Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Amir Taaki, Ivan Jelincic & Rachel-Rose O'Leary: DarkFi – Let There Be Dark (Part 1 of 2)

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

DarkFi is a new DeFi platform that prioritizes privacy. As a base layer for anonymous applications and smart contracts, it's a multichain interoperable, and open source product that anyone can build any type of application on utilising zero knowledge proof. The goal is to create a universe that anyone can access irrespective of their nationality or political beliefs. Amir Taaki, Rachel-Rose O'Leary and Ivan Jelincic, the members of the squad, joined us to chat about the importance of darkness and privacy within crypto utilizing zero knowledge proof technology. This is a 2-part series and in the next episode we explore AMMs, and the Free Assange DAOTopics covered in this episode:An introduction to the DarkFi team and how they got into cryptoDarkness and why it's importantThe crisis of civilization in the WestCrypto anarchyThe connection between crypto and moral fiberThe problems within crypto DarkFi is aiming to solve and how they are doing itEpisode links: DarkFi Element channelDarkFi on TwitterAmir on TwitterRose on TwitterIvan on TwitterThe Dark ForestThe Sovereign IndividualSecular CyclesSponsors: Chorus One: Chorus One runs validators on cutting edge Proof of Stake networks such as Cosmos, Solana, Celo, Polkadot and Oasis. - https://epicenter.rocks/chorusoneParaSwap: ParaSwap aggregates all major DEXs and makes sure you beat the market price at every single swap and with the lowest slippage - paraswap.io/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/423

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the global boxing revolution. My name is Brian Crane and I'm here with Sunny Agarwal. Today we're going to be interviewing Amitaki, Rose O'Leary and Ivan Yelinchich, who are the co-founders of DarkFi. So DarkFi is a project that's working on privacy for smart contracts and privacy for decentralized finance. We had a really long, really fantastic conversation with the three of them. That actually ended up going almost three hours. So we decided to split this up into two episodes. The first one is going to come out today as 423.

And then the next one a week from now as 424. So with that, let's get into the first part. But before we do that, a few words from our sponsor. So first of all, course one. So are you, do you have crypto assets? you know, sitting around, or do you want to participate in the staking economy, then, you know, start earning rewards and contribute to network security by staking with course one. Course one is securing billions of dollars of staking assets across 25 plus different decentralized

network, including Solana, Cosmos, Ethereum, and others. Course one also runs notes for institutions, so if you are interested in white-label nodes, or have some kind of staking needs that you want to have a partner for, make sure to check out course 1. So you go to course.1 to start your staking journey. And then paro swap. So periswap is a decentralized exchange aggregator on Ethereum. With periswap, you can feed the market price every single time.

It's fast, it's very liquid, and they just launched a V5, which has new contract and new APIs. as a modular infrastructure, it's very gas-friendly and supports free approval using Ethereum permit messages. They also added support for Avalanche, Polygon, BSE, and you can even use it from directly within Ledger Live. So go to pereoswop.io to get started. And with that, let's go to our episode. So thanks so much for joining us all. We have three guests, which is actually unusual. Normally, we were always like, no, we shouldn't have so many guests, but let's do it. I think it's going to be fun. Maybe you can just start off by everyone introducing themselves, briefly. So I'm Amir Taki and I've been in Bitcoin since 2010 and I was

working a lot on Bitcoin implementations software, doing a lot of the protocol development and with a specialty on privacy techniques. So our team implemented the first coin join implementation and stealth addresses, which have become like, well, you know, they're outdated now, but then they became standardized techniques. And in terms of darkfi, which is our project now, I focus a lot on doing research and applied cryptography development, you know, mainly around zero knowledge, but not contained just strictly to zero knowledge. You know, we're concerned with combining many different techniques together to leverage to create anonymous applications.

I'm Rose. I've gotten to crypto in 2015 when I read the Assange book, Cypherpunks. And since then, I've worked in a few different things. I was lead tech writer for Coin Desk for a couple of years, where I was mostly writing on Ethereum and privacy coins. And during that time, I traveled a lot. to different Ethereum conferences. And it was interesting, you know, an interesting moment in the space. But I also started to feel very concerned about the emphasis on transparency that a lot of the Ethereum projects and also the Ethereum philosophy has. So in 2018, I left.

I went to Rojava, learned programming. and the following year started contributing to DarkFi. So I helped build the prototype that we just released. And I'm also a researcher. I research mainly Defi and token engineering. I've been a free software developer for maybe almost 15 years now. Since I was 18, I moved to the Netherlands and started working on free software with this non-profit foundation called Dyn. In there, we developed many projects, both crypto-related and not-crypto-related, mostly in regards to the European Union and privacy aspects of various different softwares and politics.

So we also involved with cities and municipalities. We've developed many different projects that helped people integrate privately into society in some way. When it comes to crypto, I found out about Bitcoin, I think, in 2012 or something like this. I immediately loved it, started mining it and hung out a lot of. on the Bitcoin forums. I think I took a break around 2014 or 2015 when mining wasn't as profitable anymore. So I just stagnated and kept working on free software.

In the meantime, I've founded a couple of projects. There was a Linux operating system called Dev1, which is now one of the most popular Linux distributions used in the world. Spawned from this, there were two different things. projects as well. One was called headsOS with a big focus on anonymity and privacy. And the other one is now currently still in development, Maimo, which is a mobile operating system designed and built from scratch in order to escape the clutches of the Apple and the Google duopolys. And right now I'm

thinking of how to also involve these projects with crypto. When it comes to DarkFi, I've been And Amir introduced me to zero knowledge and just we started learning together. And now we're just having a lot of fun building new things and being like on the bleeding edge of tech. So it's challenging but also very, very rewarding as well. I want to start off with the question. So in the manifesto, you know, it talks about like darkness and the importance of of darkness. And maybe, yeah, can you explain, like, what does that mean?

And, you know, why? What does that, like, world look like that would, you know, you're sort of trying to get us to? So we put this emphasis on darkness within our thesis, not as, like, something which is, like, necessarily bad and scary. but actually something that's something empowering. So it's within the context that we're currently in, which is like the whole of the technological paradigm is basically defined by surveillance,

which is a kind of like whiteness, all pervasive whiteness, which has the effect of like flattening any kind of discourse. You know, it cancels out political differences. and, you know, in the worst case scenario, which we're heading towards inside of crypto, you know, people from certain jurisdictions cannot access the systems due to KYC and other processes that restrict the kind of users who can use those tools. So darkness is a counterpoint to this.

It's a universe where, which anyone can access, irrespective of their nationality or political beliefs. So, you know, it's a resistance to this kind of all pervasive whiteness. And it's also a kind of new beginning. So it's like a new dawn of a new kind of paradigm of technology that we see coming into play as a reaction to this paradigm of surveillance, but also increasingly enabled by zero knowledge cryptography, which offers like incredibly flexible. programmable privacy.

So, you know, the two kind of symbols that I used to talk about, like this light versus the whiteness of surveillance is it's kind of like a forest and a desert. So forests, you know, they're, they offer kind of coverage where within a forest, the people are protected so they can organize you know they can and they have this this tree coverage that you know protects them from attacks and it's also a kind of sanctuary for ecosystems you know it's like a natural environment like incredibly diverse and very dark but also very natural and then on the other side we have like a desert which is this kind of encroachment of this kind of

lifelessness, you know, and in a desert, like everything is completely surveilled and under the monopolizing view of the sun. So they're the kind of two symbols that we can use. So it's dark in the sense of it as a forest or like deep underwater or like the outer space. Yeah, in our conception of history, there is a conflict. The existence. is the origin of civilization between state-based forms and what we call the democratic nation, which all the value that come from in society come from people, it comes from this democratic tendency, and the state exists as this hierarchical, you know, social stratification, this complexification of social relations between people.

And they've always been in conflict. You know, history is not like a straight line from, you know, tribal society to centralized society. There were many reversions and swings both ways. There were many strong examples. Like in England, we had the Digger movement. There was also the Budika who fought against the Romans. There was the Cossacks, which were, you know, military communes that fought against the Russian Empire. also the

the ninja, the democratic ninja provinces of Iga and Koba in Japan. That was where the ninjas came from, you know, where these democratic provinces run by peasants. Also the Iroquois Confederation,

which was a huge confederation that lasted many, many centuries in the North America. So as Rose alluded to, there is this concept of the dark forest. And the idea that we have is there are forest or mountain topologies where you go around the environment and everything is distinct. There's distinctness around you. And the kind of mindset that fosters is a polytheistic mindset. You know, it's one of

diversity and, you know, alliances between people. And this is kind of of the squad wealth thesis of crypto or the tribal kind of conception of defy what defy is enabling. But the other one is the monotheistic desert tendency, which is flat ground where you are in the centre and you see to the horizon and everything that you see around you is with you at the center. And so this is where like sun worship comes from. The sun is a hot static object in the sky that represent all. authority, the sun god. So that is the other reg-fi side of crypto that we see this kind of emerging. And it's kind of interesting because in the ball phases of the market, the market

starts to become saturated with this cheap fiat credit that's printed and it starts to flow in and valuations start to flow up. And the VCs who are largely based in the US start to have this undue ideological influence on crypto. they use the coercive force of capital of money and you get a lot of these projects where we just saw this last VC pump cycle just before this last dip I actually exited because I kind of sensed that retail was exhausted from the last one this one as a VC pump we saw like ridiculous projects getting funded like Soul Chicks or I also saw a ZK project which got 30 million and I was like well who's this team like nobody knows his team and the Silicon Valley

VC scam pump you know scam other VCs so you get these projects have a huge amount of money and they hire all these like managers and bureaucracy and and and you know people who do like nonsense work and they just occupy positions in this hierarchy and you have these devs at the bottom and the devs don't they just get orders from the top and they they don't even like follow anything that's going on, they're just like tools, like little robots. And the consequence of that is the projects become very inefficient. You know, you haven't got this like convergence between like the deaths who have knowledge of ZK and the defy token engineers.

And to like actually build like solid, you know, projects. It just becomes this inefficient, like many degrees of separation coordination thing. And it needs more and more money. And it's this monster that the, the, the, the, and the bureaucracy class just like enlarges relative to the other classes. So we see that in like the ball market phases of the market. And it kind of reminds me of major extinction events in prehistory, you know, where you see these like complex ecosystems which get wiped out, just get blown away.

And then there's this bacteria. You know, there was actually the Permian Trasic extinction where there was literally one species of animal that looked like a pig, which like it was. around for 20 million years, like literally 90% of all life on the land was this one species of animal that like after this major extinction event. And it was just like it was just like non-specialized. It just ate grass and bits of crap. So we kind of see that happen, which is these complex social hierarchies get like pushed into a very kind of flat hierarchy. And the strategy shifts from, you know, like optimizing for kind of.

of profit to competing for market share. So all these new niches open up because the big dinosaurs die off. And everybody starts racing to occupy those niches. And you have to be adaptable. You have to be able to. And that's kind of like the organisms that do success for after major extinction events is they have like lots of young and they don't invest much time in their young. But they just like, you know, like cockroaches.

They can like eat toothpaste. They can survive nuclear blasts. You know, they can live in extreme. cold. So we're like, there's like two major thesis for crypto. One is the super cycle meme, which we kind of see is, is the case where crypto gets co-opted by this influx of cheap credit and it loses its like ideological edge. But we're actually banking on the other one, which is the regulatory extinction event, which actually will create this kind of winter, but it's actually good for crypto because structural.

structurally it's bullish because it hones its ideological edge and it allows like the more meaningful like really interesting design space of ZK and other crypto primitives that are being conceptualized now to like fully embody or realize itself. You know, the problem with the kind of bull market stuff is like projects with an edge get starved of resources. It gets suffocated out of existence. So I want to, I think there's a lot to unpack here. I want to come back to this for a second, but I won't quickly go back to the, to the forest analogy really quick, just so make sure I understand it,

which is, but one, I'll say, like, you know, the term dark forest means almost something different in crypto now because of just the MEP stuff, but I'd argue that it's almost the opposite,

where like, you know, the issue with the, dark forest refers to this, like, thing in, in most blockchains with, like, MEP attacks where you can see in the MMPL.

But arguably, in my opinion, that's actually a, an issue of an overly white forest, right? Where it's like the problem, in my opinion, is that the mempool is too visible and everyone can surveil the mempool and see exactly what everyone else is doing. And that's kind of a problem. That's sort of what I spend a lot of my time working on is like how do we create encrypted

mempools. But anyways, but so about like, you know, how this relates to like history. So, you know, I've talked to Zuko a bunch about this and, you know, how, do you think that is this also related to this idea about like legibility and like you know i'm sure you know the there's a famous book like seeing like a state and it's about like it claims that like you know that these systems of like legibility uh are used to allow the state to be more um pervasive in people's everyday life and like you know zucco's you know he doesn't like to share his address for example with anyone, partially for privacy security reasons, but also partially he, like, claims that, like,

you know, the ideas of, like, addresses and last names are ways that help the state, like, organize and, like, you know, organized people, which then, in turn makes them easier to surveil. Is this concept related, or do you see this as a different, you know, is it saying, or is your view of, like, dark spaces saying something different than, like, this, legibility concept. No, I definitely think it's connected. And I would also say to your point about the dark forest, in the book, the dark forest, the solution to the dark forest,

like the fact that the universe is a dark forest. So essentially, for those who don't know, the sci-fi three-body problem three-part series, it says that the universe is basically full of life. and because of this there's like these complex game theory that plays out where the best strategy is to instantly destroy life as it emerges

because otherwise it might attack you so you have these civilizations the most advanced ones which are just like surveilling the entire universe and just waiting for life to emerge to send nukes but the solution to the dark forest in the book is that the earth needs to evolve like a shield

you know like a kind of membrane around it that protects it. So it's also a situation. It's kind of a misnomer because in the sense of how we're using dark, because for us, dark implies encryption, you know, like defensive membranes. But in the case of the book, the dark applies exposure that everyone's hiding behind these forests, these trees, but if they move their head, they'll get killed. In relation to your question, I think it's definitely part of the same kind of collection of ideas. So when I talk about the forest, I usually give a kind of anecdote, which is that after the late Ice Age, so like 10,000 years ago, all of Europe was covered in forest. And in Ireland, where I'm from, over time, these forests evolved to be like the center of society.

So out of 16,000 place names in Ireland, 13,000 of them refer to trees in the name. And many, many Irish surnames have trees also reference in the name. And even the Irish alphabet was first came from, it was named after trees. So trees had this like amazing legacy in Irish history. And there were also the spiritual centre of society. So they were sacred places. And what happened was, and there were community. owned actually in the Brehian law

it said that the trees were like collectively owned and if you damage them you'd be killed with really high penalties. Anyway during British colonisation these trees were cleared and they were cleared because it was very profitable but also because

they were where Irish people were lived but also organised and were able to stage like guerrilla attacks so they were the primary line of defence for Irish people and after the they were cleared the process of colonization was basically easy because there was no defenses. So I see a similar kind of thing happening now in the interaction between surveillance and society.

It's this kind of encroachment, which is removing the ability of people to resist or to even have sanctuary and spirituality in the digital world. I haven't thought about it in relation to the book you mentioned on legibility. I haven't read it. But I think it's part of the same response, you know, sort of the same feeling. One thing I also remember from the manifesto, it talks about, you know, creating this space that's like impenetrable by law enforcement.

And, of course, like law enforcement is very much something that's, you know, a political thing connected with, you know, nation states today, right, mostly. So I'm curious, like, what in this forest, desert analogy and maybe in general in terms of, like, this intersection between, you know, this world and, like, today's nation states and political systems, like, how, yeah, we just be curious, like, what your thoughts are on that. I think our goal is mostly to create these dark safe spaces in which remember the US said they kill people based on metadata like this was a famous quote I think what we're creating is these safe ecosystems where we can not hide

but just like live safely in and with these we are able to express our full freedom in our financial systems and our political systems like zero knowledge technology allows us to do this in a very proper way I just have one thing to add what Ivan said about killing people based off metadata is they have a new type of US drone now which is called the RX9 and I only heard I heard about it in concept like two years ago but literally one month ago is the first example I've seen of it being used in a field and what this drone is, is the missile, instead of exploding on impact, what it does, it has ninja swords.

It's called a ninja missile, and the swords come and they slice up a single human target. So they have now ninja, they have like missiles, drones, which are run by artificial intelligence. So it's automated weaponry. And these can fly in the sky for hours and hours on end, tracking like a huge area of ground. and when the AI detects someone who match his face match a certain profile it launched a missile and the missile go with these ninja swords

and they had a picture of the body of the person literally was sliced into pieces his hand was here he's like a bit of his arm was here it's literally cut into little cubes by these swords and it's just a tiny like one person it doesn't cause any collateral damage so also

So China unveiled now that they have, they've made their own version of Boston Dynamics. If people search China Big Dog on YouTube, they literally have like rows and rows and rows of these as a big flex. So for me, that's like a terror scenario where, you know, okay, right now they're using these ninja weapons on, you know, brown people in the Middle East. like, who cares? But, you know, like, how, what's the, what's the threshold when, you know, the economy's going bad, you know, they're trying to extract more wealth from people, but it's not working. You know, people are becoming poorer, things become more unstable. You know, what's the threshold before, you know, they cross over into using, like,

ninja missiles on people in, in developed nations in their own backyard? I saw a video today on Facebook's metaverse where they were like, they were essentially bringing up all of these conflicts in the developing world, like the Tigrayan conflict in Ethiopia, which is an old conflict about ideology between, you know, different factions that have like long-term history. But the documentary literally reduced it down to, oh, there are brown people killing each other. Facebook doesn't have censorship. And they had like a token brown person crying on camera. And it was like this call for like surveillance censorship architecture to like be policing by people on the internet. So then we're heading in that direction fully. There's like enough voices that are pushing for it.

And it's the strange thing is it used to be the liberal classes that were defending freedom of speech. Now they're the ones actually calling for censorship. So crypto is our best hedge against that AI surveillance, you know, censorship futures. Like, you know, our means of – and I say let's push for like maximum defense. Let's push for maximum equipping of the people. Like everybody should be a minute man. Everybody, you know, the old ideal of, you know, there's no army, you are the army. Like the best defense is not on the edges in the periphery.

throughout the entire organism, a good immune system, you know, where people have a sense of community, you know, people are, like, in touch with each other, are, like, are looking at what happens in their own local neighborhoods. This is the vision of the future that crypto is transpiring. The vision of the AI mega machine is one of, you know, that mean people talk about, which is the Great Reset you know they have their website they took the video down but the website it had a video and the quote with the video

was you will own nothing and you will be happy that's the future they're given on it's like that we own nothing we just like constantly moving around place to place living on the edges doing odd jobs to survive anything we need we have to rent it

you know we're already exploited by paying rent to landlords you know our parents generation who they got stuck in this algorithm where they get credit from the bank and they buy a property and they don't and they just buy and hold the property as like the Bitcoin Maxis. They're like, I'll just hoddle, you know, and then like the rest of us, the millennials and the zoomers, we're like paying these exorbitant rents that just keep skyrocketing. I mean, you're mentioning like drones and, you know, these robots and these things.

And of course, those are like, you know, things in the physical reality. And now, you know, these other things, okay, there's like crypto. And, you know, you can make your transaction maybe from your phone and your computer. And you can have some activity there, but you're still, you know, subject to, you know, wherever you live. I remember, you know, when I read the sovereign individual, this book that, like, predicted like so many things, right. But, like, one of the things they also picked in this book was that there would be an

explosion in the number of nation states. and you would kind of have these big states kind of crumble, and there would be this renaissance where people, like, create new countries and with, like, you know, different rules, different ideas. So I'm wondering, is, like, do you think this is, is something like that possible? Do you see something like that coming, or is it focused really more fully on this metaverse or, you know, digital reality? Yeah, so I'm very optimistic about,

Because DeFi, so Ethereum Foundation, you know, they tried to create this radical market station from the top down. And it never really got adopted by the community. You know, there was no latent enthusiasm for that. But DeFi started off as something that was very nihilistic. It was about just making gains. And it still is, like, a large part of it. But what we see is that there are some tendencies, some democratic tendencies that exist.

these are threads that kind of need to be drawn out. And so that's what we're trying to do. And the important thing is, is these networks, they're very real. They're not just cyber or virtual. There is, like we're seeing now with the Free Ross style, which they just raised 14 million. And, you know, that's something that's very real and impactful. And I think it was the owner of Avey, who was talking in EFCC.

I saw a speech by his in which he was talking about how it was basically a rallying cry to Defi users that, you know, we have this liquidity. We need to start branching this liquidity to local communities. We need to start making things move, making things happen. So this process that you talk about, the feudal breakup, which happens at the end of empire, which happened, for example, with the Roman Empire when it broke up, it's something that's in process. Like we're seeing in Europe now the breakdown of the European Union, the rise of these nationalistic feudal entities. Like Europe is definitely heading towards a feudal reality. and also the big shift from a unipolar US-centric world

where a lot of their dominance and power is based off of the petro-dollar financial network, which is now being challenged by these emerging powers of Russia and China, but also this emergent crypto class, which although we're quite small in terms of significance, we're exponentially increasing and you know like there's something to be said for a technology whose time has come

when in the past you know the printing press came or many new technologies came which an old class whose power was threatened you know wanted to stop that technology from you know embodying or manifesting but they they and they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future against their own, their will, but it happened. And, you know, the thing is, you know, we don't have to worry about crypto adoption happening or not happening because it's going to happen.

It's practically inevitability based off the strength and latent power of this technology. what we do have to worry about or think about is how is it going to manifest itself in the future? Like what is going to be the end result? And we have at the root of the base of this thing, the ability to shape its outcome through the paradigm, the mental paradigms that we form, which is how typically the Kunyan conception of scientific conception of scientific, revolutions where, you know, for example, when the Copernican theory first came about, it did not explain the motions of the stars and the planets better than the Ptolemaic model. But all Copernicus was saying is that, you know, here is another theory, which I feel is more

elegant, like a better explanation, but it still took a lot of research and development of that model by scientists to make it competitive with the Ptolemaic model. and eventually take over from the Potalaic-Maeic model. Usually when there's a dominant scientific paradigm, you know, there is enough paradoxes and inconsistencies that start to arise about. And the model, the dominant mental model, have to be patched so much that it start to, like,

start to sag under its own weight. And then what basically give the impetus for this shift in consensus among the scientific community is when somebody is able, to, you know, when an opposition voice that has been promoting another paradigm, that paradigm, you know, starts to win games. And you see the same thing with many historical struggles where there was initially a small group of people that, you know, they were a minority voice, but, you know, and maybe struggling for a long time. But then, you know, events start to shift the balance in

favor because, you know, their thesis become validated. And essentially, we have a thesis about the crypto market, which is that crypto is fundamentally antagonistic with these powers. There's like no way of resolving it. You know, you can clip the wings of every, you know, crypto project in the space and, you know, try to, you know, tow the line. But essentially, the only vision of crypto that will be tolerated is a crypto which is harmless, which has been defanged. And we know, we might be saying, well, that's suicidal because the US is losing its edge and it has so much intellectual capital, not only intellectual capital, but, you know, that's the main thing of crypto based in the US.

And yet they want to call their own edge over the rest of the world. But, you know, we're not dealing with a rational elite class. we're dealing with a self-interested neoliberal elite class, you know, that wants to maintain global hegemony. You know, Trump tried to withdraw from, you know, an over-extended U.S. Empire, but what we saw is that the deep state is too powerful. Like, the deep state has its own interests that are orthogonal to the interests of the populace. So, you know, you mentioned this multipolar world. And so, you know, reading your stuff, I know you're a big advocate of, like, anarchism.

And so one of my sort of, I'm actually a big fan of multipolar systems because one of my, like, sort of D.C.s on society is that effect, I think that when you get into, like, in sort of a hyper anarchist system, what ends up happening is that power will, you'll get people who step in to sort of be these, you know, whether it's through demagoguery or like, hyper-anarchism leads to populism, which then leads to like high levels of centralization and like dictatorship. While when you instead go for something that's more multipolar,

that you can like play the game, theory of it against each other to prevent the rise of a single centralization centralized system. So like my theory is that like, you know, you either, if you, if you try to make something too decentralized, what ends up happening is you go in these like cycles of hyper decentralization and hypercentralization and these like big, you know, swings that keep going forever. But meanwhile, like, you know, if you start something that somewhere in the middle, you can actually sort of have this like, you know, dampen the level of that swing. And that's kind of what I think was, was sort of brilliant of the original founding, like, system of the United States where, like,

it was designed as this republic rather than a democracy, knowing that, like, hey, you know, a pure anarchic democratic system will lead to hyperpopulism. But like, so by having this, like, sort of multipolar republice system you can do that and i think the same thing applies to like economics where i think that like hyper competition leads to monopolies the way to prevent monopolies is to allow for oligopolis to form where these like powers are like holding each other in check and i think the same thing applies in a geopolitical sense which is kind of what you're talking about yeah what do you think about this like how do you how do you how do you how do you how do you how do you how do you how you reconcile your like the views on anarchism with this like empirical swings that we've seen historically

yes so we're not anarchists um we do have a lot of sympathy for the anarchist position we're actually democratic confederalists um you know we're big fans of abdulah ocellan who was the leader of the pkk and wrote a series of three books called a manifesto for a democratic civilization and So let's talk about first the good points of anarchism that we sympathize with. So first of all, the anarchists, you know, they, okay, they, they, they, so in the time of the Enlightenment, you know, there is, there's the ideology of liberalism was one main contender, and then there was ideology of socialism. and, you know, nationalism was an outgrowth of the socialist movement. And another contender was the anarchists. And anarchists did not achieve power in any meaningful way.

They also criticized, you know, capitalism, but from the side of the extreme left. And so, whereas the Marxists said, you know, capitalism would be progressive, the anarchists, you know, they seemed it as something, they saw the system that was emerging as something that was ultimately doomed to decay. But, you know, they also had, compared to the Marxists, they had a much more realistic conception of power and the state, a critique, which of the Marxists, which was that you would end up with a bureaucratic state, which would be more dangerous. than capitalism itself, which is what happened. And they were also right in their, the nation state was a huge loss for the values of equality and freedom.

And they argued instead for confederalism. Also, their views and criticism of bureaucratization, industrialization, urbanization, were for a large part spot on and correct. an ecological dimension to their critique. And they were also correct about their analysis of the Marxists as being a new form of bureaucratic state capitalism. So now about anarchism, where it starts to go wrong is that anarchists came from the

Enlightenment and, you know, they were kind of corrupted by positivism. So, and part of that was, you know, their demand that the state be abolished, like, immediately and at all costs, which is completely, unfortunately, like, unrealistic and utopian. And a big obstacle was their opposition to any type of authority. even like legitimate forms of authority, which meant that they have an inability to conceptualize, you know, what a system for what we were talking about,

the democratic nation would look like, and how, you know, we can work together to enable that vision, to put the steps forward, to have a strategy to enable that vision. So, you know, we, we criticize the anarchist movement, on that basis that, yes, there need to be some type of strategic thought, they need to be some form of leadership, there need to be some way of people moving together, you know, but in terms of the values or the critique, we agree with those.

I just like to quickly add some thoughts on that, because I thought that suddenly the way that you frame the question was very interesting in terms of these kind of ebbs and flows of history. And it's kind of Marxists in a way. But I agree with you. And I think history does have phases. And it shouldn't be our goal to work against those kind of ebbs and flows of history in a way. So that's the issue that we have with the concept of utopia, which is sometimes promoted by people in the crypto space where utopia assumes that you have a future society, which is perfect.

and so it's unchanging, which sounds like a really bad thing. It sounds like an authoritarian megastate. So instead, like we should have this kind of future, which is like subject to the natural abs and flows of history. And in terms of those kind of phases, I think we're in the midst, we're in the middle of a shift at the moment

from this kind of materialist era into something more ideational. And this is a pattern we see throughout history where we have these kind of religious ideational phases, which are followed by more material phases. And we just had in the West this kind of flip fairly recently. You know, we had the Middle Ages followed by the Enlightenment,

followed by the modernity, where the Enlightenment was kind of a mixed phase, which mixed religious elements with materialist elements and we see throughout history that these moments of transition are actually the most generative and I think we're in the midst of a kind of transitionary era

where we have both these materialist tendencies and the ideational tendencies and crypto is a really good example of a movement which demonstrates both aspects but there's also a kind of pattern that we see a lot where these kind of revolutions especially recently revolutions get captured

by more organized groups. So, you know, all across the Arab Springs, various revolutions, one after the other, co-opted by militant Islam. So, you know, there's also the risk that crypto could have, it's vulnerable to a similar kind of takeover. And that's why we also really emphasize that crypto develop its own kind of ideological position, you know, in its own voice, so that it's organized enough both practically but also philosophically.

to resist that kind of takeover. Is that another thing? I think it was mentioned in the manifesto maybe or somewhere else, but this idea of like a moral fiber and, you know, civilization having a moral fiber. Like what's the connection between crypto and, yeah, and sort of moral fiber? This is actually a version of,

the philosophy, again, Ocelan, especially his third book, where he talks about the moral and political fabric of society. And that's a really interesting concept because he kind of talks about, he says like, okay, there's something outside of the nation state, which is society, but what constitutes that society and its values? So he tries to do a kind of history of like, there are places like he calls nations, which are these kind of ideological consistencies where the people's political will is expressed.

So that's what moral and political society is. It's basically the emergent political and moral properties of the society that they uphold. So it offers a kind of a new axis

on which to build governance systems. And that's what we're referring to in the manifesto. Yes, so if you look up the definition of society on Wikipedia, it will say society is defined as the social relations between a group of people, but underneath a dominant morality and politics. So when we talk about empowerment of society, a big question is, okay, so how is that political system and what is that moral framework? Does it exist to empower society or does it exist to disempower kind of society, you know, in favor of like this nation state? So, you know, in terms to, and what Ocho-Lan, so typically when people talk about politics, the way people talk about politics is the politics is, you know, the study of power, it's the practice of power.

But that is actually kind of corruption, which is a consequence of the ideology of the system that we live in today, because politics is the activity that we as people engage in, you know, that's concerned with concerning our freedom, our security, our well-being. and, you know, the way that the system conceptualize politics now is that, you know, people are pre-political, you know, people have, like, innate desires that they're born with and that they can't be changed. But actually, the way that you design your political system or your institution can actually actually has this kind of feedback loop with the kind of values that people have. in society and actually the way that you design your political framework can assist people in becoming more individuated, people to become more spiritual to develop a more public nature. When the goal of politics essentially is the multiply public spaces. And when we are engaging in this kind of discourse of politics with other people, what we're essentially doing is we're learning to empathize with other people, we're learning about how to

negotiate for our interests. You know, we're learning about how to do discourse. So that kind of nature is a very healthy tendency to encourage in terms of society. And so when we talk about morality, we're essentially talking about the ideational aspect, the belief system, because we were talking earlier about paradigms and how paradigms act as a form of consensus that get people who have knowledge of techniques, you have this form of power over the material world, to get them to kind of work together in a coordinated way towards realizing some kind of vision of the future.

And so that's important to instill into people. It's like otherwise you get this reality where you have, you know, the visionary is like one dictator at the top and you've got bureaucracy and you've got devs at the bottom who are just essentially tools tools that are being used to implement the will of somebody else

like a giant mechanism and the consequence of that form of human social organisation is that it lead to a type of technology which become overly complex which is a type of mega-technics and that's why we have so that's why the systems that we use today

are very inhumane because they're made by gigantic corporations which, you know, enslave developers. The developers are just, they're just a tool in a big apparatus. We need to get away from this vision and technology. Both the user and the developer need to become synonymous. You know, people need to participate in constructing the paradigm. Just to add on Amir's thoughts about morality and these things is like we as skilled developers must, feel the need to help our society

the people we live with. And in order, like Amir mentions that programmers are being degraded into robots by their oppressors who are usually their bosses in a company. Crypto allows us to fight against this. So we can finally capture value in our own projects,

not having to work for a paycheck every month. But actually, like, if we're skilled enough, we can fulfill our moral need to help our society. So, you know, it sounds like there's a claim here that's being made that, like, society is, or civilization has these, like, ups and downs. And, like, you know, there's a book that I like, or like Peter Turchin, it's called, like, secular cycles. And it kind of, like, shows that, like, hey, you know, society does have these, like,

very clear ups and downs. And it's almost like very multifusy. in a way, but like, there's this quote, which is like the, uh, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men and weak men create hard times. Strong friend create many tendies. Many tendons create weak friends. Week friends create few tendies. You claim that it's because of this like sort of moral degradation of society.

And the question is, I guess, like, so you think that there's a way of reverend, of, reversing that. Like can't, can, do you think that, like, we can fight against these cyclical trends? Or is it sort of, um, inevitable?

Like, I mean, I know, like your Twitter bio has the, has the quote about like, uh, you know, society that separates its scholars from its warriors,

will have its thinking done by cowards and fighting by fools. And like, you know, you, I guess, obviously in a way, personified this idea of like, hey,

you know, you know, you know, with your like stint in Rahaba and stuff like do you think that there's a way of like reversing the moral like change like way direction of society or is it sort of inevitable? I just want to say quickly before I've asked the others that there's also kind of geography to this discussion where different parts of the world undergo there are different parts of the cycle at the same time. So I think we're seeing a shift.

from like the Western centric paradigm toward, you know, like society's emerging there in Africa and the Middle East. So I think possibly the West is beyond saving, maybe. But these are new societies that we can put our attention on that, you know, are like in a really good position, also for adopting everything that's happening now in crypto. Like Jordan Peterson seems to be on this like mission to like,

like, see like, hey, can we use like narrative, new narrative structuring to like reinstill like moral fibers within society? Like, is this a worthwhile cause that can be accomplished? I think the, if you, you know, John McCarthy, he, he's the guy that invented the term artificial intelligence. He also invented the concept of the time sharing, operating system and computer networks. And the reason why he invented that was because he was a communist. And essentially what he was seeing were, you know, there were these giant computers, which, you know, if you wanted to use them, you had to make an appointment. And they were owned by military and industry. And he had the idea. He was like, what if,

a computer was shared between everybody? What if a computer was like an electrical utility? You just go, you plug into the wall, and you can use a bit of that computer. And the outcome of that was the forming of the project by J.R. Licklider, which I forgot the name of it right now, but that project led to the development of ARPANET, which led to the development of ARPANET, which led to the development of the internet, it was a direct lineage, and then also formed the basis between the, for the modern conception of the operating system, which became realized with Unix. So that massive leap in computer architecture design happened because of a guy who had a certain ideological leap or mental leap that other people were not able to think about.

I give another example. I read all of the letters of Ada Lovelace between her sister and, you know, other people, including Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage, he designed the first computer. Now, the computer did not get built because he, you know, was very autistic and he kept changing the design and he kept arguing with people. And you can see in Ada's letters that she was very, very frustrated because she realized that this was something of huge magnitude. This was in the 1840s. The first computer would not be actually built until World War II in the 1950s, where it was built for the war effort. But in the 1840s, you know, Ada Lovelace, she was trying to get Babbage's computer to be realized.

and she was the first programmer. She was designing computer programs on paper. And she was a woman that she was obsessed with mathematical beauty, but also the social nature of reality. And in her papers, you can see her writing where she's saying that the computer is a tool that will have tremendous significance. there should be one in every single person's home, that people will be able to create music on them,

people will be able to create artworks with them. And the thing is, at that time, nobody was able to see the importance of the computer except Ada Lovelace. Everybody else thought that it was just like an interesting kind of tool for industrial applications. They didn't realize that there was a greater social magnitude, and so there wasn't as big a push

to get this device realized. It was one person who sadly was way ahead of her time. It would not be 150 years later, 50 years after the computer was built in the 1950s when people would start using computers to make computer graphics and artwork and etc. So, you know, oftentimes, you know, it's like when I look at the VCs now,

there's a lot of mid- IQ range Norma Tia VCs who they go, what's the next big thing in crypto? NFTs, blockchain gaming. You know, they're just saying like whatever, you know, cool thing that they've heard around. They're not able to imagine what the future is. You know, it's, whereas what we're seeing now with ZK

is like, holy crap, it like open up a huge new design space, like an untapped design space. There's so much great things that we can create that we dreamed about 20 years ago. And in fact, you know, the vision of the Unix operating system that they wanted to make back in the 80s, it was constrained by, you know, resource constraints, by, you know, by the tools that they had available to them then, by the, you know, like they didn't have ZK cryptography, you know, they didn't have like consensus algorithms. The computers were slow, but they built something that was, the change the world, changed the world of computing. And what we have now is we have the tooling and the economic resources and the computer

power to fully realize that vision that was started in the 80s and to, and to, and to, and, to, there's been a big break. Like the computer has not changed since the 80s. We're still using the same type of operating system. I mean, like, if I want to, like, edit something on a document, people are using Google Docs. You know, if I want to edit a picture, I have to create the picture and send it to someone.

But, like, now we can network the computers. We can create applications. that enable new forms of human activity that weren't before possible. You know, Ross Ulbricht, when he made the Silk Road in the beginning, he said, oh, you know, I'm just making an economic simulation. Let's see where this goes. You know, that's what he said when he announced it. I'm working on an economic simulation.

You know, let a thousand simulations bloom. I guess maybe this kind of leads into, like, dark vye and what do you? you guys are building right now. So like what are what do you see as like the big problems that need to be tackled? Yeah, what do you think are like the big ideas that like crypto can help fix? Obviously one of them, you know, obviously there's this idea of privacy. But like even within privacy, what are like, you know, do you think it's privacy of exchange, privacy of communication, privacy of what are the problems that you that you hope to be able to solve well we want to firstly like we want to solve the thing of getting back our sovereignty all the current chains are

just being they're being surveilled and controlled and people just don't have their privacy left anymore. Finally, we have these zero knowledge mechanisms that are built and we're able to use them properly. Also in DarkFi one of our goals is like empowering developers. So what we are also

building is like a simplified tooling and simplified mechanisms for developers to just be able to use and write their own ZK algorithms on products. So we can build with zero knowledge.

Most of these things are completely anonymous. So we can finally have anonymous voting, anonymous DAOs. We can have futures markets with different kind of liquidation engines. Amir actually has a really cool design for this. He can maybe mention. We can also help journalists and whistleblowers to leak data to encrypt and sell this auction this data in zero knowledge.

And this is all finally hidden from any kind of adversary who is just watching. what's happening on the chain and you avoid many of many many consequences like also by using mix nets and parallel networks one of them is actually I spoke to one of them earlier last week is NIM and it's a mix net that also allows us to to hide our traffic so then these mixnets combined with your knowledge gives us the ultimate power of just being able to hide anything we're doing on the internet and be safe and just to be sovereign. Yeah, I think that was beautifully said. And I just add that from the kind of the technical side, the main problem that we're trying to solve is also that we have this incredible technology,

which has been developed over the course of crypto, which is ZK. But so far, it's very obscure. And it's very hard for developers to use or understand. So the main problem now is just to make tooling so that it's very easy for developers to make any kind of privacy application. And there are many then problems from the product side that developers can solve. Like I've mentioned, like the whole technical paradigm right now is defined by surveillance. So for each tool that's based off of data harvesting, you can build an anonymous, decentralized and like crypto-incentivized alternative.

So that's a big concern for us. Yes, and continuing on zero knowledge, we are building a smart contract language, a virtual machine that executes these, and also like an optimizing compiler, because it's very difficult to write circuits in zero knowledge. you have to know you have to deeply know

algebra and how things work but since we want people to prototype and build products we decided like instead of doing this by hand these optimizations we can actually just build a compiler and probably the computer is faster than the brain

and can figure these optimizations out and make these zero knowledge circuits a lot faster the thing about the language we're building is it's it's a C like syntax. So basically anyone who knows anything about programming can just implement this,

implement products in this language. It's synced as well. So there is no kind of circuit configuration. You don't have to think about these. The compiler solves this for you. Well, you just implement your algorithm, your logic on what you want to do. So in our documentation, we have also examples of these.

The zero knowledge backend we're using is Halo 2. We actually did some research on the community and what they want. And even though Halo 2 is a bit slower implementation of a ZK mechanism for ZK algorithm, the big point is there is no trusted setup. And this immediately there is an implication of being a, more trustless systems. Many other projects are building with Intel SGX or they're building with trusted setups.

They might be fast, but they will always, like SGX will always be a black box and you cannot always trust black boxes even though they might be just fine. And in turn, so I've mainly been focused on reviewing the research

and applying that research So we have several lines of research. So one of them is in terms of the ZK algorithms themselves. So right now, Halo 2 is an algorithm that's very much optimized for anonymous payments. That's why the kind of algorithm was developed by the Zcash guys. But we're more interested in the whole kind of gamma of applied kind of ZK. So there are other kind of trade-offs you can make with other ZK algos, which, for example, can allow complex data structures to exist inside of ZK. So if you have, for example, the basic primitives of a set, then from a set you can construct a hash map, and then from a hash map, you can basically construct any sort of complex data structure.

and so, you know, there's a different way of optimizing ZEK algorithms, one of which is, you know, unknown order groups. So, you know, we're interested in, you know, maybe taking, maybe, you know, keeping the same, keep replacing, because right now everything's based on elliptic curves, but, you know, there's other types of unknown order groups, which, you know, you use other mathematical primitives. For example, you have ideal class groups. You have a more risky newer construction,

which is Jacobian hyper-eliptic curves. So, yeah, and then we also kind of prototype our algorithms in sage math. And, you know, another interesting idea is the compiler that we make right now is very much tied to the Halo 2 back-end. But if we want it to have it customizable with different algorithms on the back end, then what we could do is we can develop a sage-like intermediate, like, polynomial kind of tooling from algebraic kind of compiler, and then you implement the algos on the back end. I think this is the approach that IDM3 has taken with their compiler, enables them to iterate with other algorithms very quickly.

And, you know, Starks, there's different types of recursivity. So the recursivity, which is used in Halo 2, so you have these two addict curves, where the scale off field is the base field of the other and vice versa. And so, you know, you can create a verifying circuit inside of ZK and then construct all these proofs that you amortize at the end. You, like, combine them into one using the bulletproofs trick. but there are other ways of doing that.

For example, people build a Stark verifier inside of like a ZK. I'll go like Halo 2 or Groff 16. And then, and Starks is recursive. So, you know, that's one way of it. Also, ZK, the user creates the proof. But if you have some kind of state that needs to be updated, based off of secret information, then you need a way to poke the smart contracts

to update the state. So that's where other kind of mechanisms start to come in, which we're kind of developing. And so, for example, the AMM, it's basically impossible to make an anonymous AMM because you have these two pools of capital where the state gets updated and that's globally visible to everyone.

So the main technique that people use to solve that is batching. But the problem is if the batch is too small, it's not anonymous. If the batch is too big, then the price moves against you and is capital inefficient. So the actual market mechanisms that we build in ZK have to be completely different because we have a different set of constraints. To not have to deal with these constraints, there is, as I said, the complex data structures, which we're researching into earlier, but also you know you have to have a blockchain this fast and so then that kind of shift also the focus heavily

onto bridges so we're very much thinking very much like the cosmos model where you have different nodes that are running very fast and you have bridges in and out to execute functions on the different smart contracts I know a lot of people are like in favor of the eFL2 model I just don't see that as the future especially given the kind of shift in the mindset of crypto away from this like this single chain model to this like multi-asset many-to-many paradigm so yeah we're doing like a lot of kind of theoretical research on the side you know and then in a pipeline applying that and then that applied or prototype research making it into main where it goes into products So we can currently have all these tracks simultaneously.

And there are also some interesting things that Rose is also doing with token engineering, which is another technique that you could use to get around restrictions with anonymity. So for example, the way tornado cash distributes rewards to the people who are staking is they have this AMM where the reward is stripped into one side, but everybody who's staking in an epoch gets minted token one to one. So that's like a financial solution to a technical, so like a technical problem. So we can also leverage that. So in terms of like what's possible with the tech, actually a lot is possible. Like, you know, it's, you know, it's, you just have to, like, be able to think differently. And that's, that's the new design space we talk about. Like,

it's a door, which is opened and it's there to be explored for everyone. And we want to, we want to bootstrap this ecosystem. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast.

Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us, guests or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. And please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show,

and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.