The Pomp Podcast - #387: Tor Bair on Private Smart Contracts

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Tor Bair is the founder of Secret Foundation, an organization dedicated to building, researching, and scaling the adoption of decentralized technologies for the public good, with privacy at their core. In this conversation, we discuss privacy as a human right, why a risk to privacy is a risk to security, and general-purpose private smart contracts.  ============================== ExpressVPN lets you access the internet as if you’re from a different country. There are hundreds of VPNs out there, but ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast. You can stream everything in HD quality with zero buffering! If you use my link right now at EXPRESSVPN dot com slash pomp, you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free! That’s https://www.expressvpn.com/pomp ============================== Bybit currently has over 300,000 users, with the number growing in double-digit percentages monthly. The exchange has no overloads during volatility and low latency trading plus 24/7 customer live support. At Bybit, we listen, care, and improve to provide the best possible trading experience and create a faster, fairer, and more human trading environment. Visit Now: https://www.bybit.com/prize_page?campaign=90Bonus&source=pomp_en&medium=nl ============================== What’s the most lucrative investment in the world? With paintings selling for $450,000,000+, our money is on art. That’s not a typo: blue-chip art has outperformed the S&P by 180% from 2000–2018, according to Artprice. So what do you call it when one startup makes investing in great works by Banksy and Kaws affordable for everybody? We call it a great opportunity—and so do 80,000 other investors. Why wait? Sign up and skip the waitlist: https://www.masterworks.io/?utm_source=offthechain&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=newsletter_9-21-20&utm_term=The%20Pomp%20Letter%20Subscribers ============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Tor Baer is the founder of Secret Foundation, an organization dedicated to building, researching, and scaling adoption of decentralized technologies for the public good, with privacy at their core. In this conversation, we discuss privacy as a human right, why a risk to privacy is a risk to security, and the general purpose of private smart contracts. I really enjoyed this conversation with Tor, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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They make all this possible. I appreciate you guys doing that. Let's get in this episode with Tor. and I hope you enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital

or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Tor here. How are you doing, man? Thank you so much for doing this. Dude, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on. Absolutely. I know you're

serious about this because you got the real deal headphones. You got the microphone attached. You're ready to go. Yes, I attached my microphone so you could hear me. I put the headphones on noise canceling mode so nobody can bother me. I'm ready as I'll ever be. I love it. For those that don't know you. Let's start with your background and kind of what you did before you got into crypto. Yeah. So my name's Tor. I now work at Secret Foundation. We focus on adoption of open source privacy preserving technologies such as Secret Network. So I'm passionate about privacy overall. And that's one of the things that kind of got me full time into the crypto and blockchain space overall, the idea of individual sovereignty, which gets thrown a lot around in the blockchain space,

people being like, be your own bank and things like that. I was very attracted to the Bitcoin ethos. But then I discovered that a lot of people don't really understand what it takes to actually be self-sovereign. And it does take a degree of privacy. And right now, privacy is essentially a luxury good the world over. The way I see it, privacy should be a public good. And if we can use technologies like blockchain to make that a reality for individuals all over the world, not just the billionaires that have, you know, like 17 citizenships and jets and whatever, then we've actually done something with this technology. Not just, you know, creating a better, more decentralized, more democratic financial system, but just like a data system and internet that works better for everybody. I just want to make tech that works as good as Bitcoin does for money. I want to make other decentralized tech that works just as good for pretty much everything

in the world. That's my dream. That's why I'm here. I love that. So for people who don't understand the importance of privacy, let's just start there. Because I think people hear that and they're like, oh yeah, that sounds great. Everyone should have privacy. But then when they are faced with the consumer trade-off of convenience versus privacy, they almost always choose convenience. So maybe let's just start with why is privacy so important? yeah privacy is i mean there's actually a great apple commercial airing right now i kind of wish i'd written it but the one where everybody's walking around and it's a it's a girl with a megaphone and she's like my credit card number is 742 or like there's a guy who's talking about

all the divorce attorneys he's written that morning i think it's a great ad because again it's making something tangible for people that's not normally tangible the problem for people as you're saying. They always choose convenience over privacy because convenience is so tangible. I want to use Facebook to connect with all my high school friends. I don't want to have to set up a command line interface and do all kinds of crazy stuff just to be able to know that my data is not being sold to Cambridge Analytica or elsewhere. That's never going to be something we can ask consumers to do. Consumers will always choose convenience. The problem is that they've never had a real choice. We've never created a technology or a platform that also had the network

effects, that also had the usability, that protected users. We've had things like Facebook or Google, where the entire business model is give you the thing for free, now you're the product, now they monetize it, and that entire surplus between the value of your data to advertisers and what it costs to collect that data, all flows to the platform, none of it to the user. And the way that I'm thinking about it is if you give consumers the choice between two platforms that can compete on usability, but now they're getting more value directly back from the platform, whether it's in a monetary sense or whether they just have more ownership of the platform itself, people will choose that platform. And I want them to use that platform very much, but it's not just a technology barrier we're talking about. It will be an education barrier as well. So I'm ready to fight that battle, but as you said, it's going to be a battle.

Yeah, and what it feels like is there are some technologies in the centralized world that are realizing the only way to get people to have privacy preservation is to build it in and use the company's ethos. So Apple is a great example of one. There's some others. Do you feel like there's enough companies like that? Or is this something where the users ultimately are going to have to make the decision like, this is important for me and I can't rely on other companies to do the right thing and therefore I make the decisions rather than just use products that happen to have privacy prevention or preservation built into them? I think that there are plenty of companies that have the right ethos. I don't think that they're the biggest companies in the world. I don't think that they have monopoly power. So even if you have every consumer in the world, like there was a time when we thought everybody was just going to quit Facebook one day because of the Cambridge Analytica revelations. And I didn't really believe that would happen, but all sorts of people were thinking like this is finally – it's going to manifest all those like 2 billion, 3 billion users are suddenly going to migrate somewhere else. Facebook has effectively monopoly power for the thing that it does.

You know, it's a duopoly with Google for the entire online advertising space. So even if you have a smaller company like a DuckDuckGo or what have you that has more of a privacy-centric ethos, you know, that's not enough. You can't compete with Google or Facebook and use privacy as your differentiator. So ultimately, it doesn't come down to like, will customers make that choice? Will consumers make that choice? It's whether we're going to have a society and an economy that allows there to be any degree of competitive choice. I think the question you're asking has a lot to do with how we're going to allow monopolies and surveillance capitalism to be pervasive. And if we're totally cool with where we are now, if we're just like, that's fine, five companies, that's it, that's all we're ever going to need, that's the choice that we're all making. But I would prefer to think that consumers will first make the choice that, hey, maybe having Amazon and Facebook be the most powerful entities in the world, no longer global governments, maybe that's just as bad, perhaps worse.

and then they start thinking about what is this third alternative maybe something that's closer to the blockchain space where there are more things that are community governed that are user-centric only then can we start to have the conversation around how are we going to have platforms and companies that can compete directly with facebook and google not not as like a traditional corporation maybe but as an ecosystem that is so user-centric and rewards users so directly that they just want that value and they'll compete on that makes a makes a ton of sense. And obviously, there's a whole bunch of different projects and blockchains and cryptocurrencies that are focused on how do we use technology to increase privacy and protect

people. One that people are probably not familiar with, and frankly, I'm not nearly as familiar with it as you are, is secret. So maybe talk a little bit about just what is being built there, what has been built, what are the kind of vision or ideals and ethos that the community is going after? Yeah, nothing would delight me more than to get to talk about that. So Secret Network is one of these projects in the blockchain space that's primarily concerned, first and foremost, with how do we bring privacy to users? Because we believe in it as a human right, but as I said earlier, also as a public good. If you look at the state of most blockchains, pretty much every blockchain, by design, blockchains are bad at privacy. like they're designed to be auditable and transparent like the idea of an open financial

system with bitcoin you know it's wonderful anybody can kind of set up their own node their own wallet be their own bank etc but at the same time that you're being your own bank you're also constantly tweeting out your bank account so you have every transaction you know even if it's pseudonymous right it's all traceable back to this address and it's not about i say this a lot when it comes to privacy. It's not about wanting to hide something. It's just like, it's a security threat when you do something like that. Or as the Apple commercial is showing you, you just want to have a choice. You want to be able to say, this can be public, this can be private. Right now, blockchains are kind of worse for privacy than anything that came before them because there is

no choice. All data is public by default. So Secret Network is a new kind of blockchain. And the way that it works is that, similar to Ethereum, it's a smart contracting platform, But unlike Ethereum, everything that happens on the platform is private. So it would be if you combine the programmability of a platform like Ethereum with the privacy of something like Zcash or Monero, you would get what Secret Network is. And the reason you haven't seen something like Secret Network before is not because nobody thought of it or because nobody thought privacy was worthwhile. It's because this is one of the hardest technical problems to solve in the space. And we've been at it, I would say, secret contracts, as we call them, this privacy preserving smart contract stuff has been in development for the past three years. And it's only now, September 2020, that it's actually finally coming to mainnet. And that's why I'm excited in particular to be talking about it, because it's no longer just one of those pipe dreams, right? Like, it's going to be in production, people are going to be building stuff, it's going to be in the wild. And that means we're bringing privacy to the people. And so talk through use cases. So when people hear these general purpose private smart contracts, they're like, I have no clue what that means. And so describe the use cases in which somebody would implement something like this and what the value proposition to that person would be. Yeah, I'm happy to answer that. I'm going to answer it first by reversing the question, but then we'll get into some specific use cases.

I like to ask people, because they're like, what am I going to ever use this for? Consumers don't even care about privacy. Where is this going to be? I'm like, well, they do care about privacy. It just manifests a little differently. Imagine you want to build a decentralized Uber. If you do that with blockchains right now, basically, if you want to implement that, you're giving your home address to everybody, not just your driver, right? With centralized apps, there's all kinds of permissioning involved because they're centralizing it in a giant database.

If you want to make a permissionless application that works the same way and build it on just Ethereum, for example, it's not going to work. Everybody is going to know where you live. It's similar for decentralized finance applications that we're seeing today. Obviously, massive growth right now in the decentralized finance space. People are lending stuff, doing super high leverage trades, decentralized exchanges exploding, and it's all public. And I'm asking people, why would you choose to use this publicly? It's a huge security risk. It's a risk for liquidity providers on these platforms. You can get front runs so easily. it's actually kind of disastrous. And the only reason it hasn't imploded yet is because there's really no other choice. Like people are just like, they're so driven to speculation that they're willing to compromise their own privacy. So where I see some of the key use cases being is basically anywhere there's already been a decentralized application built, you know, imagine it with

privacy so that like we have the same standards in this space that we do in the regular world, like build the decks with privacy so that people can't just like follow your money around all of the time you know which is which is a huge security risk for anybody but also like access control is another big one people want to build a decentralized spotify you try to do that with something like ethereum right now the best people are really able to do is like okay uh you you subscribe pay some crypto to some smart contract we will send you back the link to some content great now you have the link you can share the link with anybody that you want it's it's it's not a closed system because it's all public by design but with secret contracts you can have access control meaning you

could subscribe to a particular like source of this link the link would only ever be encrypted and therefore you would you would provably be able to say i am the only person with the access to this content so for artists and content producers you need something like secret network to exist like let's say you're trying to build like a patreon competitor too like this is the kind of fundamental protocol level innovation that's going to have to exist if we want to meaningfully compete with the centralized world. Otherwise, it's really just still a toy. Yeah. And I guess as part of this, to me, these are the technologies that the end user has no clue whether they're being used or not. It has everything to do with the developers and the entrepreneurs who are

building the products. Would you agree with that? Definitely. And I'm always saying when it comes to privacy, the choice should never be in the hands of the users. The default choice, The responsible ethical choice for developers to make when building their applications is allow it to be privacy by default, and then the users can opt out. But that's not the way that literally every platform works today. And so as this technology gets developed, one of the things that I'm really interested in is we see a privacy technology that's built on this secret network. Does this force the hand of other blockchains, other development teams to start to implement kind of these general purpose secret smart contracts? Or is this something that can only be built on the secret network? That's a great question. So one of the things that's really important to us is interoperability, which is to say, like, we didn't build secret network to say, like, remember Ethereum? Remember Bitcoin? Okay, they're dead now. Everything is secret. like it doesn't make any sense and obviously like what we're going for is we're trying to find the

individual users and the individual developers and the individual entrepreneurs who are already in these ecosystems we want to show them how to integrate secret network with their own projects uh they can choose of course to build entirely on secret network we have our own independent consensus so like we have a standalone application universe but we're building bridges to ethereum we're building bridges to the cosmos universe we'd love to build bridges to other ecosystems as well as the demand is there. And the idea is that we can bring privacy, the way that we've designed Secret Network

is to bring privacy to every public blockchain without feeling like we have to tear down what's already been created to do it. Privacy is something you can infuse into these existing technologies. And ultimately, privacy is not destructive. It's always additive. And the way I see it is it's always

to the benefit of the user. And historically in the blockchain space, what's been to the benefit of the end user has always been what's won out. Yeah. And to me, the other piece of this that is really fascinating is we're essentially having the technology pull the users, right? In many industries, kind of, especially once they reach some level of maturation, what you get is the users start to pull the technologists. So people start to say, hey, we should do like the lean startup method and iterative building, and we should go out and we should figure out like what is the optimizations that people want on the

products they're already using and then we'll create those and that'll create a lot of value and we can capture some level of the value that we create here what's happening is actually a lot of the innovation and ideation of these products is happening from the developer ecosystem um and kind of a bottoms-up type approach rather than you know user-led why do you think that's happening in the blockchain was it just like a we're so early in the industry there's not enough users yet? Is it such a greenfield opportunity? Where's that coming from? I think with pretty much every blockchain application you've seen gained substantial traction, the developers are the users. And we haven't really had to reckon with the idea that there is this green space of millions

of users that exist beyond the developers that are going to have to pick this stuff up and run with it. So you start to live inside of an echo chamber where it's devs building for devs. And And when you, I'm a little biased here, but like if you hand something over entirely to a team of developers and you don't have anybody thinking about it from the business development perspective or from like the user perspective, ultimately they end up designing for maximum complexity. And everything hooks up to everything else. You get these crazy like integrated DeFi platforms. Also, a lot of them don't have a lot of experience in financial markets, so they don't understand why, like, a bunch of leveraged products all tied together and, like, strapped together with duct tape is actually a terrible, you know, security model from a financial standpoint. Like, anything over leveraged ultimately collapses. So I like to think about sustainability.

That's a word I throw around a lot in connection to privacy. If we want to attract end users, you know, not just devs who have like a different sort of like risk tolerance function, you need to create a sustainable and secure platform that they can come to and be like, if I show up here, my money is not going to be gone in a week, like a DeFi platform that's not going to bankrupt you because you didn't audit the smart contract yourself. I don't go in and look at every like piece of code on every app I download onto my iPhone I trust that because it's in the Apple store it has some degree of security and like if we want retail adoption you know from end user consumer like I never use retail as a pejorative I just mean regular people like I actually think that like it's a very unhealthy idea that like devs in this space will look at adoption relative to every other product only in our ecosystem and be like well we are winning the race in the super super tiny ecosystem that we've already created therefore

we must have found product market fit the only two things i think in the entire blockchain space that have found any kind of product market fit outside of like you know the very very niche dev communities are bitcoin and ethereum and i would be really hard pressed to see anything else come close in the near future so rather than like me try to say like i'm gonna fix it from day one And I would just rather see how can we help those platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum serve their users that they already have even better, expand their presence with end users even better so that we don't end up in the situation where it's just devs building for devs. We create a parallel universe. And meanwhile, surveillance capitalism carries on without us. We wake up in five years.

We realize we live in a global surveillance state, and we're all screwed. it feels also like there's this element of um a lot of the innovation and building that's happening uh is kind of at the layer ones right like the actual blockchains and smart contracts and things like that but that has to happen first before the applications can be built and those applications are likely to pull in the users right so kind of bitcoin and ethereum have kind of got to that point now where they're starting to have lots of applications around it and it feels like that's what's pulling users in is that kind of the plan for what you guys are doing in terms of hey let's make the functionality available to developers first then let's start to get some of the

applications where this is in use and kind of can be proven out as a viable use case and then that's when kind of those end users will start to interact with it even if they may not understand that's what they're doing yeah i mean that's definitely what worked for ethereum at first is like having something that was just it wasn't even about like they went out and they paid a bunch of money to a bunch of developers and somehow like bootstrapped an ecosystem by paying people off to build stuff just people looked at ethereum and they were like wow what's possible like it was a giant sandbox for them they didn't think necessarily about i'm about to build my billion dollar business on ethereum they were just like i can build things i've never been able to build before on ethereum

and that's the same way i position secret network for developers who might be familiar with ethereum or other blockchains is to say, you can build stuff with Secret that you've never been able to build on any other platform because we give you privacy by default. So there's all kinds of like use cases, like I was saying for access control, but anything related to like privacy preserving voting, privacy preserving auctions, privacy preserving lending platforms where you don't want to expose everything you've ever done in order to qualify for some sort of like on-chain loan, like you could only build those on Secret. By making the technology compelling enough to developers and showing them how you can build unique applications in the space. What we're

doing is we're letting them carve out their own role in our ecosystem. And so they say, I'm not late. I didn't show up late. Somebody's already taken over this ecosystem. It's over. They're saying, I'm early. I'm the first one in the public blockchain space to build this kind of thing. And then all we try to do is say, you've got the full support of the rest of the secret network ecosystem and secret foundation standing behind you. We will help you find that global adoption. We'll help you find the partners who are going to help you like bring in the users that are going to make this project sustainable for you. And that's kind of like the promise that you have to be making as a protocol when you are trying to reach developers in these

early stages. It's that two-piece promise of we promise we will continue to give you groundbreaking, interesting tech that creates a really cool sandbox. But we also promise to help you find a way to make this self-sustainable so that you can continue to build in this space and feel like you have that support. Got it. And so as you go deeper on these use cases, like I think the probably most obvious use case that people have seen for the privacy protecting technology has been like privacy coins. And so maybe talk a little bit about how you see those interacting with something like what you guys are building. Are they competitive? Are they collaborative? Are they just kind of completely unrelated? Like how do you see those kind of first

you know, user friendly applications of privacy technology in the blockchain space with privacy coins interacting with you guys? That's such an excellent question, because people ask me, is Secret a privacy coin? And realistically, it's not. I mean, it's a privacy platform. But it's something that you kind of have to do a lot of education on because the word privacy has become meaning like Monero. It's like you're sending something to somebody else. You can't see who sent it. You can't see who received it. You can't, you know, like that's That's what people think of when they think of privacy in the blockchain space. And, you know, from this conversation, I hope people are realizing like privacy is so much

more. It's the way privacy works in the real world. We call it programmable privacy. Programmable privacy, meaning you can have arbitrarily complex like privacy protections for decentralized applications you build on the network. And the transaction is just like a really trivial form of computation, like the simplest form of computation, the kind that Bitcoin uses, move value from point A to point B. programmable privacy means not only do you get that you get the smart contracting ideas of ethereum

where now like you can program what you want those value transfers to do you can like have smart contracts uh that interact with other contracts and unlock themselves right and trigger other actions you're creating a privacy by design like a fully decentralized platform so zcash and monero are very different for example from what secret does but what's possible with secret network is that you can actually issue secret tokens on the blockchain so like you have erc20s on ethereum right you can send these tokens around to people they can sit in like your metamask wallet or something else you can trade these tokens you can use them in applications similarly you can have secret tokens on secret network where they work like erc20s they work just like the

tokens on ethereum except that instead of like at all times you being able to see absolutely every token transfer that's going on just by loading up a block explorer on secret, all of that is encrypted because smart contracts on it on secret network use encrypted inputs, encrypted outputs, encrypted state. So when you've got a secret token, if you went to look up that token, you could see, for example, like how many people hold it. You, and you could see like how many active addresses, but unless you are the owner of the address that holds that token, you can't actually see the entire transaction history. What this means is the more people who use secret tokens and things that you build on secret network, you are gaining privacy proportional

to the actions of everybody else in the ecosystem. So that means basically a global anonymity set for all of the secret tokens on secret network. And in this way, I guess what I've been using lately, sorry about the COVID times, this is triggering for me too, but it's like vaccination in that even if you yourself don't care that deeply about your privacy, just by using secret tokens instead of something else, you're providing an inoculation for everybody else who's using applications on that network. Every successive person who chooses to use these kinds of technologies is helping protect the security and the privacy of everybody else on this platform. And it's those kinds of network effects for privacy that I think make privacy coins that

could be issued on secret network super, super compelling relative to privacy coins that are standalone like Zcash or Monero. And so really the idea here is to kind of use this as a scalable platform where not only are you innovating on the actual privacy technology itself, but then you create these almost like launchpads, right? You can come in and you can create all sorts of applications. You can create assets that are all privacy preserving. You already mentioned a little bit kind of the Ethereums and the Bitcoins of the world, you know, saying, hey, look, that's a great idea around these general purpose, private smart contracts, they could potentially, you know, try to rebuild it or just do the interoperability of what you guys are doing that they can benefit

from some from it. Now, one of the questions is, there's the secret network, there's the secret foundation, and, and not a secret foundation, but the name secret foundation. And, and a whole bunch of kind of developers and things like that, how much of the kind of future plans or outlook is what I'll call kind of holding constant one side of the marketplace, right? So I think of kind of the supply of applications and then there's the demand of users. Is the foundation, the network and the existing developer community, is the thought process that they'll end up creating most of the applications to bring in those users? Or is this something where there's active activities to go and get kind of new developers, new companies and projects to come in and build

on top of the platform. Yeah, it took me a second to figure out what you're asking, but actually you're asking like an extremely critical question. How much do you care about creating a long tail developer ecosystem versus building out the key applications yourself, utilizing the key contributors who are already in your ecosystem? You said that much more eloquently than I did. No, I feel like you had it right. I just like the way to answer that question, we have to look first at like, what is the structure of the secret network ecosystem? So I'll back up a sec. secret foundation we don't actually do any of the development work right now for the network we are purely an educational organization focused on global adoption and awareness of these privacy

centric open source technologies it takes the burden off us to have to say like this is our protocol like we're not taking ownership of the tech or of the code we're taking ownership of the community we're taking ownership of the growth trajectory of the network like it puts us in a position where we can focus on what we want to do best, which is help make sure people actually use this stuff at the end of the day. Meanwhile, there's development teams who contribute at a protocol level. So the key development team in our ecosystem is Enigma, where I used to work. And Enigma is responsible for a lot of the secret contracts code that's now coming to mainnet. And that effort is absolutely critical, right? Like we wouldn't be where we are without that

kind of development effort in the space. Now Enigma's focus can turn from not just supporting development of the protocol, but what are some of these key applications that are going to exist in this ecosystem? But outside Secret Foundation and Enigma, we have over 45 mainnet validators right now, including people who are super active in some other ecosystems like Staked, Figment Networks, ChorusOne, Dokia Capital. I mean, there's a lot. There's 45. I can't name them all. I'm really sorry guys um but there's also people like secretnodes.org chain of secrets secure secrets like organizations that have sprung up just to serve the secret network ecosystem build block explorers build tooling uh we just helped fund kepler wallet which is trying to become the

metamask of like the cosmos and secret network ecosystems and they're building an integration that'll allow you to use secret tokens right from your web wallet interact with secret contracts right from your web wallet like those are the kinds of collaborations partnerships that are essential for getting that end user adoption and we've been laying that groundwork for the past few months now with secret contracts coming to mainnet we're finally in a position where we can say hey here are the first key killer applications you've got secret tokens we have a few other defi applications we've pushed out there we have some access control contracts people can pick up and integrate into their own applications we've got these building blocks down now it's up to the

developer community to tell us how they think these things can be used. If they come back and they say, actually, we can't use these things, then we have to make better building blocks. But if they come back and they say, hey, we integrated this in our application, it runs 10 times faster, users are protected, then we know we've got something. We know we have that product market fit. And then the entire secret network ecosystem can completely reorient all of our efforts around supporting specifically those use cases in the early stage of the network. So by being a decentralized ecosystem and being flexible with our roadmap, especially our application roadmap in the short term, we're ensuring that wherever the user demand is going, we're going to be there. We've talked a lot about kind of the short term and kind of what you guys are doing now.

Talk to me about the really long-term vision, 10-plus years from now. Where does this go and kind of how does it evolve? yeah when i get asked questions like that it's so tempting for me to just be like well we all live in the secret citadel obviously uh i know it's it's a really interesting question because it really depends what happens to the world like if the world changes over the next five to ten years dramatically so i think it's changed pretty dramatically in the last eight months um but like look look over the next like decade what are the trends you think are going to occur globally and so one of those trends as i was saying is what is going to be the role of

nation states versus corporations what does that mean for self-sovereignty and these decentralized networks my thesis has always been that we're going to see more and more of a pull to these sort of user-centric networks that are user-owned user-controlled you know not in an isolating way not in like i tore him alone but just like i tore as an individual contributing within this community and this context now have more ownership and more control of the organizations that i choose to use on a daily basis. So if that's a trend we're going to see over the next five to 10 years globally, I know that Secret Network is going to have a huge role to play in that. But if we just take the world of today, and much like it used to be like, if people had thought

about what's the Henry Ford quote or whatever, he was like, if you'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses kind of a thing. So let's take that for a second. You take the world of today and we just say, well, where can Secret Network plug into the enterprise world today. I would say privacy is one of the key things that's preventing enterprise adoption of the public blockchain ecosystem. So even just looking in the next few years, thinking about how can secret networks start onboarding more of these enterprises into our universe. And there's so much that you can do with secret network just around like secure data sharing. If you're a bank with branches in multiple countries and you need to share user

data securely across international lines because you're doing some sort of fraud detection algorithm. Like what a simple like real world use case, but possible with our network. You don't have to go into like a decentralized lending platform with, you know, sushi farming or whatever's in vogue these days. Like that's just like a regular real world use case. Or like, for example, healthcare, since we're in the middle of a pandemic, Enigma built this product called SafeTrace and it's privacy preserving contact tracing. And contact tracing was a big topic earlier this year, thinking like, if I've been in contact with an infected individual, I want to know. At the same time, I don't want to tell everybody in the world my infection status.

I don't want to tell the government exactly where I'm located at all times. So Enigma built this POC to be able to say, here's a way to do secure contact tracing. And they're actually now working with Intel to get that scaled out and bring it to market in a more robust sense. Things like that can be deployed on secret network right or they could be deployed like privately as well but i think that applications like that are much more useful and in the long run probably the way that we all want to be going like those are the kinds of applications that you want to be decentralized community owned and so on so that you so that you can ensure that they're not held in the hands of like a single government that could misuse that data so there's there's the like 10-year vision

of like are is the world going to collapse i don't know but even if it doesn't there's a ton of ways that I think this technology is relevant today that I can't wait to get started building just because it'll help expand what's possible with these technologies versus the insular world we've lived in for the past few years. What needs to happen outside of your own efforts in terms of the network and the community to facilitate this or accelerate? What are the macro forces or things that can be tailwinds to get there faster? Well, I would say that education is a huge piece of this and not just education of end users, but mostly education of the governments and enterprises who to date really don't show any concrete understanding of how a lot of the

stuff works. I would say education also of tax systems and the IRS and things like that. Like if people start to understand like there's no way to put our crazy square peg crypto universe in the in the round holes of traditional regulation like we're not out here to do anything crazy obviously some people are but and to take advantage of people like privacy is kind of the opposite we're here to protect people if we can help the governments and enterprises and regulators of the world sort of understand that privacy is about protecting the same people that they're trying to protect, and we get the tailwind of that sort of support and adoption from various entities all over the world, I think that would go a huge way towards supporting like our reach to try to

onboard like the long tail of users onto these decentralized applications. So long as they see it as a direct threat, maybe to their authority, it becomes a lot more impossible. And I think that there is, you know, a tendency in the crypto space to position ourselves against the traditional world and say like, okay, we're external, we're revolutionaries. We have to be reactive to everything else that's going on in the world. And I just don't think we'll ever get global adoption if that's our attitude. And the reason we have to have an attitude adjustment is we can't allow ourselves to be left out of the conversation. Because if you leave it up to the surveillance states of the world, we will end up in the dystopia that we don't like. And if we're

just going to bury our heads in the sand and try to say, we're going to build a parallel universe. We don't need the regulators to understand. We don't need the enterprises to understand. Then they're going to build something without us too. And then at the end of the day, we live in a meat space. We're going to have to live in their world. So unless we learn to work together and play nice with the rest of the world, until we

can all start living in virtual reality paradises, we have to understand that this has real world consequence and we have a responsibility to make sure the real world that's getting built is the one that we want to live in. what do you think the things that could happen that would change your mind in terms of this is where we're going? In terms of this is where we're going when I'm saying like, which part? The part where I'm hopeful that everything works out for the best and we do integrate with normal society or the part where I'm wrong and everything burns down? The idea that you have of like, hey, the world is going in the wrong direction. What could happen that would change your mind on

that? Yeah, honestly, what I want to see is world leaders, you know, whether you're a leader of corporations, or whether you're a leader of a financial institution, or a leader of a country, people stepping up and saying, I see the value in these technologies for the people I am responsible to you know like if you're in a financial institution it's like we have investors we have people who have like given us their capital protect like for people like that to say like bitcoin is now my treasury asset that goes a long way uh for for somebody who runs a government to be able to say we are working with the creators of these decentralized technologies to build these privacy preserving applications for our citizens because we believe this is the best way to protect

our citizens. People listen to people in positions of authority. And right now, when we look at the world, I see a lot of people in positions of authority that I don't really want to listen to at all, because they just don't understand the fundamentals of the technologies maybe that they're talking about. But also, a lot of them just don't seem to have the best interests of the people they're supposed to protect in their mind. If we get to a point in the world where we have had some sort of on-the-ground revolution, and now our governments do seem to reflect the will of users or enterprises, our corporations do seem to exist to protect users. And here's where I think, or I hope Apple's moving in the right direction versus a Facebook. Like if that's

the trend of the world, if we start seeing leaders step up and say, we know this is best for our users, then I'll feel a lot more hopeful because then I know there'll be considering our kinds of solutions. And up until that moment, what I'll assume is that they're all behind the scenes, trying to collect as big of a facial recognition database as possible. And that would be the downside. That's the scary scenario. That's the thing I have to stay scared of because it's what gets me up in the morning

to keep trying to build out what we're trying to do. That would be a very, very scary world if that's actually what is occurring. Before we get into rapid fire to finish up, where can people find you on the internet and where can they find out more about Secret and all the work that's being done there? Yeah, I'm on the internet everywhere. It's not necessarily what I'd call a healthy habit, but it is a job. So if you go on Twitter, you'll find me at TorBear. That's T-O-R-B as in boy, A-I-R.

If you want to learn more about Secret Network, it's s-c-r-t.network. And that links out to our blog. That links out to our Twitter, which is Secret Network, both words. You can learn a lot on all of those pages about what's being built, about our ecosystem. There's links to all of our chat and community channels. We got thousands of people in our community channels who would love to connect with you, especially if you're personally passionate about privacy. And yeah, like I just started up my own podcast series again.

I used to have one. Now it's back, but we renamed it. Now it's called Sharing Secrets. So I'm super jazzed. I mean, I think you're best in class, dude. So I'm just trying to do my best with the interview series and get interesting people on. But I love having people on who want to share some secrets. So if you've got secrets of your own, get on my show, man. I would love to talk to you. I'm down. Ah, hell yeah. All right. Well, now we're really talking. Now we're grooving. Sharing secrets, I'm down. I have the same two questions, everyone,

before I let them go, and then you'll get to ask me one. First up, what is the most important book that you've ever read? Oh my God, ever read. Fiction, Snow Crash. Loved Snow Crash, got me fucking scared about the, sorry about that,

about the coming of potential apocalypse. And then on the nonfiction side, I really enjoyed Debt recently, like the history of Debt. That was a really interesting read, and I'm trying to remember the author, but I read it. It's like the 5,000 years of – Exactly, exactly. I read that straight –

It's a big red book, but I forget who wrote it. I know. It's a big red book, and I had it on my iPad, and I read it straight through, and it's all highlighted. But that got me thinking about the ways that money has been used as a weapon really throughout history and how like a more open financial system kind of neuters that and gives the power back to the people. Aliens, believer or nonbeliever? Oh, they got to be somewhere, right? just don't know if they've made it here yet. If I was an alien and I saw Earth and I was coming, I wouldn't be in a rush. If you were an alien and you saw Earth, you wouldn't be in a rush.

I wouldn't be in a rush to get here, man. I would be staying wherever I already was. If you were a human and you knew where the aliens were, would you be in a rush? If they were willing to take me in, I'm looking for some alternative planet options at the moment, just in case this one doesn't work out. I know this guy, Elon Musk, I think he's looking for the same thing. He's identified one. He's trying to get there. Yeah. And I invited him on my podcast. He hasn't gotten back to me. Maybe he doesn't have any secrets. We'll give him some. What question do you have for me to finish up? Man, I guess the best question I have for you is like throwing some of the stuff you've thrown at

me. Like right now, are you an optimist or are you a pessimist? Like you've been in this space a while too. You've been talking about Bitcoin forever. You're starting to be, and I've always thought of you as the kind of person who's thrown open the door for like these legacy institutions to dip their toe into the space you know so are you an optimist right now or a pessimist when you get feedback from them when you see the way they're looking at bitcoin decentralized tech right now do you think they're finally starting to ask the right questions do you think they're seeing bitcoin the right way or are you worried that they're going to start running the other way uh just just because of the state of the world are they just going to like tunnel tunnel back

to what they were doing, like the traditional world and sort of try to try to ride all of this out the way they've always done? Yeah, I think long term, like I'm an optimist, right? We live in the most like prosperous, safe time in history for humans. And the world has generally gotten better over very long periods of time. In terms of crypto specifically in Bitcoin, I kind of just think it's happening how it's supposed to happen, right? Which is it just takes time people have to get educated people to get familiar like there's something to be said about the fact that the first time somebody hears about bitcoin they think that it's you know not going to be around and then five years later it's still there like but it takes five years for that

to like sink in right that hey five years it's still here um so i think there's some of that i think there's a lot of education obviously it needs to happen um and then you know some people hate this but like the price has to go up you know there's no better way to uh elicit people's attention than to show them that the market has determined bitcoiners were right right and you know that doesn't help them today in terms of current prices but like that is probably one of the biggest inflection points in terms of adoption is the price going up and so uh it's not something where like the price going up is uh a necessary uh necessary um you know kind of inflection point but it will definitely be a big one. And then the other thing I would just say is in general,

I think there's a lot of kind of tailwinds, right? So if you look at the macro environment stuff with all the quantitative easing and all the issues that are going on there, that forces more people to go look at inflation hedge assets, right? You see all the privacy stuff you're talking about, then people go look for privacy technologies. You even get into things around like, is centralization a business risk today, right? And so, you know, should I actually go start understanding what does my business look like if it was decentralized and what does that mean? Is that my products? Is that my supply chain? Is that my ownership structure? Is that just I have a lot of offices around the world? There's no right answer for a lot of this stuff, but I do think that

those tailwinds slowly but surely push more and more people to go explore. And then just over time, they end up sticking around. It's the same way that I got here, you got here, and pretty much everybody else got here. There was a time in our life where we didn't know about this stuff. We discovered it, we explored, and eventually we were like, oh, I should probably stick around. them. I think that's kind of what we're watching play out. The problem is like, that's a really shitty answer for a lot of people because they want to know what they can do right now, right? No, for sure. There's always something you can do right now, but it definitely sounds like your optimism comes from the same place of mine, which is people are starting to ask the right questions

when before they might've been kind of ignoring the fact that those questions needed to be asked at all. So that's progress. That's the way I think about it, man, is just keep making little steps of progress every day. And eventually you turn around and say, wow, we walked pretty far today, right? So be pretty good. All right. SCRT.network? Correct. SCRT. It's almost like you just took out the E's there. That's correct. And it's also the symbol for the coin. So it keeps things pretty clear. We like to say that the E's are private. Very clever. Very clever. All right. Listen, Tor, thank you so much for doing this. I think that obviously the message that you bring in terms of privacy is important

and it's something that we need to preserve and take much more seriously is an important message. So thank you so much for doing this and we'll have to do it again in the future. My absolute pleasure, man. Thanks again.