# Sifrpunk by Wassim Alsindi [0xSalon] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Speakers: [Wassim Alsindi](https://streameth.org/speakers/wassim-alsindi)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 30:10
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-LguumxmzRKo
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LguumxmzRKo

## Description

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

Wassim https://x.com/WassimAlsindi
0xSalon https://0xsalon.pubpub.org

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

## Transcript

okay first an advert because we're in the privatized world of web 3 um we doing some stuff at a small Art Gallery the collective that I'm part of called zerox salon and that is happening both on Saturday afternoon from 3: till 500 and the Friday afterwards on the 22nd in the afternoon and those are some weird projects we might have time to talk about in a minute but it's not the reason I'm talking to you today uh one other piece of advertising which is in the main Devcon conference in the next few days there's a exhibition of mix of artists and sci-fi writers uh did some projects I have a poem set to some panels included called atude in it's a study on Infinity as with reference respect to the infinite Garden theme of ethereum and Devon this year so here's a poem I wrote kind of about Infinity here's a stanza of it to cleanse your ears out before we start the infinite Guardian the notion of infinity embedded within the Logics of the transcendental outside presupposes and necessitates the existence of finitude as its corollary there is no Infinity without infinitude one cannot exist without the other serving can't Alpha and Omega abstraction limitation prophecy hagiography Authority ontologically make ethereum great again the age of aquinar Dawns a torent of a torrent of liquidity flood broadcast Perpetual swamps Twix Cardinals and cardinality in the in in intellect all right okay here we go here's the talk talk is called suffer Punk and um that's a new word so I'll have to explain what it is there is in like I've tried to write it in Arabic if anyone reads Arabic and I've got that wrong please let me know uh my Arabic is not as good as it should be okay wonderful we're getting like thumbs up from audience that's great I can read and write but I can't I can speak but not read and write okay wonderful so okay we're going to start with a disclaimer because I realized there's a problem with giving this talk here which is um people will disagree with what I'm going to talk about and I also disagree with some of it I'm just taking an extreme position to illustrate what some people think and it's not what I think completely or is it I don't know believe that open to debate this is a provocation exploring an extremely specific purist opinion that I don't wholly share but think it's an interesting area to at least explore many might find these ideas objectionable and that's kind of the point I don't hold these positions myself I would not die on these Hills LOL okay and then I want to show you like I have some prior form on like let's say provoc Pro provocations and agitations so here's some memes I used to make under the clandestine Alias of the Byzantine business school in 2017 to 2019 in the early days of ethereum and some of these are not kind to what ethereum was doing back then which we're going to get to in a minute okay here's my this my biograph called slide I found this stuff uh quite early on I was a sincere reformist kind of researcher trying to build tools and do make theories that improve uh what I saw happening in the space then something changed and now I'm irony poisoned and blackpilled so maybe we'll get into that who knows maybe you can guess okay then like a few things that I've done that are kind of like Source material uh for the stuff we're going to talk about in part so a year or so ago I co-wrote with my friends Max hampon and Paul zidler the forward to the key acceleration is text capitalism's transcendental Time Machine by Anna Greenspan it's a Booker version of her PhD thesis which came out the turn of the century so I know there's lotss of talk about a A and B A and C A and D AC here but like I don't know if how many people here use those terms without having read any of the key texts or thought about these theories beyond the Aesthetics of them these are in essence theories of time I would suggest you read a primer like this one on the screen if you want to know more okay I also wrote for the Journal of agorism which has a bookand on at Devcon on Wednesday you could go get a copy of this magazine and I wrote a thing called necr primitivism Rising for that it's a critique of the social Cult Bitcoin I wrote this also with a project with Max Hamshire and Paul zidler reminiscences of a clock operator and this is like exploring and laying out a new theory of machine time with respect to to blockchains particularly stochastic ones as in proof of work blockchains uh here's a I have an editorial column at the MIT computational law report where I write uh things like this about codee law and chains there's a meme about Pepe on the screen over there and like we're in the East now and in the East Pepe is symbol of freedom in some places not racism and gers like you think from the West so please decolonize your Notions of Pepe before we continue uh wrote for an art context Spike art magazine uh they had a web three issue and this is the feature essay from that the revolution will not be tokenized critiquing nfts and token art at the he of a pipe bubble 22 okay I used to run this MIT Journal cryptoeconomic systems wow this is hard works even less well than ethereum okay and then before that I was doing Fork studies this is as an independent researcher so I had a project called for conomy where I was studying the network splits that happened in uh 16 and 17 between Bitcoin and ethereum as a way initially just to find like for like comparisons that we could do uh we could study an analytical lens I was mixing data science and epistemology I now realize I thought I was doing computer science back then computer scientists didn't agree okay uh can I get a GM GM okay good morning GM GM mornings are good this is a reference to greetings among Bitcoin and blockchain users and followers on social media this joke such as it is refers to the value of getting involved in a given crypto Finance proposition early on and expectations for a bright future I think that's one of the things that motivates a lot of people in a place like devcom suffer Punk come on back all right so Cipher Punk like I'm sure somebody else will talk about the linguistic origins of this but I thought I would just do a rough treatment of it so the word Cipher is derived from the Arabic word safur which means zero um and so I thought we would just trace the history of this concept of zero seems to have well let's start from the you know nearer history so in the 1200s uh Fibonacci and others transliterated the term uh the Arabic term of cifer into Latin as zium and Greek as zium uh Z cifra then into Ziro or zeper and then towards zero and Cipher so remember that zero is a key concept here nothingness or a void um adds nothing leaves things unchanged or withholding even a negation if you multiply by it uh to silence to invoid in to hide okay we know some of these like linguistic touch points we hear them at conferences like this okay and then wait oh yeah I think I missed a slide oh no we're going forwards now blockchain's only working one way I need to go back several SL back several slides one more one more yes here thank you um okay then so it looks like this term came from like both Babylonian and Mayan cultures have this concept of a placeholder that's a nothing a void that we know that number four is different than the number 104 for example uh in Sanskrit we have the concept of shya um which seems to have Arisen like about two 2,200 years ago and it was being used as a number several centuries later um the Arabs came through South Asia and then this concept was kind of brought back to the uh West Asia and there were institutions like the betal hekma the house of knowledge in Baghdad where a lot of the great mathemat mathematics that is now the foundation for like Western systems of logic and thought seems to have in part Arisen so um we end up with seur and then sufur got transliterated into Latin and Greek zeper zir as we said earlier and then zero and Cipher okay that's all well and good I think okay I'm going to skip that here's a meem financial growth exponential Financial growth exponential Financial growth on a planet with finite resources and then like probably don't need to explain the universal paperclips game I guess most of you have played it but anyway you uh play this game web based game as a humble paperclip Merchant you convert strips of metal into paperclips then you start getting tools you can automate this process abstract automate and accelerate and you finish the game running a squadron of hyperdimensional intelligences stripping planet or the universe for all available material and that's what I see in today's like Market driven capitalist Logics there's an optimization function it doesn't really care about you or me all right not saying it's good or bad just like it's a seems to be a thing um bodria of simulacrum Fame actually got quite a nice conceptual lens to think about these things from his later work for example symbolic exchange and death I'm going to read you a quote we now live in a world dominated by the free play of the monetary sign that is beyond reference to any real of production or even a monetary reference in the form of a gold standard in this world the idea of a real value of equities of of Commodities of houses of anything is meaningless as what matters instead is not value per se but infinite speculation this new world is marked by the emergence of a brothel of capital not for prostitution but for substitution and commutation again that was bodria writing before all this crypto stuff happened so take a look at his work sometime perhaps okay I'm going to skip that um you know about this stuff the cathedral and the bizar the idea that um horizontality is good peerto peer is good and the hierarchies are bad but what about if there are Cathedrals inside the but bizar implicit power structures what about tragedies of the commons what about insiders of insid aace imites cooption capture and ultimately also the Teran of structurelessness the cognitive load it requires to navigate horizontalization centralized stuff which is what I see in today's ethereum okay next slide oh man can you go forwards one um okay here's another concept that's useful the price of Anarchy this came out of like behavioral economics and packet switching in routing networks um that in the absence of hierarchical coordination there is a price in terms of effort and ultimately you know cost uh to doing things in a more horizontal way and that again is a tension I see in all these networks where um it's just much more convenient to have C uh a small number of authorities whether they're explicit or implicit and a lot of the things I see in ethereum are implicit power structures where we give the appearance of horizontality but you know underneath that or behind that might not be quite so um egalitarian shall we say all right the downward spiral so I wanted to do a little bit of historical uh digging uh archaeological digging because it's now 2024 almost 2025 there's some things that happened very very long ago at the ear in the early days of ethereum which I don't know how many people were around for those things I don't know how much they get talked about now anyway um there was a thing called the Dow like early days of ethereum one of the first major projects on ethereum 2015 16 I guess it came it was launched in the early 16 a bit of a hurry in a bit of a hurry there was some people calling for a The Slowdown on issuing all the contract it was going very fast um and I guess you all know the story so I don't want to tell it too much but there was a exploit there was a vulnerability re-entrancy flaw in the solidity contracts and uh some entity started draining this thing of funds then there was a big question about what what can be done about this thing um and ultimately we know that ethereum split into two factions one well we missed the can we go back one back one yeah um remember the the meme on the right it's very good so pay attention Okay um and so we have now at today at this you know we're at the cipher Punk Congress uh uh cultural researchers talk about a the like Cipher Punk being one of the main vertical of ethereum culture metallic writes things like make ethereum cyer Punk again but I'm going to take the position here remember the disclaimer earlier that ethereum was never Cipher Punk and it can never be Cipher Punk because of what happened in 2016 um and so it's interesting for me that when I looked at this article again this morning um most of the examples in it were Bitcoin stuff and I think last time I checked Bitcoin is not ethereum um so like I think there's a strong argument to say that Bitcoin still embodies quite a lot of cyer punk values at the expense of possibly boiling the oceans with the proof of work maybe all right okay code is law who remembers cod's law okay so in the early days of crypto culture we thought we could build technological substrates and incode our values and Norms into them in a hard way and that would be fine and we'd launch these things into the universe and they would just run unstoppably until the end of time until we started trying to do that and it seemed like like it was kind of messy and imperfect and we had a lot of problems so this concept of cod's law comes from the '90s both from Larry leig who's credited with it usually but also from William Mitchell uh city of city of bits I think his book was called in the 90s before leig so Les's definition is a form of Regulation where private actors might embed their values into the technological artifacts um but that was in the90s when what we all we could really do with this code was put it in places to share online and not really have kind of like living uh autonomous um machines agents ecosystems uh living kind of on their own which is where we seem to be now so you could say the Les Mitchell failed to consider homo blomus this will to economically automate and scale all these things at the expense of everything else and so if Cipher Punk's write code and code is law where does that take us I don't know maybe you know tell me later okay so like there's this concept from um paper by Ben green and salomi Von in the ACT fat conference 2020 called algorithmic formalism or so the paper's called algorithmic realism as a Counterpoint to algorithmic formalism and what I see in the at least in the early days of the blockchain space but there's still somewhat of a Remnant scent of this thing stench in the room is that like the formalist thinking that we can just build these things the code is law idea we can build these things launch them into the world we're not liable for those they're just Cod but they act as if you know they live on till the end of time just by the way like the idea of code is law does anyone know like does the law change law law that changes right so if code is law means code doesn't change because law doesn't change but Law changes because it has to right has to evolve and update and if you don't if you have these formalist structures you're not going to be able to respond to shifting sands of time and space all right uh let's skip the critiques that's fine you can look them up if you want they're good okay I was going to talk about the theum thing the Dow thing okay so like I guess let's just go through the history of it so there was the attack then there was this thing this referendum this carbon vote one token one vote those are the results it was meant to be indicative wasn't meant to be like binding at the time which sounds a bit like the brexit referendum which happened actually around then interestingly so you can see that this thing was like somewhat gerrymandered by large token holders didn't even bother to hide that fact um and then the thing became binding as I recall the idea was to like delete the that exploit as balances and carry on and I don't think it was expected that um some people would not jump ship onto the the new Fork the you know the fork which we call ethereum now in said they would stay on the trajectory of the previous rules in the previous history without the doubt exploiter getting their balances uh deleted through a state transition and then be ended up with two ethereums for a bit that was kind of confusing so I did all these Fork research projects not going to go into it in detail now but this is all like reporting on this stuff from the time at the time um I also spoke at like oh yeah so I also spoke at ethereum Classic Conference in 2018 about this fork-based research and that was interesting because I went to Soul to to do that and I realized it was kind of like not a very big Community around that Network shall we say like just a few people with lots of resources and making it look like a community uh so at least there's a community here around ethereum that is probably what these things are actually about if we're going to be real about it it's about the people that subscribe to these ideas or possibilities rather than a particular set of equations that govern the reality we want to metaphysically manifest anyway um top bright is like from a group chat when they closed all the exchanges down so again cyer punk okay so I found this paper yesterday called the S sensor burden I thought this is just really interesting as a kind of thing to think about I don't actually have any high quality thoughts about it but I wonder if you guys do censorship involves inter eara adopting a certain type of epidemic policy while much has been written on the harms and benefits of free expression and the associated rights thereof the epistemic pre conditions of Justified censorship are relatively underexplored in this paper I argue that examining intrapersonal Norms of how we ought to treat evidence that might come to us over time Can Shed light on interpersonal Norms of evidence generation and sharing that are relevant in the context of censorship the upshot is that justified censorship requires the censor to meet a very high epidemic burden regarding the target propositions importantly one that exceeds knowledge so censorship is a dangerous game and like you don't know where it takes you so that's the point we're making here here's a meme I to show this meme to talks to the bitcoiners because it's kind of like what the bitcoiners think of ethereum and like it's not kind right so uh this location is the Pacific island of Yap and there's the giant rocks the r Stones which are this form of money for this small social group bitcoiners always talk about this because it's a form of like dumb rocks commodity money which is what they see Bitcoin as and like you know for better or worse and so this is um one of the uh people involved in ethereum explaining to a Pacific Islander how an irregular straight trans transition works and uh you know then they're also then looking at their rocks thinking wow we can't do that without rocks interesting okay um okay so e theum classic was the continuation of the you know the Dow hacker timeline and the theorem classic adopted this Credo of K's law as one of the core parts parts of their system of beliefs or whatever you want to say you know slogans um here are the fork studies that I used to do so this is after the fork I'll be studying like the relationship of Earth time to block time how regularly the blocks are coming remember the theum classic was a minority network but both doing proof of work at the time theum classic had a fraction of the hash rate so there was all kinds of funny business that was like potentially going to happen there and the slide on the bottom right is what I told the ETC people in 2018 and I tell you what uh all of them happened and then like when the enormous 51% attack happened in 201 19 or I think 19 uh I got called into a community postmortem of the network disaster management I think several weeks of transactions got reorganized by enormous 51% attack and uh on the call was like 10 people and they were just deciding what to do and I was like oh we're back to the can you guys stop trading again but on the other side okay uh narrative evolutions of um money I think this is uh yeah ethereum over time I'm sure people have done this more recently I just dig out this old slide just to show you that the the ethnographic studies of the network seems to suggest that the social imaginaries around these networks change over time and like this idea of etherum being Cipher Punk is a relatively new kind of adoption of like a cultural um signifier and um just trying to fill in some history for people that might not realize um um things that happened in the past that might contradict those cultural imaginaries okay so here's a little bit from a book that I wrote that never came out uh was called thousands and don'ts dictators cartels and pyramids in P2P systems nobody wanted to publish it or fund it unsurprisingly okay there may exist a series of Shadow power structures allowing powerful insiders to exercise clandestine influence over the path that a network may take through manipulation of impr protocol hand or extra protocol governance mechanisms the emergence of a social civil asymmetric governance Vector whereby stated card rays of network insiders developers marketeers miners gradually consolidate effective power and influence by arbitraging governance mechanisms leveraging the intimate knowledge of their function I wrote that in 2018 and like if you look at what happens in things like defi now I mean I think that's basically what's happening everywhere in defi now there's Stakes there now before it was indirect uh but there was still some egregious examples of like manipulation by insiders uh to kind of put their thumbs on the scales of these governance systems I talk a lot about Dash in particular with their kind of Dow voting funding thing got completely manipulated by insiders okay here's a gate I found in Thailand uh the it's the I'm keeping the Gate of the ethereum garden the infinite ethereum Garden right now like yeah ethereum is everywhere for those to get for those with gates to keep as somebody might say okay I think I'm actually towards the end now so I was going to read you like a short poetic refrain uh this is a real we actually made this glass window it was in an exhibition in Geneva last year by the way the Father the Sun the Merkel fruit Legacy and ligature the Sorcerers of sarens writing hex they can't cash connoisseur of consensus casting their shadow bants Cross aelia Echoes throughout NATO's cave spirits on the Western Wall aats hadrach shum the oasy of Comm communication kryptonians corrupt ography upon the stormy Haven two tonic Knights 2.0 assemble back on their again Schism skitso ski slopes cyber Crusade imaginaries for the click clock generation scribed upon the gates of the bit inquisitor's Palace Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a Bitcoin mine trashes to trash trashes to rashes trust to tr trust to rust bro apocalypse Dow as was foretold there would be a terrible threat questioning life itself something must be done and so it was that starts is born at the Byzantine business school a toxic environment to facilitate adversarial thinking no hope no really no really as the Democracy one cannot engage a barbarian with reason nor wit M and Bailey Mo bailout Citadel boy and Rodney might it be any other way than this the Logics of the reaper encoded within the SE a new Global pillage powered by corrupt ography I think that's it yeah I could do a bit more on bitcoin but I think I might be out of time do I have time four minutes okay we're going to do suffer Punk uh which is Bitcoin right okay so before I'm working on a a book at the moment which is decolonial critique of network States before that I was working on a research project which was the ecological uh economic and social externalities of proof of work in particular Bitcoin since ethereum left the room on that particular debate this is a hermeneutic diagram by Clara coffin from the theater production we made about Bitcoin called the black hole of money uh 2022 okay Bitcoin the UN inhuman monetary system fractals don't care about your feelings systems disregard their externalities formalisms cannot reason about the real aside from a single course difficulty adjustment feedback mechanism bitcoin's proof of work is insensate it cannot care about what happens outside of its borders only that the piper is paid proof of work pits capital and ecology against each other in a prisoners dilemma style Paradox that could tip the balance in favor of a hot house Earth okay Bitcoin hash rate chart number this number definitely mostly goes up um the start of the chart is not even the beginning of the network that's just 2018 already nine years Deep by that point so this number is going up and that is like an indirect frame of reference of the ecological footprint of the energy consumption of Bitcoin remember that Bitcoin doesn't care what energy you give it Just Energy so like in future it might be clean and beautiful energy but might not might not be that okay oh yeah sorry I could go back one thank you yeah and the pictures along the top it's like um mining farms getting flooded in the south of China back in the day or catching on fire uh empty like locations after the um legal changes and updates in China a few years ago at the bottom it's bunch of stranded it's a bunch of A6 in shipping containers being powered by branded natural gas on fracking sites so it's not all bad or is it next okay so Bitcoin is a decentralized clock and the way it regulates its ticking is by every two weeks the difficulty adjustment changes the probability of a cycle of computation one of the proofs of work finding a block it's a lottery system in a way so it's a stochastic clock that is divorced from the Logics of the sun moon stars and it's actually in some people's opinion first time we've ever really done that so bitcoin's amazing but it comes at a cost right and that is that it will never know satiety in terms of uh energy requirements and so if we live on a planet which is on the edge and Bitcoin wants all the energy you can see how something might have to give and actually since I wrote all these works the insatiable demand of energy by AI is actually possibly rendering this moot now if we're just like spinning up nuclear reactors for AI stuff maybe it'll be fine maybe it'll be fine maybe not okay yeah just to say something about like so Bitcoin is kind of a land where code is law it's very very hard to change like you know web three people say oh nothing ever happens on bitcoin and there's a reason for that um because it's very hard to change make changes to that I used to work in the digital curreny initiative with MIT uh media lab which at the time was the largest concentration of Open Source Bitcoin developers in the world and I saw how conservative they were and hesitant to change anything all right okay we're going to skip through because I think I'm pretty much out of time Bitcoin doesn't care if you're rightwing it is rightwing Bitcoin is Petr masculinity look that up good concept explains a lot of things about proof of work narrative evolutions of Bitcoin which happen slower less than ethereum I'm going to finish with a poetic refrain the church and the network Zeal and time death and money all all sides of the same coin thank you very much