# "Gossip protocol" by Danny O'Brien // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025 - Speakers: Danny O'Brien - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 22:14 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, congress, ethereum cypherpunk, buenos aires, argentina, vitalik buterin, privacidad, filecoin, foundation - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-FPUi47Gt6bE - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPUi47Gt6bE ## Description Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress by Web3Privacy Now is the world's largest cypherpunk and human rights event. 4500 people gathering in Buenos Aires to celebrate privacy with internet freedom leaders like Richard Stallman, Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, and Eva Galperin. Join us in building a free internet for all. Website: https://web3privacy.info/ Congress site: https://congress.web3privacy.info/ ## Transcript This talk is about good no feedback. Um about gossip protocols. Who here um is interested in uh lip p2p? I I do work at the Falcoin Foundation which is connected to IPFS peerto-pe uh protocols in particular how they communicate using a a gossip code pro protocol. They went okay great because this talk is nothing about that. Um I realized we we were very we we threw this together at last moment and went oh this will be a great metaphor gossip protocol and then I just suddenly realized looking at all the other presentations oh no people are going to get exactly the wrong context here. This is going to be about uh revolutionary movement building in the cypher punk community and the function of uh gossip uh within that. Um I I'm I I've been a activist for uh [ __ ] 30 years. Um and uh I I to be honest um I I have done a bunch of stuff in privacy but I think generally speaking my heart is in sort of the um the main thing I've been doing is sort of free speech. Um uh so you know boo um I one of the things that's always interesting is that that you know you work together and it's often the same people and people often think of free speech and privacy as uh as as opposed in some ways. Um and also I think that they they're somewhat counteryclical. So one of the things that that happens is that uh free speech comes to the forefront and becomes a very popular thing and then uh it regresses and privacy becomes the more important thing. We had a term that we used which was uh downhill battle. So, you know, uphill battles, right? You're you're fighting against the common uh belief systems of where what you're dealing with. And downhill uh battles are where the technology and the culture enables you to do that. And free speech is very interesting in that respect, right? Because for about the first decade of digital rights activism, uh free speech was a downhill battle, right? You go into I would hang out with parties like this and I'd be go, you know, people would say, "Oh, what do you do?" And I'd say, "Well, I don't like to talk about it, but actually I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech organization." And then we go, "Oh, great. I love you guys. Oh, that's amazing." And then there was a sort of transition about 2012 where I'd start saying, you know, I work for I work for a free speech organization. And people go, "Huh, so are you uh you're a Nazi?" Well, no. I mean, obviously I fight for your right to call me a Nazi, but no, I'm not in fact a Nazi. And and it it's fascinating to watch these loops going through in time. And I think it's important because I do think right now, even though it doesn't necessarily feel that way, we're in the downhill battle of the privacy fight, right? For the last few years, even though uh you lose in so many cases, the idea of privacy has been much easier to convey to people. People have a generic kind of anxiety. They know something's being stripped away. You know, uh time was where the the thing that you would hear and you will still hear it is well, you know, I've got nothing to hide. And now people are sort of like I would like to have something to hide, right? Like everything has been stripped and broadcast across the whole thing. I would just like a little part of the my life that you know Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know about. Um and one of the things that happens is so you're at this peak and you don't realize you're at this peak and then and then things start pulling away from you, right? And people start turning turning against you or your opponents. And I think one of the things that binds the free speech and the privacy movement together is not only a sort of commonality understanding about how technology can transform uh those civil liberties and encode those civil liberties. It's also that we have a common set of opponents, right? Authoritarians perhaps paradoxically despise free speech and despise privacy. So that's one of the things that sort of bonds you together. Um and uh uh uh uh but when the culture is turning against one of those things, you sort of have a question about what you want to do, right? Um because uh you you have a choice, right? You you can either kind of double down on your principles, right? You you you turn into a a free speech absolutist or a privacy absolutist even though everybody around you is pointing to the dangers of these things. Um and uh and that means you get to preserve that value through that curve, right? And so now as we look at the cipher punk movement which has been going on for 20 30 years um you know you you have that core of sort of not extremists but of purists let's say who sort of defended themselves even in the other things. Craig, >> I joined. >> You joined it the list? >> Yes. >> Three three years ago. >> 33 years ago. I was going to say three years ago. That was a little late, but uh 33. Yeah, there you go. Today. >> Oh, okay. Um uh Craig and I know each other from the cipher punks list. So, um and a few other things. Um so, uh uh I I am not one of those activists, right? As you can probably tell, I'm kind of somewhat wishy-washy. Um, so uh there's going to be some name dropping if I have enough time in this uh in the in this thing. Um, and I want to convey that this is not named dropping in order to embellish myself in any way or promote myself. In fact, it's a weird kind of name dropping where nobody comes out of it good, including me, right? I'll say some funny story, oh, I'm hanging out with so and so. And you'll come away from it going, you're both kind of creepy. So um uh the so my first name drop and frankly I've been riding on his coattails is Corey Doctoro and I used to um did I mention I used to work at the F uh I the um uh I used to work I used to work with Corey and Corey is super interesting because Corey as you know pioneer of big who who read Little Brother when they were a kid who in shitifies the conversations at any point. So Corey, so Corey had my job uh before me at EFF, which is to be activist. And there was a single activist and Corey was the other. I would always be writing these things going, "Oh, we highly disapprove of the, you know, somebody coming and uh and and Corey on his first day uh gave his first draft of a press release from the EFF and the editors at EFF editor came up and said, "So this is this is I mean fantastic pros. I'm not sure we can say uh cod up Hollywood weird fat cat in in a press release. I was like why? Because we're a law firm. Okay, we can't like what? And and also you know you don't want to alienate people and stuff like that. But the other my other point here is that Corey talks a lot if you read his stuff and you absolutely should read his stuff um particularly for phrases like that talks a lot about movements and coalitions right so when you have a movement you kind of want that central value right but you're often forming coalitions with other people right and in that situation you you want to have a shared value maybe a shared opponent right um and you have sort of a softer feeling to your to your alloys and and the reason again there is reason behind all of this and I will have a technical element. The technical bit is coming up. I promise if you come here for lip B2B I have a small technical thing. We're 30 seconds away with it. Bear with me as we go through the soft fluffy stuff. Right? So, um, uh, I see in a movement like this and you see all these signs, right, that say, you know, cipher punks from the '9s, me and Craig and people even older than us, the neocipher punks, right? You are in coalition with the past, right? This is not there is a movement line, but you are very different from those people. And now I'm going to tell you more gossip to try and convey how different you are because frankly coming to a thing called cipher punks having met the original cipher punks I'm sitting there going oh boy I'm not sure I mean they're not dead right we're not that old but like they would be it would be weird. Okay so I used to be a journalist um in um uh a British journalist and I went in 2000 uh and I used to hang out with the cipher punk people. It was great. Um and uh I went to a party in a Silicon Valley which is not as exciting as it sounds. Um it was just in a suburban home in Santa Clara and then with some cipher punks um uh obviously like can I give them names? So uh has anybody heard of Lucky Green there? You see Craig knows. Right. So that that's the kind of name dropping I'm doing here. I'm giving the names of people who you've never heard of and they're pseudonyms anyway because they're cipher punks. Anyway, I'm sitting with all these people and they come up to me and they know I'm a journalist and they're a bit mad with you may know that the cipher punks were libertarians. I don't know whether that got through in the press release. not coked up Holly weird libertarians, just libert well but anyway um so uh uh and they were mad with there was a libertarian journalist called Declan Mccullik right and he was the most he was he was you know back back when you know I don't know back when libertarian was was new and interesting um uh uh he was the libertarian uh journalist but they were mad at him because I I I don't know I guess he suggested that you should pay your taxes or something. But anyway, so they were mad at him and so they approached me and they'd read my my my stuff and they said, "Danny, we'd like you to be our journalist." Now, this is what I mean about a coalition, a movement, and the importance of values, right? Is that that like if you do want someone I understand, right? Is that five minutes? >> Really? Okay, good. Right. We standed at half past. What? Watch these people fight amongst themselves. I'm going to talk some more. So, okay. Uh uh so, uh so that's not how you talk to a journalist. Even if you want to get them on your side, right? You don't go up to them like I mean maybe Donald Trump does, but like if I was to come up to you and go, "Hey, I've got a good story for you and if you print that story, you'll be my journalist." Right? It's not it's not going to pay out that way. So, I was like a little freaked out like that. And then um uh uh to add weirdness to this situation, um they put a gun on the table. And um uh I'm British, right? Um and so I've never really seen a gun and I don't know what the social nicities in the same way as they didn't know to say, you know, you're our journalist. I I I was not a great understander of what the symbolism of putting a gun on the table was. And so um you know uh I did the what I thought was the obvious thing is to show admiration for the gun. And so I'm going oh yeah this is great and and you I mean luckily I it was unloaded otherwise you none of you would have been here but but like watching so many proud libertarians hit the deck of a Santa Clara thing was um was amazing. So uh so those are the cipher punks but like you obviously don't get to hear those stories very often right because in a movement the thing that that carries over time like digital data is things like manifestos right so uh the the the values that you get are from uh those those elements and this is gossip right this is I mean this is this is trivia right this is the special trivia corner of the whole thing. Um and and trivia is trivial. Gossip is trivial, but it can also be dangerous, right? So, let me give you another example. Um Tim May, um uh head cipher punk, I guess. Um he didn't write the cipher punk manif what did he write? He the crypto anarchist manifesto, right? So, Tim uh was a huge poster to Usenet. Do people know what Usenet is? Kind of. It was sort of like I don't know how can I it was like >> it was like it w it was like if there was only one forum in the world right simultaneously and um it was on the web that was Usenet and he was a [ __ ] poster on Usenet and everybody in the cipher punk community were very concerned about privacy but did not think that Usenet would be preserved forever. So, if you uh search for Tim May, um and it's quite hard to do now because Google bought up the archives and then Googled it. But if you do search for Tim May and then type in a word that I can't say uh and I can barely type right at this point in our technological development, this word is so bad that I think it's blocked at three levels of the technology stack. Right? Like it won't autocomplete. Um it it probably won't get you past your router in many services. And I think at this point, you know, probably Misilla um uh will automatically deny you. Um if you saw that, and I've mentioned this to journalists in the past, right? I've said, okay, if you want the full context here, you can look for this story, but at the same time, I know that story in some way, and I don't know if it was Tim May posting this stuff, right? This is the other thing because he didn't sign with a a key because cipher punks write code, but they rarely execute it. Um uh that is that um uh uh uh but the um but it's it's toxic, right? Like and we we we you know part again of a movement is is if you build a movement on heroes and and that's what we're doing, right? When we have all these pictures up of all these noble people, right? And we go come here because you get to see, you know, Richard Storman, God bless your hearts. um that um uh then when those heroes are found to have flaws via gossip, you have two choices, right? Well, you have a number of choices, but there are two big ones, right? One one is you deny the gossip, right? You deny the humanity of those heroes because you want to preserve the idea. And the second one is um uh that you dism you throw away the idea because the the person that you were brought into this the person that drew you emotionally woohoo into the situation um uh turned out to just be a normal broken uh human being. Oh, I forgot the technological bit. I'm sorry for those of you who are just waiting for this. So, if you do want to preserve things into the future, um it this is great. This is going to sound like sound like a sponsored podcast thing, but I just sat there and going I got to stick something technical in a bit. Um, have a look into Dand. Dand the random number generator for the future. No, Dand is a uh uh uh explain it. Bumble fudge. >> It's Yeah, it's distributed entropy. You could contribute to that entropy. And there's a really nice set of toolkits. Now it's five minutes. Thank you. um uh that uh uh you can use to time lock encryption. So if you really did want to leave a message for the generations and they know it was from you rather than sitting there going did Tim May really say the thing with the hard R. Um then you can uh lock it in time and space and so that's very interesting and you may be able to use that into their applications. Anyway, now back to the good stuff. Right. So um uh so what do we do with this gossip and in particular also gossip occupies a weird space in both free speech and privacy right like so in free speech if you look at constitutions around the world including I think the Argentinian constitution it's like free speech good dissing people bad attacking people's reputation and this is ultimately I think why the free speech movement kind of curved back down is because the First time I realized we were in trouble was uh South Korea. South Korea really led the path for internet adoption and they were some of the first people that came up with the phrase meetat search engine which we now kind of think of as doxing. But a meat search engine was when someone was randomly plucked out and the the collective kind of found out everything about them. And that so that was one of the the first impacts of this. So gossip in many ways undermined free speech and gossip is also one of those fundamental challenges with privacy um policies, right? Because I is gossip the thing you want to preserve because you want people to like communicate on signal securely? Is it the is it the value you want to convey or is gossip a violation of privacy? Is it taking personal data and then shimmying it off in other directions? Is this the thing are we in coalition with gossip, right? or is it one of our opponents? Um, now I'm just going to leave you with sort of what I I think gossip is how knowledge propagates, right? I think that one of the things that digital technology provided us uh is a possibility of conveying not just a dominant narrative, not just the story of our heroes, but also the story of our flaws and have those on an equal basis. Right? And uh that has led to a confusion. the babble we are in now uh of viewpoints but I think it's the thing that will give us a balance between the heroes and the ideas right because you'll be able to hopefully understand the flaws of the humanity but still be able to um to to bear the ideas down um so thank you for listening to my um strange uh voyage through the past um I I the last one thing I just want to point out is Um uh I I sort of said that gossip was sort of the downfall of the free speech move, but I don't think that's true. I think the place where it it it really it really hits you is not when uh uh your opponents use the flaws of your leaders or supposed leaders against you. It's when they use your own ideas against you. Right? So, going back to the first part of this conversation, you know, there's an awful moment where you go, I'm really into free speech, so are the Nazis. Is is is is my idea bad because a Nazi licked it once, you know? Um uh and that's the point that is very hard to handle because that's in some ways you understand the flaws of other people, right? And you can either forgive them or condemn them. uh but when somebody starts using your ideas rather than opposing your ideas but adopting your ideas and then weaponizing them against the fundamental values you have that's the point where you have a real crisis of conscience and I want to point this out just because I think this is what's going to happen now in the privacy movement right and it's already happening right right now you have some like clear battle lines right if you're not fighting chat control then what are you doing here right like you you've got to do that sort of thing but And so GDPR, how long got 1 minute, 2 minutes? While you're looking Okay, so GDPR people, I used to hang out with the GDRPR people. It's somehow not as cool as the gun toing cipher punks, right? I was like, "Oh, yeah, I know those Brussels uh bureaucrats pretty well." They uh um and anyway, they're also not they were fine. If you if you love the GDPR, they were fine. I have no dirt on the GDPR raers. I mean, they were Green Party, so their snacks sucked. I mean, nice vegan curries, but like the little fake chocolate things disgusting. Anyway, okay, I gota I got to wrap it up. Okay, so GDPR came through. One of the biggest victories in a regulatory space of the privacy movement, I think, of the last 20 years, right? Free speech, sure, you you go kids. Great. Um, it was very shortly after that that the Hungarian government began to use the GDPR against uh people speaking out. And their argument was it's gossip again, right? That like if you say this leader did this thing 10 years ago, right? Is that a violation of their data protection? Do they somehow own the idea of their own personal data? Because we talk a lot about ownership. And if they own that data, does that mean that they can reach into your brain and prize it out? Right? And I mean, it sounds ridiculous now, but a lot of the things that we were threat modeling about our free speech rhetoric became the things that they used to undermine our free speech rhetoric. So, I want you to watch out for that because it's not you you don't have to worry about your opponents, right? You don't have to worry about the flaws of your allies. you have to worry about your own faith in your ideas when your opponents adopt them and use them against you. So, thank you very much. Thank you for bearing with me with the time. And um uh I think the most important thing is like um when you think about heroes and leaders and things like that, the important thing you should come away with don't [ __ ] trust anyone on the main stage. All right?