# Chelsea Manning, Harry Halpin [Nym], Mykola Siusko [W3PN] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress opening

- Speakers: [Chelsea Manning](https://streameth.org/speakers/chelsea-manning), [Harry Halpin](https://streameth.org/speakers/harry-halpin)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 23:46
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-V2y4KdgdgHE
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2y4KdgdgHE

## Description

Chelsea Manning whistleblower & Harry Halpin activist behind Nym reflect on the age of surveillance, privacy-enhancing tech, VPNs, American politics and human rights. Co-hosted by Mykola Siusko [Web3Privacy now] at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, 11.11 Bangkok.

X: https://x.com/xychelsea
Web: https://nymvpn.com/en

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web3privacy.info

Facilitated by The Web3Privacy now.

## Transcript

so so let's just kick it off um what do you think uh Chelsea of Cipher Punk given for example the current geopolitical context you know new US election anarchism what so forth and so on sure uh so you know The Cypher the cyppher punk ethos um you know obviously comes from you know the 19 from essentially the 1970s 1980s and 1990s um and uh I was very preent in terms of its relevance and its importance uh for digital privacy and uh digital activism and digital like the like the protection of in of of people's individual information not just like State actors and uh and large corporations like Banks um you know and I think that a you know universalizing uh privacy has been a very important ethos in the context of uh more geopolitical instability um in the sort of uh the postco environment in particular um and yeah so I think that the the ethos is more relevant than it has ever been um you know I I certainly have always adhered to uh you know a lot of the sort of um the late uh late 90s and early 2000s ethos of uh of digital privacy um being and sort of libertarian uh sort of you know um uh early Silicon Valley sort of uh uh you know theories on this um I've sort of evolved a little bit like on on my personal stances a little bit I'm like perhaps a little bit more flexible on S on a lot of these ideas but the underlying principles I I think uh remain the same um I I definitely would consider myself as having I am certainly in alignment with anti-authoritarian anti-s surveillance and pro privacy um you know uh things which I think uh is in alignment with Cypher punk I think it's in alignment with um with with uh with with Anarchist with some Anarchist and libertarian principles um I I I don't know whether or not I I fall under the those labels uh necessarily because I think I'm just sort of in alignment with it um uh but yeah I I I I think uh I think that these these ideas and these principles are have certainly are certainly more more relevant they've ever been even though I think that you know it's just it's it's also an exhausting time you know and I I think that um the digital landscape uh is going to be uh an increasingly um defract and diffused and and disconnected one yes I'd like to just add one or two uh words so I consider myself a a crypto Anarchist and I've been very disappointed and the blockchain community over the last few months we do understand that everyone's bags are pumping that makes everyone feel really happy and warm inside knowing that they're making a bit of cash digital cash that is but the fact of the matter is we've seen and I I really appreciate vitalik's points on this but regardless we've seen person after person bend the knee to Trump and support the growth of authoritarian nationalism and populism throughout the world and I would just say that's the least [ __ ] cyppher punk thing ever right it's completely absurd I'm not going to go [ __ ] suck the [ __ ] of Donald Trump just so my bags pump [ __ ] that like literally um he is for you know the the whole Anarchist ethos is against borders it's about being who you are disclosing Who You Are working with others regardless of where you happen to be born the entire point of being anonymous is that you can contribute without attaching it to your identity and these are like the fundamental core principles of the cipher Punk ethos and the anarchist principles go back even further at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in 1863 Pierre prun the famous uh French Anarchist enemy of Mark father of both leftwing and uh kind of anarch mutualism and anarcho capitalism imagine a society in the 1800s where we would progressively decentralize power to collectives to individuals via voluntary Association via contracts via Mutual Aid and solidarity they even tried to put together interest free Banks to enable Ordinary People workers and peasants in the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution to empower themselves and I think this is the exact opposite of what we're seeing with the rise of authoritarian nationalism racism and all this other [ __ ] that everyone's currently endorsing just because it's making their bags pumped I do want people to remember that as an anarchist we should be against all forms of domination exploitation and in particular state power now we may disagree about what comes afterwards it's reasonable no one any [ __ ] clue but we shouldn't just team up with an authoritarian that's like literally how Hitler happened um okay so next question what do you think Chelsea um about ethereum I don't know if you've I can't remember you even talking about yeah I I yeah so I I I obviously uh I'm obviously familiar with ethereum um I don't I don't really use uh I don't I don't really uh use cryptocurrency uh myself personally um but i' I'm familiar with it with the ethereum blockchain and I um I played around with it but back in I I think 2017 I I I set up a wallet I I played around with it I looked at the underlying code and Etc um I liked the idea I like the concept of ethereum um I think that um my my views on it are from a technical perspective are are that you know it's a like some of the like some some of the erc's are a little bit messy and I feel like it's a bit like it it like I I I while I while I I think that it was a very good concept uh initially and was it was a good attempt I think that ethereum has sort of become a uh jack of all trades and a master of none um and sort of this GL it's become this like this glob of code that's sort of messy and uh and a lot you know basically like I understand the concept of like being able to like put like some unstructured ideas and Concepts uh and and and um stru like structures of data into uh and attach them to a blockchain um like we've seen this with erc20 we've seen this with ERC uh 721 we've seen this with a number of different erc's um where we've we where you've sort of like come come with these different things but I think for computationally and in terms of like structure um I just uh in terms of like uh like what what ethereum has become I I I I'm a little less interested and a little bit more sort of disappointed in in sort of like how like the direction that it went down but I think it was a great experiment I think I think ethereum and it is still an ongoing experiment I uh but um you know I I'm I'm perhaps a little a little less little less excited about ethereum than I was whenever I initially uh uh came across uh came across it I think in 2016 2017 uh oh I think she just froze no I didn't phrase you're still there your video froze but your voice is there I mean do you have any do you use ethereum at all and if so or if not why not I have not I haven't used ethereum since 2021 so I have um I haven't really engaged with uh because of Safe Harbor I haven't really engaged with any cryptocurrency um since 2021 I would say like 20121 2022 okay well your your video is here we can still hear you so that's great so yeah I I would want to say yeah just quickly so myself and Chelsea and Max and Jana and many other people in this room uh we work at a at an organization called Nim like anonymus if you don't want to know where the name comes from and we been working for the last few years on building a mixnet and a mixnet is a piece of software I'm I think probably discuss more in the afternoon with vitalic uh where the packets are mixed together before being sent out so not a mixer which mixes cryptocurrency and sends cryptocurrency out in anonymized fashion but something like that on the level of packets and the reason why that's important is because all of these peer-to-peer systems by Nature docs their users they reveal their users identity they reveal the IP address and not just the IP address but the metadata the timing and the volume information which can be used with very simple AI otherwise known as machine learning algorithms to figure out exactly who you're talking to what your transactions or what's going on with your transactions that's very dangerous it not only enables uh me but it's a sort of thing that enables the US government to put the tornado cash devs in jail right it's a really really dangerous uh the the fundamental lower level Network protocols not just in ethereum but in Bitcoin and almost all blockchain Protocols are fundamentally broken and then on top you can add various zero knowledge proofs and I'm sure there'll be many discussions of that uh homomorphic encryption or whatever you want to do uh to to disguise the actual transactions on the Chain level but if you don't protect the network level you can get you know censorship this whole issue with inclusion list that ethereum's been having Max over there uh worked with chains saafe and we got Nim working with ethereum validators and no one seemed interested uh and we're really wondering myself personally and we've reached out to ethereum Foundation multiple times we've you know reached out kind of continually uh why isn't there more interest in making ethereum actually something which enables privacy and enables privacy both on the network nwor level and on the transaction level so these kind of Alternatives the nation state that we're building on ethereum or whatever other chain you wish uh can actually work and not act just create a a surveillance nightmare right the whole thing with surveillance is that it existed far before blockchains right so the NSA can just look at all your transactions and copy them down they can make their own little private database but blockchains basically let anyone be the NSA so you really have to take take privacy pretty seriously so I'm very happy to see everyone here today and I would like to and and and I would like to kind of like just talk to everyone afterwards about what they're interested in and how we can actually enable privacy to make ethereum Cipher Punk again because obviously it was left out the original design so the um the last question I have for you Chelsea is why is making privacy enhancing Technologies hard what is what makes making privacy te enhance well making privacy and Tech uh making privacy Tech is very hard because you have this asymmetry between actors who are who have immense uh money they have immense uh time they have immense numbers of people working for them who are in opposition to the individual right so you have uh at the individual level you have the you're trying to have privacy but you have these you have these attempts at basically since the 1930s um by state actors to break encryption obviously for State act for other state actors but um you know that since since the Advent of the internet um now and and you know allowing uh individual users to browse the quote-unquote world worldwide web starting in their 90s after ter Kim burnard Lee there's been an effort by state actors to be able to surveil these kind and and by corporations to be able to collect and surveil this kind of data and so you essentially have this arms race between the computational capab the computational capabilities of you know of the largest and most powerful institutions and organizations in the world um with an enormous amount of uh with enormous amount of physical effort and um you know brain power behind this versus the individual who you know is just trying to just trying to get by very often um with with uh varying degrees of access to computational power to um you know uh to to to software to Hardware to Tool and the tools uh and and the knowhow the knowledge based to be able to to be PR to be able to to be and and engage in privacy um and obviously uh obviously we've we've we've made an attempt over the last 15 years to make tools that are to where somebody to where the individual can be more empowered um but these the these these tools obviously have limitations and and and are up against the most powerful State actors uh St State and corporate actors in in the world so I just like to tell it's hard it's hard it's it's hard because of it's hard because of the amount of money and power that um that that that that is invested in Breaking these things so I just like to tell a little story about how hard it is and and what the kinds of repercussions are so back in 2011 there was a uh you know there was an era of uprisings in the Middle East and one country where there was a series of uprisings was Syria uh I had a good friend happen know him from Milla Basel Safa and he was just a programmer he built like 3D models for archaeologists did like random things from Milla web web kind of front end JavaScript development and then all of a sudden his nation state went up in protest and started collapsing around him um and you know he wasn't a security guy he wasn't a person he was just a normal programmer and all a sudden he found himself deeply engaged in a fundamentally revolutionary social process and then what happened is as that movement got bigger and the government of Syria started falling apart there started to be more and more repression and it became clear that the local telephone company syriatel was monitoring everyone's kind of traffic using that to track down uh an arrest protesters so he approached me he says hey I need a VPN can you and I was volunteering at Anarchist VPN kind of security Collective I said sure like we have tons of VPN access points here take as many as you need we gave him hundreds and then what happened is about uh a year later uh everyone still went to jail and he was tortured and killed in jail and to our knowledge the reason is that the US government uh had a back door into uh Skype and some other bits of software that somehow got to the Iraqi government and then the Iraqi government somehow gave it to the Syrian government and everyone and then that combined with the metadata analysis basically made the vpns pretty useless uh and unfortunately you know I uh wake up every day and I have that uh you know just as Chelsea didn't want to have the blood of the Iraq War on her hands I have the blood of my friends on my hands who I failed to deliver privacy enhancing software to so we at Nim we're trying to make that better we trying to make we're trying to say what can we do to build something can actually resist nation state level surveillance and the question is how to do that it's pretty simple it's how anonymity works is not well understood we have a crowd of people here if you want to be anonymous you have to hide in a crowd if you're by yourself you're easily identifiable the larger the crowd is that you're hiding among the more Anonymous you are right so if you're hiding a crowd of like 10 people it's like it's like kind of easy figure out who you are and if everyone has different color clothing it's like even easier or different hairstyles or whatever uh if you're hiding in a million people it's much harder and everyone is hiding in a million people and they all kind of look the same it's basically impossible right so that's like the key intuition and then what we've seen though uh and what we do is when vpns and unfortunately including tour don't do that they don't really hide your traffic in a crowd they shuttle shuffle it around a VPN shuffles it to someone else's server and shuffles it out tour shuffles it through a cool peer-to-peer network of a few servers but they don't actually Shuffle and combine and mix your packets up in a crowd so you're not actually that Anonymous so the whole point of nim and the Nim VPN which Mac and other people could you know happy to install on your phone if you want or your laptop is that we actually try to make your packets Anonymous by mixing them in the largest crowd possible and that General principle can apply to ethereum right so um you know if you wanted to make your ethereum transactions private if you made an ethereum Pacific privacy Network and you only mix yourselves with other ethereum people there's a fair amount of ethereum traffics but it's not huge you're still going to stand out right and so what you want to do is you want to mix your ethereum traffic your blockchain traffic with a lot of different traffic such as for example people just streaming YouTube people sending telegram messages people sending emails people have nothing to do with ethereum if you mix all of that together you're much more Anonymous and this is the key Insight I've been trying to explain to the ethereum community for years and no one's listening and my last update uh from the ethereum foundation shows that they're also not listening that they're trying to build their own Pacific ethereum only uh mix Nets and NPC Solutions I think that's generally I understand why it's better than doing nothing but it's not enough and any government level agency will be able to cut through that an anonymity set they'll be able to cut through that technology and identify people like you know like an a soft a knife through some soft butter and we're going to need to do better so I do want people to really think what is it we could do to make ethereum actually private actually Anonymous that might mean breaking outside our fre ship circles not just handing money to our friends to do some cool project here and there but actually working with other projects larger communities the largest community possible Right getting as many people to be anonymous together is probably the only way that we can defend people like the tornado cash defendants from going down again because if you know there's serious pressure on ethereum and this pressure is not going to go up just because Trump got elected right ofac finsen all the US government you know agencies will continue to monitor the ethereum network very carefully and if they believe anyone they don't like is using that network if you happen to be in the US government [ __ ] list they will go after you really hard with immense as Chelsea put it asymmetric power so we're going to have to really uplevel and I'm really glad this community is here because I think this is the perfect time to do it to really get outside of building oh I'm just going to build some ethereum Pacific Tech because that's not going to work when you're up against the US government that's not going to work when you're up against the Chinese government or you're up against like definitely not the bur uh the Thai government we love the Thai government but uh even if you're up against like you know whatever Microsoft research right so I do think we can do it and I'm really glad to be here and I really just reach out myself or anyone else from them while here and we'll be happy to discuss and uh Chelsea you have any final thoughts I think we've probably gone over um maybe I can ask one question to Chelsea because cyer Punk movement has been created before WikiLeaks before Snowden before Mis misinformation socials so it feels that it needs sort of revitalization some sort of cultural upgrade there was no genz there were no uh digital consumption at this scale like what kind of new refreshment uh should be made to also make suff culture more fit into maybe or um applicable to the young people for example sure sure I think I think that uh that the individualist um libertarian principles from the early cyppher Punk M Mo moment uh where it was like in like protecting yourself as an individual were uh like is a limitation um you know because it's essentially because like not every single individual has the same ability to protect themselves and to defend themselves you can give them the tools and the ability to but that doesn't mean that everybody else does what I think is important is that we'd be able to have uh a sort of uh a a principle of of of a sort of Cipher Punk uh uh you know solidarity effort where you're able to like where through my own power I can increase the privacy of somebody else that I that that I know through through the sort like what Harry was talk was alluding to about sort of mutual Aid a sort of mutual aid for privacy a a mutual aid for individual um for individual like security and protection like we have to we can look out for each other not just not not just focus on uh like whether or not I have my keys but on whether or not I have the web of trust okay cool cool cool and what kind of final message you want to share to people who want to kind of like explore seel Punk Journey but at the same time try to ship uh tangible Solutions like newvpn to end people yeah uh this stuff is extremely important uh it is life and death and it is increasingly it is increasingly a a a a very important matter for people everywhere uh if you are in a nation that is stable and feels where where you feel comfortable uh I I highly I I highly suggest that you you look around at the at the at the where the world is going and and think about you know the the risks that that you're that you're that yourself and your neighbors may may be at in uh in the not too distant future where we live in um not necessarily not necessarily unprecedented times but certainly um we are in uh we are in unstable and very uh unique a very unique time where we need to start thinking about um how we're going to not just protect ourselves but but protect the people uh that we care about around us thanks a lot Chelsea for being with us today thanks Harry for help uh please Round of [Applause] Applause so Ju Ju Just final note peer-to peer is not Anonymous okay people need to stop thinking that you can only be anonymous in a large crowd makx One Way DC NS NPC lots of different ways to do it but let's really focus on that and let's actually try to build the Next Generation privacy Tech here thanks [Applause]