also a cipher punk. I think we're downstream of the original cipher punks. So, I'm I'm not a a cyber punk. The cyber punks are upstairs at the hackathon because cippher punks write code and I don't write code. I'm I'm just a crypto anarchist. I use the tools that they create. Um I I use code to conceal my activities from the government and I encourage others to do the same. And that is is more than just code in terms of money but also 3D printing. um you know we we transform objects into code so that they can cross borders and um we use code for uh secure communications to conceal communications from political parasites. So I use the tools that they create but I don't actually create the tools. I'm more of a connoisseur. I don't think it's the creator I think it's the advocacy of those tools that makes you a cipher punk and not the creation of the tools themselves. I I would think um there's many ways we can contribute in society, right? Yeah. I don't know who I forget what's the dude's name who wrote the the manifesto. Um I think he actually says in Yeah. Yeah. I think he says in there like it explicitly says like cypher punks right code. I don't know but I think that's what he says. Anyway, I don't want to let this become personal because we spoke about Adam back and it's unfair because he's not here. He can't defend himself. Let's be there's this Eleanor Roosevelt quote that says, you know, big minds talk ideas. So, let's stick to that. Let's not talk about people or events. There is this part in the introduction of the cipher nomicon which is part of the cipher punk literature by Timothy Cay and he wrote something very interesting that privacy should be supreme should be absolute even if it means that some criminals are going to get away. Do you still believe in that or do you believe that the cryptocurrency space adheres to this philosophy and we we can go in the same order or reverse it? It's your choice. Um the question was about privacy. How can you say you repeat that again? Right. So I started from this quote from the cipher nomicon that says privacy should be absolute even if it means that some criminals will get away. The question is if you believe that we are heading towards this type of philosophy or we're becoming compliant like rail gun or whatever. So I think I think that um privacy is becoming the default and it's only becoming the default because the politicians are becoming more and more strict as they sort of lose control as the the we sort of spiral into this um inflationary collapse as I see it. and things sort of get out of hand for them and they they try to clamp down as much as possible and there's backlash from guys like us who are like no [ __ ] you we're going to you know do things our way and uh that's why I think you know privacy is the talk of the town today and it's I've certainly changed my content to sort of more focus on privacy and I think I would probably say the same for Joel and some others here. So, I think it's our it's a reaction to the political landscape. Uh, so I'm a compliance guy now. Um, we I'm building privacy pools. Uh, it's a way to keep out criminals. Uh, we, you know, I originally helped with tornado cash. Uh, we did not expect when we launched tornado cash that North Korea was going to, uh, put hundreds of millions of dollars through this thing. Um the tornado cashache team themselves does not get enough credit for building a compliance tool themselves uh which allowed you to use your note to prove which individual deposit you were. Uh I think we always had the intention of creating this for you know legitimate uses and so I think that uh and like there was a uh paper published in the St. Louis Fed by the same guys that we wrote the privacy pools paper with, Fabian Char, blockchain professor, University of Basel, and he uh described a regulatory framework that could essentially mandate the use of the tornado cache compliance tool uh in order to properly regulate the system. And I think that um being able to, you know, the philosophical answer is that freedom of association implies freedom of dissociation. So I should be able to decide who I want to and don't want to associate with. I don't treat that as an absolute. And so I think that you actually get more sovereignty uh if you have the choice. Uh and you lose sovereignty if you are forced to associate with people that you don't want to necessarily associate with just to get privacy. Yeah. So to go back to the original question about you know was basically is privacy starting to to boom to take over? I kind of I'm seeing a lot of indications of that. Like for example, um the paragon of the cipher punk movement, Apple um is now openly advertising uh privacy features on billboards all over the all over the place. Um I remember when I first started using Signal Messenger, almost no one used it and then a CNN reporter I was talking to started using it. I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting." And now random people that are not at all in like journalism or cipher punk, anything are kind of using it. Um, some of the big signs I've noticed is like PayPal and Circle, again, some of the most hardcore safer punk projects in the crypto space, um, are advertising confidential transfers as a feature of hiding balances of transactions. You're seeing a lot of this movement back towards things. And I kind of think that that's the result of, I guess, the hardcore negotiation of some of the extremists like such as extremists up on this the stage here, for example. where people don't like to think about like this is one way to make everyone kind of annoyed. The anarchists don't like to think about this and the governments don't like to think about this. But there is a negotiation between the two ends of the spectrum where you have like the radicals saying I won't do what you tell me doing you know wildly illegal things whatever just just living hardcore freedom government saying no you can't do this you have to do things this way and at some point what happens settles somewhere in the middle of those two things as far as like what you actually get and we kind of saw you know obviously crypto crackdowns in places like the US for example um and Then with the backlash from that, then there was a negotiation with the new administration somewhere a little bit more in the middle of those things. And so I don't think that we're going to the privacy um I guess paradise that we'd like. But I do think that because of some of the more you know some of the people who have sacrificed and worked hard and built awesome tech and got it used at the extreme ends that sort of pushed a it's kind of forced a middle ground to have to exist. And I think that this push towards this trend towards privacy is more a trend towards the middle ground of privacy. It's not a trend towards everywhere we want to go, but it's an improvement because otherwise it could have could have gotten nothing. I I I think where we are in regards to privacy, I think, is also very much like a a reflection of our society and government and the kind of freedom that we have. And I think I think maybe that's that's the broader question. I think in some ways privacy is a little bit the canary in the coal mine, right? Like when we lose our privacy, we're we're really steadily steaming towards totalitarianism. And when we have when we have privacy, it's it's something that protects us from totalitarianism. So I think I think there's a certain trend there. So I think it depends what countries we're talking about as well. Like you know uh for all of its flaws, places like the Netherlands and the United States still uh do respect some of these more fundamental human rights compared to other places in the world. And I think I think that's that's an important factor. Overall, I am I am optimistic about where we're going and and where we're going into the future. Also, because technology is making it easier and easier. I think one of the traps in the past of of a lot of the products of the cipher punk movement if people weren't building things for mass adoption and I really think if we want this movement to succeed and look I I I respect the mineros of this world where anyone no matter how tyrannical the government is able to opt out and and be free and have financial sovereignty. I think that's absolutely important. But I think in order for this revolution to really succeed on an even deeper level is we need to succeed in mass adoption and UX and get everyday people to start using this technology more. And I think that's becoming more and more capable now is especially as we scale programmable systems. That's one area that I'm particularly excited about. But I think unlike a lot of my cipher punk peers who are maybe more focused on privacy coins, I actually see highly scalable and programmable layer ones having the ability to actually build privacy on top of that. I mean that this is something that Amina is doing with uh Ethereum as well. And I do see that as being a a a easier path towards the mass adoption of privacy. um because because then it's not just you don't just have to convince them about privacy, you convince them on things they do care about and privacy actually comes along with that. And I think that's maybe a little bit more of a pragmatic view on how we can bring about the changes in the world that we want to see. Right now I think we have some of the best privacy tools we've ever had and they just keep getting better. But at the same time, if you look at Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the top two assets, and you you're going to mention Salana too, but they don't have base layer privacy on a significant scale or at a significant level. You just have tools to which users can opt in and then they basically get some extra deniability, but the system is still an open ledger, right? at some points in the future just one mistake that they're making by leaking their public key information or by transacting with the wrong person and expressing identity in one way or the other can basically nullify all of this effort to gain privacy and I was going to ask you do you believe that Bitcoin then Ethereum and Salana because you want to talk about that I know are cippher punk or should we look for better designs like Monero Zcash and build on those. Well, I'm I'm specifically critical of Bitcoin and Ethereum because of a lack of capacity. So So like these these privacy tools with low friction, low cost, they I don't think you can actually build them unless you have massive uh capacity and and I I don't think Ethereum and Bitcoin has that which is why I I I mentioned Salano as actually building. And what's interesting about Salana, Salano recently introduced confidential transactions and it wasn't done by the core team. It wasn't done by the L1. it was actually some nerd somewhere figuring out that if you could uh code a contract in a particular way, you effectively have uh confidential transactions and I see us evolving more towards that direction as well where through programmability and through massive scalability we're actually able to create uh very good systems of privacy but we're far from that because it's not like a user needs to use the no it should all be integrated in the wallet it should have IP offiscation there should be you know mixing taking place all these things but they should be obiscated I think from the user and I think it can be done on the wallet level in the way that the wallet actually interacts with smart contracts. So that's where I see a very positive future in regards to um privacy and I'm more skeptical to see that happening on Ethereum and Bitcoin because they just simply don't have the scale to support it and even if you do do it it's it's just too expensive. Yeah. So I think a privacy has become kind of the standin for cyberpunk values as a whole. I think it's one of the key one of the key things we need in sovereign freedom tools. But a lot of cases that's kind of like the almost like the the metric of if it has good privacy it's a good freedom tool. And there's other things you need as well. Um, I I've it's notice I've noticed that a lot of like concerns about Bitcoin and Ethereum today have been expressed in terms of the privacy and I'm there's like a big long list of things I'd get to before I'd even mention that like can the average person use it without custodians? That's number one and then let's figure out kind of that how that works. So, but as far as like the um there's a lot of no one in crypto is more contentious than the privacy community amongst its own kind. love to fight with each other, love to do whatever, love to say your privacy approach is terrible and will get people in prison. No, yours will, etc. Um, there's there's arguments on both sides of how much do you want, which things do you want baked in at the protocol level? Is that objectively always better than just programmability that then you can kind of add it in later, etc. Um yeah I is anything I think that where we're going we we should embrace everything that kind of works and at some point there are trade-offs for each solution and obviously like privacy tech is more difficult to deal with maybe is harder to scale maybe there's always some like small tradeoffs that people have to make so I would just encourage more of it right in in whatever form it kind of takes Um, I don't know too much about Bitcoin adding anything. It's pretty seems like a pretty hard process. Um, but in terms of Ethereum, uh, there have been different types of proposals to add base layer privacy. Uh, personally, I'm not necessarily against them, but I think it's a little early. uh and I think that we can sort of run these experiments on having a uh EVM compatible, you know, like DeFi, Dows, etc. on other chains. Um Aztec just launched their uh test net. So I think it would be cool to see how that works and see what gets built on top of that. And um I would be a lot more comfortable if privacy pools uh was a more mature product and if the base layer for example if it was just private transactions uh that you know there was one proposal where if you send ETH any ETH send like could be in theory part of an anonymity set because uh it like when you send it uh you then are essentially burning it, but every from the outside perspective, it looks like you just sent it and then later you can mint the ETH somewhere else. Uh, and nobody knows which of the ETH that you sent corresponds to the ETH that you have now minted. Uh, and besides the, you know, possibly freaking people out about no longer being able to account all the ETH, uh, it's dangerous because it means that everybody who sends ETH is now providing privacy to, you know, potential criminals. And so, uh, you might want the ability to have that or opt out of that. You might want the ability to use that and then also, uh, opt out of being associated with certain people who sent their ETH, uh, and, you know, who might be in North Korea or other types of bad actors that you don't want to associate with. So, I, you know, urge caution, I guess. I think I think that they're ETH and Bitcoin are more they're like sort of the model T of the cypher punk world. like the pseudonymity that they introduced was better than what we had. But like we've we've progressed past and of course ETH was like an upgrade from you know Bitcoin because now you could do smart contracts using cryptography which was cool but um you know now we've we've progressed past that now we have things like you know Monero and Zeno and and stuff like that that kind of blows that technology out of the water as far as I'm concerned. If you're using privacy tools on these public blockchains where everything is clear, there is a chance that you're going to get blacklisted, you're going to get stigmatized. You basically create different classes of coins. You're going to have the ones that have a ve very clear origin and which the exchanges or some of the economic actors will prefer. And then you're going to have sort of the black market coins which have lesser clear origins. and maybe that in the case of Bitcoin, they're going to suspect they're from North Korea or from the Silk Road or whatever and they will say that they're not funible enough. And if you go through extra mixing processes, you only make it sort of worse. So my question is do you believe that we need a technical solution to provide fungibility or is it social to the point where we just have to accept that money is money and it doesn't matter what comes from as long as it's the right amount and it's validated by the right network. Yeah. I I think we need good technical solutions but I think the problem ultimately is actually social the way you put it. This is something I mentioned about it's more of a reflection of the society we live in is like do we value freedom? Do we value privacy? And and just to take a moment to actually remind everyone why privacy matters, right? Like you can't think freely if you don't have privacy, right? It's the stifling effect of of, you know, not not having that moment to really um think for yourself and and to really be yourself. It it's it's disturbing on a deeply psychological level if if you can't speak freely, you know, without fear of repercussions. I I really do believe that strongly and I think um I think what matters and there's a bigger question that talks about politics here. If we're only talking about technology, we we're somewhat missing the uh forest among the trees here because it's a bigger political question that does relate to our political systems. Yes, these privacy coins will survive no matter what, no matter how tyrannical our governments get. But I'd much rather find ourselves in a situation where uh you know we we have governments that actually respect privacy and that like privacy is a human right and that privacy is normal as we like to say at this conference because it is and and it absolutely is respected in the financial world. Like for instance like as as a registered fund within the financial system like respecting our clients privacy is of the utmost importance. Like if we were to leak that data it'd be horrendous. It' be a big ethical and legal breach. So it's not like these concepts are completely alien either. I mean banks want to keep a lot of their activities secret. Government want to keep a lot of their activities secret. It's just a natural part of being a human being. And if we ignore that, if we ignore that, then we become a highly dysfunctional society and a highly tyrannical society and highly totalitarian society. And I think I think there's a deeper question about psychology, about who we are as human beings, what we value. And I think these actually questions become more important. The technology comes and the technology will keep improving. But I think this is part of why I think maybe the privacy coins is not the path of least resistance where you know if we build financial products that the world really wants to use and attach privacy to that. I I I suspect that's an easier path and that's why I have the position I do. Yeah. So I agree that it's mostly a social thing. um just like let's not forget that end to end encryption which is kind of everywhere was you know criminalized at one point and we had to sort of fight very hard for that and I remember of course the privacy coin dlisting era that I hopefully think we're kind of coming to the end of in terms of of crypto and so at the end of the day I I think that um the the governments the powerful already have privacy they already have a trillion dollars from Pentagon just disappear. Whoops. I wonder what happened there. Like there's already a lot of that stuff on, you know, corrupt bad actors. And at some point, I think there's going to be a a smoothing out where you have a lot more normalization of privacy amongst the the average person. um as far as like the the tainting of funds and things like that there it's kind of interesting because very I mean in cash societies or any society not the other ones unfortunately but any society like you know when I was in Croatia they use cash all over the place no coffee shop was like screaming about oh my gosh is there did anyone buy anything illicit with this euro 10 euro node in the last you know eight hops or eight users no one cared about that because partially the technology didn't really allow for that super well. there wasn't that super traceability along the chain of cash and so because of that just like maybe some we'll have other ways of catching the criminals whatever and at some point with because blockchain's a public ledger everything is recorded for you know all time uh at some point people are like well where did this come from I don't I'm not comfortable with technically the coins which you know what is even a coin right having been used by someone else that that kind of became a But when everything is when privacy technology is pretty universal um then there I think that there won't be so much consternation about that kind of thing there will be other kind of ways of focusing on who are criminals like did you receive this money from a criminal okay maybe that's maybe that's still something that society is very you know hard on but did you receive money from someone who then received money who then received money eight that you as the end user eight hops later are somehow liable for that. I don't think that's going to be a thing long term. There's there's a great saying. I think when you end up doing that, you end up uh persecuting the innocent and protecting the guilty, right? Because sophisticated parties can just do multiple ops while you're just inconveniencing real users. So yes, and I do think that um a lot of pe you know the corrupt do enjoy privacy by default as well. There's a circle, you know. It just sounds a little a little dark maybe, but like uh radical transparency would not be beneficial to people who in say governments or things like that that launder money all the time. And so at some point there's it's just the fairness of the system of you know privacy for me but not for thee. Eventually if you level it out you end up getting a better standard kind of for everyone. More accountability for the powerful, more privacy for the individual. Yeah, this is my job now. Uh, I trace all of the money going into privacy pools. Uh, we try to figure out where it's coming from. Uh, it's not funible. You know, if it comes from a known hack, then we reject it. If it comes from like a reputable KYC exchange, then we'll probably accept it. If it comes from a known, you know, Vitalic.eth uh, we'll accept it. If it comes from like a shady crosschain DEX, we won't. Um I think that you know the cash example is kind of uh silly because the amounts we're talking about are very small. Uh there have like generally for a long time been laws about large amounts of cash uh and needing to identify the counterparties of those kinds of transactions. Uh you are also implicitly KYCing when you transact in cash because it's physical. So you literally show up in person wherever you're doing this business. Um and I think generally speaking like we should be aware that uh like like one of the things you said is that you know the governments have privacy from us and so like the IRGC the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran is like the largest Bitcoin miner uh in Iran because they get free energy and this is how you create uh clean bitcoins. Uh and meanwhile they have surveillance set up so that if you're a protester running around without a hijab uh they'll shut down your bank account. So you know uh like we want to build tools that you know people can use for good reasons uh and then also protect ourselves from uh people who are trying to abuse these tools for crime. Uh I don't think privacy is bad, but I think we want to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate uses uh of these tools. And so I'm, you know, yeah, I'm I'm a apparently a fan of nonfgeibility. So, so I I disagree because you know when you when you use dollars uh or euros uh you know if every time somebody committed a crime with that euro they put a little mark on it then no one would accept that euro from you anymore because it's it's no longer fungeible. So I guess the original question though was do we need tools to make public blockchains private and the answer is no because we already have them. We have things like Monero and Zeno and that is the tool to make a a blockchain uh more private. So I think it's important you need fungeability. It's a property of sound money. Um you can't have sound money without fungeability. But uh yeah no I I would say I would say instead of trying to add dollars aren't fungeible, right? They all have serial numbers, right? But they're all accepted like one dollar is equal to another. But one Bitcoin that was used on the Silk Road, you know, is not equal to a Bitcoin that's, you know, a clean Bitcoin or something like that, you know? I mean, if like the government picks up the dollars, then they'll just like auction it, you know, back or like use it, recirculate it, right? If you pick up like you do you really want like, okay, to make the example, it's like if the mafia comes in and gives you dollars, uh, and you know they're the mafia and you know it came from like a crime, uh, are you complicit in that? if you know well if if if you know Mr. Gambino, like if I like do work for him and he owes me money, I want I want to get paid. You know what I mean? And if if those dollars are are marked or something like that and I can't get paid, then it's an issue. But the point is money is supposed to be used for everything, good and bad, right? Just as dollars are used for good and bad, crypto should be used for good and bad. It should be up to the individual. Could it be used for more good than bad? Like or is it Yeah, it depends on the individual actor, right? and whoever is holding the crypto. But but good and bad I think is contextual because like like we want large institutions to be transparent and we maybe want more individuals to be more private. So it's like having the option to do both I think is very important in terms of achieving the good. Yeah. Know I agree. I think that you know we should know everything that the governments are doing. I don't believe there should be governments though. So I mean like I just say get rid of the government and you solve that problem altogether. Uh, anarchism is like a [ __ ] political ideology. Uh, every anarchist that I've ever met is actually a small statist. Like you end up being like me and my 30 friends with our guns on our farm. Uh, make the rules, you know, and it's like, uh, what if we get invaded? Well, we'll set up a night watch and like what if I don't want to serve on the night watch? Well, I'll pay a membership due. Uh, and it's like, congratulations, you've invented government. watching the clock tick past like, oh god. I uh had the privilege of having dinner with my friend Virgil uh Griffith who spent 5 years in prison. And shockingly when he got out of prison, this was like two weeks ago. Uh he he said something that I would not have expected from someone who would have, you know, just gotten out of prison. And he said, you know, the cipher punks were not ambitious enough. Uh it's their whole ideology is about fighting the man. Uh and that is not the endgame. Uh that is fighting. That is not winning. Winning is building a better man, building a better system, building a better state. Uh enshrining the laws that protect freedom, protect sovereignty, protect privacy. That is what you want. You don't, you know, the point of the rebellion is not to exist forever in like a Star Wars, uh, you know, just because you get the Empire, you're part of the The point is to set up the new Galactic Republic, right? And have that be better than what you had. The point is freedom. The point is to get rid of the the whole Federation entirely so that we can live free. If we didn't have governments telling us what to do, then we would we'd be able to live as we want. I understand that there's become the government. Like that's just you being a tiny statist. I understand that there's like other like there's like concerns about like how things would work but if you guys read Rothbart he lays all of this out in his books man economy and state the anatomy of the state but what about looking at history as a progression like we might need to go through one stage to get to the next stage to say oh we should all just get rid of the government and don't negotiate and don't create transparent and systems for that reason like like there is I think um if you think the thing about the cy punk movement is they haven't always been the most practical I think there something mean is touching on as well like if we want the movement to succeed, if we want to actually win then we need to build products that people want to use and I think we need to actually uh you know that that is actually how we push the overtone window ultimately maybe even towards anarchism but I don't think we can go straight there from A to B. There's there's steps in between. Yeah, I I agree 100%. I think that's sort of the point of like agorism is you have to sort of you're not going to we're not going to make the government we're not going to get rid of the government through violence or uh you know by voting them out of power. That's not going to happen. You have to make them obsolete the same way that uh you know Netflix made Blockbuster obsolete. You have to create a better product, a better experience. Better government. No, a better experience for society. No, but but a better government is the in between step to to agorism. No, no, that's we we don't want any government. Yeah, okay, be great if the if the zookeeper is like more benevolent to the animals. Wonderful. But like I'm trying to get out of the zoo. I'm trying to go back to the jungle. I want to live free. You know what I mean? I don't want to have political parasites telling me what to do. So to add on to that point, I think to a certain extent if enough animals escape the zoo in order to keep the rest of them, the zoo has to become nicer. So I definitely think I definitely think the rest of them they have to be nicer. Well, that's what I'm saying is I I think that um there people skipping to the end goal, you know, skipping intermediary steps does sort of push the Overton window for the rest of us kind of in the middle. And so there's definitely like I you know, look, you can over different approaches to the same problem. And I think that they're all needed. I think that we might disagree on exactly what's the most efficient path, but I I don't really want a world where we're just pursuing one path to freedom because I don't think I think that carries a certain amount of risk that that doesn't work out or gets co-opted. I like plenty of paths to go. One one of the coolest uses of privacy tech is like making democracy way better uh because you can uh do actual anonymous voting. like we all still use like paper ballots in like you know basic databases that can be tampered with and none of this is a great system. uh but uh using you know zero knowledge proofs uh you can register anonymously uh verify that you have a valid uh identity credential issued by the government and then uh vote in a election without revealing which way you voted but people trust the math and so they can count the votes properly and so I'm pretty excited about the uses of privacy tech that just make society better. It's really incredible that you guys got fired up towards the end and now we're five minutes, six minutes over time. Sorry, Mark. We could go on for a couple more hours, but we can't because of time constraints. Thank you very much for being here. Thanks everyone. Thank you.