# DarkFi│Manifesto for a Dark Renaissance: Anonymity as Hard Offensive Power - Amir Taaki│ETHDam 2024

- Speakers: [Amir Taaki](https://streameth.org/speakers/amir-taaki)
- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 27:22
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-iYrtAkriLyY
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYrtAkriLyY

## Description

"Manifesto for a Dark Renaissance: Anonymity as Hard Offensive Power" with Amir Taaki from DarkFi at ETHDam 2024. 
https://twitter.com/Narodism https://twitter.com/DarkFiSquad https://dark.fi/ 

Sterling Schuyler - MC of ETHDam, copy and content writer for emerging fund managers & crypto enthusiasts.

ETHDam - a conference and hackathon held in the heart of Amsterdam, Netherlands from April 12th to 14th, 2024, celebrated its second edition, gathering more than 600 participants. 

In the dynamic space of ETHDam, privacy and security took center stage, featuring groundbreaking discussions on hacks, recovery, and the revolutionary work of figures like Pertsev. Privacy is dead in crypto, people that know, know. People who don’t know, should know. 

ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform growing in Amsterdam, spreading its roots to Rotterdam and Zürich.
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00:00 - Intro
03:20  - Introduction to DarkFi
04:19 - Dark Wallet and Its Origins
07:58 - Modern Mental Health Issues
09:15 - Universe 25 Experiment
11:04 - Evolution and Struggle
12:49 - Philosophy and Criminality
15:23 - Free Society vs. State Civilization
17:55 - Anonymity as a Form of Power

## Transcript

[Music] hi so um you know come up and take some stickers this's you know if you want some stickers dark F swag this is your chance they will be gone if so come everyone l a good sticker right it's free stuff that n shiny the irony that dark fire has glowy glowy stickers we're but when we're not take your stickers yeah well we're not a glowy project so but we have glowy glow in-the-dark stickers well I'll wait for them to finish you know nice um so that profile picture is Jay Stark um so I want to dedicate my talk to Jay Stark and Ross Orrick and uh John maafi which it's yeah it's strange I Ross I haven't he seems to have faded from our memory but he is now in prison for life and J Stark he was killed by the German government and maafi died in very suspicious circumstances so thanks to those guys um so my name is Airi I'm a free and open software developer for over 20 years and uh during much of that time with other hackers we uh squatted buildings to found hack laabs centers where we worked on social and political technology the early precursors to hacker spaces uh I was one of the first five Bitcoin developers um for most of my time in crypto development I focused on strong anonymity and uh I also worked for C land cooperative and was professional poker player in 2015 I joined the ypg where I fought on the front against IIs and and later I left the ypg and then I was in Syria for three years working on economics projects so enough about me um in this talk I'm going to be talking about darkfire darkfire is a L1 for anonymous smart contracts and we have um our own uh peer-to-peer Network we have a distributed hash table which is kind of like what ipfs is we have a ZK virtual machine we have a smart contract engine we have um our own blockchain in terms of applications we've built on it we have uh completely Anonymous DS Atomic swaps uh fully Anonymous peer-to-peer chat which nothing like it exists in the world and also Anonymous task system or PE to peer um and all all of it completely Anonymous so when I talk about the Dow I don't just mean that you know your identity is hidden I mean everything is anonymous the treasury all the actions who votes on what the amount the token weighted voting Etc all of it completely Anonymous so uh in this talk as well I'm going to be dropping a lot of references so you might want to have a pen and paper or a phone handy to write down in case you have something inter interesting so uh to begin with I'm going to talk a bit about the back history of dark F so in so with the project called Dark wallet so in 2013 I founded a project called Dark wallet uh along with um you know Cody Wilson who created the 3D printed gun uh with vitalic boter in who he lay a left after eight months to create ethereum and uh a group of Spanish hackers and if you're interested in dark wallet you can go on YouTube and you can search dark wallet and you'll see our initial announcement video I definitely recommend people to see it um and um and also in incident interestingly if you search dark quallet you'll see another video called Dark quallet Al uh Alpha and in that video I'm I'm talking about I go oh you know should we call it drug Market Ultra or death Market revived and that is because um when uh Ross went to jail I created a the first version of what later became open Bazaar and that was called Dark market and on Reddit at the time in Bitcoin the main narrative was about mainstream Mass adoption and there was a petition on Reddit to get me to rename my software to to something less scary because it would it would scare away Mass adoption of of cryptocurrency and at that time um the Bitcoin Foundation was was trying to make inroads it was it was a it was this click of of business guys who had seen who kind of saw all these crazy anarchists had created this really interesting kind of play thing and we kind of need to wrestle it out of their hands and if we could just get it used by the big Banks it would make payments cheaper and like credit cards less expensive and so that was in full swing and and dark wallet was a kind of response from the crypto Anarchist side of Bitcoin a rallying call against the th that co-option of Bitcoin and the name of dark wallet actually comes from a speech by the director of the FBI James Comey uh in in 2013 he made a speech about the going dark problem which is the the ma the uh uh cryptography Technologies uh widely used throughout Society now created all pervasive danger for law enforcement where it threatened to create these dark impenetrable zones in the internet as if that's a bad thing so he says it's just a quote from him he says unfortunately the law hasn't kept pace with technology and this disconnect has created a significant Public Safety problem we call it going dark so so that's that's the origin of of dark wallet and you know dark F has its roots in that origin story in 2013 so before I go more into dark F I want to talk a bit about our philosophy so there's a headline that I read uh this month and it says then the headline says I'm 28 and I'm scheduled to die in May so the article continues zorah T 28 expects to be euthanized in early May tur Beek was never able to must the will to finish school or start career she said she was hobbled by her depression autism and borderline personality disorder she recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they had tried everything and that there's nothing more we can do for you it's never going to get any better at that point she said she decided to die I was always very clear that if it doesn't get better I can't do this anymore so we now live in this situation in in modernity where there is a peing of uh uh you know uh mental disorders and you know various different types of of pathologies and you know um also this um you know pervasive sense that there's something uh uh deeply wrong and and there is an experiment from uh 1962 a study that was published that I think can illuminate us some insights into this situation that we find ourselves in and it was an experiment by um a professor called John Calhoun which is called Universe 25 and it's it's it's not without it detractions but I I think the experiment still holds and in Universe 25 what John Calhoun did is he got a very large Warehouse um huge huge space and he put these many floors and he put a population of rats inside of there and the Rats had access to unlimited resources unlimited food and water and the Rats began to multiply and and there they thought you know the rats they because they were interested in this question like okay what happens when the population Peaks and they thought oh you know we' have some there'd be some self-balancing mechanism that would happen there so I read just what what it says what his quote was so having reached a level of high population density the mice began exhibiting a variety of abnormal often destructive behaviors including refusal to engage in courtship and females abandoning their young by the 600th day the population was on its way to Extinction though physically able to reproduce the the mice had lost the social skills required to mate many female rats were unable to carry the pregnancy to full time or to survived delivery of their litters if they did an even greater number after successfully giving birth fell short in their maternal functions among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frantic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat drink and prove about only when other members of the community were asleep the social organization of the animals showed equal disruption so what he found was more dramatic the mouse population was not self-regulating and would grow to unsustainable levels resulting in not just a moderate decrease in quality of life but in explosion of all sorts of strange and novel pathologies followed by a total population collapse and possibly Extinction so I I would just tell you uh about the author's conclusion and I offer my own conclusion so the authors kind of concluded that you know when a population gets too big and they ter this the behavioral sync it reaches a point a terminal point at which these pathologies develop and the population kind of explod but I I kind of draw a different conclusion from that and um and I should also note that you know the experiment is not without it detractions or criticisms but I still think that it have it it it's have a lot of it's It's still interesting experiment so um there's a well-known fact about crows if you keep a crow as a pet it if you keep it in a small confined environment it will develop mental disorders it's animal that is extremely intelligent it needs a huge amount of space to roam around in and if you keep it confined it will start to Peck at its own feathers and eventually it will stop to eat and it will die and the interesting the thing I would be interested to see about this experiment was okay how would this experiment differ with the introduction of predators or if the rats actually had some kind of struggle in in in their existence in their lives because as we know about Evolution or nature in EV in in nature or Evolution when an organism doesn't use a certain feature like it's like our long appendix or the tails in chimps like once chimps uh changed how they locomoted from swinging on branches to walking along branches they very quickly lost their tails or the or the back flippers in Wes they over very quickly atrophied there's something about in evolution of of minimizing energy usage or optimizing our inefficiencies where if something is not used it atrophies and this is kind of related to the the phrase Charles Darwin he he says nature read in tooth and Claw it's like all the beauty in nature comes from what's you know like this this constant struggle the so-called Red Queen hypothesis that you know you're never actually standing still you're always you're always to stay where you are you have to keep moving moving forwards and related to this in medicine there is this modern idea of the hygiene hypothesis now we've seen a growing rise in these modern immune Related Disorders such as asthma you know other things like um yeah various like uh immune system disorders to do with uh digestive system Etc and um one of the the main theories about why that's happening is the increasing uh uh is is that in our developmental cycle parasites or pathogens they play a necessary role inside of our biology as we as we grow and eliminating these means that we we lose some very important trigger inside of our our bi biology and and I kind of I kind of think that we can kind of extend that concept that hygiene hypothesis to kind of mental Immunology so you know also another interesting fact is vegetables vegetables are actually poisonous when you eat vegetables they're trying to kill you but vegetables are very healthy for for you because those uh those chemicals that they they excrete in your body they trigger they trigger biological responses that are very essential for life so it's actually an important thing that we need for our existence so biology actually requires resistance in order to develop and to grow and and S complete sanitization is bad for health including mental health so there is this there is this concept that when there is a struggle the humans developed by overcoming the obstacles not by turning away from the obstacle but in the process of overcoming the obstacle we develop and we're able to grow and to ascend and to move upwards and to become higher parts of nature so uh here is a quote by n from Twilight of the idols and he says the criminal and what is related to him the criminal type is a type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances a strong human being made sick he lacks the Wilderness a somehow Freer and more dangerous environment and form of existence where everything that is weapons and armor in the Instinct of the strong human being has its rightful place his virtues are ostracized by Society the most Vivid drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing effects with suspicion fear and dishonor yet this is almost the recipe for for physiological de degeneration and here is another quote by Ernst Jer in which he says the cult of crime is so characteristic of our times its dimensions and extent are easily underestimated it would be no exaggeration to say that threee quarters of literature deals with criminals and their deeds and their millu and its appeal lies precisely there this indicates how far the law has become dubious people have a sense of being under foreign occupation and in this relation the criminal appears a kindred soul so I have to add an important addendum here so the criminal label is a label that is given to us by the state we're certainly not criminals we're Forest Rebels um and we have to differentiate oursel from criminals with our morals because unlike mafias we we have a philosophy and this history of the state is a 5,000 year history of Oppression and they like to call us criminals but they themselves are criminals you know they go oh you know the that technology it's a criminal technology but we've all seen the the scandals and the pedo rings and all the imagery and all the stuff they do as well like assassinating people and the corruption that's so endemic in us in a terminal Society that's that's really reached its peak and free Society is the origin of all the value that is created you know when people have a vision and they want to create you know a piece of art or they want to create a product or they want to create something new there is there's some Drive within them that cause them to create that new thing and state civilization since the origin of human history has been in a continuous war with free Society um you know we always hear these textbook stories about you know civilization uh this you know Glory but it's actually not true the original state civilization that emerged in Sumeria was AI a slave civilization that was Waging War that built pyramids where the priests inhabited the upper areas and maintain statues of the Gods and they would uh use their military to conquer surrounding areas to seize the Surplus and to expand their military and expand their conquest and if you're interested in this topic there's very interesting documentary you can find it on YouTube called the ascent of woman is made by BBC the first episode and it's very Stark when you see the transition of the artwork in early um Society or early civilization where the artwork went from imagery oriented around nature or oriented around growth uh to to and fertility to imagery oriented around uh uh uh domination and War and slavery and that's that that imagery is night and day you can go to museums and you can see that so now we kind of stand on the precipice of a declining us Global power and we we're seeing the rise now of a multi-polar world and so kind of we need to stop thinking of the of the um of of the regulation and the compliance and we must we have to kind of look to our own future we have to chart our own path because the free societ and and and also about the our free Society the society which actualizes human beings you know where people are managing their Affairs without the state so um so under our and so we now and so anonymity which is name of my talk anonymity as a hard offensive power as as free Society to have a new tour so if you look up on Wikipedia the definition of hard power Wikipedia will Define hard power as military and economic power and I think actually now there is a new third emerging form of hard power which is cryptography so you know now right now people view cryptography and privacy as as a defensive technology but it's more than defensive and even this this this meme you're know like oh privacy's normal you know like oh you know privacy's nor me essentially like oh when I go to the bathroom nobody want to watch me no privacy is not normal privacy is exceptional privacy allow us to conquer and expand the territory of Freedom as Satoshi as Satoshi said and right now we're and and all those narratives about compliance they they're losing sort of narratives because um and the reason dark f as a concept is so powerful is because we're in a kind of feedback loop with the with the nation states when people talk about compliance and the states crack down on crypto that is the an example of a fragile narrative where where there is a migration of capital and users out of those systems but in the case of darki where darkfire is by design an antifragile system where where when when dark when the states crack down on anonimity validates the dark F narrative it kind of like drives capital and usage towards dark F so dark f is in a very strong position whereas all those other RFI kind of privacy Normie kind of things are in a weak position with uh uh regulation and and the states they they as soon as as soon as States crack down that entire thing kind of shatters so if you're interested in that there is a video that we made in collaboration with Rec news R KT you can find it on YouTube it's called Luna Punk and the dark side of the cycle and the dark and and we have this concept of the Dark Forest and the Dark Forest it's it's a it's a forest that provides the forest Rebel the kind of cyber gorilla with concealment and the more and and the gorilla operates in this Forest he's in a symbiosis with this an anonymity Forest this kind of ecology and the more the Gilla helps the forest to grow the more the forest protects the gorilla and so now I will talk um about some of the technicals of dark F so I'm yes I'm immensely proud of you know what we've been able to achieve and um I'd say that if you go to the dark website and you click the documentation and then there's a hamburger link and you click that and you go to start here and you scroll to the very bottom there's a section called a detailed overview and you'll find all the specifics you know about the the overarching view of darki so um imagine now that you've you've cloned the darki repo and you you're you're in the folder and the first thing I would invite you to look at is the source directory SRC and if you go in there there's a subdirectory called net that's our own peer-to-peer uh Network that we've implemented and that network is multi-transport yeah I want to make sure you're giving us a summarized overview of your detailed overview yeah summarized I mean I could just read it if you prefer no we're good we're good just a couple more minutes oh two minutes huh [Laughter] I mean well how about this we've got a couple questions I don't want to do the questions oh okay I mean if sorry they they can come afterwards and talk you know I'd rather give the you know the info well what I'd love to do is is just ask you one question and then people can talk to you more outside and yeah we've got one question here which is will darki abide or comply by the rules of even one regulator in the world I mean no perfect no but I I mean we don't we don't have um we don't we're not managed by a company and all of our developers are completely Anonymous except me um you can contribute using tour we even have our own chat system there's I mean like a lot of these projects they're like oh we made a chat but they then they're saying join our Discord but we don't use Discord we don't use any centralized chat system we have our own peer-to-peer fully Anonymous chat you can change your nickname all the messages are completely unlinkable we don't use GitHub issues either we have our own task manager is by Design L is meant to be a system that's completely resilient and not able to uh uh be attacked I mean you could attack me to take me out but it doesn't mean the system the system can still operate that's like um because yeah too much of crypto is like oh you know we need to make a company and and Chase the money and and you know I don't think that's going to hold water when there are uh Extinction events which extinction longtale extinction events that are rare by Design and are unplanned for and completely unlike anything you've seen before um what I'd love to do is just for everyone to give Amir a huge round of applause thank you so much for your time and for sharing this with us and what we can do is I would hope that people can come to you and ask you more questions and have a chat is that cool awesome awesome thank you so much everyone for being here we really appreciate your energy and we would love for you to carry this into tomorrow for our final day of eat Dam we'll see you downstairs for the Boral thank you so much [Music]