Amir Taaki [DarkFi] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

you see this logo do people know what this logo is yeah Silk Road is the best thing that happened in crypto and it and it and Ross alrick he created the Silk Road where you could buy anything it was the first agarist Cipher Punk Market that existed and they put him in jail they made an example out of him and now he's going to be free this is the best news I've heard in a long time so I want to offer a a libation to those who have made sacrifices in the past and those who are yet to come and will also make sacrifices so I honor these people so you know may we walk in their path and do justice to their work and as above in the cosmos in in the heavens and in nature so it is down below here where we live where we exist and this is what we're going to go into today this knowledge this wisdom we're going to talk about these things so very quickly about myself um I'm Amir Taki I'm a free software developer for over 20 years I was a core Bitcoin developer in since in 2010 to 2015 um I worked on privacy tech for over 10 years made the first uh privacy alos in Bitcoin coin join steal addresses uh wrote the bp1 made the first UK Bitcoin uh exchange I also uh was in the ypg I fought on the front line against Isis I was part of the Syrian North Syrian rava government for three years working in you know the Revolutionary government and in this talk I'm going to talk about darkfy so very quickly darki is L1 for anonymous smart contracts you'll probably know what that means but most people don't but so basically it's um in the same way Monaro is the anonymous version of Bitcoin we're the anonymous version of ethereum so and I'll also talk about our app today that we're developing which is crossplatform for mobile and desktop so about the name dark wallet it actually comes from uh sorry dark fire it comes from a project called Dark wallet in 2013 which um was a project that you know a group of us co-founded uh you know me Cody Wilson who invented the 3D printed gun vitalic was also a co-founder and a team of Spanish hackers and you can go on YouTube you can find the original video announcement video for Doc wallet it's an important piece of Bitcoin history um but the name it came from the director of the FBI James Comey he gave a speech and he said that the the the mass usage of cryptography if it gets adopted it threatens to create these dark zones in the internet and he he says uh this disconnect creates a significant Public Safety problem which they call the going dark problem and this is this is what we refer to this Dark Forest which the Dark Forest is a place where it enables communities to thrive to be protected to mobilize to have cover and concealment and uh you know for really the cipher Punk values to take roote and to flourish what are the cipher Punk values there are three things three things that I are think are the core things one strong anonymity none of this privacy blah blah blah no strong anonymity as in nobody can find who you are and put you in jail that is the most there's a really important quality no compromises there is no such thing as you know different degrees of anonymity there is either it's Anonymous or it's not second censorship resistance nobody can stop you speaking you can say whatever you want you know there is absolute 100% free speech thirdly sovereignity nobody can come down and shut down your infrastructure your infrastructure is your own We Own It the community owns it so why do we need these why do we need to have these Cipher pun values you know well imagine this imagine an authoritarian government comes into power and starts putting your friends in jail and you want to mobilize to create a parallel free Society so what do you do you need to First be able to communicate and fully anonymously you know need to be uh talk with each other to get the message out then you go and you form an anonymous St and you know the dial is completely Anonymous all your members are protected and you fund raise and you raise money and then you are able to allocate resources to projects you're able to pay people in your project anonymously you're able to pay them a salary for the work that they do you're able to coordinate work you have Anonymous task managers you have the anonymous tooling to be able to coordinate effectively and then people get paid and they need to trade that they need to go to OTC they need to convert it to cash they need to be able to pay for their uh uh life and so therefore people are able to mobilize and they're able to take back their freedom and um you know the the time is coming like things are reaching that point within the next 5 years or so you know we all feel it there's going to be some mega event happen of great political economic significance it's coming and we have to gear up and prepare you know not be complacent you know we have to we have to use all of our means our resources to build our capability so when the time comes we already have an Empire on the internet an Empire of parallel societies that's ready to mobilize and take freedom from the government oops this one so you know and you know my the principle I always think of is um you know uh it's like if you say something and you know it's not even you know it's not even that you know offensive or whatever but you say something and I suddenly react in a really strong way I like twist your arm I use Force against you you know that's not a sign of strength so when the governments are putting deaths in jail when devs are dying suspicious deaths you know uh they're really showing their hands they're showing where they're really afraid they're putting devs in jail for making Anonymous software so that is showing so that is an indicator to us where we have to push more not not you know they're trying to frighten us into compliance they're trying to make us scared we have to do the opposite we have to be defiant we have to stand up and say no we're going to do more of this and nothing you can do about it because history has taken a course and is going to keep taking that course because when a technology has arrived whose time has come it cannot be stopped and um you know people go oh you know uh darkfire what about this uh you know competitor or that there is no real competitor to darkfire because you've got all these privacy projects and they're going you know they're you know devs have being sent to jail for making privacy software and they go oh yeah join our Discord I'll check out our Google Docs if they're saying that they're obviously not afraid of going to jail and if they're not afraid of going to jail they're obviously not doing anything important we just like as cryptocurrency we've got we've had billions and billions of dollars poured into this industry we still have not built the tours that people actually need to mobilize I'm going on Twitter and I'm reading projects going the future is uh AI agents conscious coordinate it's like you haven't even built a chat app you haven't even you're using Google Docs it's pathetic like we have not built the stuff that people need and you know how it works the VCS they get money from the central banks they print the money and the projects they want to you know they they want to like uh please the VCS they go Mr VC you know we're not disrupting the status quo and so they present themselves in a certain way and that's why every nobody everybody's being too afraid to innovate to really push what crypto is about crypto is about being able to send money from any one place in the world to any other place you know unencumbered truly Anonymous nobody can stop you it's it's like it's uh and you know what people always go oh you know what about dark F what about criminals and you know what it's like it's no mistake that all the movies and the media that we consume is about criminals is about gangsters or mafias Etc because people have really real sense that we are colonized by a foreign a foreign occupier which is the state which is the governments and it's like their Authority has become so dubious you know that and and that's why you know uh the appeal that's where the appeal comes from and uh and in this sense you know it it ends up we end up going oh you know the criminals maybe they're more like us than than these people in power than our rulers actually are and you know they invent they invent this label of criminal and they put that on us and they judge us by their standards we're playing the rules by their game the rules that they make you know you can never have the same morality between the rich and powerful and the poor and the oppressed we're just not on the same level so we we need to stop thinking in their game playing their games now an there's a really important thing to note here which is we are not criminals we are Forest Rebels we are fighting for a righteous cause we have morals we have philosophy we're not if you want to say anybody is a criminal they are the true criminals literally 2 million people were killed in the Middle East for nothing absolutely nothing it's like the amount of crime that has been done Against Humanity by states by the by the global system is really astounding when you look at it so when they when we are trying to get back our freedom with technology for free Society to organize amongst themselves and they go oh that's very criminal they Hypocrites absolute Hypocrites so no we will not stop we will we will push fully towards the OG vision of what crypto was really about you know and uh and so so this is a this is the Luna Punk uh RFI dark uh War you know where is it so I just explained ah okay I got a point in there okay um so there are there are two types of system and this is I'm going to tell you why we're going to win why we're ultimately going to win because there's two types of system one is frag fragile system which is the whole regi side of crypto where you know um you know you go to VCS and you're like oh Mr VC give me some money you know I'm doing this really compliant thing you know we you see with projects are like um oh we've got um you know visa and Mastercard or whoever on board or Black Rock and the thing is uh as soon as they get any push back the liquidity the liquidity gets scared and exits it's a fragile it's a fragile system and that those VCS they go into the next which is I don't know AI whatever it's like not authentic whereas the antiag antifragile means that it's a system that the more you shake it the stronger it gets the more powerful it gets so when we have Anonymous Cipher Punk cryptocurrency P2P systems when they attack it it validates why you need that and then people go oh you know these people I thought they were crazy but actually there's truth in what they're saying you know and and that causes liquidity to migrate to those systems just think about the things that we say today that you know people are saying 5 10 years ago that people thought was crazy you know um it's like not even controversial anymore to say that there are hostile elements in the government that actively look down on the people despise people and want to divide Society want to society to not exist so that they can control us better and it's a very and it's a very dystopian and this this is this is a long history goes back to the Victorian ages of of of of the ideologies Garden cities Factory school system this is the system been a long time in making and it's a system that deliberately by Design makes people passive and nihilist makes people not activated and not reach their full potential it's it's one that sees society as a resource to be harvested to be used so you know the more that they crack down on crypto oh yeah sorry this side so there's a feedback loop with anonymity and surveillance the more we're more effective in our work the more the states resort to hard power to surveillance the more that they're forced to take off their mask and reveal who they truly are and the more it causes us to fight back and to develop more anonymity software sorry and so you know that this feedback loop it radicalizes crypto it leads to it's a it leads to the true agorist nature of crypto being unlocked so you know so I'll go this one first so if you look at the tornado cash case how did they get those guys there's three you can look in the case but there's three main things first you know they so the reason why they put them in jail is because they made tornado cash that much is obvious but it's not how they put them in jail in the same way Al Capone he got put in jail because of the taxes so in the tornado cash case there was three things one they had access to their internal signal charts and they able to say oh well you know you said this and therefore you know you're kind of like you know the CEO uh second secondly they had a dow a transparent da and so they were able to go oh well you own this amount of tokens you're kind of like a board member in in this company thirdly they're running infrastructure so this is something think this is this something when we've been developing dark fight because we we're not just building you know a product we're building a network a community we've been and we've been thinking how do we protect ourselves and so the the first thing is we we we were like okay even if you use signal even if you use an anonymous chat app you still your messages are linked together you have a persistent identity so we created the world's first completely Anonymous peer-to-peer uh uh chat application sorry it's not on this screen it's on the next one this this one here and uh and there is no linkability between your name nicknames so you can change your nickname to anything and he and he uses cryptography like rate limit nullifiers to stop the network being spammed but this nothing like this exists in in in the world at all nothing and um and it runs it's peer-to-peer it runs over tour it runs over Nim you can use any anonymity Network and uh and not only is it do we have the chat we also have uh we also have tasks so you don't have to use GitHub issues so that that way the devs are completely protected so you can't when it later on even if they get access to the internal chats because in the beginning we wanted to be able to talk about the project in public but the what normally people have to do is they have to you know run away to uh private groups and they have like more and more become clandestine from the community uh because they're afraid of liability from speech that's like you know they say we live in free speech we don't live in free speech you know people are in England people are being put in jail just for Facebook posts there was a guy who held up a sign that said oh you know Black Rock the politicians they're corrupt he got three years in jail this's very real uh free attack on free speech and in crypto we have this as well there are certain things that I cannot say I cannot speak freely otherwise I will go to jail and but we didn't want to have to run away from the community we wanted to be able to engage with our community openly so that's why we had to make a chat application where there is no linkability there is no you cannot take any chat and say oh you said this you know Mr andir because I would just go it wasn't me it could be anybody because anybody can use that nickname you know and uh and then also uh so I put it on so also um you know the Dow thing in tornado cach so we had this experience so people don't don't actually know but um assanis Freedom was bankrolled by the crypto Community by sanow which raised 55 million to free aange and you know when we raised when we when we made the Dow you know we had this idea that it would free a Sange by all means necessary it' be this Dow that would like liberate this political prisoner and it would do it would take any action but then once the Dow existed there was this issue where it was a transparent Dow Neath and uh and so everybody nobody wants to vote in a DA for for such a high stakes political prisoner especially if you're just some random dude and you know they can come and they will take your life away from you and nobody will hear from you again so it just it just it it froze the da created inaction in theal and secondly you know the da was meant to participate in a public auction but because the DA's Treasury was public it broke the game theory of the auction so in 2020 2021 everybody was talking about DS how DS were going to create this new form of uh movements political organization online there were there was things like Squad wealth the squad wealth thesis none of that came to fruition and instead what took over in ethereum was this kind of you know defi uh dgen kind of shitcoin and nihilism and I think the reason why the DS in take off is because they weren't Anonymous it didn't allow people to do real political action political action where there's high stakes where you actually need DS people need to be protected and this is what crypto is really about and we've really failed in deliver in delivering that thirdly all of the infrastructure for dark fi is completely PTP self-hosted Sovereign you know it's very easy you know to set up to go oh you know we just need some web service you know but we've approached it with an adversarial mindset there's no other project that's approaching it like that from first principles and people always go to me oh you know how can you coordinate a project when it's like Anonymous you know in the '90s I would just join IRC channels and there were random projects and I'd go hey I've got a problem and you know we'd coordinate and then you know I'd start submitting patches the projects and we'd work on it and that was how we built open source that was how we built the internet that was the norm in the '90s this is a new thing where on the internet everybody has like a a you know a fancy profile picture of their face their real name on Twitter with a blue check mark we've been so brainwashed by the transparent Paradigm that our imagination has becom enclosed that we cannot imagine another way that the internet can be you know and people can't understand how can you organize on the internet anonymously without kyc and real names and so that's why everybody always goes back to these conversation about identity and it's like it's stopping us like delivering the actual interesting tools that people need like people actually need to be able to have free speech we haven't delivered that in crypto we're not able people like using Google Documents still forget the AI stuff what about the basic tools that we need you know um and actually being anonymous online is very good because it teaches people you know to think critically to have defense in depth to not like you know there's this there's this like Neo feudalism that's arising on the internet where you're on some guy's platform and you choose your Le and you're like by being part of this allees Crew He will he will treat me well you know and that's why for example on Twitter you see all the like people going oh Elon Musk is so great because when you know Elon Musk blesses your post you get boosted and you get monetized better so that's like that's like the Paradigm that the entire crypto Community has been sucked into and it's a failure the the crypto Community is on Twitter so come home Cipher Punk and you know it's it's even worse than that because um you know Silicon Valley has this entire business business model where you know they're like we need to capture as many normies as possible and we need to tax them and we all need to extract a little bit of money out of as many like individuals as possible and you know that's why when they make software they make software that is is like you know there's like a certain wisdom about how we make apps know like the app it needs to be you know like uh White it needs to be non-threatening it shouldn't have any values it shouldn't stand for anything it shouldn't have any principles um you know it needs to be like super basic and and you know I I've been going through I watch a lot of sci-fi and it's incredible all the Sci-Fi you know I'm not even just talking about the Sci-Fi in the '90s I'm talking about sci-fi now has this image of the future with UI that look amazing where it's like you know like youve really stepped into another world you have you know the power at the end of your hand and yet for some reason you know we're not get that instead what we're getting is these crappy you know electron slop uh Java apps which are laggy and they crash they're just garbage there's like so many garbage apps and they're like surveillance silos is this mentality of Silicon Valley I read an article recently which said that gen Z does not know how to use a printer I know a lot of you are gen Z and you probably know how to use a printer but there is a endemic of and I I've noticed this in my lifetime the level of skills in devs has dropped massively like people are way less skilled than 10 years ago I was even watching a video from the 80s of Dennis Richie and he was going he was going oh yeah well you know I'm my family went away for you know uh a week you know to visit my uh my their uh parents their uh grandparents and so I was alone and that's when I wrote you he wrote an operating system in a week how hardcore is that can you imagine that today cannot and so that and you know uh also said gen z uh doesn't know how to use a file system and indeed when you look on the Mac computer it hides the file system from you it like hides the power of the technology it's in fact you're not meant to use that full power of the technology so not only is the technology being made for low IQ Nory sheep I'm sorry to use that I'm not I don't think people are that but I think that's how they view people it's actually actively turning people into that it's like actively make the technology is making people stupid so there's a different way of building technology which is technology that enables us to build infrastructure you know and you know I want that that sci-fi futuristic imaginary of technology that we are PR we were promised in the '90s that's why with dark we're trying to create we're trying to bring back that vision of Technology we were promised you know like reality versus expectation in instead we have like metamask metamask is absolutely terrible you know dark wallet was actually the first web wallet um and when I made that when we made that instantly there was uh six different Bitcoin web wallets and we imagined back then that you were shopping online and you kind of you go oh that's that's cool I want to buy that and so you just one click and then you buy the the products you know using your web wallet in your browser and um you know then vitalic went and he made ethereum and then metamask got created but somehow it morphed from that original Vision we know we no long we don't buy things online using that we use QR codes but somehow we end up with this thing where it's like oh you deploy a website it's a web app you've got this metamask and it's just such a crappy uh it's such a bad Paradigm it's non-portable it's insecure you know so uh why we don't have our own app like why don't we have our I like saw the um the original Mist wallet for ethereum that looks so cool what happened to that why don't we have like that why aren't we why are we in why is there this risk for devs of hosting the front end it shouldn't exist at all it should be like full peer-to-peer distribution it's completely possible but it's like kind of we've reached that terminal stage where you know like they they say um the Empire State building was built in one year but now they can't even build like it cost like 20 billion and they can't build like 500 M of train line in California so it's kind of like ethereum where there's his there's his Mega budget mega mega huge projects trying to build and they just it's like a singularity they can never approach The Singularity they get closer and closer and there's a lot of coping where they're going oh you know well we didn't reach the original guard but we did do these side missions and it's kind of um uh why is it the dark fire you know with a where there are projects that have 20 to 100x or more of our budget have not even been able to do 20% of what we've done like what's up with that so we are making our own app and you know we we have uh where is it we have a Dev meeting every Monday we're building the Empire of Cipher Punk and you know to conclude you know they they call us criminals but they're the true criminals and in the end history will be the final judge of our actions and history will absolve us and anonymity it's not just about protecting yourself when you go to the you know you go to the bathroom it's way more than that it's about as Satoshi said himself it's about expanding the territory of Freedom outwards privacy is not Normy privacy is special it's exceptional it's something we have to struggle for and we fight for it and the dark we're in this dark forest and we are we are Forest Rebels and this regi dark F split is going to come and uh this is a really important point because I study a lot of math I like read math every day and it's like you're reading math and you you go oh that's that's an interesting mathematical truth Mother Nature is based on mathematics it's mathematics is literally like you know the language of the cosmos and what we as cryptographers do is we take those mathematical truths and we construct cryptographic schemas so when we are using cryptography we are literally summoning the power of Mother Nature to protect Society against the state and there is nothing they can do about that because violence cannot solve math problems cryp crypto regulation is an open and official provocation against Liberty and sovereignity and all who advocate for it are domestic enemies of the people and must be absolutely opposed the right of the people to keep and deploy cryptography shall not be [Applause] infringed there is a struggle between the previously creative and now outworn Sensei order and the new emerging creative idealistic forces in all fields of Social and cultural life every important aspect of Western social life is in crisis its body and mind are ill we are between two epochs the dying Sensei culture of a magnificent yesterday and the coming idealistic culture of a creative tomorrow the Rays of sun still illuminate the glory of the passing Epoch but the light is fading and in the deepening Shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly in the confusion of Twilight the night of the transitory period stands before us with its nightmares shadows and Horrors Beyond it the dawn of a great culture is waiting to greet the people of the future the moon illuminates our path through the coming long night let there be dark [Applause]