Interview│Ameen Soleimani - OxBow/Privacy Pools│ETHDam 2024

the future that we want and does not look like having full surveillance Central Bank digital currencies that can spy on everybody and then centralize all of the transaction data into a single honey pot that can be hacked and then exposed and that could put everybody in danger next up at Eve Dam meet I mean an advocate for Oto cash can we build Tech to protect us even from future Bad actors let's dive in uh my name is Amin solomani I've been a ethereum software engineer for eight years now working on a variety of projects Dows stable coins um more recently privacy and compliance tools yeah that's that privacy is is normal and it's good and we want to build tools to protect ourselves while we uh use privacy so that we don't end up uh potentially uh helping out people that we might not want to help out like criminals the first thing that comes to mind is security U because one of the first examples that I brought up at the beginning of the talk was about how the Nazis were thrilled to discover how great the Dutch kyc systems were in World War II because uh they were able to find and Massacre all of the Jews in the Netherlands uh and so that's an example of a case where uh you know you build something that you think is for a good cause uh but it ends up in the hands of somebody who abuses it and so um ideally we can build systems that keep people safe even if the people who inherit those systems are you know maybe bad guys and privacy is one of those things that can help keep people safe one example of a use of privacy that you know uh I a couple examples like we um I I was using privacy for for payroll back in the day when we originally made tornado cach uh and that was nice uh because you don't want to reveal everybody's salaries publicly and so there's a lot of mundane use cases you know that are just day-to-day uh trying to you know protect people's personal information but more recently in the last 18 months I started helping out with the Iranian uh nonprofit called Iran on chain that I started with my friends which is around uh raising money to help out activists in Iran and it's all legal because uh it's compliant with sanctions uh there's certain exemptions that you can use for humanitarian aid for food and medicine for uh internet infrastructure like vpns and starlinks and stuff but even if you're doing compl client you know transfers of of funds to people in Iran uh you have to really care deeply about security and so um it's you know putting people in danger there if the government finds out who they are and how they're getting money uh to to buy these things and so there's also like very strong uh know geopolitical and like security reasons to uh try to maintain privacy um we want to uh have you know the future that we want and the future that we want does not look like having full surveillance Central Bank digital currencies that can spy on everybody and then centralize all of the transaction data into a single honey pot that can be hacked and then exposed and that could put everybody in danger and so there's some governments that are taking this seriously like Switzerland and some governments that are sort of trying to ignore the reality that um centralized surveillance systems are vulnerable to being exposed and leaking and um even Beyond financial data uh the same technology has a role to play in digitizing democracy if you want to improve on Democracy right right now write something in a ballot somebody goes and reads it and they manually type it into a database face and like there can be fraud and manipulation at any step of that process uh you know people joked like Andrew Yang I supported him in 2020 and he was all like we're going to put voting on The blockchain everybody who knew what they were talking about was like no we don't want don't do that that's crazy because everything was still transparent uh if you vote transparently you can put yourself in danger you know the dictator comes and says why did why did you not vote for me you know uh or or there can be bribes where people you know you bribe somebody to vote a specific way and so if you want to protect the safety of Voters and democracy that you digitize you also want to use the same tools that we've been building today and so you know tornado cach is basically the MVP it was like the version one of anything that we could have built in the future and so we shipped this stuff in 2019 you know and like in even in uh people say oh you made like 100 pool or something it was it was like used for finance and it's like you have to realize like when we made this stuff 100 eth was like $10,000 like eth was 100 bucks right it's like a one month salary for a software engineer uh that's like what people used it for and it's a shame that you know our earliest versions of these systems uh were attacked by governments uh instead of being you know harnessed by governments or supported by government governments to improve their systems and so I hope that in the future uh they they work with us to to develop these things and it does follow a pattern um I'll explain what I mean by that this isn't the first time that new technology has come out that governments have been afraid of and then eventually mandated the use of uh one of the last examples is https right you you when you use the internet on your computer there's a little green lock in the URL bar and that is what gives you the safety that your security that your transaction your your information that's being sent to that server and coming back is encrypted and so the government said you cannot encrypt uh your web traffic first they said this is you know illegal discrimination and and and privacy nerds like that's kind of dumb like we want to build the stuff so that people can protect themselves why should I be forced to expose my like credit card information in plain text whenever I make a payment on the internet to anybody in the middle of the you know the internet service providers routers of Etc all the way so that and eventually the the cipher punks and the Nerds uh won this argument uh in courts and in in business and the government now mandates the use of https on all of its websites there's no Government website that you're going to use that's going to be unencrypted right and so I believe that in the future the same process will will take hold and the governments will mandate the use of privacy preserving Financial technology like the stuff we're building today I I brought up the Promethean meme earlier where I described Roman and Alexi as uh Prometheans you know they put the eth in Prometheus uh because they you know Prometheus famously steals fire from the gods right and feels like zero knowledge proofs are this like crazy new technology it's almost like magic and they they took it and helped bring it to everybody uh for all of our benefit and then they're punished for it and in that story Hercules comes along and eventually frees uh Prometheus and so I'm trying to get support and we you know rallied uh Community 800 transactions donated over $1.5 million do to support their legal defense fundraiser and so with any luck they'll be able to go free and you know even so we still want the best outcome for them possible because uh we don't want the uh governments to attack innovators uh especially and open source Developers for the for the crimes of their users they're not the criminals uh in this equation and so I think like I mentioned I'm inspired by the previous generation of Cipher punks who brought us encryption and I'm hoping to build on their legacy of bringing private money and private private voting and the new zero knowledge proof technology to fruition for everybody thank you for your contribution to humanity do you have uh any last words to your audience any last words I hope I don't die immediately uh any last words for the audience uh privacy is normal and um yeah follow uh free Alexi Roman um do uh on on Twitter and uh if you if you can support the cause