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

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

The DarkFi squad return for the second part of this 2 part episode. We chat about the FreeAssange DAO, totalitarianism in crypto, and hear about Amir's early involvement in many projects including Bitcoin, DarkMarket (OpenBazaar) and even Ethereum. Diving a bit more technical, we also cover the DarkFi platform, a new blockchain 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 applications on utilizing zero-knowledge proof.Topics covered in this episode:The Free Assange DAOIs transparency ever a good thing?DarkMarketTotalitarianism in cryptoAmir shares his views on EthereumSolarpunkEpisode links:Dark.FiDarkFi manifestoDarkFi Element channelDarkFi on TwitterAmir on TwitterRose on TwitterIvan on TwitterThe Dark ForestSponsors:Gnosis Safe: Gnosis Safe is a smart wallet for securely managing digital assets and allows you to define customized access permissions. - https://epicenter.rocks/gnosissafeTally: Tally is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/424

Welcome to Epic Center, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Brian and I'm here with Sunny Agarwal. So today we are going to do the second part of a long episode we did with Amiraki, Rosalie, and Ivan Gelangich. So this is episode 424. If you have not listened to 423, the first part of this conversation, you know, I recommend you do that. that and you start there. And you listen to all of them together, but it was really fantastic conversation and I really enjoyed it. So they are working on a project called Dark Phi, basically trying to bring privacy to defy. So before we go into the second part of the episode, we would

like to share a few words about our sponsors this week. So first of all, we have Gnosis. So digital assets today on Web3 are usually controlled by a single private key. But that pros isn't challenged because when private keys lost or compromised and all the funds are gone. The Gnosis safe solves this problem. Knozisysaaf is a smart wallet that enables users to control digital assets with much more granular permission, involving multiple private keys, a subset of which is required for executing transactions. So these keys can then be stored in different hardware or software wallets, we even shared across multiple people.

Knosis saves extra layer of security in person. personalization make it the most trusted Web 3 asset management solution for individuals, teams in DOS, a lot of dollars using Gnosis SAFE. And in total, already more than $100 billion worth of digital assets are stored on the Gnosis SAFE today. On top of that, Gnosis save also provides the opportunity for developers to plug into the platform and build their own apps and permission modules. So visit Gnosis dashsafe.io to learn more and get started setting up your own save. And second of all, we have Talley. So Talley is a new wallet for Web3 and DFI that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to Metamask. It has all the features

of Metamask, but the difference is that Tally is 100% open source under the GPL V3 license. And it's 100% user-owned, with all the profits flowing back to the community, not a corporation. The launch of Talley is coming in the new year, but the team have just released an earlier version of the community to the community, the talent community edition before the dollar launches. You know, what features are in your idea? Well, what annoys you about your current world? Try out Talley, join the community on Discord. They have community calls each week with, you know, hundreds of people joining and, you know, get involved. So all of the info you need is at Talley.

That's t-a-l-l-l-y-cash. And with that, let's go to our episode. So, you know, one of the other challenges I know with like AMMs in Zer Knowledge, because so, you know, I've spent a lot of time doing research on this as well. I'm not really a copographer. My co-founder is. And so he, you know, understands this probably better than me. But like a lot of D-Fi today requires shared state.

And with Zer- Knowledge systems, you usually, you know, You can design non-UTXO zero-knowledge systems, but it's like, you know, it's a good mental model to think about it in where like when you're making a zero-knowledge transaction, you need to know the state that you're about to apply your transaction to. And that basically turns into a world where maybe everyone can only do, only one transaction per block can be executed. Like that touches a piece of shared state. So you have one AMM and 10 people want to try to trade on it. only one of them can. So for osmosis, you know, which is the project I work on,

our solution was say like, hey, the AMM sits outside of the privacy system, and we instead just have a shielded pool, like Zcash style shielded pool. And whenever someone wants to do a trade, assets pop out of the shielded pool, hit the AMM, do the swap, and then come straight back into the shielded pool.

And then the user's wallets should, just automatically roll over their addresses. So our solution was, hey, ignore the hard problem. Let's do the simple problem, which is just have, you know, the asset layer in zero knowledge and not the smart contract. Because to do most of the interesting smart contracts that require a shared state, from what we understood, we need like even more advanced cryptography techniques, like MPC and stuff to make them work.

So is that stuff you're also like thinking about as well? I just jump in quickly and then I'm going to pass to Amir. So I think that you're completely right in everything you've outlined. AMM is kind of like a paradox within CK. It's basically cannot be done without de-anonymizing the amounts or the participants. So we have to evolve new concepts. But I think that zero knowledge is a unique opportunity to do that. And the reason why is like there's this really generative role that constraints play in design.

So defy itself came from, unlike AMMs themselves, came from engineering, you know, within a set of constraints. Which the constraint in that case is like, how do we do order books in a way which is like peer to peer and decentralized. And that's where like, okay, we can use this curve. You know, that's where that idea came from. So I think, you know, over time, we will see the same kind of thinking happening within the ZK space. And as opposed to being a kind of restrictive thing, it could actually blow open new ways of thinking about finance. We need a field of ZKFI, like redesigning of all these DFI primitives to like work within the zero knowledge world and constraints and such. Yeah, we just call it darkfi.

Yeah, as you mentioned, you alluded to MPC. which is one way of updating the state. So all these techniques can work together. As Rose said, I like to call it isomorphisms with tradfi. That's what DeFi is. It's like we're trying to explore how to report these tradfi concepts over. I think the blockchain algos are getting a lot faster. So the whole kind of orderbook constraint,

is becoming less of a problem. But ZK introduced like a different set of constraints. And actually the order book model is better for ZK than the AMM. That can be implemented inside of ZK. As well as a liquidation engine. So you can have a leverage, fully unwise leverage. But there's also other kind of market mechanisms, you know, where you know for people to buy and sell on the market it's not just restricted to you know

central limit order books and AMM so you know so that's kind of something we just have to essentially prototype into many products built them see what gains traction how do people adapt and and try many different designs you know i have literally i have like uh four different designs in my head about things that I want to try out. So is this dark phi, do you see this as like a new smart contract blockchain, kind of similar to like you have, you know, Ethereum and Solana and, you know, others? Or is this more some sort of zero knowledge tech that will plug into different blockchains and or, and if it's a smart contract, it will this be like a proof of state

blockchain or his own staking mechanism or like like yeah what was this going to look like like so one of the first products we're actually kind of gearing up to make will be a dal like an anonymous doll and actually we're going to make probably use tendermint uh bft for that and and tendermin's cool because it's got the iBC into blockchain protocol what essentially is like the blockchain is not our focus, we might inside of our toolkit provide a blockchain that people can use in their

products and then bridges the people can use to connect these blockchains together but the the Cosmos model you know NIM is using Tendomint on the back end Zcash is switching to

tendament you know so that's more like the crypto way that I feel Okay, that's very cool. Yeah, so basically it could be sort of its own blockchain and then you just use IBC to send assets over and then you can do privacy. Like you can do things there and then take them out again. Yeah, I would say quickly that it's similar to something like ETH, which is generic, you know, EVM with like programmable smart contracts. but it's different in that

we're very much committed to the philosophy of Unix so we want to make small modular tooling which can be composed together to create projects so like Amir said

you can kind of like plug in the blockchain but you could also just use the contracts on another chain which maybe that's what the day we're working on now will do as we don't have have the blockchain yet. And similarly, you can just, so the things ideally are like separate tools that can be composed together in a very flexible way. That's really cool. That's like awesome to see that, you know, I think that I think, yeah, I agree. Like it seems like Cosmos is sort of becoming this like

spot where a lot of like cool privacy stuff is being built. You guys should also check out Anoma. They're like another really cool project that's doing a lot of cool stuff with, you know, zero knowledge also both on Cosmos. Yeah. So, you know, Amir, you, you, you, you, you, You were also mentioning earlier about this free Assange Dow that you want to help create. What are your plans with that? I'm working with Asangis brother, who they've actually been planning to release an NFT for a while now. And then the free Ross Dow happened, which was set up to bid on the Russell Brick's NFT. and it actually raised, I think it was 4.5KE,

and it made a bid of 1K, which he won the auction with. So all of that money that it raised was 14 million, which is a pretty big victory for kind of Russell Brick, who was one of the initial heroes of crypto, has done so much for the space, and now is in prison for life. And, yeah, and then Assange's brother, he's been for ages trying to find a way to, because Assange's essentially broke, he spent all the bitcoins that he got in a long time ago.

And now he's just relying on lawyers helping him for free, which, you know, essentially you get what you pay for. And his extradition now has just been approved to the US. So he's facing imminent extradition. It just needs the foreign secretary of the US, Priti Patel, to sign the order, essentially. And he just literally had a stroke a few days ago on the right side of his face. So nasty, nasty stuff. So I think, yeah, we have a very solid chance there to raise, you know, 20 million in this Dow. give to Assange. The Dow is very interesting because a lot of big names I know in tech have joined

the kind of Telegram group and there's a lot of enthusiasm for it. You know, people are very, very active and then, you know, we're kind of setting up that Dow now and the initial version will literally just be, you know, put something out on Eiff, on Ethereum, you know, so, the family when they list the NFTs there's a way for people to pull capital to fractionalize the NFTs to bid on them so the Dow will like then give shares of the NFTs that it's won back to the people who have invested in the Dow which is the same model that the Free Ross Dow made so um Dahls are very interesting politically um the you know uh And maybe Rose can say more about this.

But a few years ago, there was a lot of talk about DALs as this, like, political formation, which, you know, was just talk, but it's, we've seen in, like, literally the last year or so, the, like, now DALs have gained, like, a lot of traction. Also, the original conception of DOWs was that be this autonomous organization in the internet. there would be like hiring people and be like running running like by itself and autonomous. But the DALs have actually shifted in nature to be more focused around ways for people to organize in this post-corporate kind of democratic squad slash tribal structure and, you know, diffuse liability and act as a collective. So that's an interesting evolution of the Dow concept, which has coincided with the kind of takeoff of Daos.

And the interesting thing about Assange is like, okay, that now like Daals, which have been mainly confined to like financial project, now there's this kind of like strong convergence of kind of cypherpunks using their kind of like knowledge and their means to free like the original cypherpunk, who was like a sanch and yeah so

that's I think a signal in the noise of like what's coming yeah I completely agree with Amir

and I'll just add I think his point about the dows is interesting like how the earliest kind of dows like we saw the Dow on Ethereum

it was very much this kind of this old Zabohian language of like unstoppable glacial code

you know, like this code is law kind of stuff. And the DAOs in the early days, there were visions as they were envisioned as these kind of almost like sentient AI kind of actors, you know, that were like inhuman and autonomous. And it was kind of scary almost the way that they were described. But now we've seen in the past year or so, actually the shift to DAW is emerging

and much more of a social phenomena than I think people had expected. And increasingly, you know, we're seeing now with the free Ross and the free Assange Dow, a really interesting tool for coordinated activism. Yeah, I'm very bullish on the dao space. I can imagine that this is also something, somewhere where like the zero knowledge and privacy is important,

where it's like, you know, especially for something like, you know, the Assange Dow where it would be like, you know, I don't want, maybe I don't want, high government to know that I'm like contributing to like to this kind of thing but like this is something I want to do regardless right and I think that's important but you know on the flip side though you know I guess wrapping it all the way back around to the beginning like you know there's the what about like is other cases where you know over privacy is an issue where let's say like the ability to contribute to these like um you know movement um

is good in certain cases like this. But like if we're talking about like political funding, for example, like, you know, it would be, I think people appreciate a level of transparency in knowing where, you know, certain people in power get their donations from and like who. So, you know, if, if bribery is a inherent part of the world we live in, it's at least nice to be able to be able to. able to see where the strings are, who and what's pulling the strings rather than not even having any visibility into that at all. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And if you read a lot of the literature on those, there is a big emphasis on, you know, transparency, you know, at the level of like corporations and governments and that kind of thing. And I do think that transparency in some cases is okay. And actually you can make DAOs which combine, you know, things like anonymity

for the users with transparency of the finances, for example. So it's not to say that building anonymous tooling necessarily means that every single aspect has to be anonymous, although in some cases it should be. You know, for some of these DAOs, like say it's a DAO operating a city or something, you might actually want that the expenditures are public. But the people might be, by be hidden or you might have other ways of customising that and you can but it's it's the problem with the current kind of transparency maximalism that we have is basically um everything is exposed but the most sensitive thing is is i think probably that the users are exposed and and yeah that's that's probably the most important thing to solve yeah i would add as well the um uh during

the Russian war, they put out competition for people to design the next gun for the Russian army. There were a lot of really well-funded, you know, big names, scientific engineering teams that were like designing these guns. And Kalashnikov, he was just like a guy that, what do you call it, the people who know about, like, met using the tours to make to do things with metal um and he was in the hospital bed and he was thinking about his experience in the war like about the guns like everything that he he found that he saw was wrong with them and he was thinking like if only there was like a tour that was like this and like this and he started to design it and he went around everywhere trying to get

people to form his team so that he could go in the competition and win the competition. And nobody wanted to give him resources. And but he found like a few allies and some guy gave him a corner of the factory. And he produced the Kalashnikov and he won the competition. And then the Kalashnikov, it's like, it's no coincidence that it's like it's like the symbol on if you look at many flags of liberation movements or flags of you know of even nations they have a picture of a Kalashnikov because it was a tool that like tipped the balance in favor which which allowed many different like rebel movements to kind of exist and

to like fight for their interests that would not otherwise been able to exist, you know. So, yeah, so the Kalashnikov kind of, it ushered in this, you know, and I talked before about automated weapons, which I think is like the real kind of danger to humanity, which is this scenario where, you know, the human soul is completely subjugated and, you know, we lose our ability to, we lose our free speech, we lose our ability as, as consumers in a market. You know, they're talking about CBDCs, central bank digital currencies, centralisation of the financial infrastructure and social credit scoring, which the Western states are trying to copy with the CBDCs. They're inspired by the China model. the courts you know like I was reading an article where it was saying you know when you go to a local court

it's good to have someone who has like a local lawyer because they know how to talk to the local judges which the local judge might might judge you badly because you don't know the decorum so what kind of legal system is that which has which has become so detached from notions of justice you know And I talked about censorship, you know, the cause for Facebook, for, you know, the media to tow a line. So what is the last avenue of defense of human freedom? Like, you know, and at what cost? And even that freedom is being taken away from us now. So, so I think that, you know, we need, we need the.

the means to preserve ourselves as human beings as, you know, human individuals in a society because that's being encouraged on now. The outcome is, I don't believe this. So I like that there is all this public goods focus in Ethereum. You know, I love the whole kind of ideas. around collective ownership, DALS, you know, people power, that's incredible. But the other side of EF, which is, you know, making this alliance with regulators, you know, they really tried to kind of bring the WEF into kind of bed with them.

But then Gary Gensler, like, turned on them. So they kind of got done. That's a huge mistake. That's like literally cluing up your competitor. I don't believe this kind of optimism of power that they kind of have. I think like there is like this tension that's like irresolvable. And actually the ultimately the swing of history is like in favor of our side. And you know, it's and it's and it's it's healthy that we.

kind of push to like realize you know the the realization of these tools to their fullest extent um like those of us there is there is going to be this kind of choppy period you know I liken it to there's a storm coming and we we have a lifeboat and like crypto is our lifeboat to like cross the storm uh you know people are going to like fool off of their lifeboat you know people are going to fall in the sea but ultimately ultimately like the place that we get to is going to be something very special. We're going to go somewhere. We're going to arrive somewhere which is going to like the people that escaped persecution

in Europe. You know, okay, maybe that's not a great example, you know, of everybody going to the US. But, you know, they went there, they got given land. You know, they got ownership for the first time in their lives. And what I see around me happening now is people, everybody is becoming so poor. And when I say that to crypto people, go, what are you talking about? Everybody's becoming rich. And it's like, yeah, in crypto, everyone is becoming rich.

But in the real world, everybody is becoming really, really poor. So it's like, yeah, it's kind of frightening that you see happening. And also during the coronavirus, I watched. a lot of sci-fi, like a lot, a lot of sci-fi. And the interesting thing is, the movies from the 90s, they have, you know, what the White House being blown up by aliens

in Independence Day, you have Godzilla destroying New York, you have the tsunami, washing everything away the day after tomorrow, and it was like, okay, the Soviet Union, it's gone. Like, we're supreme now, we're on time. Okay, what do we,

want like and people started imagining like you know the apocalypse coming and then we got nine eleven like the twin towers and it was like it was like we were so fascinated by that vision of the future that the al-Qaeda saw it as a great marketing opportunity and they were like cool like that that's something that and it was in terms of like damage done like people killed it like it wasn't it wasn't like a huge number of people i mean i don't want to say Compared to the population of the US, it wasn't something that crippled the US, but we can see now, like, visible to be seen, like, that it had a huge impact on politics, you know, massive.

It's like, it was a victory for the Islamists. And it's the same thing now with the movies that we're seeing come out now, the sci-fi movies. They're so brooding, they're so apocalyptic. Like, there's always, like, in most of them I see in the future, there's been some kind of disaster of them, you know. And it's like everybody is like expecting something to happen. Like in the next five years or so, everybody feels, you know, there's going to be this big,

we don't know what it is. There's going to be like a major political, economic events. Something's going to happen, you know, and it's like, and so, you know, that's where crypto is situated, you know, and it's crypto's job is to, like, I mean, those of our, a building with cryptos to be on the right side of history, because ultimately that's what it is. And trying to fly under the radar, those elements of crypto will eventually,

they would just get stamped out of existence by the state, you know, because it always happens like this in history. You know, there's a feedback loop of rhetoric. You know, things reach a fever pitch, you know, and the more that the state is going to, this is actually Rose's thesis, I'm saying. But the more that the state cracks down in crypto, the more it radicalizes people. And so it creates this loop.

And that's the inevitable tendency. I'll just like add to what he said about, I'll just summarize a little quickly my thesis, which is basically like we have this super cycle. And super cycle is a bet on regfi. You know, it's just like the idea of the super cycle is everyone's got really rich because Pepsi is going to have NFTs and, you know, the US government is going to use Bitcoin. something. And so that's like the super cycle thesis, simplified. So it entails the existence of

regfai. But the thing about regfi is that regfi also necessitates darkfai, because regfi is a heavily policed, restricted area where you can only enter if you have the right nationality, and everything you do within there is contained, and you have to pay tax on everything. And so liquidity is going to spill out into the technology, which offers something closer to what we used to in crypto now, which will be, you know, we call it darkfi. And then we have this split like that's happened between the cryptocurrency industry. It's basically split in the middle. We have the reg fie and dark fi. So what happens next is this kind of the cycle where, you know, the state tries to restrict dark fire. It tries to crack down on dark fi. But that is

simultaneously reinforcing its, it's, it's justifying its existence. So the people that have been restricted to this zone of darkfi are increasingly radicalized and increasingly alienated from this regfi system. So it's actually the catalyst for their political autonomy and self-determination process to occur. So I'm quite bullish on, you know, this differentiation between darkfi and the kind of current paradigm of surveillance. I think it's really important process and I think it's it's ultimately very positive for society. One topic I was also curious about, so, you know, this dark fight now, right?

But of course, Amir has had previous projects before. There was dark wallet. And then there was this thing called dark market. Dark market was this kind of, you know, anonymous eBay style thing in a hackathon. And then there was actually some people's. And it seemed like, okay, obviously the use case would be something I could be centralized Silk Road. And then you had a bunch of people who basically then started this Open Bazaar, right, which was kind of the same idea.

But I think at least on the surface targeting more this use case of, you know, some sort of global eBay and, you know, people would sell like mucks and stuff like that. But still, in a way, it all seems kind of weird because you had in 2011 already, right, Silk Road, there was a lot of usage of Silk Road. Like, people really, like, wanted a product like that. And even when Bitcoin was, you know, obscure, people actually used that, you know, more than anything else. And so in a way, it's like the, it seemed like a dark market idea of like, okay, do you know, decentralizing these marketplaces for like, you know, physical goods and physical shipments such an obvious thing to do and seem like, okay, there would be like huge demand for this kind of stuff. And I'm curious, like, yeah, what are your thoughts on this? Do you still

think there's like an important problem? What is the state of this kind of world? I'll address both parts of what you said. But let's start with the second part. Dark Market, which has originally announced in Toronto several years ago, was a prototype. I was working on Dark Wallet, so, you know, we made the prototype in one night for the hackathon, and, you know, we put it out, and then I forgot about the project. And there was a petition in the community at the time. So if people look at the dark wallet video, the original dark wallet video where we crowdfunded 60K to fund dark wallet development.

Oh yeah, brilliant. And not many people realized, but at the time we were the minority voice. Now it's trendy. Now it's like everybody's like, yeah, cypherpunks. Cipherpunks, right, code. But the time, there was a lot of people in the Bitcoin community going, oh, we need mass adoption. We need big banks.

Like, why is Amir bringing so much heat? And I was like the fly in the pudding because, you know, journalists would love me. And I'd go, oh, blah, blah. And I'd be like ruining. I'd be spoiling the whole kind of corporate kind of co-option process, the this kind of the people were trying to assemble or construct around Bitcoin. Was that on purpose? Like were you purposely trying to destroy that?

Yes, because the Bitcoin Foundation, so I was, so the initial Bitcoin.org website, there was a list of five names. I was one of the original five that was on there. But it was Gavin Andresum, who was afraid of like, of up and coming, young devs like myself who were like vying for his position who tried to like push those kind of people out and I became I was like the first to suffer from that and so I kind of saw like that there was this cabal of developers that were trying to like kind of seize control of Bitcoin and that's why we make the the BIP process was to kind of put breaks because the way

because I came from open source background as well as well professional poker player for two years and and so inside of open source world I understood about community like where Ivan comes from as well we were part of the whole anarcho you know hacker free software you know guys working on Linux like hardcore for many years so we kind of we understood software development in terms of in terms of that idea which is like the way that you build your software has to be modular. It has, you have to, you know, expose the inner parts of the technology.

You know, it favors like elegance and simplicity of design because you want the whole technology stack to be transparent. Whereas Gavin Andriesen and those kind of guys, they came from like a corporate background. So in the corporate background, it's about making products and users for consumers. So they want to integrate the entire technology stack. They don't want to like diffuse it and the emphasis is not on simplicity. It's on perfection. It's on completeness. So there was this clash of ideology inside of Bitcoin.

And so that's why I forked off and I started working on lip Bitcoin. And that's why also, you know, we saw what was happening with the Bitcoin thing. And we were like, no, this is like why Bitcoin was invented, because there was a big shift in Bitcoin from 2010, 2011, where you would go on the forums and there would be everybody all day long talking about Austrian economics, sound money, you know, the evil central bank, agorism, you know, overfrow the state. It was like, that was literally the Bitcoin talk forums. and then, you know, these guys started to come along and you'd see them be at first. And I'd see, I'd even meet them in real life and people would go to me, they would say to me something like, you know, you are an expert on creating software. I am an expert on marketing.

And in the way that we do marketing, blah, blah, blah. And they're like trying to school me on how I should talk to the media going, you know, it's not good what you say because you might scare people away from the project. It's like, dude, like, you know, people use Bitcoin because Bitcoin's cool because that's like, you know, ultimately, like, I don't care about like passive consumers. You know, I've heard the argument we could hide in the noise. I don't buy it. I think you're simply just like, you're simply just opening, you're opening the door to allow takeover. You know, the type of people you surround yourself is critical.

It's key. And the reason people who want to do things in life, people who have like. like ambition and sense of purpose. They see something that has like, has its ability to, you know, strike paths or like to create new paths. You know, like when you're walking through nature

and, you know, you want to get to somewhere and the path hasn't been tread on and you have to tread the grass. And then other people do that and it creates a new path, you know? So that was what was happening to Bitcoin development. And the dark market, there was a petition.

On the Reddit, if you search petition dark market, you'll find people made a petition. They were saying, this is a community petition for Amir to rename dark markets open to open bazaar. You know, that we as a community disagree with how this one developer has created a software like with a branding that is against our will. So there was that attitude in the community. Like it's different now Like I can safely say now The defy is cyphapunk Like defy is like the original

Willa Crypto That's why I'm not long Ethereum foundation I'm long DeFi and Dau's Like that's where the future lies You know And so yeah Dark Market got rebranded to open bazaar

You know also You know they wanted to change the The license from GPL I'm a GPL guy you know, like, fuck the corporates if they want to use my shit, like they have to also publish their source code, open source as well. You know, I, a lot of open source devs think it's a victory when they write free software and it gets used by like Google or Apple and they get nothing back. I think that's just like a victim mindset, like Stockholm syndrome. So anyway, they got me,

they got me to change the lot. They sent me a letter saying, can you change the life? So I said, all right, yeah, I don't care. Here, it's MIT, whatever. And then the next thing they did after that is they went to Andrus and Horowitz, and they started to get VC funding from A16Z. The people who don't know A16Z, there's like two groups of VCs in crypto world. There's like cool VCs, which are like young people, which are crypto-native. We know we will come from like, you know, either the early Bitcoin generation or the later one.

It doesn't matter. you know, but they, we embody like the same my deal. And then there's like the, the Silicon Valley guys who, they're friends with other people in Silicon Valley and, and their friends with people in the banks and they get cheap money, you know, the money that's printed by the central banks. It doesn't go to the hands of people. It goes to other big banks who give it to their buddies.

And then the buddies in Silicon Valley, they get this, this dollars, which they got for cheap. And then they give it to crypto projects. and crypto projects give pieces of their work. So the hardworking developer, he works hard. And you know, like Marx, Marx came along and he said, look, this is how much money you're making. You know, this is how much you get.

This is how much, you know, the capitalists get. Like, let's organize and take that thing over. Let's run it ourselves. And that's my proposal to developers now. It's like, you know, let's take that over. Like, why are we giving ourselves pieces of our work? to the big guys. And so Andreessen, so all these big VC firms, you know, they, they all talk in a certain

way because they're connected to the state. They all act in a certain way. And the interesting thing is you see a lot of projects, especially in the bull market phase where there's a lot of like money flying into crypto. You can have very bland branding. They're very generic. They're very safe looking. You know, they're not like stepping on anyone's toes.

And the interesting thing is that. pressure, that conformity pressure, it doesn't come from the market. The market actually desires cool stuff. The market desires like, you know, disruption and like, you know, differentiation and diversity. Like, that's why we watch movies about heroes prevailing against all odds, you know, David and Goliath. It's like thousands of years old. Like, it's something that speaks to us internally. But this pressure, it's coming from this network that's largely based in the US to conform.

And so that's what happened to Open Bazaar. You know, they start to add all this censorship tech to like censor pages and stuff. And, you know, they start, the way that they were like orientating their phrasing was going, oh, you know, it's like, it's like eBay, but, you know, we make kind of predilections about the spheres of activity that are enabled or not enabled. So, for example, Ethereum, when it came up, they said, let's just make tooling for developers.

The developers will use it in any way that they seem fit. And that was the power of EF, the kind of turned into a generative ecosystem. So in terms of generative ecosystems, if you're there and you are constraining this like emergent life form that's like exploring, you know, into what Rose was talking about, this dark space with its kind of tendrils and you're like cutting them off and you're saying, no, there is a path that has already been created and you can only go this way. and then essentially you're preordaining the destiny of that technology, you know. And that ties into what you started saying, which is, you know, the whole philosophy of the agorists, which the agorists were saying, and it comes down to this concept of economic simulation, which is, you know, we are the economic simulations as a form. as a form of this of organization, of, you know, like quantifying the unquantifiable which existed

before. For example, I used to be an open source developer for many years. We created tremendous amounts of value for society. The problem was that we had no way to capture back some of that value that we created. And the power of tokenization, which a lot of people are strangely in Ethereum Foundation, they seem against, like, defy and markets. They seem like anti-markets. We're pro-markets. We think, like, this is a hugely generative tool. It's like there for us to explore and to use. You know, we can create these, we can create these simulations that the participants in DALs in DFI protocols can themselves prefigure their own destinies like destinies that we is the the

then like not me as a boss but as a as a as a new and everybody else that we can through this intellectual culture that we have through the the ideas the means the means, the images, the symbols, the stories, the narratives, that we can, that we direct our energies, you know, and their whole thing was, is the crypto-anacists in the origin, they said cryptography is this new tool, which we can use to make parallel societies where the oppressed, where, you know, anybody who is marginalised, people on the fringe, people on the They can start to meet and they can start to organize and they can start to realize their visions of the future. And not only that, the code, the DNA of these new forms of organization is immune by default to all forms of totalitarianism.

that it's like, for example, well, you know, like some organisms that they're like naturally antibacterial just because of their biological makeup, that this kind of organizations are like anti-totalitarian and that these form the seed of the new type of civilization. Just to interject briefly, what makes those types of organization anti-totalitarian? We have to think the reason why people use Bitcoin, the reason why people use cryptocurrency is because they have some will, they have some intent of what they want to do. And crypto is kind of the path of least resistance.

So, for example, you know, crypto is not. easy to use right now. Yeah. You know, I went to, for example, Lebanon recently. And in Lebanon, they have lots of small exchange shops that are trading Tron, USET.

They're like literally and we talk about mass adoption of Bitcoin, but turns out maybe it's Tron that actually realized that. And I was talking about these paths through the wilderness that we create. So, you know,

going off the beaten path, into the wilderness. You know, there's like brambles. There's like bits, there's like nature around you. It's, you have to like, you know, push it out the way. You have to crush it down. You know, it's not convenient. Yet, here we are.

There are people that are choosing to walk through the brambles to get cut. Because there is some reason that bring them to crypto. And I ask to you, like, to look and think to yourself, like, why specifically crypto. It's not because, you know, they can buy coffee with cryptocurrency and saying, oh, it's cheaper to buy a coffee. There's some reason there. And that's, that, that reasoning is what we should explore further. I wanted to address Brian's question a little bit. So I think crypto definitely has the capacity for totalitarianism, you know, as does any technology. But technology contains like two potentialities, basically.

There's like an authoritarian strand within technology, but there's also this kind of democratic strand. So like we will see probably both authoritarian crypto systems like China style social credit scoring combined with non-authoritarian democratic techniques, you know, as we're seeing like emerging in the DAO space. So there's this kind of joint history of technology and Merhi mentioned earlier on that we have this analysis where we look back in history and we see

there was two types of civilization, there was the democratic civilization, the state-based one and these have been in conflict throughout history. Well, there's another philosopher Louis Mumford who looks at that history and he says that's not a war between politics or forms of organization. It's actually a technological war

that's playing out between two forms of technology, one that he calls megatechics or monotechnics and the other which he calls polytechnics, democratic techniques. So you can have both things, but the legacy that we're coming from is one of user empowerment. And so the characteristics of like democratic technology is it's owned and operated by people in service of their needs. Instead of, In the case of megatechatics, users being exploited as tools within this kind of inhuman apparatus. The other example would be like something like Facebook where the users are essentially

enslaved within the system. Everything about the software is built to capture their attention and their time. And they're literally being harvested, like farmed, for. for their data and their attention. And they have no voice or control over that system. So this is like the same hierarchy and like enslavement relation that Richard Stallman talked about so many years ago in his critique of proprietary software when he first like spoke of free software, introduced free software.

You know, he noticed that if you have a system where there's the use. users and then there's the developers. That's an abusive relation because you have a class of people on top who are making decisions based off of this user base which is locked out of the code. So we have that now brought to unprecedented, unimaginable extremes in this surveillance paradigm

exemplified by these Web 2 kind of technologies. Whereas, you know, crypto is offering an alternative. at the moment, it's still transparent, but at least in crypto, you know, people control their own destiny and uses control their own data and their own activities. So that's a fundamental shift in the way of thinking about technology, I think orientating towards more democratic as opposed to authoritarian lines. So, Amir, you mentioned that you see that the Ethereum Foundation is starting to become more anti-market. it. And so, you know, for listeners who might not be, I think many people might not be aware of like sort of your role, you know, you were quite involved with sort of the early stages of Ethereum and not like actively in the project, but like, if I remember correctly, I think someone told me that you were the one that actually introduced Vitalik to Gavin. I don't know if that's correct or not. But like, you know, you were very involved and, you know, very, you know, I guess part of that like initial movement. that helped create Ethereum.

What is it about, you know, the Ethereum Foundation that you see is starting to maybe diverge from the original visions that you may have aligned with? Okay, so, yeah, you're the only person who really knows about that. But most people don't know much about

crypto's early history. So, Ethereum as it started was, it started off as, you know, socially conscious, technically minded people who saw the potential to generalise Bitcoin a lot further. Honestly, when I was hearing about Ethan in the early days, what I didn't really understand like what it could be used for like nobody could give me practical examples so that is a very good example of the kind of intuitive mindset winning over the observant i'm like a bit maybe too observant sometimes which is the jungian kind of thing so yeah but as ethers kind of developed

it never really had a strong vision of what it was wanted to be. It was kind of like, oh, you know, like here, you just kind of, people just kind of make whatever. We just give like a base layer. And yes, that was good, but like where we can see that heading now is the community is becoming immensely fragmented. If community is still, I think, the most interesting or you know powerful kind of crypto community

you know Bitcoin has lost its edge completely all the smart people have left um you know Solana it's it's very it's very inorganic

VC led and if you look at Salana Breakpoint the types of people that were there but each community it's like um you know, a lot of very smart, interesting people. But where I see it heading now is those fragmentation means happening,

especially there is a lot of L2s that are popping up. And all of these L2s are kind of vying to become the next Ethereum, essentially. And then also PolkaDar is also a branch of the ETH community. So Ethereum is essentially, there are many different groups now that are emerging. defy as an entire phenomena

is emerging outside of the influence of Ethereum Foundation Ethereum Foundation has kind of lost a lot of his soft power so yeah so

Eve really doesn't have like a strong sense of like what it wants to be where it wants to go they try to kind of because For example, like, if you look at Vitalik's blog or you look at his talks, he will talk about a lot of different things. Like, oh, there's this voting mechanism, or there's this thing that's interesting.

But it's just like trivia. There's no, like, overarching theme that kind of tie these pieces together into like a coherent kind of, you know, direction that can, like, to pull people in. And that's actually the role that Ethereum Foundation should be playing. The Ethereum Foundation should not be like actually directly involved in, you know, like shaping the projects, you know, or, you know, like managing the development of the software. Actually, it should be like kind of steering the overarching direction and, you know, inviting in people to collaborate on the philosophy and developing the intellectual culture. But that dimension, it's largely missing from Ethereum.

They tried to fill it in with this radical market stuff. But the guy, Glenn Weil, he's completely from the system, like he was educated at Stanford. I met him twice, actually. He doesn't remember meeting me the first time. but I asked him both times if he knew about Rajava, which is the most interesting political experiment in the world right now. And if you're a political scientist, you should know about that. But he had never heard of it.

So the only people who never heard about Rajava that are into politics are essentially people that are like so embedded in the system into like liberalism. And it's also a guy that he goes to like the W.E.F. he speaks at Davos. So this was like kind of the tilt that Ethereum was trying to position itself as was going, oh, we're the more kind of like friendly version to Bitcoin,

which Bitcoin is like anti-regulator. We're like willing to work with the regulators. But then it didn't work out because, you know, Gary Gensler like flipped on them and they kind of got cucked. So then there's just been this vacuum and the defy kind of phenomenal. phenomena's like emerged out of that. And as I said, it started off with like animal, animal coins and scam projects and all kinds of crazy, crazy stuff.

But then it's like slowly finding its way. And it's interesting because, you know, there's this tendency towards, because like Rose said there's these two visions of technology that are at play. and you can kind of see it in, you know, the, or the, like, surveillance apparatus on the one side, but then the other side, like, or the kind of, like, you know, like the Arab Spring and the color revolutions, where, you know, people organized through the internet as a swarm, and it was, like, you know, people moving together using these modern technologies to change the world that they exist in around. them and and that's like that's like the human empowerment vision of technology but the other one is the top down vision of technology which eF is or especially eF found eF core is very much still like

integrated into this mindset so for example cleros the talk in eFCC by federico he's actually talking about how, you know, Foucault, when he spoke about the panopticon, he misrepresented the panopticon because the panopticon was good as originally envisioned. It was like a decentralized form of surveillance. And that entire movement come out of like, and they actually came up to me, and I posted about this on Twitter and the Claros guys, it came up to me in Lisbon and they said like, oh, hey, like, you misunderstood like, what? what we were saying, you know, that I was like, guys, like, I didn't misunderstand anything that you were saying. I come from England where that movement started, like the whole Garden Cities,

movement, industrial system of education, decentralized, you know, public surveillance. But that's something that EF developers are talking about. Like, Vitalik himself was pumping Claros, you know, like the decentralized court system. So it's, the, the, the, There's this like ideology that's like deeply inside of EF core, which is disconnected from the like kind of cyphopunk will of the community. And that's why I kind of see the community kind of pulling away and like killing its old, old master. But it's still kind of very mixed up these trends.

Like, because there's that solar punk imaginary, which Rose can talk more about, which is, is very much based around this authoritarian vision of the future where, you know, where you still have like mega cities, except there's just like more trees. You know, we use solar panels. But it's still like the same apparatus that we live in. And like, and the problem is, is that the technology as it's being conceptualized now

is dominantly first world. And, you know, people who, they kind of like, they like live in the system. You know, they just want to tweak the system a bit, but they don't fundamentally, want to like change the system. They're like actually, the thing is pretty okay.

But the flip side of that is a system where, you know, two million people were killed in Iraq and Syria over the last like 10 years to, to fund like our oil extraction so that we can, we can continue the industrial society where, you know,

people, common people now, even, it used to be brown people, now it's actually and then it was the Greeks and the Spanish but now it's actually like people in the US themselves like you know the the hyperinflation event that we're all expecting to come it's like it's like now it's like they've extracted all the resources from all the world but now the only resource left

is there is the people directly under them and so their position of power is getting more unstable and the only kind of flip side they have to that is to authoritarianism And as Rose alluded to, the problem of capture of the technology is where blockchain actually becomes the means for this new authoritarian technology, which, you know, CBDCs, they're trying to give incentive for people to move over. And one of the main Ethereum projects now, people keep talking about is UBI, universal basic income. The only way to make universal basic income work is if we have identity on the blockchain. And that's why everybody keeps talking about identity, you know, quadratic voting. So this is this idea that everybody is identified on the blockchain and managed by this central system,

which drops credit to people. And UBI is a centralized shit coin fiat air drop to incentivize people to move to CBDCs, which, you know, before we used to have this network of local community banks, and now community banks are being pushed out of existence. and that financial infrastructure is being centralized. In England, we only have five high street banks, you know, Lloyds, Barclays, Nat West, etc. But now they want to get rid of those banks.

So now the only person who are issued credit will be the central bank. Literally just be a website. Your bank account would be a web, like literally an account on the web server running at the European Central Bank. And they would just go, beep, issue more credit, beep. And, you know, they're deeply inspired by the Chinese model, which they're like, you know, they're like, we brought China into WF in the 90s because they're like, oh, the Chinese will become more democratic.

They'll become more peace-loving and freedom-loving. But it didn't happen. China is like just doing China. Like, yeah, China, authoritarianism is cool. Capitalism is cool. And then, but then now they're creating this social credit system where they're like incentivized people who have good behalf. If you're like not late to meetings, if you're only associate with good people, you know, you get like incentives. You get benefits through their system and they allow you to get like cheaper train tickets or better rent.

The Western states, they're looking at the Chinese system and they go, cool, that is a, that's a really interesting idea. We should copy that. That's what the whole UBI, CBDC thing is about. And the problem is that if as an intellectual culture, a lot of things, this EF elite now, they're trying to conceptualize, oh, yeah, how do we create this court system? How do we create this identity? How do we create this form, this vision of the future, but using blockchain, so it's decentralized.

So it's, like, harder for people to, like, attack it, you know? So, but then the other vision of technology is the stuff that we've been talking about, this whole kind of episode. And it's all the DFI and D-Fi and D-D stuff, you know, like raising, 20 million to free Assange from prison, you know, to fight the system, you know, to give to the Russell Brick campaign, you know, cypherpunks, freeing cypherpunks. It's like we've become a power. Like we have negotiating power now. We have, and you know the biggest hedge fund in the world Renaissance technologies, you know, Robert Mercer. Robert Mercer, he's the guy that funded Cambridge Analytica.

He's the guy that funded Brexit. He funded Trump. He put Trump in touch with Bannon. That was Robert Mercer, who is the chairman of the biggest hedge fund in the world, Renaissance Technologies. They figured out how to use their financial power for political power. And now Steve Bannon is leading a coup, supported by Cambridge Analytica on Europe. Essentially, all these European states like Vox and Austria and so on. they're going towards right-wing neo-fudalism.

They're doing that with under this federation that Bannon's created. And that's all funded and supported by Robert Mercer. So like, so we are the cyphopunks. We are a new economic class. We're, you know, like the amount of money that's being moved through Asia, through Asian markets, every single day, like capital flight, going through U.S.D. Tehr, all the crypto organizations, Like the level of sophistication in this market compared to 2013 is like on a whole other level.

Like, you know, we have people are using law now. People are using tech. We have so much tech tours. The people are like also everybody is so mobile and they're like going to Africa. They're going to really dodgy places like El Salvador. That was started because a guy just started setting up ATM machines. So this is like a community with vitality, which with entrepreneurialism. And, you know, with drive and ambition that's exploring.

And so that's the vision of tech that we see. Like, let's, you know, that's like our power that we have, that we have leverage to be a new class, to enact this economic political vision that we have, you know. We're technologists, you know, we're finance people, with the intersection of philosophy, economics, and technology. The three big movers of human history. Yeah, I was going to let Rose talk about. what I was saying earlier about the solar punk and lunopunk imaginaries. So Amir alluded to, you know, the importance of that solar punk has for a lot of people in Ethereum.

You know, and he described it as authoritarian. I think it definitely has authoritarian tendencies. Although if you speak with solar punks, many of them are not, many of, many of, many of them weren't aware of that and they see themselves as being more this kind of like neo-socialist kind of paradigm but by virtue of their transparency and their insistence on identity and they've basically integrated authoritarianism into their systems. So quadratic voting and GIC coin is a perfect example of this. GIC coin is a project which is openly solar punk. They They talk about solar punk all the time.

But they, in order to do quadratic voting, needed to have identity. So for that, they use GitHub, as we know. And just recently, they blocked all grant proposals from people speaking Farsi because of US sanctions against Iran. So this is the logic of surveillance and authoritarianism playing out like in the immediate present. But the downstream of that is potentially worse. So DarkFi is proposing kind of counterproposal, which we call Lunar Punk, which is correcting the authoritarian tendencies in Solar Punk essentially through an ominity, but also through an insistence on ideology and philosophy instead of this kind of absence of ideas, which typically is just a backdor. for the liberal ideology, which I think Ethereum has fallen victim to.

So Lunar Punk, you know, its symbols are things more like forests as opposed to the solar punk desert, which, you know, its central symbol is the sun, which is again this kind of dual meaning of both a symbol of nature, but also one of tyranny and surveillance. So Lunar Punk's, you know,

inhabit these kind of more liminal dark space, places which are more like a forest, you know, that protect inhabitants and offer sanctuary then to people who are persecuted and also provide a line of defense, which is really critical. And this kind of this vision that we're talking about, you can see it in the solar punk imagery. If you just Google solar punk on Google images, I mean, it's maybe kind of a simplified version of what I think some of the people in Ether talking about. It's very Dubai-esque. So you basically have these megastructures, which have now grass around them. So the implication is we have a future where capitalism and industry have been preserved basically intact. But we now also have trees and grasses, etc., which imply that we've corrected the climate crisis through planting trees or something.

but the fundamental issue at hand here, which is through our analysis, you know, industry itself, like hasn't been addressed. It's remained intact. The reason why I think solo punk is attractive to many people and to people in Ethereum is because it is optimistic, but also because it offers a vision of the future at a time where the future feels increasingly closed off. And in a time, where, you know, apocalyptic narratives are the most dominant. And so solar punk is refreshing to people because it says actually we can, you can use technology to solve these problems so we can have a better future, etc. You know, so that's not, it's not bad that people are wanting to, to see the future. They're wanting to imagine a better outcome. And so with Lunar Punk and with Darkfire,

we're also trying to offer people a way to like envision the future, like to speculate on other futures which are better than this one, but without falling into the trap of like tyrannical systems as Solopunk does. Cool. Well, I would say let's wrap up at this point. We've gone like super long, but this was like really amazing. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think we like covered so many different things. Yeah, but so thanks so much everyone for coming on. I'm sure there will be people who are like interested in getting involved in, uh, in the community. Say, I wish I could just listen to Amir talk about history like this for hours on end because

I think that was just the best part. Yeah. Thanks so much everyone. It was a, it was a pleasure to have you on. Yeah. Thank you. And apologies, we didn't talk more about tech. We have elements channel. We're going to put on more documentation, you know, over time. So, you know, we also have a lot of to say about technology stuff. It's our life. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thanks so much, Guy. Real pleasure. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. 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.

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