Hello. Uh, my name is Amin Solemani. I'm the CTO of Oxbow. We're building privacy pools. And my key message today is build the future that you think you deserve.
So, you said privacy tools should be built without the terrorists. What does that mean when you design privacy pools? Yeah. Well, there was a predecessor to privacy pools called Tornado Cash, and there was a problem where North Korea hacked a video game for several hundred million. I don't know why the video game had hundreds of millions of dollars, but uh then they started depositing some of that money into Tornado Cash.
And the ordinary users of Tornado Cash that were not North Korean hackers had no way to distinguish themselves from North Korea. And so what we do with privacy pools is we allow the legitimate users to prove that they're not the terrorists when they use the system so that they can keep their money separate and have privacy for the good guys. Why do you believe developers shouldn't be punished uh for what users do? Yeah, developers I I 100% believe that de developers should not be punished for the crimes of the users. uh it creates essentially infinite unbounded liability forever uh on the developers for any potential future action of a user.
The analogies also make no sense. For example, if I make a hammer which is used for construction and somebody uses it for a violin purpose that was not the intended use of the hammer and I as the hammer man, you know, builder, manufacturer, distributor should not be held liable for uh the crime that the hammer was potentially used for. Um, even things like weapons, uh, guns are sold uh in stores and they're typically marketed and sold as self-defense instruments. And I think privacy itself is security. And so uh being able to have financial privacy is a means of protecting yourself.
And some people who might want to abuse that uh might you know that shouldn't reflect on the the developers of these systems especially especially when the developers of the system don't actually have the means to prevent the usage by uh those illegitimate actors like in the case of tornado cache u the contracts were immutable people can access it through you know command line tools the UIs are on uh IPFS, so there's a static uh web page that can't be taken down by the developers. When all the developers went to prison, um the system still worked. And so it was clear that they were not necessarily maintaining it in the way that the courts uh accused them of doing so. And so that's just another reason why I don't think that they should be held liable. You say OPO is non-custodial but permissionless.
Permission. Yeah. How does that work? Uh so I I am the CTO of a company called Oxbow and Oxbow provides the monitoring and um whitelisting services for the privacy pool system. So you can go to privacypools.
com and you can deposit your money into the pool and there's a waiting period and then Oxbow will vet your funds. We'll go do transaction screening. So, we'll look up where the where the money came from and if we find that it came from, you know, North Korean attacking a DeFi protocol or whatever, we won't accept it. If it cames from, you know, Vitalic, we will accept it. And, you know, there's the spectrum.
And so, uh, on the in the system, uh, we can never move user funds. We can never freeze user funds. So, we don't ever have custody of the money in the system. uh what we can do is remove deposits from the white list of approved deposits and only those approved deposits are the ones that are allowed to withdraw privately. So we can't rug your money but we can uh take you out of the set of whitelisted deposits so that you can no longer get privacy.
And if you are taken out of the list of whitelisted deposits, you can only withdraw back to your original deposit address. And you can do this at any time. And the smart contract that implements that functionality is itself immutable. That we cannot change or upgrade. And so there's no way for us to uh tamper with user funds, move user funds.
And so in no way do we ever have custody. And so it's non-custodial. But the part of it that's permissioned, it's not like, you know, Tether or USDC stablecoin that it's permission in the sense that they can blacklist your money. that makes it custodial. Um, it's permissioned in the sense that the privacy part of it is permissioned.
You said that the fight for privacy is going on and on. Yeah. What future are you now building? What future are you building towards when you said that? So the the fight for privacy goes on uh and there's many fronts.
Uh some are fought in courts, some are fought with code. um with the courts, you know, Alexis's trial is still going. Uh he lost his trial. He was sentenced to five years in prison. He is out on bail pending an appeal.
Roman also has not yet had his trial. The charges are still ongoing despite some positive uh you know, efforts in the US and Trump maybe being a pro- crypto president. Uh the case still goes on. Um, in the EU there was a, you know, uh, I don't know if it's legislation or if it's a memo or or or, uh, a planned law that bans privacy coins and anonymous crypto accounts in 2 years. And so they're still trying to squeeze out the privacy which is sort of odd to me because on the one hand you have GDPR uh which is a very privacyfriendly piece of regulation and then on the other hand you have you know trying to block all privacy coins.
So it's hard hard to reconcile these two ideas. Um in in the US uh there was a memo by the Department of Justice that recommended that developers should not be held liable for the crimes of the users of their platforms and that any ongoing court cases in you know that are not aligned with this should be dropped but it hasn't been dropped yet. in the samurai wallet uh case is also still ongoing in the US as a Bitcoin uh anonymity tool and the part that we're building in code and the future that we want to build towards is one where people have the right to defend themselves and protect their financial privacy. And it's a f it's a future where we don't have uh mandated government honeypotss of financial information that can get hacked and then abused because that's inevitable. And so by building privacy for the good guys, we can show the world that there are positive use cases for this technology.
Especially when and I was at Alexis's trial the one of the judges they said we cannot think of a positive use case for something like tornado cache and so that is the bar that they have set and we need to uh show them definitively that there are positive use cases for this technology and hopefully that uh you know better rules are made as a result of that. [Music]
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.