# Programmable Cryptography and Ethereum, Panel | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 55:59
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-yCOCZhkDmnc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCOCZhkDmnc

## Description

One of the core themes of this panel is how Programmable Cryptography synergizes with Ethereum. Panelists will discuss questions such as ''Why have we not been able to do everything we've wanted with Ethereum?'' and ''Why have certain kinds of applications - from decentralized social to decentralized games to decentralized finance - not been able to reach their full potential with only consensus technology?''

Speaker(s): gubsheep, Albert Ni, Barry Whitehat, Vitalik Buterin
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Applied Cryptography

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Music] over here gentlemen thank you testing am I here awesome I'll give everyone another 15 seconds or so to get situated um and as folks are getting situated I guess I'll just first say you know welcome everybody to what I hope will be one of the many highlights of your Devcon experience my name is Albert and I'm delighted to be the host moderator and perhaps even provocator of this panel joining me as has been said is the one and only gub sheep Barry White hat and a VG three very low information names taking this zero knowledge thing a bit too seriously if you ask me though I guess white hat is a positive piece of information like you know how people in the west they have these family names like uh like Taylor or Carpenter or Smith or Shepherd you know maybe one day in the digital realm it'll be full of white hats but but I digress um today we're going to discuss programmable cryptography and ethereum this is exciting for a bunch of reasons one that stands out is that the four of us convened at the last Devcon in Bogata for a panel that we titled what to know about zero knowledge now I know most audience members didn't see that simply because there's so many more people at this Devcon than even the huge number that was at Devcon ladam but as those who did see that panel may recall I started that panel by apologizing why because zero knowledge is not just a misnomer it's usually an objectively incorrect way to be thinking about what is going on with modern applied cryptography and most of the time when people do quote unquote ZK no part of what they're doing is actually in zero knowledge which we discussed at length last time that's why it's cool to see how the terminology has evolved in just the last two few years we used to call it ZK because we didn't know what else to call it now we call it programmable cryptography or PC perhaps because we don't know what else to call it now call me oldfashioned but when I see PC I still think personal computer so I always do a double take when I read a note by gub sheep or Berry that says something something PC but you know what hijacking words such as crypto and zero knowledge uh to mean things that they didn't mean before it's basically a tradition at this point so more power to you if PC actually starts to mean programmable cryptography that might be your most impressive feat yet so without further Ado I I really have to start here what are we going to be calling this stuff in two years in 2026 or 2027 and I don't mean like literally try to predict the exact words because if you if you knew then we would already be calling things that but as gub sheep alluded to in his talk and some of you already saw the term programmable cryptography actually predates even the last Devcon uh in fact gub she Barry and I discussed programmable cryptography at edcon a couple of months before the last Devcon but we didn't discuss it in the way that we are talking about it now it was more Vibes and intuition than realization and understanding so really for any of you what jumps to mind for what might be the Vibes and intuition of how we are going to be talking about and thinking about this in a couple years anyone and I think um we're going to slowly stop talking about zero knowledge proofs and sarcs and Starks and we'll just start using the word proof and like lots of mathematicians are going to get upset but like that's like fine right cuz like we made the economists upset by just like abusing the hell out of the word inflation so let's just do it to mathematicians to so yay we'll prove ethereum blocks I I I think that the Advent of things like FH and IO is going to mean that the way that people think about programmable cryptography will be based upon those Technologies more than Zer knowledge proofs so I think that we will have things like faith and Destiny become the kind of primary Vibes that people interface with is I think I remember in hello in one of our last conversations that was particularly centered around zero knowledge we discussed how the idea of what people were calling ZK apps at the time might not be a complete Outlook actually on what is possible with this technology you know the point of these applications was not the fact that they used zero knowledge but it was the fact that they actually did something they brought some new kind of capability that wasn't possible before whether that's a privacy capability or a verifiability capability or something like that and I think that you know to use a historical example this is sort of like when we when we talked about websites as Dooms right there was some point in time where we talked about the idea of like oh this is a DOT company and well look how that turned out eventually we started moving to things like oh here's a browser based game or here's like an e-commerce storefront or something like that and you know we similarly we don't call things HTML apps or HTTP apps we've started to move away from that in the ZK world I hear ZK apps less and less these days but I think we're going to also face the same kind of problem with programmable cryptography and cryptography apps there's not really applications of programmable cryptography it's about what you do with them so I don't know if it's going to be something about like the nature of programs that are collectively run by multiple people or a capability or a thing that happens as a result um but that's where I would think well hopefully we'll have more chances to chat about this in a couple of years and Beyond and uh it'll be really interesting to revisit it because I think one thing we know for sure is that we won't be talking about these things the same way we are now so programmable cryptography and ethereum or maybe PC and eth uh I know not everyone here saw the the talk that gub sheep just gave but real quick in that talk gub sheep did a great job teasing the first topic that I really want to dig in with each of you here on today which is quite simply how do we think of about PC and eth together how do we think about programmable cryptography and ethereum and I'll I'll start with an even more direct prompt is ethereum a form of programmable cryptography and conversely or maybe complimentarily is programmable cryptography an extension or is it like a spiritual descendant even of ethereum um where does your mind jump to italic I'll start with you yeah I mean I think I think it's like a similar type of thing but different it's like kind of like uh how I think about like Justin a ones shot signatures which are this like primitive that Justin Drake loves talking about but they depend on everyone already having quantum computers but like the reason why that analogy comes to mind is basically because I think blockchains are not crypto cryptographic algorithms in the way that we think of cryptographic algorithms but they achieve achieve like objectives that are similar to cryptographic objectives right like they give you guarantees that like some data has been published at some point in time they can create systems that can that can have a guarantee that like someone who wants to participate can participate which is a really important property of like voting systems but like really some of like potentially everything they give guarantees of like verifiability of the execution process they uh some like one cryptography like cryptography paper buzzword that blockchains basically do as what they call a bulletin board uh so blockchains are like I would call them cryptography adjacent because they do similar kinds of things and in some ways they feel like and work like a cryptography primitive but they also have enough differences from like things like uh sonar and FH proofs and fhe and alisation like that they're worth thinking about as being their own thing one thing I also wonder about is is there some root node perhaps that both programmable cryptography and ethereum are specific facets of is there maybe some more General way to describe systems or the sorts of programs that we might want to run where you might say Okay so this property it's as an implementation detail something like ethereum or a programmable blockchain can provide those guarantees and you know this other property as an implementation detail you can use something like a ZK snark or some form of program alisation to achieve that and I think my answer for that is uh simulated trusted third parties uh so this is the idea that you can take a protocol and you first imagine your protocol as running through a he trusted third party so everyone sends everything to Zuck and everyone trust Zuck and Zuck gives everyone the answers and then you figure out how to replace Zuck with some kind of construction that has much stronger trust properties meaning like much less or no need to trust any uh any specific actor and often parts of Zuck can be replaced by cryptography but there's but but often there are situations where parts of Zuck can uh be replaced by blockchains um so it seems to me that like it's like they're natural extensions of each other that like uh ethereum is an implementation of programmable cryptography ideas right that it's just based upon it's like it's contained within one thing that has shaped my thinking is that having programmable cryptography not necessarily as this entirely distinct thing or an extension but it seems to be and this sort of Builds on what both gub sheep and metallic were saying it seems seems to enable us to in some situations think more holistically about what it is we're trying to do what properties we want something to have and I mean two is greater than one quite literally and sometimes that additional flexibility I think has really helped unlock how we think about things even when it wasn't maybe strictly technically necessary for that so I think some of these second order effects which are always harder to predict than even the already very interesting like literally what can like X versus y do or not do uh is going to be a really big part of the story as we continue to explore one thing that's also become abundantly clear at least to me and I imagine others here would agree is that programmable cryptography or at least what we're calling that right now and ethereum I'm pretty sure we're going to keep calling it that at least for a while those together the whole is greater than the sum of the parts these are very complimentary and we're really going to see I think a really beautiful Synergy or you know choose your buzzword here uh in the years to come but for this kind of next section of this conversation what I'd like to do here is put on this provocator hat because if nothing else it would be entertaining to me and hopefully to some of the folks who are here with us right now and and it's you know as moderator it is my Devcon given right to seek seek amusement so what I was thinking what's the best way for me to provoke here um and let's start from the basics if you want to provoke you can be reductive and simplistic so I'm going to be reductive and simplistic and I'm going to say there's two buckets here there's the uh programmable cryptography bucket and there's the uh ethereum bucket so I'm going to start with vitalic as the I guess representative of the ethereum bucket metallic what would you like to see the the quote unquote programmable cryptography folks do differently like maybe consider approaching or prioritizing uh differently such as potentially placing greater priority on making things that people in the ethereum ecosystem can use more immediately I me I think you know in ethereum this this year we've definitely seen a big shift from like just building demos to trying to build applications that really work for regular users and that work at scale and we've seen like plenty of beautiful examples of this right so you know we've seen foraster and poly market and the usual ones Doo you know decentralized uh like um encrypted Google Docs alternative uh you know we've seen uh all kinds of different things and blockchain's becoming much cheaper and more performance has definitely been a critical part of that right and so and I think programmable cryptography has been getting to the same transition right where like Dev tooling around SARS has gotten vastly better and just keeps on improving every year um and I think uh actually it is time to like really uh have like at least some portion of uh that Community like approach more problems with I guess a product mindset right so like one example of this is uh like a one you know we've seen this year ZK email right and like basically turning email addresses into ethereum addresses where if you have an email address you can generate an ethereum address that can only be controlled by that email address like that's powerful that's like a Web Two web 3 integration that's like a bridge that allows um in like existing like web 2 users to start using ethereum applications in this like very direct way that allows you to then just like swap the email address out with anything else later and I think there's like equivalence of that in zup pass there's equivalence of that in the whole like other like ZK identity raer space like basically like like really get into that uh gear of like actually building things that are like next year like everyone here is going to use and like use voluntarily and like not just because uh the high priests told them that that that this is like the aligned thing to use G sheep I'm curious for your thinking on this because you're obviously not against the idea of building things that people would find useful and I also think it's been fascinating to see how ethereum not just technologically but well for lack of a better way to describe it the the values and philosophy of ethereum have been very influential and beneficial to you um so when you hear things like what vitalic was just saying what what else comes to mind like why is it I'm going to be again productive deliberately here why is it not as simple as figure out the thing that a lot of people can use and go and build that or or is that what you think you are doing yeah I think ultimately it has to be the answer to this sort of thing has to be a yes and um and I kind of favor an approach that takes at least three things into in into some kind of balance here so on the one hand we absolutely need to be building things that touch real users at the end of the day that are going for aop maximization at the same time I think that I've seen both myself and projects in the zerox park orbit also fall into the Trap of basically uh spending a lot of time building one feature you know maybe not even one product yet but but one feature or you might see when the technology is in really early stages entire companies you know well-funded companies emerge to build one circuit to do one kind of identity transformation or something like that and I think it's worth taking a step back at times and we do need to have that kind of feedback loop out in the world but at the same time balancing that with the approach of well okay how can we always be thinking about how to level up our capabilities and generalize and and and not lock ourselves in we've had a lot of experiences where um we'll have basically one neat thing that we want to do um maybe it might be some kind of proof between uh some sort of identity source and some kind of application that we could imagine using identity source as authentication and we might put a couple of Engineers who might spend a couple of weeks or even months building the circuit that takes the incoming data schema converting it you know running it through a different proof system and and getting some output and then we might realize after deploying that that actually you know this is slightly different or this is maybe even like completely off from what people in the Target domain actually want to see from the data in the source so that's where a lot of my thinking in the last couple of months maybe year or two has started to go around like well maybe we don't yet have a complete mental model of what's going on and before putting all of our eggs into the basket of maximizing for a particular kind of adoption if we can build systems that allow us to flexibly iterate and experiment then uh we can sort of take a balanced approach and then one thing I mean I'd love to hear from Barry as well is there's at least one more kind of branch that we need to be pursuing simultaneously which is well what if it's not just the mental models of about existing technology that aren't there yet but what if it's the existing technology is completely wrong and something like obfuscation or functional encryption is actually going to solve a bunch of problems that are uh you know obstacles for programmable cryptography even reaching any kind of adoption so um some combination of these three approaches in balance is is hopefully the way to go I'd be curious to hear from Barry though uh so I spent a lot I spent some time thinking about why the first blockchain application was currency I thought that there was like another world where we could potentially have had a reputation system become the first major thing to use that technology but since but I thought about it and I thought that that was reasonable for a while but now I don't think that that's reasonable anymore because I think that like currency is inherently Freer right because you can just transfer currency to other people and other people can receive it from you there's no real barrier to entry but if you had a reputation system or identity system it's it's it's harder to transfer reputation the other major problem is that like currency is able to like interact with the rest of the world very easily right because you can transfer from one thing to another but like how do you do reputation and identity systems how do you use them well it ends up being all about like going to places or being allowed authenticating to do something and I feel like this is not a good like uh business to be in like this doesn't seem like a good place to spend our energy because it fundamentally makes systems that are better at excluding people it's a more efficient way to exclude people one thing that like I've looked back on the last year and thought like maybe that was a bad idea was the focus on ZK around ticketing and things like that because I feel like making like there's these arguments that I've heard before that like if you make it easier to kyc people just people will just get kyc more right or maybe kyc is a bad example if you make it easy to check if someone's over 18 or not then people will just have to prove they're over 18 if they want to buy eggs or something right so like this is my general concern about like going in the direction of like we should just go to production right now and like this line of thinking has made me feel less excited about building things with Serge proofs and more excited about building things with with more uh like an interactive technology like uh FH and IO and things like that so that Segways nicely into I wanted to dial up the provoca touring a bit and uh I'll start with gup sheep I have I have one for you as well italic for gub sheep I guess one lens with how you zerox park and others have been approaching PC that it could be a bit of let's call it a skeptical lens would be that it sort of kicks the can down the road for figuring out the thing which we certainly all agree is some version of impacting people in a positive way and I'll even get more specific one thing that we've discussed is there may even be these kind of correct by construction is elements to what's emerging in terms of how this whole programmable cryptography thing works there's some really interesting stuff there and and actually if you ask me I kind of believe that that's we're going to feel like there's directionally correct by construction things kind of like how the theory of computation was or even just like a turing machine uh feels almost correct by construction once you start to really appreciate it even though it's not obvious at all at first you should have this tape and these symbols and that that should be like the way to think about pretty much all computation or at least a very remarkably effective way to think about all computation and yet at the same time it's a the turning machine isn't actually a relevant concept A lot of the time I would say the vast majority of the time you know I've been a professional software engineer I think is very interesting and yet it pretty much never mattered you could say maybe that's cuz we got multiple layers of abstraction later or other things I mean I think it's somewhere in the middle there but yeah that's kind of my I want to hear your response to that sort of prodding yeah so one thing that's been really interesting for me to observe over the past maybe five or six years um that I've been building various things with some of these Frontier Technologies is this idea that it's been a process of constant generalization and what generalization gives us is leverage um so to give a couple of examples this one actually comes from something you know more adjacent to ethereum than than programmable cryptography when I started working on Dark Forest in 2019 at the time the idea of building an onchain game using zero knowledge seemed kind of like this really interesting or clever trick you know we were using ZK in this one very particular way to achieve one very particular kind of interaction on chain and we built this application using uh some bespoke patterns because there wasn't any you know model for this idea of an onchain game or an autonomous world and I remember thinking back then you know one of our big Inspirations for dark force actually was this game called e on line which is one of the oldest and largest you know MMOs with sort of the most interesting uh player activity emergence longevity all of these things and I was just thinking man you know it would be so interesting if someday we could we could get to a world where Evon line or something of that kind of complexity was actually running on chain so I ended up spending about two or three years building Dark Forest and uh continuing to just add to the specific Dark Forest circuits optimizing the specific Dark Forest smart contracts and adding in all these features and at some point I met you know my my co-founder at Xerox Park um ludin who what he did was he took a look at how we were doing Dark Forest and he basically built a mental model for what was really going on so he kind of built this mental model that was expressed both in software and abstractly conceptually for this idea of autonomous worlds and autonomous worlds infrastructure and they got to work building lattice and mud and Redstone and and all of these tools um and you know suddenly became possible to build not only the next 10 dark forests but also something like a dark Forest that was actually a hundred times more complex and interesting and actually had a shot at getting to hundreds of thousands millions of users and actually today it's really interesting we've closed the loop on this over five years and Eve recently announced that they're going to be building their new game on ethereum based technology so when I think about this sort of question I think not necessarily like well how do we make the perfect abstraction of something like Lambda calculus but how can we build a more mental model that actually gives us leverage where in 5 years because we're thinking about this the right way and we're building the right abstractions we can actually access those those you know millions of people who might want to to use this technology that leads nicely to the proding that I want to throw your way italic which um my I guess strawman counter point to the PC should be doing more for ethereum people today it would probably be something on the lines of um this is not as generous to ethereum as I think it should be but let's just say that ethereum has made amazing strides but it still feels a lot like this like magical Island where the physics Works differently um but it only works that way on that island and and there are bigger and better Bridges to get over there but the island is still kind of pretty far and the bridges are still pretty narrow um it's almost like a Bizarro burning man right down to the traffic and and just how accessible uh is where it's like accessible but it's not that accessible and ethereum does already clearly have a very big ecosystem f with people doing amazing work on all sorts of fronts and so arguably what ethereum needs is efforts that um kind of aren't just stacking on top of those prodigious existing efforts but taking this say complimentary approach bringing like a phrase that comes to mind is bringing Snippets of ethereum physics back over to uh the main continent um you know to accelerate like how these these different worlds can can synergize and synthesize um and I'm curious for what jumps to mind when you know you hear those kinds of thoughts sorry I'm trying to like think of um can you like rephrase the question again yeah I think what I would boil it down to is reductively you could say if programmable cryptography Works backward from what ethereum needs it may be more marginal in terms of how it can bring what ethereum really cares about to the world and that would be one lens that differs at least slightly I think again the the real answer is you can do both but I I want to be reductive for the sake of argument yeah I mean I think uh ultimately like it makes perfect sense to like you know have people that are developing the algorithms and algorithms I think are inherently a very general purpose thing and like there are some sometimes optimizations that you can make for some use case but then like as we've seen with proofs right everyone is just moving to doing proofs over risk five and once you do that then it's like any optimization is basically almost equally valid for any use case right and I think for fully homomorphic encryption and uh obious like a lot of the surrounding Primitives there's like a big element to them which is just general purpose and it's inherently something where you build infrastructure that like either almost any use case or at least very large classes of use cases need right and there's like one group of people that's very good at and like very naturally inclined to do that and then there's like a somewhat different group of people that are more applied um you know applied programmable cryptography yeah in ethereum people um sorry I just realized applied programmability in ethereum spells ape it's fine but you know so you have like the applied programable cryptography in ethereum people and then like you might realistically end up having like several other applied programmable cryptography communities pop up that care about other kinds of problems and like to me that's a natural kind of uh diffusion I mean just like there's lots of ethereum communities that like really think much about programmable cryptography but then uh at the like even those communities it's like once the the general purpose stuff gets good enough then they end up using it whether they realize it or not right like anything that's on top of a uh validity rollup you know we're not saying ZK rollup anymore they're validity rollups uh that is a a user of programmable cryptography but they just like don't see it at all and so I expect we'll see a lot of that well for the final portion of this talk which you guys both sort of hinted at I want to dig into the future which I'm sure everyone is interested in uh in particular through the lens of obfuscation um but before we do that and I really only want to take like two minutes for this because I do want to make sure we have a chance to explore that topic well I want to give everyone like 90 seconds to one get another frog because I know you guys wanted to do that um and maybe even scan a neighbor's frog if if you have if your neighbor happens to to have one so everyone feel free to take a moment to actually pull out your phone search the swamp um and and while we're doing that gub sheep I'd love to hear some quick thoughts on what is this whole frog crypto thing about anyway uh we saw a glimpse of it at devc connect in Istanbul last year even just like why frogs but you know what else is there to it that you might want to say while we have everyone here yeah so some of you may have noticed the Frog hats that have been popping up kind of like mushrooms uh around the conference um or some of you might have swung by the programmable cryptography Booth downstairs uh frog crypto came out of uh being originally a pun on one of the decentralized sort of Dev connect events we ran last year in istanbull called Prague crypto and we sort of realized I think at some point someone either like typoed or or you know some part of the pee on some signage fell off and we're like oh frog crypto yeah that maybe that could be kind of like a mascot or something um so the idea here is that you know these frogs are almost a delivery mechanism for some of the base uh sort of data of programmable cryptography this year what you can do with them is you can collect them on zup pass so you can go to zup pass press the little frog button and start collecting a frog every 15 minutes and what that frog is is it's basically an EDSA signature that's really easy to make ZK proofs about and various developers have been building games on top of this idea of making ZK proofs about your frogs one of the new things this year is that you can also scan other people's frogs by you know holding up your phone and scanning the QR code and sending them a frog request this allows you to add them as a friend in frog social and what those frog requests are are those are self-issued attestations to other people who are also participating in this so what we're essentially doing here is we're building this social graph actually of thousands or actually I think of as of maybe a few hours ago we might have crossed like 10,000 frog requests that have gone out between different members of the community that we're going to be able to start making all these kinds of social graph proofs on top of so you can imagine being able to do these reputation proofs we're already starting to run into a lot of issues with Cil attacks so you know it just goes to show that cryptography preventing these sorts of social attacks is definitely there's both like a theory of it but also a practice to that um but we're excited for this to be a sort of sandbox for people to experiment with the various kinds of functionalities cool well I I recently got a an abusa toad which I was very excited about um and speaking of AIS Cod let's dig into officiation because and and the reason for this is I can't really articulate this well but it feels a bit like the quote unquote next thing and and what I mean by that is it's a thing that we do understand technically but I think we're still figuring out how to think about and reason about it in other ways kind of like how we technically understood ZK long before we really started to have some of these now seemingly basic conceptual break throughs even like single player versus multiplayer and other things of that sort there's so many different lenses here we can look back at the Arc of how things are developed and how your past predictions have gone you can look forward you can just share new insights and realizations I'm going to start with you Barry because this is something that I know you have been into a lot and you've been one of the primary sources for me to begin to get this sense around obfuscation um in the way that I'm describing here um yeah so I'm very excited about the potentials of obfuscation and it's like Pary okay so the way to think about it is that you like vitalic was saying earlier you can imagine that you have this like trusted third party that you can actually trust and that you can just ask them to do something to help you and with Zer knowledge proofs they can help you to verify computation but they can't do anything else and with NPC they can do like multiple people's computation but they're not able they have this interaction layer but with IO you're able to have this like no interaction required basically you put the something in and you get the answer out and this is really this seems to me that like we're getting so close to what like a an actual trusted third party could do that it seems that it seems that we might be getting towards the end of cryptography that like we're we're at the point where like once we have this it's hard for me to imagine like what else we could actually have because if we could have something else it would have to be something that like an actual trusted human would not be able to achieve uh like there is a couple of things that IO can't do like data availability and uh onetime signature kind of stuff they can they can repeatedly you can force them to do things repeatedly but like the it seems that we're getting to the end of the land that like and I don't know what we're going to do once we get there I mean I think uh you know once uh we if we actually get to the uh end of the line which uh I do think uh alisation in some sense uh is in a certain sense because we B it basically does let you uh like simulate any uh third trusted third party with the exception of this uh like you can't uh that you can't uh ensure the nonreverting uh property and that you can't ensure well you can't like an anti- censorship uh but uh like once we get the end of the line of like baser technology then I think that's the beginning of the line for so many more things that get built on top of it right and I think this is uh something that we see in lots of other fields right like there's definitely lots of things that we've seen that have basically approached some kind of optimality like multiplication you know we know how to do it in in L in now and in uh okay fine you know the algorithm that technically does it in analog an only actually becomes like remotely efficient if you're multiplying like quadran digit numbers but like for everything else we have n l log l and like do you really care about the difference right but then it's like when you have like Fast these fast algorithms that enables lots more stuff in higher level fields to be built on top of it right it's like if and like 4A or fast 4A transforms did not exist then there's an entire class of zero knowledge proof algorithms that would just not be possible and we will not even be talking about this field in the same way today right and then on top of that then you figure out once we figure out how to make any trusted third party trustless and then once we get that down to a like there will be a period of like at least a decade where we figure out how to get everything down to the lowest possible level of overhead right and then once you get past that then you know the question is like what are are all of like every time you make an optimization what are the new things that you can build on top and then I think even after you're done the optimizations you can keep on thinking of new things to build on top like that's I I don't think it ends yeah one thing I think about as well is this idea of right now one way we can think about obfuscation is as an as a drop in replacement for a trusted third party and that might enable us to give stronger you know security or confidentiality or other kinds of guarantees uh on top of things that we use trusted third parties for today but an interesting question for me is you know in in the spirit of one prompt that we've sometimes discussed is this idea of like what if obfuscation is not the end but it's really just the beginning like what is it the beginning of I suspect that you know similar to uh you know I have a similar prediction on things like ethereum and other kinds of cryptography once obfuscation or these kinds of Technologies become ubiquitous enough we enter a totally different state of what the internet looks like and feels like it's not just the internet that we have today but servers are replaced by these more you know trustable or verifiable or confidential Services we actually go from like solid to liquid or liquid to gas in terms of what it even means to be interacting digitally now I don't really know how to think about that I feel like you know I know Barry and vitalic have some ideas on some of the the crazy stuff that might happen there um but that's a prompt that I at least think interesting to consider yeah I love that I I'll build on that it's really hard right now to imagine obis being like virtually free given that we've barely begun to understand how to even do it and then the overhead is significant to say the least at the same time you tell someone a 100 or definitely 200 years ago that the cost and latency of sending a message and not just a message like let's say HD video halfway around the world would go to basically zero um I think that would have been even more unfathomable and so we've seen that these things happen slowly than quickly all the time and uh while we've got a lot of heavy lifting you know grunt work to do I do think it's valid to take a moment and say what jumps to mind as you start to imagine the currently Pie in the Sky feeling hey this is everywhere this is the the beginning you know intersections are overlapped with other Technologies or other aspects of society um I know this is something you guys have mused about at various points so curious to hear what jumps to the top of the mind for you here uh so my prediction for the future is that in 20 years there will be like what we would call today a religion that's based upon indistinguishable obfuscation at the start of the panel I talked about like Destiny and Faith being the like Vibes of the future world and that's my prediction I also predict that one member of this panel will become a member of that religion or that like we won't call it a religion that ah that that's a secret um yeah like we won't call it a religion in the future but like today that's what we would see it as yeah that's that's fun so it's like how Beth Jos does his thing about thermodynamics and we get to do our thing about aisc yeah yeah okay let's see yeah far future I mean uh well get into oh get into bcis and then you get trustless two way telepathy yeah know you know do you want to like upload your like your thoughts to Facebook probably not right but you know do you want to uh like have deep communication that involves like sharing uh thoughts directly with other people for some specific other people like sometimes possibly um so that's one of those spaces where like if you don't do it with cryptography it feels like it's almost default dystopian but if you do it with cryptography it feels fine and like actually having cryptography up to the highest possible standard by of usability and just like Drop in replace um replacement uh Power once that stuff becomes available seems like it would be really powerful right like the level you want to get this stuff too it's like uh I think for me the analogy is how our like internet bandwidth is at this point so good people just like send pictures as a way of saying things that they could have said in like five words just sending the picture is faster and like to someone in 1980 this would have seemed like bad insane like no why the hell are you like voluntarily incurring like 100,000x inefficiency right and like these days of course we figured out how to cut the inefficiency off of our like lower level bandwidth by a factor of more than 100,000 and so that's like doing that is like actually totally fine right and so I think uh what we want is we want to get the overhead numbers low enough that the question flips from like why programmable cryptography to why not programmable cryptography and we get more things proven FHA encrypted and offis skated as needed by default yeah one other thing that I think is a really interesting feuture to consider as well is this idea that programmable cryptography or whatever we'll call it in the future provides an alternative lens on digital agents of the future so I feel like a lot of the dominant narrative today uh centers around this idea of oh llms you know we anthropomorphize them they speak to us in natural language those are going to be the the digital that's what the digital agent of the future looks like um but there's a very different concept that you get if you take the idea of something like a smart contract or what we call a crypt Toma you could kind of Imagine an OB fiscated program running inside of a smart contract with onot signatures to its logical conclusion you know this might be cryptography's dual to something like AGI would be a cryptomed um and what the cryptomed is is rather than this sort of digital God figure that's got its identity that's bearing down on you it's almost like a force of nature like a Gaia type thing that pervades digital cyberspace where wherever I am in digital cyberspace I can kind of interact with this underlying fabric style thing that just permeates across digital reality so as one example here I I sort of think of DNS as a very very primitive version of this kind of digital agent wherever I am on the internet I can reach out to DNS and it behaves in this very you know well structured and useful way that creates some sort of global context now imagine taking that capability and ramping it up 100 thousand times imagine imagine giving that intelligence that's a very different concept from something like GPT so I feel like we're already getting a snippet of this um but we have like a minute and a half left and so I kind of want to end where we began but instead of what are we going what we we're going to be using in 2 years what words are we potentially going to be vibing around in 20 or 50 um what shotgun what jumps to mind I mean I think like the words will just become more basic right I think it's like you know during the like academic uh like pedan era um we you know obfuscation is called um IO and distinguishability offis and you put the I lowercase but then of course that like uses the hell out of everyone cuz that's input output and then uh I'm expecting we'll just call it aisc um and then I expect 10 years after that we'll give up on that too and people will just talk about encrypted programs so I think we'll just like start talking about every Concept in uh language that just makes it feel like something much more and more banal and just like something that's a part of life yes one for me is as Barry and vitalic has have been saying if IO gives us all of the powers of a fully trusted third party then that means that anything further along this Trail would have to give us more than what a trusted party or an actual human could do so there's probably some crazy sci-fi Tech out there that goes far beyond what we think of today as cryptography and blockchain but as a natural descendant um maybe we'll for the complexity theorist in the room maybe we'll Ascend the polinomial hierarchy or do some crazy stuff with comput I think Quantum is probably like the most immediate thing that's in front of us but what's after that I mean we don't know I think that something will happen similar to what happened when we invented money that we invented all these words like justice and like um so so I I believe that those will become the like default words that we'll be using in the future like honor Justice all right gentlemen thank you so much for that exciting panel session let's give them all a big big round of applause thank you now we're not done yet we're not done yet we've got some Q&A coming up and we're going to show it on the screen um ladies and Gentlemen let's go what eight votes for the top question two-party MPC could do everything that fhe promises just much cheaper now in the next 10 plus years and likely ever are we victims of a VC powered story takeover big question I'm not sure who wants to answer it but Albert I'll pass it over to you yeah I'll start uh if there's a VC powered story take over here that'd be very interesting where's the I mean the whole point of that is the money where where is the money have you guys are you guys not sharing something here with me and what's going on um um no like um 2pc is limited to two parties though right and you want to have like multiple parties so like that's one of the reasons why FG is more interesting like both are interesting the other big problem with MPC is the interactivity requirement that's also a problem with FH and that's why iio seems to be the most interesting I think for me right now great all right anybody else if not we can skip to the next question that's good I also want to know where's the VC money in programmable cryptography hopefully coming soon ladies and gentlemen next question has I believe seven votes the second question on the screen will the PC allow smart contracts to have signing functionality similar to eoa who'd like to take that question anyone anyone can yeah I mean I guess it depends what you want out of signing functionality right because if you want just like the ability to express Authority then like you don't even need any kind of programable cryptography right you just like use ethereum's built-in call mechanism already right um and the one the one thing that alisation does that is interesting is that it gives you um a uh snark that where the algorithm for verifying the snark just is verifying any kind of signature scheme and like that comes at the cost of requiring a shusted setup but that does basically mean that you have like zero knowledge proofs that are extremely cheap and like that that are only as expensive as uh like just a signature which is extremely cheap in the current world and then in the quantum world like the quantum resistant ones are somewhat more expensive but it's uh I think still interesting um the uh thinking about like what like the other thing that you could do like the thing that you definitely kind of can do but with difficulty is if you start talking about not signing but like encrypting and decrypting like what if you want a program that has a secret that it releases under smart contract conditions and the challenge there is like the way that you would do it is you would have an offer skated program that releases it if it provides a proof of blockchain consensus um that like has like some finalized route and then thei and the finalized route like shows that some particular condition was met and then the program only then would just out would actually output the secret the challenge with this is uh like basically uh like one is vulnerability to 51% ATT tax right so B if uh 51% of The Seekers come together they can privately extract the SE secret without ever like actually being slashed and one mitigation to this would be to like add a tiny amount of proof of work in like maybe like 1% proof of work and then extracting any individual Seeker it would cost like at least a few million dollars um so there's some mitigations uh there but like and so it's like on the B it's like possible but with uh caveats which I think is uh interesting thank you Vitali possible but we caveats let's go on to the next question now this one's fun I think GB sheep just mentioned this very briefly about Ai and programmable crypto the question at the top is how much autonomy should AI be allowed to have to interact with programmable crypto who'd like to take a gup she can I pass it to you yeah so one idea that I think is very exciting to revisit from the last 20 years that relates to this question is this idea of the semantic web so for those who weren't familiar this was the idea that maybe we could have an internet-wide Mega project to take all of the data on the internet and make as much of it possible uh machine readable semantically consistent with other data um make it so that machines can talk to each other in some set of data schemas that are universally interoperable and I think you know the semantic web didn't work out for various reasons at the time one was the verifiability of data uh is something that we just you know we didn't really have the technology to have programat programmable verifiability back then then but now that we have programmable cryptography we can imagine a world where you know the current version of autonomous digital agents which is AIS and llms which are an upgrade over the the bots of 20 years ago can speak in programmable cryptography to each other so programmable cryptography almost becomes like a language or communication stack for these digital beings of the future um so I'm I'm all for AI being able to interact with programmable cryptography I think there's like even Wilder intersections here but one thing I want to add here is programmable cryptography is not like entirely orthogonal to the idea of autonomy but I think it's more in that direction like the question of how much autonomy what we call AI because honestly I don't think we know what else to call it right now that is sort largely in a different sphere and what's interesting about programmable cryptography is it's sort of second order like depending on the autonomy level of AI programmable cryptography May really shape the implications around it like like will something decide that it wants a semantic web or or those types of things um but yeah the elephant in the room is like will AI be very autonomous and will it have you know very serious implications I think that it's some maybe interaction with with what's going on here one could say that it certainly has interactions with with blockchains um but I just want want to highlight that programmable cryptography at least at a simplistic level I see as largely like something that's complimentary to the to the autonomy question um itself I'm curious if anyone else wants to chime in on that yes no no all right he shook his head so I'll take that as a no but no worries thank you for the answer as well I think that's quite comprehensive autonomous AI that's going to be quite an interesting future to look forward to let's turn our attention to the top voter I think this is 12 votes the most I have ever seen so far in any of the sessions um if ethereum was built with programmable cryptography in mind rather than Bitcoin with smart contracts would it have been built differently um I mean yes with like a lot of tiny details right it's like if ethereum was built with statelessness in Minds the gas cost structure would have looked very different the uh tree would have looked very uh very different lots of things would have been like designed around stateless proving and for snarks it's like basically similar like gas cost of hashes would have been uh higher we probably would have considered just like using Poseidon right from the start I think uh I mean when I started in ethereum I was definitely like in a YOLO mood I probably would have just made Poseidon the hash function um the what like there's just a lot of like little tiny decisions that would have been different I think the core of like being a platform that has accounts and that has trans actions and that has a VM probably would have been the same all right thank you very much Vitali appreciate the Insight uh we got I think one and a half minutes so let's try and fit one or two more questions will devs using progue crypto risk punishment like tornado cash devs how to dance with compliance bit of a loaded question would anyone care to try well I'm curious what gub sheep thinks because this is his problem not mine but in in all seriousness I mean I think that I look there is precedent like cryptography in a very simplistic sense was you know there were efforts to try to ban it in the '90s something we completely forget now it's like you can't not use cryptography to surf the web like no browser will basically let you do that without a lot of pain and so I think that the the financial aspect of tornado cash was obviously a significant part of that I think that what's fascinating about programmable cryptography is we literally have a precedent that cryptography is everywhere you all use it every single day generation one cryptography in the form of like https and other things like that so I think there's a very broad surface area there's always ways to do things in ways that cause these effects but I think the the key thing to keep in mind is that the surface area here is very very Broad and that's what makes it exciting maybe yep maybe one quick one quick sentence on it yeah yeah I I think that one thing that I think about here is it's about how we really sell the capabilities of the technology for example one thing that you can do if you're talking with someone who might be very skeptical is do you talk about interoperability or do you talk about subverting nation states and you can talk about interoperability in that conversation you know that's sort of what what this kind of thing is all about this is something where we are testing the the powerful capabilities of programmable cryptography um but uh you know it it just depends on what we put what foot we put forward first so all right thank you very much as the music's playing that's our C to say goodbye Ladi Gentlemen let's give speakers another big big round of applause