The Wolf Of All Streets - They Are Watching You! Protect Your Privacy On The Blockchain | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Crypto Town Hall is a daily Twitter Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in the crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Yo. Yo. Yo, yo. Scott is there. Scott, you there? Scott, can you hear us? He declined to call us, of course. Ran? Yo, Mario. I'm sure Scott wants to talk about bricks. I was having that issue where my mic didn't go on. Sorry. Hold on. I can't see. Where are you?

Oh, there you are. So, Scott, I just told Ryan that you really want us to talk about bricks. I'm not sure it's a good idea. I know you're a big fan. I think I have. I don't know. Very mature. Man, damage control right after the show.

That was an hour or two of damage control. Not for me. I've already described Twitter, my technique on Twitter. I think ever since getting past like maybe 150, 200,000 followers, the only way I can approach Twitter and remain sane is that I view it like pulling the pin out of a grenade, throwing a grenade in the room, and just casually walking away and never looking back. That's how I think about every tweet. I'm going to have to start viewing spaces that way too, I think.

Yeah, man. Like you start, what happens, and it's a good idea because what happens is like everyone now petrified to talk shit on Scott is that you throw grenades nonstop. So they kind of give you a little tap on the shoulder or punch you in the gut and they end up shooting them in the head. I thought the guests were knowledgeable and fine. It's just every once in a while I hear something, I'm like, that's just not true, and I have to interrupt.

You know, like, oh, breaking news yesterday. No, bro, that was like April. All right, so we'll do bricks again today, yes, Scott? Yes, more bricks, please. Bricks updates. All right, man, so you want to kick it off with a market update and today's uh your show because i know that um you're a very private person you take security extremely seriously no one knows your wallets and and this is something you're very you're an expert at absolutely well it's something that i would like to be able to uh participate

more in but can't because i I have been a doxed public personality in the crypto space for so many years, which makes it almost impossible. But I mean, market update, Bitcoin still kind of hanging in the same spot. Very much not much to see here. I mean, Rand, maybe you can talk about BNB and if there's any implications to what's happening there. But that is at least still trading below 220. But I think the market, very kind of boring after the drop last week, people are sort of holding their breath and waiting to see what happens next. The real story,

obviously, is NVIDIA is going to be reporting earnings. This might be the most hyped earnings. It's like the Super Bowl of earnings right now, because NVIDIA has obviously been somewhat carrying the market, it seems, on its shoulders. So poor earnings could be a harbinger of bad things to come from the market. And positive earnings could obviously mean that a lot of people will think that this sort of little correction is over and things are going to rip to the upside. So I think, you know, listen, for me on Bitcoin, this market is extremely oversold. As I told you guys last week, I mean, for our side hit a historic low, might go lower, but I think we're going to bounce around for a while. I'd be surprised if at least in the short term, we go much, much lower.

But, you know, the market has a way of making me look really stupid really often. So we'll see. But then, you know, moving on from there, Rand, do you have anything to add sort of to the market update? I mean, yeah, I think, I mean, we covered the RSI as being quite low. We also covered the fact that total three is now at the same level. Total three is the Bitcoin is the crypto market cap, excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum. So it's actually the real altcoins that is now at the same levels that it was after FTX. It's literally at the same levels that it was at on the 8th of November,

which is after FTX. So we spoke about that. We spoke about sentiment. Then we spoke about potential COVID restrictions coming in and what they could actually do to the markets and what the source of all of these is. Because if you look at what's going on, it sounds very much like the first COVID pandemic. If you look at how first it's a tourist, then it's another tourist,

and it's like one or two cases in the United States. Then it's the discovery that the virus is spreading faster than they anticipated. Then it's mask mandates and no gatherings and stuff like that. And now we're starting to see the beginning of mask mandates. We look at what the agenda behind all of this is. And then did a little bit of a bricks update in terms of Putin spoke last night, Modi spoke last night.

So we spoke about that. And I just spoke about a couple of altcoins that I'm accumulating very, very, very, very slowly. But as I said, I'm not really accumulating them right now. And maybe just one more question to round before Scott, you go to the panel is uh you covered nvidia as well in your show today so maybe give us a a quick overview on why it's so hyped and what makes it so important so if you look at the the snp the snp is rallied despite

global liquidity actually coming down so usually the snp rallies uh or the NASDAQ rallies with global liquidity, or specifically dollar liquidity. In this case, the NASDAQ ran with liquidity going down. And what drove the NASDAQ up is very much, they call it the AI rally, because it was made up of like five stocks or seven stocks, mainly AI related, which is Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Meta, Facebook. So this year, the NASDAQ is up about 40%. The top five stocks make up about 25% of that 40%.

And of that, the biggest is NVIDIA. Now, important to note that NVIDIA hasn't missed its earnings forecast in four years. And I think what's going to happen is they're announcing today after the bell closes, if they beat their expectations or meet the expectations. And just to recap what the expectations are, they're looking for earnings per share of 2.07. They're looking for revenue of 11 billion or 11.04 billion. And they're looking for free cash flow, about $4 billion.

If the NVIDIA hit that, I reckon NVIDIA runs and the NASDAQ run with it. If NVIDIA misses the forecast, then you could get a correction of up to 5% because then people may say that this bubble has popped and this AI bubble has popped. So that's kind of like what we're looking at. I think I agree with Scott that this is, I don't know if it's the most hype, but it's certainly one of the most important earnings. If we want to keep market stability, it's the most important earnings. I don't think NVIDIA would disappoint, but let's see what happens. Yeah, I think that's exactly a perfect summary. And I do want to now move on, I think, to the topic of the day, obviously, which is, as Mario said, something I wish I could be more passionate about, but it's very difficult in our situation.

I know Mario, Ran, and I have all had people very deep in our wallets who have tracked effectively everything that we've ever done. I can tell you that anecdotally, personally, and I know these things have happened to all three of us because we are all docs, transparent figures in the crypto market. I've been extorted. I've had to deal with the FBI. I, for a while, had to have security. I've been attacked in public. I've been stalked. I've had people send me pictures of my children playing in my yard that they shouldn't have. So it would be nice to be able to have some privacy and not need that level of it. And so I understand why people remain anonymous and are not doxed in this. But I think that even for people like us who are pretty transparent and major personalities, there are very obvious things that can be done or things that we would like to see in the market. And today we have like a really breadth on the panel, a really awesome breadth of both

privacy experts and then obviously people who are building these things. You know, I see we have Encoin, an EN privacy protocol on Cardano. We got Elusive who had news yesterday, obviously, about private swaps on Solana, which I think is really cool. We have Moshe here, a digital architect, co-founder of Tomi. And then, of course, Dopp, which was launched yesterday, which will allow you to effectively keep your transactions private. And just the broad strokes, obviously, of something like we've all sent a blockchain transaction, a crypto transaction to someone, and then you realize that once they see your wallet, they can see everything you ever did, everyone you ever paid, everything you ever bought, everything you've ever done in that wallet.

Right. So guys, we've got another. So we've got a FIRO. I don't know if it's pronounced FIRO, FIRO, Ruben, I'm sorry. But basically, and then of course, one of my favorite guests who I talk to quite often, Seth for privacy. Seth, I want to start with you, I guess, of course, one of my favorite guests who I talk to quite often, Seth, for privacy. Seth, I want to start with you, I guess, for some broad strokes here. You kind of obviously you rose to acclaim or larger acclaim to some degree when you realized what was happening with Ledger, right? Ledger released the service that people freaked out about saying that it was going to be a violation. They could backdoor your device, all those things. You were the guy who discovered that, wrote a thread about it.

It absolutely blew up. But you've been passionate about privacy for a long time. I guess maybe we should start with why this actually matters. Is it important? Because a lot of people are completely dismissive about their privacy. Yeah, yeah. I'd love to get this started there. Thank you for the invite. I'm excited to chat about this in front of a larger audience because often privacy doesn't get the limelight that it deserves. And awareness is a huge step forward towards privacy. But really, basically, I mean, when I'm talking to people, pretty much everyone wants privacy, they just may not realize what that means for them. And I mean, like you were talking about how you're a public figure, people know who you are, obviously, people know what you look like, etc. But that doesn't mean that you

don't have privacy. It just means that if you want to keep specific things in your life private, it's going to be a little bit more tricky, because I think a lot of people cross wires between the ideas of privacy and secrecy, or privacy and anonymity, where most people don't necessarily want to be anonymous, hiding in a forest, invisible to anyone, no one knows what's going on. But practically everyone wants privacy, which is just very simply the ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. You choose how much the people around you know, you choose how much you reveal to governments, to nation states, to friends, to family, to everyone that you interact with. And that's ultimately what privacy is. It comes down to you having the ability to consent

or not consent to data about you being publicly available. And that, I think, is something that everyone wants. If you talk to anyone and you ask them, hey, can I see your bank records or see your pay stubs for the last year, see how you're spending your money. No one's going to want to do that, even though they may not think they need privacy. But there's a very fundamental human desire for privacy that we all have. And finding how to fit that into the digital age where everything we do is online. And now in the cryptocurrency age, where much of our finances are now online and publicly visible in a way that wasn't even possible with credit cards or debit cards, bank accounts, that sort of thing. There's

a lot of new things to discover. And a lot of us kind of have to hit a pain point of realizing how much is out there about us before we can swing back and start to take some actionable steps towards privacy. Yeah, I mean, that all makes a ton of sense. And as you pointed out, obviously, with crypto, as much as we can advocate for privacy, it's actually very, very public, right? The blockchain transactions, if someone knows how to look into it, they can effectively find anything they want about you, which is a bit terrifying when you actually think about it. I mean, I want to talk to Dopp, Matan, I know you're there, and Mo, either of you guys, what's up, about what you're doing about that and why you view this as so important. Because Dopp is just incredible. Most of what the problems that I've

had have been because I was using public ledgers, right? And so people could dig back, like I said, if you were able to just hit a button and say, don't reveal the sender's address, how many problems that solves? Mo, you want to go ahead? Yeah, sure. So again, first of all, thank you for inviting me. So I think it starts even before that. If we look since the dawn of history, you've always seen that there's two major tools or weapons to control mankind. The first one is money. It has always been money. Money is being weaponized all the time. It's being weaponized when you look at the Russia-Ukraine war.

Money has always been weaponized. But the second thing, which could be even bigger than that, is information. Information is maybe the biggest one, the biggest tool to control. And it's a huge problem that we cannot control our own data. And with all the magnificent and beautiful things that technology brings us, it's also taking a lot of our privacy, therefore taking a lot of our freedom. Now, Seth said many, many things that I agree with. But when we look at the mission to decentralize the financial system, it cannot happen with all respect to everything. It can never happen once we don't equal the privacy that we have in the

conventional system. When I go to the grocery store and I want to buy milk, it doesn't make any sense in the world that the seller can go into my wallet and can see my balances, he can see what I have, or I can go to his. Just makes zero, zero sense. And it will never ever be a form of payment, a real one, a scalable one, a mass market one, without solving those issues. Now, those of us that know, Satoshi spoke about it. He spoke about it in 2011 in one of his latest talkbacks. I think it was in Bitcoin Talk.

Vitalik spoke about it two months ago, spoke about privacy and the fact that he thinks that if Ethereum will solve privacy it will be a big problem for them in the future so scalability and privacy are two very important things Moshe, Scott, I want to say one quick thing is that if you got me on this space six months ago talking about this topic I would be making the argument that privacy is overrated and it's dead. And I think if you have nothing to hide, why the hell should

you require privacy? I know it sounds like a very naive, dumb argument. But then obviously, I experienced what surprisingly you experienced as well, is that people doxing your location. My old address in Dubai was doxed. I wasn't really private about it. I had personal matters docs, all my wallets. And I didn't even care about all my wallets being public, but then people could link it to everything, to all projects that we work with, people in my personal life. So I learned the hard way that privacy is a necessity. But I'm actually curious, Scott, you've had issues with the FBI, Scott? Hold on, hold on. When we signed up for blockchain, when we signed up to transact on the blockchain, did we not sign up

for the fact that every transaction was going to be visible to everyone on a public ledger? Isn't that one of the major things that we actually signed up for? We signed up for a world of transparency. We signed up for a world where transaction can't be changed. We signed up for

a world where every transaction is visible to everyone on a public ledger. Isn't that what we got into when we decided we want to be part of this movement? I definitely think not. I definitely think not. This is a bug. It's not a feature. This is not something that was planned. The idea is to go against double spending and make a decentralized financial system where no one controls it, no one can print more money. The way you said it very good, and Seth said it very well. Privacy, it's not about hiding something.

Privacy is about the power to control your own data and to disclose and not to disclose what you feel comfortable to do. And we don't have it now. And you see it and you feel it, and you you know many many times how many people go into your wallet why did you sell that token why did you do that it's a huge problem that needs to be solved and i think darth is doing something beautiful to solve it yeah yeah i want to talk about data ownership protocol as well it's got just one question if you don't mind like very briefly what did you go through what was your experience because that sounds horrific yeah i want to be i was on the right side of the FBI, not the wrong side

to clarify that question. I was, I thought someone, I thought someone swatted you or something. That was my guess. So I, so yeah, I would say that the first major problem I have was being SIM swapped twice. Right. And, uh, and I then went through the entire trying to work on that with T-Mobile. They gave me the highest protections. I got SIM swapped again. Luckily, I didn't lose any assets because I had it pretty well protected. But it's pretty terrifying when that happens. You have to change every password you've ever had in your life.

That's when I started to take this years ago, privacy and certainly security more seriously. Seriously. Yeah. And then, you know, from there, I after having a whole lot of issues with my my wallets being doxxed and lined up with tweets and all the shit that we all know, we've all been through a million times to create these sort of false narratives. Then I had people trying to extort me, saying they had face fake knowledge. I had to deal with the FBI and go after the people who were attempting to extort me, which they didn't have anything anyways. I mean, it's a real shit show, man. And people don't realize how much goes on behind the scenes once everybody has access to everything that you've ever done, or because they just see an opportunity to take advantage. I mean, I'm telling you, when somebody sends you a private message with pictures of your kids playing in your front yard, saying they're coming for your money you take that pretty seriously yeah i i and mostly like what i went through very briefly is i like very recent i went through from the from being private no one caring i recorded all my calls and obviously we're talking about the blockchain on the blockchain all my wallets were public i was

very comfortable with it all my wallets were linked very comfortable with keep is remaining public and when people told me like Mario, this fucking stupid, even my, my team members, and I was just dumb. I'm like, Why is it dumb? There's nothing to hide. Let's put it all public. And then you realize as soon as you are public person, you know, you put your name out there, people will use any piece of information to come up with any any narrative. And and they start experiencing the importance of privacy.

Emotion, what triggered you to launch DOP? Yeah, so I got to say, I don't think privacy is the only problem of famous people or public people. I think it's a big problem. Just if we want to make crypto a real mass market form of payment, then it's got to private you gotta allow people to

choose what to disclose now this was the major reason that made us try to solve this problem and i think what we successfully did or we're successfully doing in dap which is just going live soon is and the alpha is out, so you're welcome to test it, is we're bringing privacy to Ethereum. You can encrypt any ERC-20 or any other ERC-721 or 1155 NFTs. You can encrypt those and then store them or transact them on top of Ethereum with the scalability and the security of Ethereum without being tracked. You can choose using the data ownership protocol.

You can choose what to reveal. You can say, you know what? I just want to show that I bought an NFT, but I don't want to show the rest of my balances or I don't want to show the other tokens I have. Or you can say, you know what, I want to show the types of tokens that I hold, but I don't want to show the balances, which makes sense. You choose what to reveal. You can choose to reveal everything to the IRS if you want to, no problem. You can give them a key and they will see everything. So we think that this kind of protocol would become a standard for the Ethereum ecosystem. And by doing that, it will solve one of

the major problems. It won't solve the scalability. There's other protocols to do that, but it will solve the ownership of your data problem, which is a big one. Yeah, Paul, what are your thoughts? So I think a lot of people don't realize that Mario's opinion and his opinion that he had quite a while back when he first got into crypto about, I don't really care about the privacy, I'm going to dox myself, is actually insanely common. More people that interact with, especially people not in our bubble of cryptocurrency,

really don't care about their privacy. And a lot of us don't care about it until it becomes critical. And so one of the fundamental theses that I've had about getting privacy adoption is that it needs to be by default. And I think a lot of these protocols, I haven't looked at adopt very carefully, but I think one of the most important things that as builders we need to do is give it to people that don't give a shit, right? I don't care about privacy. I just want to transact. I want to send and receive money. I want to interface with a protocol. And I get that privacy regardless. And I think Apple actually has created a great, what I call kind of standard and has adopted a level of privacy that most people don't realize they're getting. Now, when iMessage came out, it heavily increased the privacy of an SMS chat, at least between two people that are using an iPhone or iPad.

And for a lot of people, they didn't know. Like when I went and sent a message to my mom and to my sister, they didn't realize that was end-to-end encrypted. Until tools like that become a default, we're not going to see good privacy adopted. And we lose the level of privacy for those of us that care. Now, in the scope of cryptocurrency, I've noticed this in cryptocurrency protocols, the ones that make it default, the ones that make it as easy as sending Bitcoin, i.e. so far from our experience, Monero is kind of the de facto standard. You don't have to deal with multiple address types.

You don't have to shield your money. You don't have to know, hey, do I have money that is clear or not? I just simply send and receive. That protocol has achieved the highest level of adoption. So I think user experience, hiding the fact that you even have to do anything for privacy is a key piece. From the viewpoint of what I've seen with things like Tornado Cash and protocols that are kind of opt-in, you get them used by a lot of the nefarious actors and very little by the people that just want to use crypto or just want to use financial services. I think it's a key thing that

people forget about. Yeah, Paul, basically, you're saying, I think, which we know the obvious is that humans are going to be human, and they're only going to care about it as much as it's convenient. As soon as it becomes convenient, exactly. It's an absolute sad truth. But I think the key piece is let's build the tools that just get privacy into their life, doing the things they already want to do. And then we, as people that actually care about privacy, actually get better level of privacy because privacy is a lot like trading markets. Liquidity is king.

The higher liquidity you have in privacy protocols, the more private it is for everyone. That is the anonymity set problem that you have. And that's a key piece we forget about. It mirrors a lot of just financial markets. Liquidity begets liquidity, gets a better product. Ruben, go ahead. You've had your hand up for a while. Hey, yes. Thanks for having me on. I just wanted to touch on a few things that were talked about. And I guess like Mario was know, he didn't care about it. And it's often the case that once you need privacy, you didn't care about it, it's kind of too late. And I think also, I don't know who was saying this earlier,

but he was saying, oh, you know, blockchain transparency, isn't that what we signed up for? You know, this is everything. But I think the key difference is that with the new privacy system, or actually with all the privacy systems since then, although you are hiding what the transaction is, you are not preventing the verifiability, right? Which is not just by sight and everyone's not just eyeballing it. It is through the use of clever math, right?

It's not. And of course, we have all these expert cryptographers and mathematicians that make sure that everything is right but this is kind of the beauty of you know zero knowledge proofs or the new types of privacy protocols where you can still verify that you know no money is being created of tin and no one is printing money for themselves but still hide all this thing so yes blockchain transparency i think it's's more of the lack of technology that was available then rather than, oh yeah, this is something that we definitely must have. Because if we want to be money, as Moshi has pointed out, Satoshi wanted privacy, but the tech then wasn't quite there. The other thing that I also wanted to touch is that, you know, he said like weaponization of money. Yes, that has happened to, in a way, weaponization of money has happened for like a long time, but it is also a relatively new thing, the way in the global economy things are working, right, with sanctions coming like much, much more to the fore in the past, what, 20 years or so. And, you know, we've

seen cases where, you know, Venezuela had their gold reserve seized because, you know, UK and a bunch of Western countries say, oh, no, you know, your leader isn't responsible. And they took away. Russia had literally their entire like central bank deposits removed and liquidated, you know, because of their war in ukraine so i'm not saying uh supporting russia or anything but it's pretty scary when you see hundreds of billions of dollars disappear that was deposited in the bank even as a nation yeah definitely so so anyway i just wanted to touch on that that you know i i i came to crypto because, you know, my payments were being censored, right? And I feel that, you know, with the whole move towards like everything should be KYC,

everything should be like AML. Not that I'm totally against it. I do think that there's, you know, some measure that we need to employ. But at the same time, you know, it should not be just about hiding criminals it's also about like you know being free to do things without someone telling you what is right or wrong the government deciding which country is right or wrong or like you know for example in china or even even in western countries right like i ran a vpn service in 2007 and back then, VPNs were considered like, oh, why would you want to use a VPN service? You must be doing something dodgy. Now, every day you get so many VPN services

here and there. And because of that, my business was actually censored. I was cut off from my credit card companies. All these payment gateways did not want to accept payments. And that's how I kind of with crypto. And in a way, i would say privacy is kind of essential to maintain the uncensorability so so yeah yeah seth i see you have your hand up and i want to ask you uh you can comment really quick but then i want to ask you specifically your thoughts on friend tech in this uh it you know in this context i have not dug into friend tech at, so I don't have any comments there. I'm shocked. I know.

I've seen it's the latest rage, but I haven't followed it up yet. Are we really talking about Front Tech again? Are we back there again, Scott? The only reason I asked is because, you know, we had this sort of 100,000 people. They called it a hack, but it wasn't really. But being able to connect, once again,

everyone's addresses to their personalities. But no, we can skip front tech. Go ahead, Seth. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good example of many people who sign up for something not realizing the ramifications. And a good friend of mine, Andrew Bailey, mentioned on a podcast lately that often pain is the best teacher and sometimes the only teacher. And I think one of the reasons why I love that we are able to have conversations like this with people who maybe haven't experienced any pain related to a lack of privacy yet, is that you can get ahead of that. Like you can avoid pain being the best teacher. And a lot of the things that we've talked about, get towards that. But I also just wanted to kind of briefly touch on the idea of privacy again, and that I

think we've kind of harped on a lot of the different ways that like you and Mario want privacy and how it's been a struggle. But it really comes down to privacy as the means to an end. It's not interesting to gain privacy just to gain privacy. I'm not pushing privacy as this idea just because I like privacy or because I'm for privacy. But privacy is an immensely valuable means to the end of freedom. And ultimately, there is no ability to have freedom without privacy, and especially financial privacy. Because if we have our finances laid out for the world to see, laid out for governments to see, who often either are authoritarian or can quickly become authoritarian, the amount of freedom that we actually have is drastically diminished. So if we're really seeking human flourishing, human freedom, and the individual having power

rather than the oligarchy or big government, that kind of thing, we need privacy as a means towards that. So oftentimes, we need to look at the bigger picture when we're talking about this kind of stuff and seeing that it really is the way to achieve freedom at a broad scale. Moshi, an argument to be made for, you know, would you invest in a project that is doxxed or a project that you don't know the identity of the founders? There's also an argument to be made, and I still believe in that argument, despite what I've been through, what Scott's been through, and I'm actually curious what Ran's been through, what happened to him in South Africa.

I have a feeling there's some dark shit that happened in South Africa to Rand. But isn't there an argument to be made where a world that doesn't have privacy could sound very dystopian, but it could make sense. Imagine everything is transparent. No one could lie because everything is on the blockchain. I don't believe in that argument as much as I did a few months ago, but I'm curious to get your thoughts, Samoshi. My thought is that we need balance. Just like

Seth said before, we just need balance. And the problem today is that we don't have it because we don't control our own data. It's kind of crazy. Regarding to investing in a project without knowing who it is, who stands behind it, you know, if I had the product, if I didn't

have the product to examine, then probably not. But if I have the product and I can check the product, I don't care who stands behind it. I don't care about who are the inventor. I care about the invention. If it's decentralized. If it's decentralized.

If it's decentralized, of course it's decentralized if it's decentralized of course of course what what do you mean look at all of us all of us have bitcoins does one of us know satoshi i mean it's alfini but but other than me knowing it's alfini does anyone knows who's bitcoin creator anyone knows satoshi but then everyone is behind it because we saw the technology we We played with the product. So I definitely think that we need to move from credibility to more proofs, to verify, to see. But again, the ability to choose to share this information. Okay, I want to share this information with you, but I don't want to share my financial balances.

I don't want to, the fact that I want to buy an NFT. I agree with you that that's a flaw because I don't like it as much as you don't like it. And I believe that if you go and buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, then the barrister shouldn't know every single ICO that you've ever invested in and every single transaction that you've ever made. I agree. But having said that, that's part of the rules of the game that we signed up for. We signed up for a public ledger.

We signed up for a… No. I would actually disagree. Early in 2013, privacy was a part of the story. We signed for a financial system that is not in the control of anyone specific. We signed for mathematics as a verify method. And if we found, and we did, not only us,

other projects also found that using zero knowledge proofs, we can get the same verifying capabilities as what Satoshi did in 2011 or 2009. Then we just have a better solution today. And I'm sure that in 10 years, there will be a better solution back then. We signed for a system that is decentralized. This privacy, lack of privacy, it's not a feature. It's a bug. And I got to say one more thing.

Just, you know, I 100% support and agree with everything Seth is saying. We need to remember privacy is freedom. In many places over the world, when you don't have privacy, it takes from you the ability to express your opinion without risking something. It's not only in the financial system. It's also you guys. You cannot express your free opinion without taking a cost. People in Russia, people in Arab countries, people in China, when they do that, they're risking their freedom. And those kinds of technologies that allows you to own your own data, just for starters, are an extremely important step to go against everything that is happening in our digital

lives, that everything is exposed, everything is under control in Google. Moshe, one last question for you, Mo. Before we go, I see a lot of panelists with their hands up. One more question is like, how do you prevent that option of privacy to be used for nefarious reasons? Yeah, that's a good question. So obviously, we don't want those protocols to become the safe havens for bad actors. That's definitely not what we want. And we do have tools that allows agencies, just like Zcash, by the way,

allows agencies to blacklist some addresses from interacting with the smart contracts. And this committee should be, the committee that chooses which addresses to be blacklisted should be in the control of a DAO. Because, you know, Russia agency can say one thing and the American agency can say a different thing. So you need to have a DAO in place to be like the de facto courthouse to make those decisions. But the protocol does have disabilities in it that allows them to blacklist and stop and block bad actors from enjoying these systems.

Yeah, because I feel, and Ryan, you probably agree with this, and I'd like to get other panelists to see if anyone on stage agrees with the point that everything to do with privacy benefits everybody because it gives us freedom, but at the same time it's mainly used by those that are doing things that are illegal and nefarious does anyone disagree i disagree yeah that's not the case yeah yes good at all so any any guests can feel free to jump in instead of me yeah look i think there's different

there's different motivations for privacy and and and too often the criminal side of it uh is associated with privacy it's that negative yeah houdini so you just dropped every last time yeah yeah so so someone else was jumping it at the same time as yeah it was pretty passionate seth yeah go yeah i can go and jump in there. Yeah, I definitely 100% disagree. I mean, if you look at any of the most popular privacy tools out there, they're most broadly used not by criminals,

but by people who need privacy, by dissidents, journalists, activists. I mean, Tor, if you look at the history of Tor, it is overwhelmingly used for good things. Yes, there are things like darknet markets that live on there that can be used for good things. Yes, there are things like dark net markets that live on there that can be used for bad things. But the the use of a technology for evil does not make the technology not worth it. And we've seen this throughout all of the the history of technology, the car, first adopted by criminals, phone first adopted by criminals, smartphones, widely used by criminal organizations, and sped up their ability to do crime. But but look at all of those things and look at the human flourishing and freedom that have come through

them. There's always a first adopter phase to privacy tools that often are those people who are most in need. And that is normally journalists, activists, dissidents, people in repressed countries, and criminals. But the last of those criminals being able to use a tool does not make it evil and always has to be possible for the tool to actually bring freedom. Because if we talk about a protocol where you can censor at will anyone who's using it, you have to know what's going on in the protocol. So you have to have a way to break that privacy or backdoor that privacy. And you have to have some sort of censorship layer. And if you have those two things, the privacy tool itself cannot function to bring human freedom. And that is something that I

will always push very strongly against. That goes against what Bitcoin was created for and what much of cryptocurrency was created for, because we need censorship resistance for this stuff to bring freedom. And in order to have censorship resistance, we need privacy. And if either of those things are able to be changed, able to be broken by whoever is behind the project or protocol, it will not function. If you look at popular cryptocurrencies like Monero, which is the most popular privacy tool within the cryptocurrency space, there's no ability to backdoor the privacy. There's no ability to censor on chain. There's no ability for miners to censor, which is a huge step towards freedom because yes it means that bad actors can use the tool but it also means that good actors can use the tool despite authoritarian regimes governments law enforcement that are evil attempting to prevent them from doing so and that has to exist for human freedom to be brought through these tools ryan you were jumping in

yeah i think i mean you know i've got a know, one of the things that really struck me when I went to the U.S., when I lived in the U.S., was how they want to believe in transparency. Like all court documents are public property and, you know, everything in the U.S. tries to be a very transparent environment. I mean, let's put aside the the let's put aside the the layer behind that but i just and i understand the need for privacy but i really struggle to understand how the the powers that be are going to allow privacy because i just think

it's not it's not part of of how governments operate i think i was saying this i was saying this before but i got cut off i think that it's really important to understand the motivations for privacy as well so we're talking about pretty extreme cases right like living in an in an authoritarian or a dictatorship government or you know a criminal using it to hide their whatever nefarious purposes they're doing. But I think even at the most basic fundamental level, when it comes to transactional privacy, at least, even for people who are just complete beginners, you wouldn't think that they have a motivation for privacy.

It's important to separate that, the fact that privacy is security, right? Like, it's simply dangerous to expose your personal financial information to everyone in the world, no matter where you live, right? Like, in fiat systems, governments allow privacy in the form of a bank account. Right? Like when I go to, you give the example of the barista at your coffee shop, like they can't see

my personal financial information. So Houdini, let me ask you a question. I've got another question for Mo. So the question I have for you, Houdini, is privacy dead? Let's be straight here.

Like with Rand's point, like with CBDCs, et cetera, is privacy dead? And then I want to ask Mo is that how do you determine what to make private, what not to make private? I know you guys are working on a DOP, so I'm actually curious. But HoudiniSwap, is privacy dead? No, it's absolutely not dead. I think it's the next evolution. And it depends where you're like, in what context is privacy dead?

No, absolutely not in the specific context of crypto and blockchain i think it's just the next evolution it's we got to this point where we've we have some pretty serious adoption we have institutions playing like we're in contact with with hedge funds for example who require privacy like it just if our our philosophy is that if crypto and blockchain is to become a global digital payment system there needs to be privacy like it's just not going to function in a in a seamless way with cbd you know with central bank digital currencies it'll never happen like it's just not a realistic future and so it's not dead but it's evolving

hmm she's like get your foot i actually have a question about uh central bank digital currency so i know you guys have a lot of privacy developers on here um what's your sense of urgency on that because that is coming very fast and there's no stopping it and. And as you can hear from the World Economic Forum, they're constantly talking about it. Central banks love it. And it's going to be linked to a bio-identity and potentially a social credit score like China. So what are your guys' – what's your urgency?

Is it worrying you? Dop, you guys didn't actually – I don't think you spoke. Do you want to unmute your mic, Dop? Yeah, sure. Can you hear me? Yeah, bro, we can, yeah. Perfect. So you just asked if privacy is dead.

And I want to say that from my perspective, privacy is not even born. Okay? I think that now crypto is not really mainstream yet. So it feels that privacy is not really, you know, needed, but that's not the vision. It's not our vision for crypto. Our vision is to bring crypto to the mainstream. And in my opinion, it will never happen without privacy.

So it feels like privacy is dead because, yeah, in the past, I totally agree that in the past, privacy was mainly for criminals. But, you know, that's what people used to say about Bitcoin. And I think that we are growing together as a crypto community. We see that people really need privacy. So, you know, Aristo used to say that the truth is in the middle. It's not about zero or one. And the middle is the truth. And I think that absolute privacy or absolute transparency are both wrong.

So you don't need zeros or ones. Yeah. We need to allow the crypto community flexible privacy settings. No one thinks that, I don't know, cash is for criminals and it's private. It's the user responsibility and it's not the tech responsibility. We just need to give our users the options,

the options to do it in their way. Ruben, jump in. Yeah, so I think Ran mentioned that, Ran mentioned that the government is not getting privacy, they won't get behind it. But I do think that if with enough pressure, like for example, let's take a look at the UK, right? They actually wanted to ban end-to-end encryption on messaging, right? And in response, iMessage, WhatsApp,

all these end-to-end encrypted messengers were saying, well, screw that. You know, if you guys are going to ban us, then, yeah, none of these are going to be available in your country. Right. So I do think it's, you know, rather than just saying, oh, yeah, governments are, there's nothing that we can do. I do think that if it's sufficient enough, people make it a point to care. They actually can be changed? Because I don't think these people, when they're being denied the tools that they use every day… But Ruben, people don't seem to care, man. It just doesn't…

We talk about privacy all the time, yet people still use social media that has no privacy. People still publish shit that has no privacy. It just seems that people are voluntarily giving up privacy for convenience i i don't think it's right to say people who use social media don't care about privacy i mean we all use social media but again it's all about the the ability to have that choice right so none of us want to have like a thing like we chat where you know the government can see everything right i think unfortunately a lot of us still use Telegram because of their false advertising. But yeah, but I think the other thing

that I wanted to bring up is that, you know, CBDCs, yeah, of course, you know, this is a really big concern, but if the Europe, when they surveyed European citizens on what was the number one concern

they had on CBDCs. It was actually about privacy, right? And now you can see all the... Ruben, talking about privacy, Ryan, we can hear you talking to your kids. Doesn't seem you care much about privacy, man. Ryan? Okay, go on.

Ryan, we can still hear you. Let's actually all mute and listen to Ryan. Ruben, go ahead. Yeah, we can still hear you. Let's actually all mute and listen to Ran. Ruben, go ahead. Yeah, no, as I was mentioning that, you know, even if you take a look at the messaging behind the European CBDC, they keep on talking about privacy, privacy, privacy as well because they realize that especially when it comes to money, especially when it comes to countries that have been, you know,

subject to authoritarian governments like Germany, still very cash, they would defend cash very, very heavily because they believe that there's importance between the division of money and the state. But even among Europeans, privacy is actually the number one concern for CBDC. And I actually found that surprising. But all of this information, it's not just me spouting out. You can look it up.

It's all online. So just wanted to say that privacy is not dead. Of course, it's a battle, but we shouldn't be giving up. And we have actually come a long, long way. HTTPS being standard and the encrypted messaging being standard so there has been a lot of good progress so we shouldn't just give up and say ah you know there's nothing we can

do about it yeah leia and mo i want to go to leia leia your thoughts like do people really give a shit about privacy like okay we're giving them the option here like we talk you know who do you know was talking earlier about giving it as an option or I think as well. Mo and Dob here as well talking about the option of privacy is freedom. Yet the next question is, do people really give a shit as we saw everyone giving away their data to the big tech? Yeah, it's a good question. I think as time goes by, you know, like all of this technology is still extremely new. You know, more and more people are getting on social media now. And I think initially, perhaps people didn't understand the problems with, you know, publicizing their entire life online, you know, talking about

private things on WhatsApp, on Twitter, DMS and Instagram DMS and things like that. But I think as time goes by, people are starting to become more suspicious of governments, more suspicious of big tech. And so I think I am actually starting to notice people caring about privacy. You know, it's really interesting. I saw a new ad from Apple saying that Apple is like, is the place you can go to for privacy. I don't know if anyone else has seen that. So privacy is becoming extremely trendy. And I think it's something which people really want. The question is, are they going to put their money where their mouth is? And unfortunately, I don't think they will. I think at the end of the day, people will always favor convenience over everything, over democracy, over privacy, and so on. And so I also, I kind of want to just go back a sec. You also

asked, is privacy dead? I think it's up to us. I think we're at this like interesting intersection where we have to decide what we want to do. I think big tech and governments obviously are very anti-privacy despite Apple's ad. But we're at this weird intersection where it's really down to what we build and what we create

and how loud we are in the crypto community and how loud we are as you know citizens in a society that demand freedom and privacy so i don't know i think time will tell to be honest oh sorry i muted mo your thoughts on that same question like do people really give a shit yeah so you know i think the answer is like this. We are early adopters. So you look at yourself and you compare yourself to the mass market. It's a wrong comparison. I think people care a lot about privacy, but people have no patience and they have no tolerance.

Right now, they don't. It looks like they don't. They don't until they do. I'll give you an example okay so like in israel i think it was like six months ago there was a huge huge thing and all of the public spoke about the fact that the government can use a system a software called pegasus with a company called nso in order to just put your phone number in the system. And without you clicking anything, the government is in your phone, they see your photos, they see your videos,

they hear your calls and see your texts. Once this became public knowledge, there was a huge, huge chaos. Everyone spoke about it for two weeks and now everyone is investigating this. So privacy is not an issue until it is. Right now, we don't see it because like Matan said before, crypto is not mass market, guys. Crypto right now is a speculation tool for making profits or losses and to make money. This is what it is right now. But this is not the vision. If we want to get to a place that blockchain is the backbone and the basics of financial systems, then we will need to allow users what they have today. Plus, we cannot show a less good of a product. We need to show a better product so we are better in terms of self-custody great we are better in terms of the fees and the and the speed great we are we are very bad in scalability and in privacy so we must solve those issues people will never ever ever use cryptocurrencies

if they know that anyone that gets the payment can go to their wallet. Period. That's it. It's very simple. It will die at that second. Once we solve this, and it shouldn't be hard. It should be, like you said before, flexible privacy. You should be able to reveal what you want to reveal to whoever you choose.

How do you do that, Momo? How do you do that, Momo? How do you do that? Because I was looking at Doppen before going to Seth. How do you allow someone to choose what to reveal? It sounds technologically impossible. No, so actually it is. So when Bitcoin was developed, zero knowledge, proofs, all of those technologies, they were there, but they were very early on.

Recently, in the last few years, companies like or projects like Stockwell, projects like AdStack Network, they've done a major breakthrough in terms of the mathematics that allows you to verify transactions without being transparent and open on the blockchain. We are using those mathematics equations. And obviously, with our own development, in order to create a system that gives you full power on top of Ethereum, you mentioned Monero before. One of the problems with Monero is that it's not like for example it's not stable right so people use stable coins what if you can have a

stable Monero or something Monero doesn't give you the flexibility to choose Monero is strictly private over here we have a protocol that gives privacy to Ethereum so you can take USDT, you can encrypt it, and you can transact it

now using zero knowledge proofs without it being traceable on the blockchain. I would finish and say that you need to test it. Guys, you need to go to dApp.org and use the testnet

and see it for yourself. it's beautiful and it's working right now um seth yeah yeah i'd love to jump in on that because the the idea of having the power to reveal what you want is a vital one but it really comes down to freedom the freedom seth the freedom sorry i want to add like The freedom argument of it makes a lot of sense. It's just like my two concerns is like the various reasons and do people give a shit? Yeah, also like what just to kind of Mo's point circling back on something he said about it before. I don't know how it is in any given country, but in the United States, you're going to have to report every single transaction one way or another. Right.

So, you know, as you said, you can, I guess, give the key to the IRS so they can see it. But even being able, you should be able to be private, but still be able to share those transactions. You're going to have to. In the United States, you just can't hide your transactions. It's literally impossible, not something that you would get in trouble with the IRS. So there has to be a way to thread that needle. Unfortunately, I'm sure there's countries where you can just send privately, not share it, never share it with anyone. Great. You just can't do that here. So it's a really valuable tool, you know, to be able to sort of thread that before. And the only way that privacy is convenient is that it's the default. If we have to take extra steps to gain privacy, you're going to drastically limit how many people are actually going to choose the private path because of that convenience privacy seesaw that most people want to just sit on the convenience side. So it is important that

things are default. But there's a there's a misconception that a system that has default privacy, like Monero, for instance, does not allow you to reveal the information that you want to reveal, which is, it's a myth. It's not true. If I am using Monero, and I'm using it totally above board, which I do, I pay taxes, which I do, I can still reveal any information I need to about those transactions to the government or to other people using something called a view key in Monero that exists for most privacy preserving protocols. Zcash has a similar concept. I believe Fero has a similar concept. Ruben can comment more on that. But it's it's not something where when you are using a private tool that provides privacy by default all the time, you don't have the ability to reveal

information. You always can, even if the tool didn't have a native ability. Even Signal, if I wanted to reveal a chat to someone, yeah, I can just screenshot and share the chat. It's much easier to selectively share data than it is to opt into privacy every time. And so it's really vital for anyone who is building a tool or who is a developer, who is an educator in the space that we push for privacy by default whenever possible, because that is how we get people using privacy preserving tools, even before they realize the risks of a lack of privacy and cryptocurrency.

Yeah, for sure. Elusive. I want to ask you because I literally saw the news yesterday, and I shared your profile here saying we had to get you here obviously not knowing you but i saw anatoly sharing that you were offering basically private swaps uh on solana first of all why is that important and uh how does that work then if you want to share those transactions with the irs something like that just kind of leads in to exactly what we're talking about here yeah happy to be joining the space and have the chance to finally also give some impulse. Yeah, so I think we broadly talked about the reasons why privacy is important, especially in DeFi, I think

a lack of privacy really undermines the individual's freedom. So private swaps are essential just as normal private transactions are. And for us, this compliance aspect that we were just talking about is also really important. So for us, you can generate viewing keys for individual transactions or different rule-based subsets of your asset ownerships or transactions. So if you do a private swap, swapping your wrapped E for your sole for USDZ on Elusive, what you can do is you can generate a viewing key that then gives the IRS insight into this swapping transaction,

only exposing what you did in DeFi to all third parties that you share this viewing key with. And what we are working on, which I think is important, is also to have this feature be directly integrated with block explorers, right? And so you generate this key, share it with anyone and they pass it into their block explorer like they would with a normal transaction hash and now

they can see what happened in an encrypted transaction so they don't have to go out of their way when checking what happened in an encrypted transaction. Likely users shouldn't have to go out of their way when getting privacy, so I think. So you guys are threading the needle as well.

You're finding a way where you can transact privacy, but you have the choice and obviously you can still share it tax-wise and things like that. Yeah, I'm actually curious, Scott, who on stage, I know we're going to wrap soon, but who on stage experienced something similar to me or Scott? I know Ryan is with his kids and I'm not sure

if he's listening, but I'm actually curious to hear another story. Very much so. I'd love to know your story that South Africa is a different world to the West. Have you been doxxed? Have you had any issues because of the transparency of the blockchain or you've always been careful?

I mean, I haven't been careful. It's not like I have much to hide. Like, what am I hiding? I'm not doing any illicit transactions. You know what I mean? Like, it is what it is. Yeah, but hold on. We just made the argument

that you don't have to hide anything. You don't have to hide anything for people to come up with a story. Like, you don't want competitors to know all the projects you're working with for example yeah i mean look that's why that's why i'm making a transaction sorry i'm very much i i understand the problem very much i've experienced the problem very much but i'm just as i said before like i feel that when we got into blockchain one of the features that we were told that it has is that everyone

can see every transaction so you know it was one of the it is we were told that it has is that everyone can see every transaction. So it is a problem. I understand it. I think I agree with Mo that with this problem, unfortunately, it does stop blockchain from being used as much as it can be used. Because you're thinking about it in terms of investing. Think about suppliers buying chips or IP or software from other suppliers and competitors being able to track their wallets and then effectively infiltrate their supply chain and destroy their competitive advantage. That, for me, is a big problem.

If you're thinking about Apple one day transacting on the blockchain and paying their semiconductor supplier, then the entire world will know exactly where they're buying all their IP from and all their consulting and whatever else they're buying from. And I think that that's a fundamental problem in blockchain. I think for as long as we have governments, and for as long as governments have control, they're going to be very much against privacy. We saw this where we thought, as the crypto community, we said they'll never be able to infiltrate Tornado Cash because Tornado Cash is a protocol and it's a decentralized protocol and the keys have been burnt. And therefore, there's no way that the government can control or come after Tornado Cash.

What did the government do? The government found a weapon against T NEDACASH, which was sanctions. And using sanctions, they've now taken the developers and put the developers into jail. I think the developers actually out of jail now, if I'm not mistaken, I may be wrong. But what the government did was they found a tool in their arsenal to be able to shut us down, or to shut privacy down, because they don't want people to have privacy. So I think that as much as ideologically I agree with it, I think that it's a very, very, very tough fight to fight because I think it's the ultimate part of what the government don't want to give us, and that is privacy. Can I jump in on that real quick? Sure. Yeah, go ahead.

I'd love to just comment on the Tornado Cash thing because it's something that I've thought about a lot. that real quick? Sure. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I'd love to just comment on the Tornado Cash thing, because it's something that I've thought about a lot. And when it comes to Tornado Cash, the sanctions did not technically prevent people from using Tornado Cash. And even today, people can use Tornado Cash. What the sanctions did and what the most important tool available to governments is when pushing back against tools that are truly decentralized, which Tornado Cash smart contracts are, but the ways you can access them aren't, which is the main gateway that people have been prevented from using Tornado Cash, they can use fear as a weapon. Sanctions in this specific case were a tool of fear. And so when we continue to propagate the idea that governments are against privacy,

so we shouldn't even fight for it, We actually aid the governments that do not want privacy in their goals. We aid them in those aims. So I think it's very, very, very important that we remember that even though, especially like in the Tornado Cash case, which is a good one, it set a terrible precedent because it showed the governments are willing to go after developers and projects who build on privacy. But it also showed us in the positive light that tools that are truly decentralized, like the Tornado Cash smart contract, can continue existing and continue working despite government sanctions and government interference. And the tools that we build have to be able to continue functioning despite whatever governments

want to do. I agree, but I disagree. And you say that we can continue to use tornado cash. Yes, if you're very, very, very, very, very technical and you exclude 99.9% of the population, a subset of very, very, very technical people can still somehow use the protocol, but they know that if they do use the protocol and the government does actually find out

that they use the protocol, then they've actually violated sanctions. So you can say, oh, we can't. Yeah, and that's the fear tool. Yeah, you can't use it. The reason it can't be used easily is because of a flaw in the Ethereum ecosystem where most people go through centralized API providers. That's not a flaw with the Tornado Cash smart contract.

99.9% of the world don't know how to use anything else and won't know how to use anything else and won't know how to use anything else and shouldn't know how to use anything else and by the way if you do interact with tornado cash today you're in violation of sanctions and as far as i understand that violation of sanctions is quite a serious criminal offense in the united states so it's like yeah it is possible to use it it is possible to use, but if you do, then you're violating sanctions. Of course, and that's the fear tool that I was speaking of. That's the tool that they're trying to dissuade people from using it, but they cannot prevent the actual tool from existing. And it's only a flaw in the theorem ecosystem that prevents most people from being able to use it.

You can say this about anything. You can say this is about a bomb. Hey, you can still go, you buy a gun and shoot people, but you're not allowed to shoot people. I think, you know, laws. You can't really use tornado cash today. It's too risky to use tornado cash today. It's very risky. You can't use tornado cash today. So that's what I'm saying. I think that you've got to look at the government's agenda.

The governments are talking about CBDCs. They want exactly the opposite of what we want. We're saying we want privacy. They're saying we want privacy they're saying we want full transparency and then that must that full transparency must also become full control and you can't go to people who say I want full transparency and full control and say hey we want privacy I think it's a very very very tough fight to fight ideologically I agree I want to have privacy of course I want to have privacy but, I think it's a tough fight to fight.

So what's your response then? Is it bending the knee to the government's aims to strip privacy? No, as I said, I think there's certain fights that I choose to fight. And there's certain fights that I think are not worth the way that I'm going to move the needle. And again, we can sit here as Crypto Twitter and as 4, 000 people in the twitter spaces and talk about how much we want privacy ultimately we have to accept that privacy is the one fight that governments are all going to fight hard against because privacy means that they're not going to get their tax revenue privacy means they're not going to get their control privacy means that they're not going to get their disclosure

and they don't privacy is not binary privacy is not binary. Privacy is not binary, Rand. It's not what level of privacy. I agree. It's a very, very… I agree, but I think… Can I jump in for a second? Can I jump in for a second? Yes, please.

Go ahead, Mo. Go ahead, Mo, then Leah. Sure, yeah. So, guys, you know, you say this. I got to share with you our experience regarding America because all of us are looking at America like the government of the world, but it's not true. There's 300 million people inside America. There's 7.7 billion outside of America.

Like when we started to develop DAP, then we immediately hired a top firm in America. And we spoke with them. And one of the partners is like former head of anti-money laundering and things like that. And by the way, we got an opinion today, thank God. But part of the discussions with them was like, guys, listen, you need to do this. You need to do this. Do that. Do that. But then after we've done everything, they told us, listen, it's completely legal. It's perfectly fine. It's nothing like tornado cash. But you want the golden advice? Listen, block it in America, block it completely in America until the government won't shift because the current leadership is against all of those things and are very, very aggressive.

So, by the way, we've done it. Not that you can block a protocol, but we are blocking the IP addresses to gate the protocol from America. So we did do this, but we need to remember that governments change and fear is a tool that works until it doesn't work. And regarding the necessity of it, please, I don't think it's, you know, I don't want to say it's not an opinion

because it is an opinion, but in our opinion, it's almost a fact that crypto will never be a mass market tool without the flexible privacy features in it. tool as a default settings in the standards of ethereum and the blockchain that will allow people to disclose to the governments to disclose to the irs it's not legal to not show it to them but it is perfectly fine for me to buy an nft without the need to show my entire balance yeah i agree i agree and i think this is a good time to plug my sponsor to say, if you are American and you do want to experience this protocol, use a VPN, use NordVPN,

and hook me up for a referral link. I'll give you a referral link later. Yeah, so all criminals, make sure you go to, I'm joking, anyone in Dubai as well, check out NordVPN. All criminals use Rand's affiliate link for NordVPN.

Nice. I mean, you know what i love i love i love when exchanges and and protocols say no no don't worry you know we we block us ip addresses i mean i don't know any crypto user that's not using a vpn these days i'm going to be honest yeah go ahead yeah so i just want to talk about um the mentality of oh it's too difficult to fight so let's not fight i think that's one of the weakest and most dangerous mentalities you know if we had that mentality we wouldn't even be here in the crypto space we wouldn't even be we wouldn't even be on twitter elon wouldn't have owned twitter we'd still have jack dorsey and and you know world economic forum and all that controlling twitter the fact is if we give up now then we're Twitter. Elon wouldn't have owned Twitter. We'd still have Jack Dorsey and World Economic Forum

and all that controlling Twitter. The fact is, if we give up now, then we're not going to get anywhere. And privacy is a human right. It's a fundamental right. And it has nothing to do with hiding illicit activity. It's about your right to choose what you want to show and what you don't want to show. And the fact is, it is going, it's happening. More and more people are building protocols to allow this. I know DOP is obviously doing this. Tommy is doing this. Do you have a right? Do you have a right to show

what you want to show and not show what you don't want to show? Because when I'm doing my tax returns, I don't have that right. Not inside my wallet. It's not your business. It's not the government's business. But when I do my tax returns. I don't have that right. Yeah, but I can decide.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to pay taxes. I never said I'm not going to pay taxes. Yeah, and disclosing to the government is also different than disclosing to every person you've ever sent a transaction to. Not necessarily. It doesn't mean I'm not going to pay taxes, but that opens up a whole other can of worms.

I'm not even pro-taxes anyway. I don't think the government has a right to steal from me. So that's another can of worms. I pay my taxes in case the IRS is listening. I don't agree with that. I pay taxes, but I'm open about the fact that I'm anti-taxes. I love the IRS as well, in case anyone's listening. My favorite agency.

I also love the SEC, contrary to the other things. Yes, yes. They're welcome on stage anytime. Sorry, Leigh, I just wanted to put these disclaimers. Go ahead. Sorry. Anything that Lea said is not endorsed by me or Scott. Sorry, Lea.

We were just kidding. You get better. Yeah, yeah. I do have a retort back to Lea. Look, I agree with you. And I think that we should fight for our rights and our rights to privacy. But, you know, I think with, as I say, for me, it's a personal thing in terms of picking my battles, in terms of which battles I think I can fight and have a high probability of winning

and which battles I can fight and have a lower probability of winning and therefore probably a higher return on effort. And so for me, what I'm saying is I really respect people who are fighting for privacy. I just think it's one of the hardest fights to fight. I respect people like you. I respect people like Mo because I know very much that he has been fighting very much for privacy. I'm just saying, if you take the subset of things that I choose to fight for, I think that privacy is one of those things where I'm more comfortable leaving it to other people who are more passionate about it. I think most people are exactly like you, Ryan. That's why I was asking earlier, do people really give a shit? Because while they say they

give a shit, their actions don't show that they give a shit. No, but it's also, what is your probability of success? How hard is the government going to fight back against you? You think about it, how hard will the government fight back against me for holding Bitcoin? That's quite a big fight. Governments allowing me to hold a currency or a store of value that they can't control, that I can send cross-borders without an intermediary, without being part of the financial systems. I mean, that's a big fight. Like, that's already one big step forward.

Now, that is a fight that I'm willing to take because I think that the probability of winning it in the current playing field is reasonable. When you add another layer and say, you know, will the government let me have privacy, then that's not a fight that I'm – I mean, I like the idea, but am I going to fight it and spend a lot of my time fighting it? Probably not because I think that the probability of success is much smaller.

And I think that, as you said, that's the reason that most people choose not to fight for their right to privacy because I think the probability of success is very small. Can I jump in here? Can I finish my point? Yeah. Leah, your mic doesn't seem to be working. Go ahead, Leah. I don't think her mic is working.

Go ahead, Ruben. And then we're going to move towards wrapping. She's back. She's back. Go ahead, Leah. Try again. Yeah, I don't know her mic is working. Go ahead, Ruben. She's back. I don't know. I got disconnected. I just wanted to finish my point. Ultimately, you all do agree that freedom matters. You can sit here and say that you don't believe in paying taxes and all this stuff. But ultimately, you're all just too afraid to say the truth in case that the IRS...

But ultimately... Lea, we can't hear you. I'm sorry. Your mic is breaking up. It's amazing that as she talks about privacy and the IRS, her mic mysteriously cuts off. Don't do this.

I'm being paid by the IRS to mute Leia. So anyone that says anything bad to the IRS, you may be accidentally muted by me or Scott. Yeah, Leia, your mic is really bad, Leia. I'm just going to mute you because it's really choppy. I can't hear you. But I think what Leia is saying is that we're cowards, me and you, Scott, for not attacking the IRS

and saying that privately. Even though I'm not in the US, I don't report to the IRS. I'm just kind of backing up my boy, Scott. So I think that's Leia's point. That's just a quick question. What do you think it means to fight for privacy? Like when you say it's not a battle that's worth fighting for, like if there were privacy options available to you, would you use them? Not use platforms for convenience when that's at the detriment of privacy it's probably the most obvious thing we could do and no one's doing it's like there's so many alternatives to other to the big tech to google like even in crypto how many people have

are huge you know use google chrome which whatever uh but could use brave but go over to brave and then they don't like the way that some of the content doesn't load and then they go back to google chrome right yeah well i think this goes back to the point that I think Paul was saying earlier, and I know we're getting wrapped really soon. People care about their privacy only in as much as it's convenient and they don't have to go out of their way to change their behavior to remain private. It really has to be built in. Yeah. Leah mentioned that point earlier. She said people will choose convenience over privacy. And I think that's one of the most astute points of this entire show. It really

is about convenience and it has to be there. And for people to expect to get a PhD before they're able to use a privacy tool is not realistic, but there are convenient tools out there. I mean, shameless plug, we've done over 100 million in transaction volume on Houdini swap. It's a very popular tool. Send me some of that, bro. I was going to make a bad joke, but I should hold myself back.

So go ahead, Scott. Go ahead. Well, I thank you guys. We're up against time here. But Dopp, you haven't actually spoken and I'm a really big fan of what you guys are doing. You guys, everyone should follow it at dop underscore org dot org.

The black, yeah, there's two logos on stage you should follow. The ugly red one and the nice black one. The ugly red one is ours. It's Crypto Town Hall account. Ours should be black. I was going to... I know, man.

I know. Everything I have is black, including my clothes. But yeah, so the red one is Crypto Town Hall because we're going to start hosting shows from there in the very near future. And the other one is DOP because we're pretty big fans of what they do and they're about to wrap up the show.

Dop Data Ownership Protocol, the mic is yours, guys. Thanks. Just a short comment to Ren. So Ren said 10 minutes ago that he has nothing to hide, that he's not using any privacy tools. He's like, he don't need it. But respectfully, you will never

ever upload your passport, all your credit card payments history to Twitter. So you have what to hide. And it has nothing to do with criminal activity. So what I'm trying to say is that without privacy, we will never, ever, ever go mainstream.

Never, ever. I agree. I agree with that. Well, I think it's a good point to a good place to end, Scott. Yeah, I agree. I think that was a great conversation. What's your wallet, by the way, Scott? Four, Niner, Zed six horse alpha Mario

horse alpha Mario alright guys we gotta wrap on that horse alpha Mario your mind is so fucking weird man we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up

you should try being married to me I'm gonna get my wife on stage one day and we can break it down I would love your wife on stage no joke it would be one of my favorite spaces

for sure but let's let's wrap it guys Ryan final words I'll tell you I would love your wife on stage. No joke. It would be one of my favorite spaces for sure. But let's wrap it, guys. Ryan, final words? I'm not falling into this trap, bro. Oh, we stopped it. You know, you ordered me to stop it. So since then, I've been unfortunately forced to no longer do this.

If anyone wants us to start doing this thing again, if you know what I'm talking about, just let us know in the comments. Moshe, I'll give you the final words. I wish I could hang out with you right now. Moshe, any final words? Yeah, just final words. I think we all agree now that privacy is a big part of freedom. We always say in our privacy is freedom. And please, if I can may use this stage to invite you guys.

We are in the development stage. We want users to use the testnet, help us find bugs and security breaches and stuff like that. It will help us a lot, and it will help you guys later with the airdrop that will be given to the users of the testnet. Thank you, guys. Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it.