# Rachel-Rose O'Leary [DarkFi] at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Speakers: [Rachel-Rose O'Leary](https://streameth.org/speakers/rachel-rose-o-leary)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 26:29
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-av2KLxXZz34
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2KLxXZz34

## Description

Rachel Rose O'Leary on  forest-as-a-metaphor of shelter for communities to flourish, neo dark age, shifting power dynamics, self-defence digital tooling, anonymous coordination at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, Bangkok 11.11

http://dark.fi
https://x.com/lunar_mining

Facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective: https://www.web3privacy.info
Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web3privacy.info
X: https://x.com/web3privacy

## Transcript

okay thanks very much for coming to the talk uh quick question from you guys uh how many people here have heard of dark fi nice so that's most of the room um how many people feel that they understand dark fi on a technical level okay that's that's pretty much no we had like one or two okay well uh so this presentation kind of has two goals but I only have 20 minutes so you know we'll see how we get on uh but essentially it's a it's a two-part presentation um first it talks a bit about um this concept of a 500-year forest Dynasty which is basically a counternarrative um to the idea that we're heading into some kind of a surveillance dystopia where you know the nation state is going to turn us all into bug men and stuff um so it's it's it's a story of an alternative timeline where you know we end up in a more utopian scenario through anonymity and peer-to-peer Technologies so that's the first half and then I'll try to also go into dark fight and explain a little bit the tech stock um so you know you clear up some of your your understandings on that um so yeah and and to start off I I'd like to invite you every second Wednesday we have a philosophy discussion on our peer-to-peer uh chat app dark IRC um so I'd like to invite you all to come the next uh meeting is this coming Wednesday and we'll be talking about a thinker who was the main inspiration behind the first part of this presentation who's an Irish philosopher called Desmond Fel uh so if you'd like to talk more about what we're going to uh speak about today please join dark RC and uh come to our philosophy meeting it's easy to join uh you can find the instructions online if you just go to dark. and then click around you'll find the uh the explanation of how to join and uh hopefully see you there at the next discussion okay so um to like I'd like to contextualize this uh in terms of forests and deserts uh so in dark F we we think of anonymity as a kind of forest um in that it's a place of life and plurality in multiplicities um the desert on the other hand is a surveilled place where uh Society is is is locked down and can't evolve or take different shapes so the forest and like the cover of anonymity actually allows Society to evolve and change and create like new forms of uh social organization um so that's a big motivation for us uh in building dark F where do I point this oh up there um okay so just to quickly Define some of the concepts that I'll be talking about now um there are two things there there are nations and there are states a nation is not a state they're separate things but they're often confused um so when we talk about a state uh generally what we mean is the system of government um that you know kind of uh operates on a nation uh so it kind of sits on top of a nation is like a mechanism of of government um Nations themselves uh are better thought of as communities of communities um so you know you can have different kinds of Nations Nations can contain other nations um and you can also have nation states which are the dominant uh form of uh like society today um and so that's basically a kind of state but that's infused itself with a particular set of cultural values that it's adopted from a nation um typically Nation States uh don't properly adopt the cultural uh kind of imprint of all of the Nations within the nation state but they take some aspects and they create a kind of superficial representation of a Nation uh that's called a nation state uh so this is the idea that I'm going to try and explore really quickly today um the idea is that desertification is the basic process of the age um so the last 500 years we've seen a um a general process of desertification which is described in this graph um so unfortunately it's not very well labeled and I'm not sure how well you can see it but this is some research that I did uh so here you have data from Ireland Northern Ireland England Scotland and Wales and so what this is uh describing is is the number of uh governance structures per capita over time um so it starts in the 1900s and it goes up to now so it's the last 120 years so what we've seen in this small example local example of what's a global phenomena is the uh the the the rapid uh reduction of governance um structures per capita um so as the populations of these places have grown at the same time the local governance structures have decreased um so essentially what this graph is representing is the aggregation of decisionmaking power in a few small centers um and you know it's a it's a massive centralization of decision-making power away from the peripheries um so you know this is a example of from the British Isles but this is happening globally it's not a local uh process it's all over the world uh we've seen the a massive reduction in in governance structures and when I talk about governance structures um I want to be clear that we're not talking about governments in general uh so it's not this is not describing the reduction of governments um actually it's it's describing the reduction of uh local autonomy and of decision-making power from communities um so this is one angle to describe what what I mean by uh desertification which is a term I used in in the last slide so this is one form of desertification but there are many many other forms that if you were to graph them as I've done here they would look roughly similar uh so if we were to graph you know the decline of language diversity or uh biodiversity um or cultural diversity we would see a similar kind of like downward trajectory um and that's what I mean by desertification being the basic process of the age um so there's number of reasons for that I'm just going to hone in on one reason um which is you know basically the last 500 years has been defined by a uh the nation State Paradigm um so this is a quote from a Welsh nationalist called Sanders Lewis um what's really interesting is that here he's recognizing that in the pursuit of Welsh autonomy from uh England he's also noticing that in fact this kind of nationalist uh uh effort that the Welsh were undergoing isn't a weird is is a is a weird contradictory thing because in fact the the very thing that they're fighting against is nationalism but it's a British nationalism and they're fighting it back they're fighting against it with the Welsh nationalism and this as I will explain is like the ba one of the basic driving forces of like the spread of nation states um in the last 500 years so what the [ __ ] oh there we go so there are two kinds of nationalisms and one propels the other uh so on the one hand you have this imperialist nationalism that wants to expand uh it sees itself as the center of freedom and it wants to spread the freedom that it represents outward um on the other hand you have these liberatory nationalisms uh so that's comes from the peripheries of these that are kind of uh subject to the imperialist expansion of nationalism and the goal there is to uh to fight back against the imperialism through the creation of a New liberatory Nationalism that comes from the periphery uh but as you can see these are in feedback um so one leads to the other um and that's a basic mechanism behind the growth of nation states I hope that I'm not going too fast this is actually a one hour presentation and I'm trying to do it in 20 minutes uh and this clicker it's not working hello oh [ __ ] sorry that's the wrong direction okay so what I've been trying to describe here is that there's like a paradoxical kind of nature to the nationalism um and nationalism can be described as the self-defeating will to overcome deserts which itself creates deserts uh so just really quickly there's like three aspects of this um one is that like uh we're talking about the last 500 years um one is that in the creation of these uh liberatory nationalisms um we have a split between the conscious and the unconscious goal of the nationalism um so consciously they were trying to create a new nation state um but unconsciously they were actually trying to create a new life image for themselves that uh that they that that you know um uh image of life that they felt happy to that the society would be part of so it's like uh a drive to create a new way of life essentially um but because they were that was the unconscious goal they also uh failed to recognize the the true nature of their goal and therefore they started to do all this unconscious emotional irrational behaviors as part of that unconscious uh project uh so one of those things is like the in the liberatory nationalisms they uh began to reflect the image that the imperialist nationalism had of them so it's a kind of internalization of the um the image that was projected onto them by the Empire so they basically became what the Empire said they were um by unconsciously uh acting in an unconscious way um and they also misunderstood why the their Pro their their uh nations were becoming desertified um they thought they needed a nation state to stop the spread of desertification but in fact it was the nation state itself that was causing that spread um so it was like a paradoxical effort finally they saw themselves as isolated instances when in fact these processes that I'm describing were were part of a global process uh so what's really interesting is that coming up to the Millennium uh we have many many thinkers becoming conscious of like this all this stuff that I just really quickly tried to explain um so several different philosophers and uh people who are interested in politics begin to realize like oh actually um you know we've been trying to create like a liberation of our people but we've been using this social structure the nation state and actually if we look at history we can see the nation state is is what is what has in some ways cause this loss of freedom in in our people so they they stting to realize that coming up to the Millennium and you have a number of different thinkers building on each other who are all saying the same thing like we need to question the nation day Paradigm um so that's really interesting in itself o [ __ ] okay so we had this kind of um this cyclical nature to history um and every five 00 years there's some kind of a shift um so the last 500 years was defined by nation states um prior to that we were in the feudalist era um and you can see the others on the on the graph so the the basic claim that I'm making is that we're entering into a kind of Neo Dark Age and that sounds scary but it's actually a really good thing because it's going to be a time of uh mass decentralization of power and Spiritual Development and cultural growth and reforestation um so you know these are some of the the goals of that process it's an inversion of what we said before in the last 500 years so rather than aggregating the par around the center we we can reenter the peripheries and you know reactivate the provinces and restore par to communities um and essentially yeah bring about this um this sentiment which is that reforestation will be the basic process of the next 500 years um so darki and many other projects here are building tools that in some ways are intended to like support this process right like we're in support of decentralization of restoring power to communities and reactivating the provinces and dis intermediating power away from the centers that have claimed it over the past 500 years and peer-to-peer technology is a part of this anonymity is a huge part of this because without anonymity uh you can't properly decouple from the existing um uh Power structure [ __ ] sorry trying to click can you can can you change is not can you change it to next slide yeah okay so now I'm going to quickly uh how am I for time by the way okay is okay I'm going to quickly talk about dark f techto um so darki is trying to do two things um it's focused on Anonymous coordination which means like communication basically and also Anonymous Finance um so the center of our uh project is this chat up which I mentioned earlier on um at when I invited you to join the the philosophy meeting so we have dark IRC which is a peer-to-peer chat application that is the most Anonymous uh chat app on the market uh it has metadata anonymity so Network level anonymity um through tour or Nim pluggable transports um it also has encrypted DMS and encryp crypted channels as well as transparent channels um and uh we're we're trying to build you we're building a crossplatform app so you can right now you can run an APK from Android um you can run it on Windows or Mac OS um you can also compile from source which works best on Linux or uh or Mac um so we the anonymous coordination means communicate in a way that's completely censorship resistant and Anonymous uh also we're trying to build tools for projects to manage themselves we need to move away from the Paradigm of like crypto projects relying on Discord and uh and Google Docs and Google Drives um in order to operate their projects so we have an anonymous peer-to-peer task management system um and uh the the chat up um and we also have uh Anonymous um Dows which are kind of tying these together so the basic idea is like if you're a community and you want to um you know build a new Society uh we're giving you all the tools that you need in order to do this uh completely peer-to-peer an anonymous um right now these are different Damons that you can run uh separately but we're building we're starting with the chat but we're building eventually like a super app where where you can use the chat and the tasks um and the Dow and the payments Etc from the one interface uh so this is a cool this is an ad for our APK um so you can download this if you if you want to scan or photograph this you can download this just like click and run um but we also have like we recommend you to compile from Source if you can because there's more features um this is though it's like uh running over Tor automatically so it's like Anonymous uh like just like plug and play um yeah so quickly to explain dark f a little bit better uh you know there's there's several layers to our Tech stock we got the peer toer Network which I mentioned this is where we have the chat up and the task management um and you know all of that's running over the peer toer Network which is super stable at this point uh then we have the blockchain layer uh darkfy uses uh random X proof of work um so the idea is that it's it's CPU minable um we're going to have optional merge mining with Monero um when we launch which will be hopefully soon um then we have the anonymous smart contracts um so I think I have a slide about this I'll explain in more depth how the anonymous SM contracts Works um so basically you've got these peer-to-peer node running and then you've got front ends uh so yeah this is on our smart contract our architecture um so dark V has like a few different layers here like specifically if you guys are familiar with like Noir and Aztec and stuff um we have a different approach to them where we actually separate the ZK Machinery from the smart contract runtime uh so we have on the one hand the wasm uh smart contract uh runtime and they're uh there they that can be written in any wasm compatible language but we use rust um so there's that and then we also have the ZK layer which compiles down to Halo 2 um which is the ZK algorithm that we're using um and so using this we have a ZK assembly uh like uh ZK VM you can write lowlevel uh circuits um that enforce your uh anonymity constraints that you want in your program and then essentially import the the the bik code from that from that the VMP puts into your uh wasm contracts and then you can you define your smart contract logic in there but you make use of this underlying ZK Machinery in the wasm um so that's basically how it works and using this uh kind of layering we have a few contracts already deployed natively uh so we have money which is you know send and receive swap uh these are contract calls that you can as a developer you can you can call them so they're publicly accessible smart contract calls um similar to how you have on eth um then uh so you've got those then you've got Dow is is also a native contract with all of the vote um uh propose Etc Dow logic um and like there're the two ones we have now but we're planning to also deploy other native contracts and also as a developer you can write your own contracts and deploy them as well uh oops oh yeah five minute warning uh so I kind of mentioned this uh so inside of a transaction we have these like different fields um one is the Smart contracts uh calls that I mentioned uh the ZK proof signature verification um and the the fee um stuff as well and so I I'll note here that you can uh chain like multiple smart contract calls within a transaction um which means you can create like fancy logic uh like for example in the future you could be able to uh like first do some kind of trade say you're a dow you can even do this as a dow first you're going to swap um some token for another token and then you're going to send that token to someone you can do that you can change that kind of logic even as a d or you know as any uh agent on the network come on oops okay whoa oh my God okay so there is uh this is just a cool image of the transaction being validated onto the blockchain so like like that like a wormhole oops okay so yeah this is uh so I got not much time but but I'll quickly explain um are any people here familiar with the um the sapling payment scheme from zcash not very many so this is a we use a protocol for anonymous transactions which is also used by zcash um and I'll quickly mention it because I think this is the best existing example of what we call in dark fight Anonymous engineering um so it's a really interesting protocol that allows for fully unlinkable transactions uh using like essentially cryptographic tricks um like a cryptographic protocol um so if you want to take a photo of this slide you can see on the right in Pudu code we have the very basic um uh protocol explained um and this is uh how like essentially our Anonymous payments work um so we have Alice she's sending um 100 whacked token to Bob um so you have on darki it's a utxo blockchain so you have the inputs and the outputs um so you you input this um burn proof which is a encrypted hash of like a number of attributes including the amount the token ID a serial number and the public key of Alice um and then you mint in the output uh like this same coin uh to like into um Bob's uh wallet um and you see there's a serial number in there that's critical to how the sapling payment scheme works this is essentially double spend protection um so in sapling and on darki when we create a coin um we mint a uh serial number which is later revealed when we spend that coin and like we know that that coin's been spent based on the fact that the serial has been revealed that's like super high level but if you want to go into it more detail it's like basically a spec there in pudic code so check it out um yeah swaps same basic principle except for it's interactive so both parties have to sign I've got two minutes left so I'm going to really quickly wrap this up um oops so Anonymous Dow I mentioned this is our most comp complex app at the moment um essentially what it is is you have an anonymous treasury fully encrypted onchain that can be operated on by D participants um through Anonymous token weighted voting uh and onchain execution um the Dow as I mentioned it's also programmable like and you can use it within smart contract calls so you can the Dow can be a basis of uh interesting defi applications like protocol owned liquidity fully Anonymous um but you know or like you can use it as a featureful multi-sig if you're a community and you want to make decisions collectively over the use of uh of the money you can do that as well um so thanks for coming to my presentation sorry it was so kind of rushed uh if you want more info please check out our website it's at the lower end of the page there you can find the instructions on how to join dark RC um and you know come to the philosophy meeting if you want to talk about some of the topics that we touched on today um and uh let there be dark thank [Applause] you and