# Privacy First | Parazyd, Ameen Soleimani, Mykola Siusko | ETHDam 2023

- Speakers: Ameen Soleimani
- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 34:30
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-w_72TlZYGN4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_72TlZYGN4

## Description

Parazyd is a founder of DarkFi. 
https://twitter.com/parazyd 

Ameen Soleimani is a founder of SpankChain.
https://twitter.com/ameensol?t=IihfhpFRvtHpMwqypgXW6g&s=09

Mykola Siusko is a privacy researcher at NYM and Web3privacy.
https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy

Moderated by Eleonore Blanc, founder of CryptoCanal.
https://twitter.com/blockblanc

ETHDam is a Hackathon & Conference that gathered over 500 DeFi and Privacy builders on the 20th and 21st of May 2023 in Amsterdam. 

Privacy is normal. Following the arrest of Alexey Pertsev, a Tornado Cash developer in the Netherlands, ETHDam 2023 is determined to counter the chilling effects of the lawsuit and bridge worlds to discuss the future of privacy, encouraging to build on the shoulders of cypherpunk giants.

ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, - a blockchain education and events platform growing in Amsterdam, spreading its roots to Rotterdam and Zurich. 

ETHDam 2024 is on the map already! Keep up with us to see updates: 

CryptoCanal https://www.cryptocanal.org/
CryptoCanal Twitter https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal
Join CryptoCanal Community https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity 

We would like to thank our partners and sponsors that made this event possible. 🌷

Our BFF 1inch https://1inch.io/

Our Frens: 
Sismo https://www.sismo.io/
Aleph Zero https://alephzero.org/
Scroll https://scroll.io/
RAILGUN https://railgun.org/#/

And our Sisters:
oasis.app https://oasis.app/#earn
Maven11 https://www.maven11.com/
bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en
Lido https://lido.fi/
Spankchain https://spankchain.com/
API3 https://api3.org/
Gelato https://www.gelato.network/
VanEck https://www.vaneck.com/nl/en/crypto-etn
Marlin Protocol https://www.marlin.org/
Silent Protocol https://www.silentprotocol.org/
Cyber Capital https://cyber.capital/
… and Proto https://twitter.com/protolambda 🍍

## Transcript

foreign [Music] this is the first panel that we're doing today and obviously I wanted to start strong and uh and have all of you privacy Builders say a few words thank you for being here let's have a an awesome conversation thanks for having us say introduce yourself uh hi I'm Amin solomoni I was part of Malik Dao giving a lot of the grants to tornado cash early on uh helping Steward the process um helping pay some of their uh legal funds too and now working on privacy pools to try and Advance more potentially less uh sanctionable version that can prove that you're not like illicit funds when you withdraw but without revealing Who You Are yeah cool my name is Michael Cusco I am a privacy Advocate if you can say but not the legal Advocate more like an activist side uh I run a think tank called Web privacy now our aim is to make privacy mainstream on educational level and not uh tool or a market accessible to technological privileged people and at the same time I'm part of an in-team trying to help make privacy on infrastructure level and basically work within the also metadata and how you can basically hide yourself from the bigger and passive adversaries that trying these days uh you know demand your data and change the way you experience internet and life Etc hi I'm parasite I've been a free software developer for about a decade or so now currently I'm the lead developer of darkfi which is the new blockchain that we're making with privacy at its core privacy by default and it's something that that's like very dear to me now and moving into this whole cryptography aspect of it and the maths are very interesting for me that pushes like the boundaries of the computation we can do today and through that we can actually have a freedom there as a as code thank you all three for for being here for traveling from far to to be here and make a statement with us today maybe we can start this conversation uh by discussing the tornado cash case uh I think where you all came we all chatted before and I think you all wanted to be part of this event um for Alexi and to make a statement so maybe you could all share a little bit what this what this means to you I'm going to start by saying I think it's a bunch of [ __ ] that he was kept in jail for six months like anklet technology is not new like uh if he was a Flight Risk they could have anklet him six months ago there was absolutely no reason to keep him in jail that whole time except to like mess with him so I think that's kind of preposterous and I think it tells us generally speaking that um once you experience technology and internet and we think that it's a free space we could do whatever we want express ourselves we are highly limited by many many many different actors who just in a negative way impact our life and somehow there's this big stress between a certain democracy and freedom uh especially of speech or uh code of speech that we can do on internet and at the same time these big limitations that could be opposed of us so it's not kind of it's it's good in in this weird way that suddenly also people woke up and like oh we need we need to defend ourselves we need to get together unionized in some sort of way we need to collaborate instead of you know like usually anyone you go Twitter and you want [ __ ] each other Monero Seekers they care someone else and it's kind of they fight all the time instead of getting together and contribute for better also legal fund also developing activist practices and I will drop one small bomb a bit commenting on compliance it's not about tornado cash but I was talking with our CM yesterday from Mexico exploring privacy use cases and he said that one of the biggest use case is when journalists are doing work on the local government and narcot traffic and they could be dead tomorrow just because they're doing their job for the society for the community and they need the Privacy tool and in this sense it's it's interesting that if you compliant with the Mexico government on that case you will have a big trouble so it's interesting that in the Democratic countries of Europe or in the states there's one thing but if it's Mexico or Iran and Euro women this completely different story for you so in this sense I would also try to to look at this case in a broader context and understand that lots of countries have different setup and lots of these groups are highly vulnerable although they're working for you can say Humanity yeah I agree with you also completely it's what the what they often forget what they often forget is like that people have this need of being private and like being just being combined by giving out any kind of metadata and things you get like shot at that's like well that was Obama's whole deal it's like we kill people with metadata and like even if you're trying to be compliant you're losing these uh like safety you it's like the safety is gone like you cannot like trust it um they also do this to people like uh Assange as well um they just arrested and they arrest him and they keep him locked down without like visiting people and being able to talk to people so it's like it's they're playing mind games which I think are very painful for people who do this and then it becomes very difficult to work as well so we need to like stay together and help each other out I wanted to add a couple things uh you have notes yeah you're prepared uh professional yeah uh this is pertzev is an FSB agent like that was fake news right but like the actual U.S state Department like blinken uh tweeted that like North Korea made tornado cash and I was offended um they didn't make it like they were you know I made it right like what's the deal right and so that he had to like delete the Tweet because the entire crypto Twitter showed up and was like you and you can't just as the Secretary of State just like drop fake news that North Korea does this like what it's insane um and then uh I'm very grateful for Keith's uh presentation earlier thank you so much for uh very lucid uh presentation and a couple things I would add to that is that like the the tornado cash Dao didn't even control the protocol right it controlled like an opt-in wallet that you could use if you know while you wanted to use the protocol but you could just not use that wallet also uh and and then lastly the doubt didn't even control like it controlled it uh optional registry of relayers it didn't even control like the you know you weren't forced to use those relayers you could either withdraw on your own or even use other relayers that you knew out of band um and so yeah I I uh and the last thing I'll add is that uh the St Louis Federal Reserve uh published the best paper on tornado cash I've ever read and they in the the last line they say tornado is a integral part of public blockchain infrastructure right and their whole strategy for obtaining privacy on public blockchains given what they knew at the time which is like we have a tornado cast should we ban it should we use it how should we let people you know use it what's the regulation their whole plan was use tornado Cash's own compliance Tool uh to help people reveal you know their transaction history to regulated financial institutions and it's like clearly this is not like a criminal Enterprise like we're building privacy tools that Central Bankers are like hmm this seems like a good idea uh and they're probably their compliance tools like really helpful you know maybe we should look into this and and so I I really hope that you know Alexi is able to win his case and obtain his freedom and uh we can look back on this and sort of laugh at this era of misinformation perpetuated by governments I was I was wondering what do you think about what the state is going to do like the future projects like this we're doing also like stuff even without compliance um I I don't think that had the intended effect that they thought like I think they were trying to chilling affect it and I think it just made everybody mad yeah yeah but no like the problem with this thing of compliance non-compliance they just finished a research for C cash on because the problem that also the government officials have a fairly limited view on privacy use cases because they project just one use case and said just criminals use uh they still and that's it they don't they're not interested in maybe marginalized groups and maybe political activists that's the first misconception right I think yeah and that you have to fight that's why that's why I was like kind of like and still if we go to community if someone States it's agreement is for criminals you need to have a really strong argument against not just saying it's not because when you have this Twitter chat it wouldn't work so you need something strong and I went uh I use Ukrainian Russian war as the kind of like the extreme the need for privacy and research use cases and there are lots of uh domestic violence survivors who are lacking uh funds for support and basically if you don't provide the means of survivals and privacy or protection of information communication abusive husbands would go and do domestic violence again again and again or kids stalked online kids that were forcibly moved from one territory to another and they want a safe messenger just one tool to talk with their parents to understand what to do because they're lost afraid and stuff like that and also researchers imagine you're doing something related with cancer or something with like I don't know the break uh breakthrough in AI or even physics and you need to connect with your colleagues in Oxford so they would relocate to you and then you need a private a private of communications private tool to send your documents and stuff like that and you know the criminal maybe you're the new Nobel Laureate a new Nobel Prize winner and in this sense these tools they kind of create the possibility of big change and sometimes when we look at this as From transactional perspective we highly undermine audiences the potential positive impact and we also project this kind of like utopian View that I think people misunderstand in dark fight they see dark fight is kind of like out that's Utopia now that's maybe the way that's the question yeah but the thing is we just have to put this technology out so people have it people use it that's why we make free software it's not like something that's oh it's hard to use or whatever like maybe in the beginning yeah but uh I I don't think that people won't write like user interfaces for dark like onboarding uh people on on decentralized chat uh chat uh apps and and stuff like that so like if you put the technology out it's Unstoppable to add like the Ukraine example like vitalik has publicly stated that he was using tornado cash to donate to Ukraine right like I think I think it was Elizabeth Moore some Senator was like tornado cash was all money laundering and it's like which is that money launder like it's trying to help you know and it can be even the extreme to like the mundane like I was using tornado cash for payroll right just so that people get paid without anybody being able to see like their entire you know transaction history and income and Etc when all of this happened what was your first reaction how did you feel found lawyer sorry found the lawyer yeah I think I teach reaction as a can learn from this as it's as it's developing as well which is really difficult I will point out to one thing that we should mature in a way that from community on telegram group and stuff I've seen that there were lots of High Caliber lawyers like Ahmed from neem who was supporting Guantanamo case uh silke Noah like lots of talented Defenders who could set up the structure how you talk about it how you communicate about it for the community like not maybe in the hardcore legal terms but how to react what's the next what's your next time move when you go to investor for example you pitch the same project you would say ah you know we're not a mixer with something else you hide it or you have a great legal punchline basically and then the next big thing is that there's still Community separation because kinda it's right time to do an activism but Real Deal activism is campaigning with the flights for campaigns with a certain creativity I have your name each campaign what was the point there and I think it just started there is this example of hey this could be how Community could defend itself and it's funny that it's last summer I I've seen one vacancy from stateless team it's called Head effectivism I'm like what if every project has this vacancy not this defy Guru whatever and they're like no we're building Grassroots Movement we are building advocacy uh I guess it's something like ethereum community in any way but there's still big room for how to develop a smart approach in within so many projects that could get together and build this kind of like Forefront of use cases first second if you go to a tour website one super good recommendation they have a public research on user personas and they published this Fatima researcher from Iran Persona stating why this person needs privacy how this person uses privacy was the technical proficiency of this person was the risk level of this person and once people publish this publicly all this information then we find much more meaningful way how ways how to collaborate cross-countries and with the different mindsets so is this time now to sort of build resilience educate people around us and just be ready is this I think the sort of the Mantra in crypto is like in the beginning they laugh at us they ignore us and then we fight are we do you think as privacy Builders this is fight time yes yes uh that's the short answer when when tornado got effect uh I I was actually at zcon in Las Vegas uh day one of zikon I was going around telling everybody how amazing tornado cash was uh and then day two of zecon I was just like raging uh I'm pretty sure I like joined a Twitter space and like yelled at everybody uh some people were like yeah we have legal Clarity I'm like they're about to throw my friends in jail like [ __ ] every single one of you uh that's not the regulatory Clarity I want um and I remember having this conversation with somebody like like I think it was a somebody who helped with like WWF stuff too uh and they were like look like if you could just take out all of the bad guys this is right before it got sanctioned right if you could take out all of the bad guys of you know in tornado cash and everything else work the same like wouldn't you do it and I had to think about that for a while and I was like you know I don't think I would and it's it's not because like I don't want the bad guys using it it's because I don't believe that I should have the power to decide who the good and bad guys are for everybody more and more so I don't think anybody should have the power to decide who the good and bad guys are for everybody right this is a privacy tool that we want him to create as a public good we made it for ourselves because before we made this you know the way to achieve privacy on the public blockchain was like run your money through coinbase right and it's like any low-level support engineer at coinbase because you can just get bribed for like a grand and then just reveal your entire transaction history it's not a very sophisticated privacy setup you know so uh we built it for ourselves we built it and and had we even kept the the keys right like somebody would just put a gun to our head one day it's like it's not in the position you want to be in right it's important that these things are uh you know that we view control as liability and try to relinquish it where possible so I was upset and then once you know I found out that uh Alexi had actually been uh thrown in jail by the uh Netherland authorities I was I was just very upset and sort of demoralized because at the time I couldn't imagine you know a way to over overcome this but I was reinvigorated by you know the the the community really rallying around this cause it's not something I expected to see to be quite honest uh to see coin Center come out and start you know uh filing lawsuits against uh the government the treasury ofac itself and to see like coinbase come out in support and even you know our bankless guy like David Hoffman he got dusted in his wallet and so he's like let's let's dance treasure you know it was it was cool to see that that kind of support and people appreciating privacy For You Know It uh the value that it actually provides for society and not being willing to just uh let this go in the sort of in-between phase here with this case how do you see it individually in your work today has it changed something and how you see the future of of your own projects personally I'm a bit like concerned about ethereum's future because it might become just purely illegal to run an ethereum node or like everything gets censored um I think we it's really cool that people build privacy tools on ethereum and they people also build their twos and whatever which is like good and private but um it's it is still kind of scary that there is this chance that everything could be banned and you you become a criminal for using it so I I want to remove this concept of identity of using like Identity On A blockchain and just having everything Anonymous so we will just have a new paradigm of Finance uh we run a lot of service on audience and we found out that kind of if you ask people blindly if they care about privacy they'll say yeah of course of course but then they don't use any tools they kind of don't promote it in a meaningful way they just copy these phrases privacies and norm and stuff like that but they don't understand what does it mean and people stop using Linux yeah yeah it's a fairly limited amongst people and then if you try to research geographically what's happening with the Privacy I don't know the Indian our CM recently told me that hey uh government opposed 30 tax on crypto so people went through in search for privacy tools and then the big use case is important and I'm like aha there are local things on to that and in Turkey the opposite they they're seeking censorship resistance tool to read kind of Truth or alternative media and basically that's just VPN they don't need maybe they would wouldn't even know that it's a privacy tool it's basically for them it's a glimpse beyond the government firewall and I think that a good psychological uh tool is to understand that we live in our small bubble and then once another cash happens you need to communicate this bubble to external world like a journalist in the traditional media and suddenly they don't have italic they don't know they're not the cash and stuff and they don't know ethereum and it's kind of weird explaining complex stuff to people who are maybe writing for financial things and in this sense I think that we need to do kind of like a step back and and collaborate with like eef the uh ngos organizations who are fighting for privacy for many years on this fundamentally different level when they could use Court decisions as a defense of a certain case they could structure articles or comments on the um on the effect on the Senator's opinions in in less childish way more like super serious and at the same time it's it's an interesting time for us to and that's what we're kind of doing like I'm like where is the academy for privacy there's nothing 101 privacy for uh general public there's no it doesn't exist in this market it exists a web tool but we're kind of afraid of collaborate with them because no no you're trying additionalists you're centralized and I've also seen something very interesting here in the Netherlands while trying to gather interest and actually to Rally the general public for this case first of all their charges were kept unclear not public which through a lot of people in disarray and couldn't stand against or for because they basically didn't know why Alex was being detained so even normal privacy advocacy groups that you could think of uh privacy just straight up privacy and uh associations as well as other bigger knowns I would say all the way to amnesty refused to make statements because of that and Clarity and I think that was definitely a play in the case is that opacity which also prevented the community The Wider community of privacy Builders to be able to stand up for or against the second thing is that every headline mixed everything there was Lazarus group you know tgb agent and you know Pro and crypto you know all in one headline and and for for the media this was a terrifying topic right um and so even for privacy Advocate the first thing that I realized while attending normal conferences around privacy is that because this was linked to crypto it was double scary um and I feel like that's these are all the narratives that we're trying to fight so yes to more education um but it's as you said it's not one side and every country has their own cultural specificities around privacy and what it means and use cases here's the trick for you yes please when we talk about privacy it's like a boogeyman big brother is watching you they will fight you when they're crypto right also like it's the end of Fiat we're coming double scary I call it fear-based communication and it's hard to so it's hard to connect based on the fear uh in big groups in small groups yeah 100 people here there uh of paranoid highly paranoid people who say you know them and uh and yeah yeah of this Anonymous and then you collaborate with them on Dao and you're like what who are you like like when we all gonna go into jail so but think about the opposite like if this unicornish whatever bright uh positivistic thinking on privacy could exist and how it would even enroll in terms of how people could connect with each other so what we are thinking a bit in like human rights empowerment and envision of the new internet Affair decentralized whatever but then not uh putting too much pressure with the Snowden on the shoulder of poor Mexican person who just exploring web free otherwise you'll be like wow it's too much for me ah and one last people think they're too small to fight the bigger authorities that's the typical comment we see in the socials it's kind of like who am I comparing to the government and in this case person uh just losing power on doing something not just against but kind of reclaiming uh agency over uh her or its own uh privacy it's kind of like too small to fight or to to be part of campaigns yeah often people think they're alone but just look at how many people rallied for tornado cash and it means a lot I have to say this was the this example of uh being in court and seeing one human one individual standing um yeah across from this Almighty government that felt very righteous and as as we built as we move forward as we build I just want to make sure that we try to keep inspiring people about privacy that it's this beautiful positive unicorn but also that Us in the back end that we build as much resilience as possible to these things because maybe one thing that we can all say is that tornado cash lives on right this is not this was one person was in jail but the protocol and the blockchain and the smart contracts keep turning um how can we keep and make sure that that resilience goes on I think one way is to like advocate for other use cases that also benefit from privacy like I think it was like Andrew Yang was like we should put voting on The blockchain and everybody knew how that worked was like no do not do this right uh because things like semaphore which actually do private voting and things like Machi weren't really ready yet but now they're I think semaphore is in production in some cases and you can actually have private voting and people get why you want private voting right uh that's not like a very scary use case that's like it would be insane if everybody's you know votes were tallied for all presidential or Central elections that's like one of the defaults that we have and so being able to just use our tools to build those defaults is a way to advocate for you know the whole sort of you know umbrella of private tooling uh altogether I think the yeah when we were research music on privacy tooling database I saw that last year lots of projects shut down especially mixers disappear these cards are dead everyone left somewhere without even leaving a certain node that we need to work together help each other whatever it's like they disappeared I'm like wow it's like dozens of them are just dead privacy coins the same and I think partially they were scary partially they see how the government let the USA government could come to their house and stuff like that and I think that the problem is that there are lots of talented Engineers who are scared or who prefer to do something defy like something easy easy going and that's a big misconception because basically why you make again white people become richer then you could contribute to something really meaningful in the sense that then maybe the next time you won't have one million transactions fancy transactions instead you will save lives of the 10 people again in Iran or in another geographies and in this sense what I really like that we need to connect the dots one of the good dots is is here there's a guy JJ you know him I think uh he is okay yeah no no he's advocating for tigrainian people in Ethiopia because he is part of the community and he and they are doing self-custody entropy project and he is running a Dao he's running fundraising and it's a perfect match for the first of all uh highly passionate developer and at the same time with he seeks for privacy tooling and then he seeks for Community collaboration the same with the core Dao and lots of doubts that emerged lunar doubt that emerged in in a way like how we could reshape collaboration culture so instead of just saying let's replicate or defend let's go back to collaborate and understand what does it mean maybe it's an r d like Aragon in Aztec is doing called private voting maybe it's uh educational like explain privacy alternative cash to 11 year old like these things then or a case explain the case to 11 year old and then collaborate and help each other and here I would say that maybe all these privacy fancy tools could allocate grants not just for tooling but also advocating um and I see the aliens is coming but there's a bit slow for me well so yeah no no aliens is sorry private resiliences are coming but there's no actions there's no kind like hey this is a workshop with lots of uh lawyers from the field on turn on the cash case that's our statement that's how we work that's our principles uh that we push forward here's our grants to the people related in researching and advocating and other things yeah no fair enough um maybe some last words for the hackers that are here hacking on privacy hacking on D5 what you would like to see in the future and maybe uh some last few words for the tornado cash case um tornado cash is just the beginning uh like tornado cash was the second deployment of ZK snarks in production in history after zcash the genie is not going back in the bottle right uh ZK is here to change everything like humans if cryptography gave us uh Secrets the ability to have secrets then what ZK gives us is the ability to have shared secret state right and in tornado cash that secret state is very simple it's like a Merkle tree did you spend the money or not you know but it can be far more complex and I think in time we'll start basing more of our society on these kinds of things right you want The Ballot Box that everybody trusts that you know doesn't reveal how people voted but we all believe and and and have faith that it does actually count the votes properly and and outputs the right thing and so I believe that the stuff will be transformative and looking forward to seeing what all the hackers come up with then I recommend hackers do lots of cast death like lots of user research before even going for use cases and one comment again from Mexico that it's really literally a quote we need maybe like a VPN this one big button connect and then you will make a private browsing and not opposing on the people to complex buzzwords or slang so they would be like what how I it's like the first generation of wallets who are like that how they even use it ux UI is just broken and now this was became like one button to button and that's it so in this sense try to think broadly in terms of that not many people have so many computers in the world they use smartphones their smartphones are cheap so if you do an application think around how it would work on this Smartphone and basically try to put yourself in the shoes of not privileged group that then your privacy tooling will find much more much bigger perspective and lots of projects would back it up because basically it's not ending with the hacking space maybe tomorrow we will go and seek for funds for support for Grants and understanding how these privacy tools could be scalable it's super important to think about it here and now nice well put for hackers I would say solve problems don't just like give out solutions to which which don't solve any problems like find the issues and solve them utilize Simplicity it's very helpful you will see in your like experience of programming it's the best thing regarding tornado cash I think it's the future like maybe not tornado cash specifically but all of this anonymity all of this technology that we're getting it's going to win I'm pretty sure about that fantastic thank you thanks thank you