# Unmasking Crypto's Moloch by Kris Is [Gitcoin Citizen] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 26:07
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-C-i11RN0L2U
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-i11RN0L2U

## Description

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

Kris https://x.com/krrisis

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

## Transcript

okay and here we are uh welcome everyone uh I am Chris and today I want to talk to you about why we are here I'll be juggling a little bit the clicker and my laptop um but so three years ago I gave a presentation uh in Paris uh called mad as hell uh and it was a a kind of Call to Arms like I feel today everyone is mad but it's not exactly what I meant um the current polarization in the world is pretty paralyzing also to myself um but at the same time I feel very much awake and this presentation is about why this matters to be awake so every single line of code every interaction um you need to be aware of the ripple effect that you are causing so I wish this for everyone that you feel awake that you're aware uh that you are accountable uh for the past the present the future everything that you contribute to so I am just a node in a network but I want to tell you my story because um maybe this resonates for some of you so I was born in 1980 so I'm like a total dinosaur totally super old for crypto um but so I witnessed the dawn of the global internet and what struck me is how permissionless it felt so anything I could think of I need a little computer like software for my computer someone had already built it I could just find it on the internet anons helped each other out it was beautiful it was glorious um and yeah it was so nice to see this permissionless uh times evolved of course but still at at the time I um I was inspired and Maxs were a joke at the time so I wanted to work for Microsoft so I did so I I believed in their mission of realizing your potential putting a PC on everyone's desk and so I worked there for five years and it was fantastic I really learned about hierarchies how you can push people down how you can extract maximum value for the shareholders and really not care about your customers at all and I was not totally convinced just yet so I did a number of other Silicon Valley type jobs and then uh I tldr is basically I went really to the belly of the Beast and um I got it all I got a great car great salary it was all fantastic I had everything but I felt nothing and then I burnt out I really burnt out and then after a while I discovered crypto and that was so different suddenly there was hope and there like salary-wise I had nothing but I felt everything and so I started at swarm City for the people who remembered this like it's long time ago in the beginning uh 2017 um there was oh sorry not keeping up with my slides here um but so yeah I worked um for them and then there was the parity hack and um at the parity hack we lost all of our funds but I didn't care I just continued working for free because there was this visceral idealism uh we were building radical alternative systems it was cypherpunk it was Anarchist it was powerful it was really beautiful but then yeah you know at some point I did need to move on everyone else did and uh I went to forg it this was totally my post money era I didn't even have money to make rent but the same Vibe it was like really the opposite side of the spectrum like I started working at gitcoin then and like coming from Microsoft it was really something else and then these damn airdrops started to happen like I had some tokens and then I had some more tokens and then suddenly I felt Rich um and that that was a weird feeling and I started to feel safe I SAU and I started to Thrive and that was something new there was abundance and it was really a nice feeling never had that but then you know then this happened and uh that was uh uh not such a great moment I lost all my savings a life-changing amount of money was just doing my job Frozen the headlights and this moment symbolizes a lot for me so I was I was angry that I I lost uh my money that there was still such a centralized system that that this was possible uh that someone uh that or just a few people could still rockpool so many people um that we and this was the proof that we had to continue building this was just a start but at the same time I went deeper and I discovered that my anger was also linked to the fact that my greed clashed with their greed and that was a very important moment for me so um I went through like two of these cycles of like hope and disillusionment so first from like open-source beginnings of the internet to hyper individualistic Cutthroat companies and then like this new world with strong values to everything about short-term value so anyways this is just like my story but I'm sure you all have yours for people who have been here for a while and I am ready for their third act so I want to try something else I want to like have a nervous breakthrough uh and for that I think we need a Clarity of mission why why are we here so for me uh the mission is for all of us to thrive the people and the planet for this we need to sustain and grow the subculture that we have and expand it further out but we also need to be honest with ourselves we need to acknowledge that there is greed and we need to medicate so that we don't succumb to it so first let's define the problem space a little bit like this guy said greed is good um and I think I think that is not correct like greed just is it is it is real and we need to face this we need to face our own demons so I want to talk a little bit about the Legacy world and the similarities with this new one that we are building because how can we build new systems if we don't fully grasp the existing ones already existing one so this tweet kind of sums it up for me like d is the primary culture in ethereum and that's kind of ironic because we set out to fight Wall Street we set out to do the to build the exact opposite so we need to be aware like this is this critical juncture that we can either overtake the world or be overtaken by it the stakes could not be higher and success is definitely not guaranteed so I see these three attack factors and I want to go into all of them a little bit so this is some the things that fuel everything in the outside world and it's invading us at a hyper fast speed we cannot get sloppy um and we need to be very aware so first let's talk about corporate so if you go outside you if you still do that um you might have noticed that the world is not looking so great uh the Western project is failing the US Empire is entirely collapsing there are interdependent catastrophes and we haven't witnessed this in Generations so I had like a lot of stri slides but like this kind of like sums it up like you know you all know this like but we just don't want to know we want to look away but we shouldn't we really have to confront the fact that like late stage capitalism is just eating Us Alive and all systems are failing so just as a uh simple annoying reminder like one% these are some simple numbers like 1% of the richest people own 46% of all the wealth in the world um the 50 50% of the entire worldwide population has less than 1% of the wealth in the world a CEO makes 350 times the salary of the average worker which is like tenfold as it was like in the 70s big oil has made 20 220 billion dollars of net profit in the last year while people's um like um their their power bills have just exploded and there's about 3,000 billionaires who together own1 trillion declared it's probably a lot more and we're not even talking about crypto so there's that situation and com that is then next to this you also have the war economy so in the past year we've spent about $2.5 trillion doll on War and the biggest war economy in the world has been pushing for this and things are escalating just a little bit so we'll see what the next us Administration uh will do here but even if they don't do anything uh the ball is rolling a lot of things are happening and all of this is the economy uh it's the most powerful force on Earth so what do we do with this um this is one thing that I still wanted to tell you about the corporation which is like uh um a great documentary that you can find on YouTube as well and it tells us why all of this is happening uh everything is driven by this company ethos and it Compares uh a company with uh the characteristics of a psychopath and this Vibe is also in this world uh the only difference is like we are doing this on steroids there are no protections um and most people and that that is something that I find very interesting and remarkable most people have never even worked in a company so they are not very aware of how this is invading us so I see this widening Gap uh between on the one hand side like these cute little Regens who the activists like the hippies who want to make the world a better place and then we have the Deens and it becomes wider and wider and people are also proud of this they're not hiding that their Deen it's like a label they're carrying because most people came into this space because of value with a small V so that is that means that people don't see the difference anymore between the numbers the values on the screen versus what is actually valuable for human beings so um I I see this mentality all the time that we are capitalist creatures by nature but we are not that is something that we have been programmed to be in the beginning money was just a unit of value that we used to track debts and to make trades uh but then we started trading the units themselves and this poisoned everything and then now um oh sorry I forgot the slide and then now we have this programmable money and and we have all the energy is here this is what we're building um and we have a lot of um information isymmetry to put it politely everything is focused on this short-term gain Focus so if we look at the future I think the worst possible outcome is that we go into deep economic War Warfare the mass value extraction increases even more uh the governments won't be able to regulate anything and they will just join the circus they will buy they will hoard the tokens as well and my nightmare is that we just have a bunch of network states that arm up that protect themselves and there's even more poverty and the people are dying even more indust streets than they currently are and I think that's not what we have to do I think there's an alternative um the idea of that the market will just figure it out we've tried it as well in the past it is not working but we're not seeing this because everyone is speaking in tongues they have like different languages we all have our bags and it's like it's going to be great it's going to be awesome everything's well but it's not this is truly the troan the Trojan Horse so we need to design for this greed and we can do this with mechanism to realign the incentive so there's stuff like bonding curves there's the token engineering Academy that has done a lot of great work they stopped last week I assume it's because they ran out of funding but we need more of these all of these people who are working on realigning incentives focusing on on that that those are the the public goods so money is just a tool to an end um and that's what we need to be aware of personal wealth will come if your community has wealth then as a byproduct your personal wealth with will come we've seen the slide in the beginning there is enough wealth available we just need to redistribute just a little bit but yeah we are asleep at the wheel we're not really like aware of this and that's why I this is an important addition to me and that often is underestimated we're all addicts I know I am um so people have never felt so lonely and isolated the algorithms feed you a lot of content all the time even a lot of quality cont content but we're all distracted we are hyper consuming we have supercomputers pointed at our brain and so we're all sedated we're asleep most of the people are very deep asleep the algorithms have one we are offline we are harmless and we are part of the largest social engineering experiment in the world um people are angry they're frustrated they're depressed they're ready for blood and together with the economy this is a powder keg and I honestly don't think that any entrepreneur or politician is going to save us sorry but we've tried that either we let it's going to kill us or we're going to kill others and like you know the one does not exist uh but we all together we can make a change that's what ethereum is about that's what blockchain is about so we need to align and we need a mission for me the mission is really about flourishing and so crypto connects and that this is by Design so we cut out the middleman with blockchain so we actually can help people reach their Highest Potential I truly believe that that this is what we can do but first we need to thrive ourselves so just as I mentioned that there's three attack factors um there's also three antidotes so for me this one is the most underestimated we are a community we are a very strong subculture we have the best memes we have the best Geeks um and we are activists with unstoppable Tech and that is the best weapon of them all so Community is immunity this is the antidote to all the algor algorithms um and I really think we are not capitalist creatures we are social creatures we are Community Seekers we want to belong and we have proved in the past already that we are a community like look at the merge and we're still going to Surge and Verge and Purge and Splurge uh and companies can simply not build this uh it depends on favors it depends on going the extra mile this is not money driven this is culture driven and we already have this culture we just need to nurture it so on this one I've changed my opinion so many times I've worked in multiple Dows and it's horrible it's slow it's messy uh and but you cannot build what you do not live but people are burning out at quick speed everyone is tired and personally also very tired so we like need to nourish the people we need people people we need coaches um I really think that just giving people higher and higher self iies and Dows is just toxic uh it attracts the wrong kind of people it attracts the sociopaths it drives out the Geeks and the missionaries and we need more missionaries instead of the mercenaries so I don't think we are going to get there with uh more kpis and gmv um but we need to bring value with a capital V but okay so we need values and principles great but where do we start and I think this is what this conference is all about the work work has already been done so we have the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace which is a very simple old text still stands we have the cipher Punk Manifesto now we have the ethereum cipher Punk Manifesto as well and these are just like some of the core principles in there and it's as simple as that and why start there why focus on this because it's still all about the internet it's what can get us out of this eternal cycle of Empires rising and falling it's what connects us and this time it is Unstoppable so if we just live by these pillars um and we call out the people who are making exceptions to these pillars to these rules um then we can get there we just need to ship okay so we got um communities we communities we had values but even people who agree on these points they still disagree because we're all so different we have our own background we have our own knowledge um our traumas our own habits and I think we can fix this by just again more awareness by taking the time you can learn by unlearning and I think we can do this by reconnecting on three levels uh the intellectual the physical and the spiritual so let's start with the intellectual um I have learned by from so many people out far far outside of the space I read all the time and I still feel so stupid um so I personally rarely tweet um and it's surreal to me to see all these K's posting the weirdest stakes and getting like thousands of likes I'm like what what what are you talking about this this misses so much context um so I think more of the people in this space in this very event should be tweeting creating podcast hold salons get together and educate we need people to learn we need to infuse also our subculture with everything that has been done for thousands of years we need to bring in this existing knowledge and the people with this knowledge and we need to incentivize this so this weekend in funding the commons one Bennett was talking about uh that every project should give 10% of their B budget to uh public goods well I hope we can give at least like two or 3% to adding context and culture because that is a public good so we need to uh cross-pollinate more on this level and so I'm putting myself out there and I'm just throwing in some tip tips of some things that have inspired me so here are some documentaries samsara is a very old one but it's beautiful and it goes on into the cyclical nature of everything and if you are really aware of how cyclical everything is in history and around us only then you can get to the next level then you can make it to Nirvana the second one most people probably know but when I look online it feels that that nobody knows this so if you have watched it please watch it again uh Century of the self is available it's also a pretty old one I think from the 80s or '90s it's available for free on YouTube and it uh goes very deep into all the psychoanal analytic techniques that are being used to manipulate us to control the public opinion and Foster consumerism and this goes so deep again I feel some people are not very aware of how influenced we are all the time then um movie wise I'm a big movie buff buff so I could put so much but I had to definitely put in V4 Vendetta I could have also put in Fight Club and a matrix but these things still I'm still enthusiastic about these movies they're Classics and it's about people coming together and rising up and that's what we are doing um there is a power in numbers and on that note like if you have seen the remake of The Matrix like for me that is so funny if it wouldn't be so sad like how the Matrix has ever actually overtaken The Matrix so like give it a give it a watch and cry um the zone of interest is about the Holocaust and it's a a very good movie to be aware of how we are all just taking care of our family and thinking of our own short-term needs it's such a beautiful way of expressing how it's always business as usual and how we are all just humans dark wat is a little Jam of a movie but you I could have just as well put um Aaron Brockovich there and that's like oh how it takes just one person to speak up to stand up and that is also what this movement is about books um I could put so many books here uh but I I noticed that many people know don't know this first one um but I see it as a perfect allegory for blockchain it's about a world where there is hyper transparency everyone imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everyone in a way it's the opposite of the Privacy conference but you should read it it's actually not and it does a lot to the human psyche The Fountain Head um I have a lot of respect for uh in Rand about the power of the individual um but then at the same time uh I put in this one walkway which goes talks about the spirit of Burning Man of collaboration and then Ursula lwin is actually about the power of socialism and I wanted to put these two on there because especially for the more us Centric people in the room it's always a dirty word but the thing is you can Jo suppose it there can be good in many things and two things can hold hold Truth at the same time so and that is what we need to focus on more culture more learning from each other then um these are just some of the links that inspired this very presentation so I put it under uh intellect as well and I want to see what inspires you this is just a conversation starter so like what inspires you on a daily basis what drives you and take the time to listen to absorb so then um physical the physical connection is so important it was beautiful in Chang maai to see as I've never seen it before so many residences pop up so many people get together and this is where the deeper alliances are formed this is where we become in a way I hope a peace Army plus next to this you have a lot of permanent hubs that are popping up all over the place so we are getting there if you don't have a local Hub just yet build one there are endless examples of how you can do this and um we need them we need to get together then also just as a recommendation like hug people like it personally changed my life if anyone later around or at any of the moments and you want to hug just come over like very very important um then talking about connection could not miss out on this like you all need therapy we we all need therapy I've been have taking therapy my entire life I've been making so many lousy decisions in my life uh but I'm owning them and so we you know we need to be humble um we all got lucky all the people who are here got lucky and we need to be hyper hyper aware of our own trauma I really believe this um because we will code in our mistakes or thoughts if we are not aware that we have a shadow side and we all do you need to be able to deconstruct yourself before you build so all of this that I've been talking about is what vitalic calls like the social layer uh we need to build holistically toward a more open and free Society so to some extent you can enforce this culture um and San where pure incentives don't work and very often they don't so my call to action is like let's make a let's make ethereum great again or let's make it great or cool and let's counter the attack factors with a focus on on Community Values connection that is the secret sauce and we will get there if we all see the importance of spreading this subculture and for me this event in itself and the many events are to proof like how strong this subculture is we need to thrive to survive so this is an evolution it's not a revolution it's it's naive to believe that you can save the world um but it's also naive to believe that you cannot change it one by one it's not a war the wars will happen without us uh but it is a dance it's an evolution and they are fighting us at the same time and they will keep fighting us harder and harder there will be some Blood on the Dance Floor but I think it's very important that we keep dancing so why are we here why are you here I want you to be aware to know why and to have some hope and to spread it so I love this quote that a friend told me like we are not born into this world we are born out of this world no one is free until we are all free we are all one so let's integrate our molok and greed is real but we can all Thrive so let's connect thank you you [Applause]