Why we are all here | Mykola Siusko, Web3Privacy Now | Berlin Meetup

check check but you will tell when the stream will start no okay please sit down our play will start okay ready go okay um hello everyone um it's uh big pleasure meeting you all here um I just arrived from prag when I spent some time preparing many things for Berlin and there's some sort of bigger I think geographical connectivity because there are many people from different continents countries uh backgrounds cultures here and for us it's quite important to connect people in times of uh disconnect uh my name is mikola uh I'm that guy uh we have a collective of uh people uh who cares about privacy and and we love to give voice to different uh privacy friends actors uh uh Advocates and activists uh who could help us to understand how we can navigate this challenging environment I will give a short uh intro talk then AF will uh continue and then I will introduce everyone else and I think we'll have a great time here so one thing that we are streaming and recording um second there's certain rules of the house first of all thanks lii for hosting us in the C base and in case you don't know what's this place it's one of the first uh activist spaces uh in the history I guess and it's interesting to connect the previous generations of activists with the fresh blood and then see a certain transition of knowledge uh we have this space we have Terrace and then a third room I didn't have time to assemble anti-s surveillance board game that we made is a fork of Monopoly when you need to connect with each other to build your Sovereign stack but uh we will play it today um I will go Qui quickly about what we do what's important and why it's not about just me standing here but many people in this room and further uh High stairs um I want to say that uh for me it started uh mid uh summer uh 2022 when a friend of mine said he joined status team and they had the vacancy head of activism I'm like with with fre company crypto company and the vacancy head of activism what what it even means and then I discovered that they're building logos uh they building a network uh kind of um let's say architecture for a network state and I was really impressed that it looks looked like a proper uh activism then uh I discovered that people in crypto could really connect within an important causes uh especially when they think that they're threatened by governments by legislation um there are some people who are not uh from crypto here for example or or from web free or from privacy I will just do some sort of expl explainer so years ago uh developers who are doing one of the Privacy tooling uh were um arrested and recently charged with uh criminal charges which uh many people at the industry thinks that uh it's outrageous and then I saw many young people maybe who never protested in their lives got together and spoke went outside the streets went outside out from their computers and at the same time um I tried to navigate what's happening around and then hakon came H berno uh by partially by the people who now are part of our team but then Czech enthusiasts who were just caring a lot about privacy in general um it was really Charming to see that uh kind of is this hardcore conference when there's no uh token Centric sponsors there's no companies who will try to ask you to invest uh in their projects or the vice versa um there were lots of meaningful people uh from I don't know starting from n to eff uh I try to debunk a bit intersection with the Ukrainian activism and basically what are the challenges between uh if you are going for example with your activism to the decentralized stage um and what could happen and how to empower Builders with certain uh knowledge in that sense I'm super happy that uh one of the things that pop up from this hakon uh is a real deal product is basically a wallet uh with store that is now functioning and they have really good ethics behind it and it's built by a few people so generally speaking it's an example when a project that originated from a hakon still lives I mean maybe it's challenging some sort of scalability issues with the funding with the project scaling with the team scaling but at least there's a certain connectivity with with the first cause uh that I mentioned with tornado cash and then I tried to understand but who is building privacy at the market who is doing what because information was really scattered and many people had different opinions like what's the privacy in that sense Anin young was said saying that we also want a privacy with the Nightfall protocol with polygon while on another spectrum they were like uh I don't know dark F saying everything should be Anonymous and Anonymous engineering is the thing uh I think aggregate information try to kind of see the bigger picture helps us to understand what's going on now it's 700 projects with different state of privacy not all of them are private I would say like uh majority are not private but I mean some of them are uh progressing towards the goal and one of the reasons why we are here is basically defining what's the goal Behind These Solutions uh then a year ago we made an event where uh some of the speakers today were also there for me it was important I mean what someone could think cringe but we invited World coin to have a debate with Amin and to have a debate with Cypher punks and not just blaming those people on Twitter that they do wrong but create some sort of this Greek type of debates like let's sit on station and talk what does it even mean especially on those projects who are trying to capture your Biometrics they are also capturing the highly talented developers and researchers and and interesting here is like how we could help those people to be more more vocal in terms of where do they work what kind of uh let's say ZK washing they're doing for those projects and stuff like that um and for me personally it was also important to have different opinion on privacy uh I mean you're here with the Privacy pools first but also uh dark f with more philosophical take on privacy because I think one of the important and underexplored um let's say phase of privacy is to give it different opinion and voices like for example how the Privacy would look alike for the someone living in the favas in Brazil and here are here's one my n colleague and uh they do have community members uh in Brazil who are working with the people in favas bringing this one only laptop to their room uh or privacy in Ukraine or privacy in Iran uh depending on your side and then having this kind of like verbal conversation on like what kind of um measurements preoccupations and also approaches we should have dealing with the game now we progressed towards something like we call l2b for privacy if you're using MDB then MDB for privacy there's some people in the room who are aggregating data for that basically what where we are going we want to have not just one database a snapshot of the market but also scoring uh it's a pain in the ass but it's interesting to see how you can even ATT test the Privacy features of the projects one of the interesting take is like 90% of those projects never passed any security audit but I would state above that you should always look into the security audit what they what they audited if they audit a smart contract and not a privacy features that's kind of like uh part of one part of the game but if they audited even the privacy policy if they audited the Privacy features if they audited uh some sort of what kind of centralized governance model exists within the project then you can see that it's clear privacy fit uh uh audited performance uh it's interesting that within what we are doing we clearly see a certain uh I I would say age gap or a cultural gap between different privacy players um some people I don't know who claimed that they Cypher punks uh from 10 years ago they try to patronize others how to perform privacy and we want to kind of find the sort of Middle Ground when we would be also welcoming to newcomers and we will also help young people to understand what does mean for example when I was judging ethd recently there was a Turkish team and Turkish team said within their project hey we want to help our mom to vote uh privately uh but we want to do it in whole turkey and I'm like dude like maybe start with your small community you can do this in one month but changing the fate of the Turkish elections uh it's a good Visionary goal but it's impractical this project will be dead the next day after the hakon will end because people won't support I mean it's a noble cost but kind of like uh try to iterate differently and now uh we're kind of act as an ecosystem with many different things uh from I know like now we are doing for example research for ethereum privacy system within the whole thingy we have the own Community launching academy uh having internal newsletter and uh and stuff like that um but what's also kind of like one of the thing that um happened recently I I met a friend of mine and she asked me okay what you do but how do you make money on that because basically she's trapped with the capitalist game and uh I was like ah money you know uh so recently we playing with the organizations that could try uh be become Our member first was logos now I think anada will come I think the O Ox could be one more ands and we are trying to instead of being captured on goinging and asking every time for every ity and I think Department of distalization also a bit bored with that asking for money uh charge for annual fee and collaborate uh instead of uh having this kind of like a symmetrical sponsor uh facilitator relationship and uh yeah there are Grant spending from zash ethereum Moc that also help us to um do asynchronous uh performance and also uh do research today we received the first uh individual member who supported our activities and he's in the room and really thank you for that uh for us it's interesting to play if he can be really independent from every project so be more like uh have a balanced view uh on the market itself and uh what's important here that the our Manifesto states that we should move from kind of like fighting with each other and if you are in the Privacy groups you see that there's a lot of clashes and fights within within equals in the same and should move to collaboration uh for example within the summit that we're doing in Prague on 13th of May one room will be hyper practical uh no Theory so people would to work some collaborate with each other uh then on eth Berlin we're doing privacy Corner when we will help also H hackers to ideate uh help to ideate their privacy features to kind of provide the feedback loop if they're going the right directions or maybe someone already built what they're trying to build and give them some tips and advices on that with many speakers who are visiting the an event and uh what I also found out happening at the market that many people have different approach to privacy and I think it's it's it's it's good that we have uh that diversity uh it would be pretty boring because we will have the same uh view on privacy I really love when people start to ask what kind of tools you are using here and now because uh many privacy Advocates don't use the much of privacy tooling which is interesting because there's certain asynchronicity between privacy tooling and uh Force tooling and I think it's a cultural um Clash that we should tackle and be much more humble in terms of how we talk with each other about privacy in general and there are many contributors this is the most important slide I was just a bit off time to do nice uh logos and avatars but there are like at least 100 people doing something with us either facilitating projects or uh curating or uh providing some uh support um occasional many uh privacy experts uh help us to do our projects and we are super helpful and thankful for that and I think that we will just scale the and for me it's pretty uh I'm happy to see that just privacy is a topic that could be really easily link to decentralization in general and then to open up a conversations when we are why we are all here to quote uh some famous video um and then the last thing uh kind of wrapping up the stuff um I think that we should kind of move uh also from labeling each other to more more different way of how we collaborating with each other and uh sometimes uh when we kind of think of each other as I don't know you're researcher you're a developer you're a marketing person we are putting people in the wrong buckets while in many cases uh with some of the people we were discussing a Buddhist privacy stack with others we were discussing how you would ship privacy into the cheapest device in some African countries and that's what makes these conversations much more helpful and a casual reminder that we have war in Europe and there are also many privacy use cases uh along the way uh you can check uh Bic cash research I made on privacy use cases within the Ukrainian Russia war and also you can think more that not just time is now but it's happening all around us um and now afriy you're the next we won to do interruptions um afre qu at Department of decentralization eth Berlin uh many people are saying etherum OG but I mean and I think that with the Department of decentralization what I super love is that they also try to disrupt the way you collaborate with uh Market the way you kind of like manifest yourself and the way you try to build a sustainable organization that delivers I know like hakon for almost 1K people or like events like protocol Burke and I hope you were there the last uh September and please make a small round of applause for ay