Scott Moore [Gitcoin] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

I decided to write this talk um because I sort of started in this space as a privacy Advocate uh in 20156 um and you know a lot of the last five six years I think especially we've seen a shift from interest in privacy to other types of movements especially from the cipher Punk movement to even you know what getcoin I think has has often promoted as sort of the solar Punk movement um and I've kind of reconverted back to being very focused on cyppher Punk philosophy and one of the fundamental reasons for this let's see if this changes is a paper by Philip rogay which is called the moral character of cryptographic work which is the title of the talk from 2015 where he essentially makes the case for phography as a political tool and I think all technology is political uh artifacts of politics is also a famous paper from the 1980s but fundamentally in particular cryptography rearranges power it determines who can uh basically move information and to whom and that inherently in the internet age is extremely powerful and in the context of the internet you know and now ethereum and others it's even more powerful because it pretty much controls the entire way that you know value and incentives flow in society so you know we should be thinking in the context of this about the history of how cryptography is being used or has been used and think of it as a resistance tool or think of it as a political tool and this is not really A New Concept like the S and these sorts of tools were used um in the sort of ionian ERA this is like thousands of years ago um they've being used in the aasad Revolution and other Revolutions in historical times uh so in this case uh they were using a lot of uh kind of uh secret communication and crypto analysis in the context of um basically like Warfare between uh the uh moali which were like a kind of more uh I guess Rebel Alliance and and the the sort of uh umad caliphate in that context it's being used in actually protecting information uh from those who might seek to uh either destroy it for political or sometimes even religious reasons so in the alchemical Renaissance during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the you had uh a lot of gnosticism you had a lot of sort of more magical alchemical work happening in the shadows even under the court of Queen Elizabeth uh in this case under uh what was called the Bohemian Court uh for those of you familiar actually what's funny is this is the sort of Moving Castle of the Bohemian Court which is where how's Moving Castle uh came from just a fun reference ref but like this sort of to me reflects in the same way as um in the context of Galileo which is going to be the next one the fact that you know we're we're fundamentally very beholden to and I think um we should we should really be thankful for cryptography in bringing us a lot of other things that maybe we don't actually expect that has brought us um over over the last 2,000 3,000 years and so in the context of these examples I think we have to be uh sort of really going back to the cypherpunk roots and the systems that we're building today uh which is why I feel like I'm kind of resurging back to to those roots myself and the sort of fundamental starting point for the modern movement which I think everyone here is sort of familiar with is the Cy Nomicon or Timothy May's work alongside Eric Hughes with the cypherpunk manifesto and fundamentally I think this work as time goes on will continue to be underexplored because we forget history very easily and so if cryptography is a tool uh that rearranges power then cryptography is a tool for the people and it's a means of reclaiming our digital autonomy and our rights to privacy and our freedom of expression and in that context I think we should be very careful about the tools that we're building uh and look back to some of the work that you know started this whole thing in the first place and that the work uh that um Satoshi did was in the lineage of and think about the sort of not just peer-to-peer forms of electronic cash that we're building but also the specifics to um how those tools how those Technologies rrange power so if we actually I think spend more time on this and if there's more conferences like this and if there more people like you I think we can do a lot better in terms of promoting those values and that's why I'm glad that we have things like dark five for example in the cont text of uh the current sort of movement so I think this is just kind of a PSA right but there's some actual things I want to mention uh after this as well um because we do seem to be losing this battle uh on multiple fronts and one of the ways we're losing this is by onchain actions and onchain tools becoming largely focused on trying to capture information or to learn or essentially abuse the fact that there is this transparent Ledger in order to uh essentially um give power to larger centralized institutions um and it's very possible that we just continue in this direction for the next 20 50 years and that we actually end up in a worse scenario than we started because everything is on chain and so I think my kind of example here is a little bit outdated now but I I particularly like this one because um Arkham is is really just blatantly promoting itself as sort of on onchain intelligence it's like the CIA of of of blockchains in this case or something and I think that the biggest problem with this is fundamentally that once you start allowing these kinds of tools to be the norm it's very hard to undo that Norms are are very um uh kind of slow to evolve um it takes a long time for them to ingrain themselves in uh a political or social context and uh if we sort of are complacent or forget that that's the case or or pay less attention to uh what's happening in the broader ecosystem or stay cloyed in our own sort of spaces uh we're going to see stuff like this emerge when it's too late versus uh when we can actually do something about it and so I think you know the question is you know where did a lot of a lot of maybe not this room because you're here but where did the cyppher punks go right where are the people that sort of started a lot of these movements and I was actually just talking with um Kurt who was at the's in the audience I think too and was at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is now doing a lot of great work in the space as well in uh web 3 about the fact that even when John per Barlo wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cy cyberspace he really thought that the web or the Rebel Alliance had won he was very convinced that you know we've already made this internet it's great uh good job everyone like let's go home I think that is fundamentally the mistake that we're making in some ways now um and I think you know the interesting example of this I I just think semantically even is the way in which web 3 as a term has evolved so web 3 was actually originally um what was used before this current iteration of web 3 In fairness but it was originally used by Gavin wood to describe a post Snowden web and a post Snowden web is one where systems for decentralized encrypted information and publication like freet or bit torrent are possible uh one in which uh Dynamic transient information for private broadcast or or private or broadcast Communications both is possible and where you have this sort of consensus driven trustless transaction infrastructure and uh sort of open systems um with things like salana we're even sort of losing the last one where a lot of stuff is actually closed Source it's not even it's not even open source necessarily at this point and so fundamentally I think where the cipher punks went is a very important question and we should try to find them uh here and and and elsewhere in in our sort of lives and I think if we do that um we can sort of prevent this excessive acceleration of the space and and I think there's sort of a particular piece that is relevant to this which is related to subcultural Evolution um and normative development and specifically um you know this is a little bit of a a hyperbolic example but David Chapman's piece Geeks mops and sociopaths kind of describes the fact that you know subcultures become very uh popular someone creates a thing people say this is a cool thing I'd like to go and spend time with this cool thing um that attracts more people who are interested in sort of understanding this network and over time um you know people see hey there might be money to be made in this thing and uh that money gets extracted from the system elsewhere and becomes part of a totally distinct new system and so you know one of the things what why we need the the cyppher punks and why we need to pay attention to these other things is because we are using Capital systems we're using value systems and and fundamentally if we're using value systems we have to contend with the fact that we we need to know where that value is going and so um you know even though just before this we were sort of talking about like the introduction was saying that Venture is maybe not good or Venture Venture is dangerous I actually don't think Venture is necessarily bad or or certain types of investment are bad but we do need to know where that investment is going and we need to know where capital is flowing and we need to sort of make sure that it's staying within the circles or within the ecosystems uh that prevent this sort of um hyper growth and in turn sort of uh internal collapse of of the space that we're in so this is the actually most common way I think that subcultures or movements fail is through the uh sort of acceleration uh in uh in capital formation and in general sort of like restructuring of of power which is why we you know should think back to that first slide and the fact that you know there's some tools we could use to potentially uh fight back against that that same Force the other way in which movements often fail is in uh sort of stagnation or subcultural stagnation and and this is actually perhaps an unfair example that I'm using for this one but I think there was a movement called the dweb movement which I think is still relevant in in some ways today but the decentralized web movement um was very me mainly like the open source movement was like against Capital um it really uh tried to be very purist it did not let really people uh form businesses or form structures of uh Collective sort of um uh growth and in turn this this ended up with um essentially a few things happening one it became too inward looking and it lacked the incentives to gain traction um people burned out maintainers of open S software historically M uh maybe the best one being op SSL most famous um burned out heart bleed happened and ultimately uh you know a lot of those projects ended up becoming uh less trustworthy because people were suspicious that you know maybe if they rely on this tool it's just going to collapse and rly uh as well and um most importantly I think um these kinds of movements can be sort of red queened out of existence and what I mean by this is this is a Lewis Carol reference and basically um the the Red Queen is a character in in the story that basically says um oh like you know essentially um it's interesting that you are um you know running as fast as you can um and and and just staying in place um you actually have to double your speed every uh you know every every week or every day uh in order to get anywhere um and and so it's just a it was sort of a it's much better in the book I'll say but basically the the point is that um you have to keep accelerating in some capacity in order to even keep Pace with the rest of the world or the rest of the movements that are happening because they're powered by uh much larger forces and much larger forces of capital and I think um this is one of the biggest problems that um that occurs in in very um very ideological communities where we we see people who are genuinely passionate about uh cause but maybe don't necessarily have a clear strategy uh as to how to promote the mission or promote the vision and so the view in my um sort of like you know last couple of years I guess in the space um mostly working you know in in part still with Dows like uh like GS uh ZK sync and so forth but also independently um is that we need to really Define the values and principles that bring groups together and promote them optimistically in the context of a lot of the work that we're doing here um I again I I think that like a lot of the speakers that have already gone done a great job of this with clear projects that are actually making a difference I think setting norms and rituals like this conference or just setting norms and rituals with each other um even in private even philosophical reading groups and so forth I think are really important to preserve core values to do that sort of I I I'll say this is a little bit wordy but like poly centrically where we build this together is really important um but still with different nodes uh across the world and perhaps most importantly and most missing is forward planning uh for the natural death and Rebirth of certain types of uh smaller communities within a movement um if you really rely on just and this is why the polycentricity is so important if you really just rely on one node just like in you know many of the systems we're using it turns out uh it's very easy to take down and so fundamentally we want to be really planning out where is the next node where is the next space who are the people that are going to drive that and and how can we sort of work together on these different parts of these movements um and you know if we don't do this uh or you know if if we're not careful about how we do this uh this is a classic example that I think most people have seen the sort of General interference with organizations uh uh sort of procedures for the CIA great example of how easy it is to kind of destroy uh organizational movements um and essentially it's everything that uh spoiler earlier a lot of dows do today uh where people kind of bik shed ideas uh you stop focusing on the real things uh the real problems and you start sort of like uh infighting a lot versus really trying to build Unity together uh around a specific common goal and um you know I can't tell whether you know how successful this Playbook has been uh in the history of the CIA I don't know it's like not really available information but I suspect that at least based on a lot of the work that's happening uh in the space and and how easily sort of uh different movements sort of can can fragment um that this is a real issue and hopefully those principles from before can help with resolving that um so oh we need to resist the urge to infighter fragment we need to make sure that we have Norms that bring people together uh rather than create conflict which I think this group is really great at um we should ensure that there are a wide range of funding sources including for-profit funding sources but also grants and other sorts of ecosystem support ideally that are between peers even between us in this room um and we should you know plan for um oh did I where where did this go a uh we should plan for essentially uh yeah like a a sort of a brighter future around um around our privacy ecosystems I think I missed one slide and my putting this together but I think you guys get the point right this is like the general sort of like thesis for um I think creating any movement and I think for me as I guess like someone that really values this community cares about the fact that this community is has been true to those values for such a long period of time and has a sort of I think a really good soul and a really good heart um I hope that this group can kind of continue to make progress and and help build a better privacy ecosystem and help rearrange power um and I hope that I can be part of that movement as well so thank you for coming to my TED Talk um and thank you all for being here