# Lefteris Karapetsas [Rotki] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Speakers: [Lefteris Karapetsas](https://streameth.org/speakers/lefteris-karapetsas)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 28:30
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-dAC_-1r9ohs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAC_-1r9ohs

## Description

Beyond Tokens & Points - the Cypherpunk heartbeat of crypto by Lefteris Karapetsas [Rotki], Bangkok, 11.11

On crypto industry stereotypes from scams to casino, permissionless ledgers, dev activism, coordination failures, cryptography for degens, E2EE education, open-source & self-sovereignity.

X: https://x.com/LefterisJP
Web: https://rotki.com

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

Facilitated by The Web3Privacy now.

## Transcript

I want to talk about how we can go beyond tokens and points right um for those that don't know me my name is leis I've been in ethereum for a bit um mainly worked in solidity in C++ ethereum back in in the early days and um I created and also had to clean up the Dao this Etc hard work Fork um along with Christoph G and the other so sorry for this uh if any of you were affected um I worked on Ryden which is um what the lightning network is to bitcoin is what Ryden was supposed to be for ethereum didn't really catch on you know payment sers didn't really catch on uh and I'm the founder of Rodi a portfolio management accounting tool that's uh local first and privacy preserving I may mention it a bit but the talk is not about R it's about um why we are here so um I guess many of you do work in this field right and you probably have had the question by I don't know a date um your grandma your grandpa what what do you work in you start to say yeah work in creep wait the moment you say this do you know what the other person will think of what do you do for a living and you if you say the word crypto do you know what comes in their mind yeah um next slide this guy so they think that you're probably a scammer or um you like gambling you have you have issues you have a problem um or they may just you know go away from you you're a criminal you you you should like I should stay away from this person um what's um what's worse is that um you may be known only for for hacks like uh you cause people to lose their life savings um we lose about like 30 million in one hack 60 million in another hack every other day there is someone losing uh their Fortune like there is BBC articles the guardian articles saying oh you know this uh poor guy from France lost their entire life savings in this protocol or in the da hack or in whatever uh then with um all these hacks being funneled to terrorist regimes we it really gives us a very bad name that we actually are funding terrorism um um oh there okay there okay and then that crypto is basically um FTX like I had I had I had actually um my lawyer once asked me so you're looking for a job right FTX went out of business I heard they she really thought that FTX so so basically the most use centralized exchange at the time is actually crypto there is the vast majority of normies as you may call them like think that crypto is a centralized exchange even even now um then they see all the points they see the the meme coins they see frch and they say okay this is crypto so just gambling in dog coins or when we saw people like like bit boy and every other influencer or you know call like a opinion leader um they we made them represent our industry um but is that really why we are here like I don't know about you but I've I've started working in this field just because I wanted to do something different and and change things right um so what would you say that crypto when when when when you you are on this date and you want to explain crypto to your to to your date like what you do for a living probably she doesn't want to hear your life story so this is something that we really have to work on on how to improve our image but if we had time and we do now have time a bit to to to drill into what crypto is good for I would say these four things is is a good um um summary so it's a permissionless and Unstoppable Ledger um it allows for zero Fe and cross border payments um transparency and it helps with coordination if you have even a bit more time you can um drill into what permissionless and Unstoppable actually means it means that that um you just don't need to care about what someone uh says about what you want to do because um you don't need a permission to use your money you don't need permission from the government to uh uh open a bank account and this is not a problem only of of um as some people in in Europe would say oh no don't don't worry we we are fine here uh you probably all saw uh quite recently with um the protest in in Canada where through do just basically froze the bank accounts of protesters that just didn't agree with what his government was doing uh permissionless and Unstoppable also means that you don't need permission to use your own money right uh has anybody been uh denied banking here because of being yeah yeah I see some hands I have been denied banking I have been uh um um I have had bank accounts closed because of uh of course I don't say it uh being a with crypto so you should never need permission to use your own money uh for this also uh when uh when you use a bank sometimes they may ask you so Mr caretas I see that you're sending more than 5,000 Euros oh don't worry Mr bunker actually it's a it's not a scammer it's me I I am actually initiating this transaction okay good but this is not the question the question is who are you sending it to what is the transaction and then you start to question the you know to to discuss with the bankers why do you need to know what I'm trying to to use my money for so the whole point of crypto is to give you agency you shouldn't have to answer to uh the bank about what you're doing and let's not even go to the cbdc um dystopia where you have specific terms on when you would end up being able to use your own uh funds um H Okay so so a kind of boring um attribute of crypto is crossb payments people may think that this is solved but um this is actually one of the strongest points of crypto you just can pay anybody anywhere it sounds boring but it's actually extremely extremely powerful um if you have ever had to employ freelance contractors anywhere outside of Europe because in Europe we have sepa transfers which are fine um but if you ever need to employ anybody else you would either not be able to do at all through your bank or you would need to um use something like either wise transfer or PayPal and they have uh extreme fees like from from 2 to 5% on the entire amount um sometimes you have to go through extra kyc maybe your transfer got stuck and you have to contact support and then to pay a freelancer someone in in Nepal you may end up wasting a month and an extra 5% on the amount so this is actually something that we in crypto have managed to unlock and make into reality so almost zero fee crossb payments um crypto also has transparency what's what does transparency mean it means that crypto being a basically transparent uh database that everybody uses and everybody can can read from it um could be used it is not it could really be used in government so governments could use a transparent Ledger in order to to so how they're spending funds uh then bureaucracy could be killed because I don't know everybody's situation is different but I I am a citizen of one country living in a third I have a kid um whose mother is from a fourth country so I'm dealing with three different um uh countries and their bureaucracies uh every time that I need a certificate of birth for my kid or anything I need to contact different offices in Germany and then go to embassies it's it's it's it's mess while if you had the ability to just do all this on chain and not need to contact every different office and if they're closed uh or have them communicate between each country so a transparent lender really could solve bureaucracy a lot um another thing is coordination right we've all seen um the rise of various daos uh how we can um all collaborate and talk about um like solve problems um also we create incentive mechanisms there have been a lot of experimentation about different incentives in um uh in crypto and uh we are all trying to slay molo the god of coordination failure incidentally about daos I'm going to talk a lot about them tomorrow in at 1:30 I think in Devcon and I will well criticize a bit quite a lot about how D are today and how they have failed um to actually realize this this vision and what can we do to fix it um all right so are we doing any of these things maybe we're doing Dows a bit but still we really SE at that um but all of the other stuff we are not really doing like when you think of crypto you just don't think of any of this so why why hasn't this uh promise materialized first of all it's something that we are all to blame whenever I talk to anybody in in my crypto they are always oh come on we left stop being like a kill Joy look these points they're helping us they they're bringing in the masses which when you translate it to reality it means sh upes they need to come so that we can dump our bugs on them and then we can exit who cares about that afterwards who cares so we normalize scammy Behavior to lure sorry my Greek accent lure retail um and we have many people who talk a lot you know blah blah blah blah blah blah decentralization blah blah blah open source yay go go but in reality what they do is the complete opposite of what they are talking about um so there are a lot of demagogues in this field uh and of course yeah uh the governments are very much against us like the regulations worldwide are against crypto because crypto is said to disrupt them so that is indeed a very difficult problem that we are facing and why hasn't the crypto promise materialized uh also we are developers and sometimes we don't think about stuff we are creating a protocol that's um nice but then uh decisions slowly get co-opted and actually centralize some protocols um then I talked about transparency right everything is open everything is public but we have a complete lack of privacy as an end user so transparency is great if you're a government but if you're like the average zo you don't really want everybody to to to see what you're doing on chain because this is a totalitarian regimes we dream um um so when I talked about fla design and centralization what what I mean is as devs I don't think that we think ahead enough like the original creators of ethereum made some very serious mistakes that have not been fixed and uh they're actually being um uh built upon and we build upon Foundation that is is is um is not really uh solid like um you can't ask for your um the transactions of your address um give me so you're running your own node you can't do that uh give me the the blocks that my validator has produced no I can't do that um there are certain VC funed companies that are trying to push even more stuff out of the node to other centralized um Solutions so the problem starts to become that um slowly bit by bit the protocol is getting co-opted by um um certain interests let's say and then what will end up if we continue like this it's just we're just going to end up with a slower version of of trfi so we as as as developers are also responsible to make sure that the protocols that we are making um can stand the test of time um what can we do for this we we need to go back to the cipher Punk routes right um we must not think only you know how can I fix my bug how can I make this work again um we need to think long term not about the next year but in the next 10 years uh maybe about our children also no not about protocols that will just work for the next five years uh don't take shortcuts this is like something very very easy to do as a developer you just want to close the computer go to sleep um go back to your uh home but we really need to think uh things through I I'm afraid that sometimes things are not thought through in in especially in ethereum and um speak up many of us have advisor ships here a big bug of a particular uh token uh engine investment here so you're afraid okay I shouldn't really talk bad about this protocol I shouldn't talk bad about this protocol because it's connected to this VC that actually is funding my own protocol so all that really uh if if you don't criticize like this is something people tell me a lot that you know you're never going to get funding to for your project because you're too vocal again fact that we really have to um uh criticize things when things don't go well because then we are end up we're going to end up being uh captured by VC interest uh again walk the walk don't uh just talk about stuff so um we have a completely neutral uh funding mechanism for uh ethereum protocol development called the protocol Guild uh you can always donate to them this is me donating to them uh some time ago this is one way to keep the protocol neutral you just donate directly to a mechanism that is completely neutral and funds uh core protocol developers and researchers um yeah now we're going to talk about privacy so I I take this quote by the anoma co-founder that privacy is a mistake I I really love that she wrote a blog post um that's called privacy is a mistake and this is like the the gist of it everybody wants privacy right but the word privacy is bad because the word privacy creates the idea that you're hiding something you that you're a criminal that you you're doing something that that shouldn't be visible to the outer worldall that's not correct though um when you think about privacy what do you really want right you you want to just not share information like you don't want to share what are your addresses you don't want to share what tokens and how much you have of each token and we are building apps and unfortunately protocols that just don't care about this in reality what we need to do is um Empower so privacy is not about hiding but about empowering the user to decide what does uh he or she want to share um I'm unfortunately almost all of public blockchains today are completely public everything is visible on chain uh everything you own is visible on chain once I find out which address uh corresponds to you everything around that address everything that's connected can be uh connected to you um if you try to disconnect those connections by using something like tornado cast then you are now considered the criminal because um of the sanctions against tornado um what can we do for this we need to normalize end user privacy um we need to um use tools that help us achieve privacy um when you design a software you you need to think with privacy in mind you you shouldn't just say okay maybe in the future we'll just do some changes because once you start it's going to be very difficult to actually introduce it later um use and support uh approaches that use privacy uh uh privacy first and uh support those who fight the legal battles as we all know um come on you can do it good uh like walk the walk and don't just talk the talk again um the uh tornado guys uh so Alexi and Roman have are fighting two different legal battles uh in Netherlands and the US and they I don't know if they still have this but they did have this um uh um donation for their legal fund so if anybody wants to help them this is the link to their um to their legal defense um I think that A change is needed a change in thinking and a change in how we we we basically act and how we develop again I mean this is also the Cyber par Congress we really need to think what does that even mean um the Cyber punks wanted to achieve privacy through cryptography right this was one of their main um tenants the cyer puns were Skeptics of government and of surveillance they didn't um they didn't welcome government government They didn't accept surveillance because surveillance is a way to not only monitor but um uh suppress you uh Champion open source and decentralization and also being champions of autonomy and self sovereignty so that your data is yours and you don't need to depend on external uh Services uh the crypto user the average crypto user what many of us called dents today is sort of the total opposite basically private the cryptography no YOLO what this this protocol I don't care just YOLO into everything um skepticism of government no government is our friend why because uh when they are with us we get Mass adaption when for example we get um someone elected that is pro crypto then oh suddenly we love we all love the government it's great now um now we our numbers go up so now we are very friendly to the government that's that's that's insane and that's that's I don't know like the past few weeks I I've been pretty disappointed with some of uh the crypto people and how they suddenly Embrace government um the D also doesn't care is it open source is it close Source no worries does it have a big enough apy is the percentage good enough for me to YOLO that's what I care about um autonomy and self sovereignty okay who cares about that like um I don't is the contract owned by an end user address no no no no worries how much e can I get out of this in the short term so we need to eradicate this uh mindset this this is this is a virus this is sick um but we also need to educate because sometimes people actually do come to me and ask so okay you talk about privacy but what does that even mean how how can we get privacy I want to be private what does that mean I mean it's a spectrum like there is many things that someone can do uh we can talk to people about end to end encryption and what does that mean how um how should you be chatting with someone when you actually want to be protected don't use telegram like everybody encrypto uses telegram it's not ENT encrypted it's it's insane like a um a field that basically came through the cyberpunks is actually using a non-encrypted means of communication as its main um messaging tool um explain about on privacy I could make a talk about this alone because how easy it is even for OG or people who are very very into crypto to make a mistake and connect addresses by mistake let's say using the same deposit address for an exchange um explaining what is uh wrong with sharing your IP with people and how uh you can use VPN to go around this uh how maybe you shouldn't share your email with every service and there are some email services that you can create a different email for every unique provider uh sorry unique email for every provider why you should be using dis dve encryption so if if your um laptop gets stolen uh they can't just open it and read your data and uh how you should be Lo limiting social media sharing and this is something that I don't do I'm really bad at this I'm a Twitter uh and like everything that you share and everything that I share uh is getting a digital fullprint about me where I live what I do what are my interests um and then someone can use it against me or against you at any point in your life um okay and that governments are not our friends they they're not bad always sometimes but we operate despite them we don't need their permission we don't need need their acceptance um and they're not always on your side you have to remember many of us are from from you know Western so-called countries um and we we feel safe because uh we have had relative uh stability in the past 50 years but even the Western Government is four years in the best in the best worst depending on which side of the regime you are um away from changing to totalitarian regime uh the sovereignty of the data should be with with the people not with the government so you shouldn't have to ask the government for permission to do things or to have an identity and so on and so forth and again that the Western World Is Not immune to totalitarian regimes um We should strive to use open source uh I'm a very very big open SCE proponent um because open source gives us transparency open source um by transparency I mean like you can see what the code does or you can ask someone um that uh can read that particular language to you know confirm that oh you know this uh app doesn't share my IP with anybody doesn't send my data to an external server open source also encourages Community involvement and attract and uh attracts talent that means that because uh not only can you read the code but you can also share it Fork it build on it uh this is the the very definition of Open Source open source doesn't just mean um uh Source available um then people are encouraged to work on this code because they don't need your permission to actually build on it they don't need um a friendly license or a friendly fork or whatever the they call those today you just take the code you read it and you build on it and then you um contribute back to the to the main repository uh we don't build World guarders in op source so uh we have lack of lockin and data capture and also General open source is very positive it encourages Innovation and takes the world forward um and we should strive for self- sovereignty so I like to work on what I call Self Sovereign apps but as an individual the idea is that you should hold and control your data um and that there is also the concept of self Sovereign identity so that identity um doesn't Ure through a central government so if you're I don't know a refugee from a government that you're fleeing from and you don't even have the passport then you go to a third country who are you do you even have an identity so you should have the ability to to uh identify yourself um Empower individuals to share what they want and with whom they want and also by not depending on a central provider you end up being um independent and so this is like self sovereignty but what is self- Sovereign applications because I think I'm running out of time I just going to go fast here um uh the idea is that we have the web two apps right and then we got web three DBS that are basically centralized servers that also talk with the chain but selfing app basically gives you the so ownership and ability it's basically giving you agency over your data how you handle it and how they are shared with everybody and they are open source because they give you the ability to audit the code so this is what a self sovering app is um a self overing app is also Local app like these are the good old local apps I'm a very big proponent of things that were normal a few years ago like okay I'm a bit older so few decades ago um then uh are being reintroduced by this seminal paper called local fair software so the idea is that you use software um this is Martin kman the guy who made the paper that just bring back what we used to call um applications back in my day so the majority of the functionality is local um the data is is stored locally but privacy and security is Paramount there is a network connection of course you use a network it's not [Music] um the local first is not an offline up but not every single keypress is a round trip to a server we create apps that basically empower the user and are putting the local s uh first um come on um I'm just going to give a super quick TDR about what I do uh which is basically an embodiment of everything of of this basically it's a local first app that solves a problem the problem of trting what you have in crypto and where how and and allows you to manage it so the super quick T ldr of roty is that it's all open source verifiable it looks like this um it gives you um like a breakdown of what you have and where in which chains um you can manually put stuff about how much you have in a bank it gives you a b side view of your entire portfolio and where it is um it also tracks uh many chains so like also Bitcoin chains uh uh sub trade chains uh we are going to add Solana that many of our users want I track traditional Finance also but with some kavage uh it's all about customizability so you you decide how to Ser your data where to send it um what nodes to use if you want to use an indexer you use an indexer if you want to use your own no you use your own no um it allows to do uh pnl uh accounting for taxes and it has a history of all events across all chains and across all track addresses um so yeah it's actually very hard to find people to work on um uh stuff so if you liked what I'm talking about um and if the ethos part especially the ethos part because finding people is finding devs is easy but keeping them because they are aligned with the vision is is what's hard so if you like what you heard you know like apply uh to work with us or you know it's open source just contribute and then uh working with us is a the the normal uh continuation also uh you can use the app uh if you like it you can buy the premium subscription that is how we found ourselves and you know talk about it we survive through world of mouth so we we Thrive by people talking about Ry to others and then you know we get more people like that um that's all I guess uh right yeah thank you very much guys [Applause]