Amir Taaki, Ivan Jelincic & Rachel-Rose O'Leary: DarkFi – Let There Be Dark (Part 1 of 2) #423

Transcript

welcome to episode the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the global boxing revolution my name is brian crane and i'm here with sunny agarwal today we're going to be interviewing amir taki rose o'leary and ivan yelanchich who are the co-founders of darkfy so darkfy is a project that's working on privacy for smart contracts and privacy for decentralized finance and we had a really long really fantastic conversation with the three of them uh that actually ended up going almost three hours so we decided to split this up into two episodes the first one is going to come out today as 423 and then

the next one a week from now is 424. so uh with that uh let's get into the first part but before we do that a few words from our sponsor so first of all uh course one so are you do you have crypto assets or you know sitting around or do you want to participate in the staking economy then you start earning rewards and contribute to network security by staking with course one course one is securing billions of dollars of staking assets across 25 plus different decentralized networks including solana cosmos ethereum and others course one also runs uh notes for institutions so if you're interested in

white label nodes or have some kind of staking needs that you want to have a partner for make sure to check out course one so you go the course dot one to start your second journey and then pair swap so pair swap is a decentralized exchange aggregator on ethereum with pair swap you can beat the market price every single time it's fast it's very liquid and they just launched a v5 which has new contracts and new apis it has a modular infrastructure it's very gas friendly and supports free approval using ethereum permit messages they also added support for avalanche polygon bse and

you can even use it from directly within ledger live so go to paraswap.io to get started and with that let's go to our episode so thanks so much for uh joining us all um we have like three guests which is actually unusual normally we were always like no we shouldn't have so many guests but let's do it i think it's gonna be fun maybe you can just start off by uh everyone introducing themselves briefly so i'm amir taki and i've been in uh bitcoin since uh 2010 and i was working a lot on um bitcoin implementations software doing a lot of the protocol

development and with a specialty on [Music] privacy techniques so our team implemented the first coin join implementation and stealth addresses um which have become like well you know they're outdated now but at the time but then they became standardized techniques uh and in terms of darkfy which is our project now uh i focused a lot on on doing research and uh applied cryptography development you know mainly around zero knowledge but not contained just strictly to zero knowledge you know

we're concerned with combining many different techniques together to leverage to create anonymous applications i'm rose uh i've i got into crypto in 2015 when i read the assange book uh cypherpunks and um since then i've uh worked in a few different things i was lead a tech writer for coindesk for a couple years whereas mostly writing on ethereum and privacy coins and during that time i traveled a lot to different ethereum conferences and it was interesting you know an

interesting moment in the space but i also started to feel uh very concerned about um the the emphasis on transparency that a lot of the ethereum uh projects and also the ethereum philosophy uh has so in in 2018 i left i i went to rojava learned programming and uh the following year started uh contributing to darkfy so i helped build the prototype that we just released um and i'm also a uh researcher i researched mainly uh d5 and token engineering uh i'm my turn

i've been like i've been a free software developer for maybe almost 15 years now um since i was 18 i moved to the netherlands and started working on free software with this non-profit foundation called dying in there we developed many projects both crypto related and not crypto related mostly in regards to the european union and privacy aspects of various different softwares and and politics so we also involved with cities and municipalities we've developed many uh many different projects that helped people

integrate privately into society in some way um when it comes to crypto i've found out about bitcoin i think in 2012 or something like this uh immediately loved it started mining it and hung out a lot on the bitcoin forums um i took i think i took a break around 2014 or 2015 when mining wasn't as profitable anymore so i just like stagnated and kept working on free software in the meantime i've founded a couple of projects there was a linux operating system called devon which is now one of the most popular linux distributions used in the world

um spawned from this there were two different projects as well one was called heads os with a big focus on anonymity and privacy and the other one is now currently still in development uh mimo which is a mobile operating system designed and built from scratch in order to like escape escape the clutches of the apple and the google duopolis and right now i'm thinking of how to also involve these projects with crypto uh when it comes to darkfy i've been amir introduced me to zero knowledge and just we started learning together and now we're just having a lot of fun

uh building new things and uh being like on the the bleeding edge of tech so it's challenging but also very very rewarding as well i want to start off with the question uh so in the manifesto you know it talks about like darkness and the importance of of darkness and maybe yeah can you explain like what does that mean and you know why what does that like world look like that would you know you're sort of trying to get us to so we put this emphasis on on darkness um within our thesis not as like something which is um uh

like necessarily bad and scary but actually um something that's uh something empowering and so it's within the context that we're currently in which is like the whole of the technological paradigm is basically defined by surveillance um which is a kind of like whiteness all-pervasive whiteness which is has the effect of like flattening any kind of discourse um you know it it cancels out political differences and you know in in the worst case scenario which we're heading towards in inside of crypto um you know people from certain jurisdictions kind of access the systems uh due to kyc

um and other processes that restrict the uh the kind of users who can use those tools so darkness is is a counterpoint to this uh it's a um a universe where uh which anyone can access irrespective of their nationality or political beliefs um so you know it's a it's a resistance to this uh kind of all-pervasive whiteness um and it's also a kind of new beginning uh so it's like a new dawn of of um a new kind of paradigm of technology that we see coming into play uh as a reaction to this paradigm of surveillance but also increasingly

enabled by zero knowledge cryptography which offers like incredibly flexible programmable uh privacy so you know that the two kind of um symbols that i i used to talk about like this this light versus the the whiteness of surveillance is it's kind of like a forest and a desert so forests um you know they're uh they offer a kind of coverage where um within a forest the people are protected so they can organize you know they can um and they have this this tree coverage that you know protects them from attacks

um and it's also a kind of sanctuary for ecosystems you know it's like a natural environment like incredibly diverse um and very dark but also very natural and then on the other side we have like a desert which is this kind of um encroach encroachment of this kind of lifelessness you know um and in a desert like everything is completely surveilled and under the monopolizing view of the sun uh so they're the kind of two um symbols that that we can use so it's it's dark in the sense of it as a forest or like under deep underwater or like the outer space yeah uh in our conception of history

um there is a conflict the the existence the origin of civilization between state-based forms and what we call the democratic nation which all the value that come from in society come from come from people it comes from this democratic tendency and the state exists there's this hierarchical you know social stratification this complexification of of social relations between people um and they've always been in conflict you know history is not like a straight line from you know uh tribal society to centralized society

there were many swings both ways there are many strong examples like in england we had the digger movement um there's also the the buddhica who fought against the romans there was the cossacks which were you know military communes that fought against the russian empire the also the the ninja the democratic ninja provinces of igor and koba in japan that was where the ninjas came from you know where these uh democratic provinces run by peasants um also the iroquois confederation which is a huge confederation that lasted many many centuries in

the north america so as rose alluded to um there is this concept of the dark forest and then the the idea that we have is there are uh forest or or mountain topologies where you go around the environment and everything is distinct there's distinctness around around you and the kind of mindset that fosters is a is a polytheistic mindset you know it's one of of uh diversity and you know uh alliances between people and and this is kind of the the squad wealth thesis of crypto or the tribal kind of conception of of d5 or d5 is

enabling but the other one is the the monotheistic desert tendency which is flat ground where you are in the center and you see to the horizon and everything that you see is around you is is with you at the center and and so this is where like sun worship comes from the sun is a hot static object in the sky that represents authority the sun god so that is the other reg fi side of crypto that we see this kind of like emerging and it's kind of interesting because in the ball phases of the market uh the market starts to become saturated with this cheap fiat credit this brothers printed and it starts to flow in and valuations start

to flow up and the vcs who are largely based in the us start to have this like undue ideological influence on on crypto rather they well they use the coercive force of capital of money and you get a lot of these projects where we just saw this last vc pump cycle just before this last step i actually exited because i kind of sensed the retail was exhausted from the last one this one was a vc pump we saw like ridiculous projects getting funded like sold chicks or i i also saw a zke project which got 30 million and i was like well who's this team like nobody

knows his team and the silicon valley vc scam pump you know scam other vcs so you get these projects they have a huge amount of money and they hire all these like managers and bureaucracy and and you know people who do like nonsense work and they just occupy positions in this hierarchy and you have these devs at the bottom and the devs don't they just get orders from the top and they they don't even like follow anything that's going on they're just like tools like little robots and uh and the consequence of that is uh the projects become very inefficient you know you haven't got this like convergence between like the deaths who have knowledge of zk and the d5 token engineers uh and uh to like

actually build like solid you know projects it just becomes this inefficient like many degrees of separation coordination thing and it needs more and more money and it's this monster the the that grows and the bureaucracy class just like enlarges relative to the other classes so we see that in like the bull market phases of the of the market and it kind of reminds me of its major extinction events in pre-history you know where you see these like complex ecosystems which get wiped out you get blown away and then there's this bacteria you know there was actually the permian traffic extinction where there was literally one species of animal that looked like a pig which like it was around for 20 million

years like literally 90 percent of all life on the land was this one species of animal that like of this major extinction event and it was just like it it was just like non-specialized it just ate grass and bits of crap so we we kind of see that happen which is these complex social hierarchies get get like pushed into a very kind of flat hierarchy um and the strategy shifts from you know like optimizing for kind of profit to competing for market share so it's all these like new niches open up because the big dinosaurs die off and everybody starts racing to occupy those niches and you have to be adaptable you have to be

able to and that that's kind of like the organisms that do successful after major extinction events is they have like lots of young and they don't invest much time in their young but they just like you know like cockroaches they can like eat toothpaste they can survive nuclear blasts you know they can live in extreme cold so we we're like there's like two major thesis for crypto one is the super cycle meme which we kind of see is is the case where crypto gets co-opted by this influx of cheap credit and it loses its like ideological edge but we're actually banking on the other one which is the regulatory extinction event which actually will create this

kind of winter but it's actually good for crypto because structurally it's bullish because it it hones it's like ideological edge and it allows like the more meaningful like really interesting design space of zk and other crypto primitives that are being conceptualized now to like fully embody or realize itself you know the problem with the kind of bull market stuff is uh um like uh projects with an edge gets starved of resources it gets suffocated out of existence so i wanna i think there's a lot on back here i want to cut i want to come back to this for a second but i want to quickly go back to the uh to the forest analogy really quick just to make sure i

understand understand it which is but one i'll say like you know the term dark forest means almost something different in crypto now because of just the mev stuff but i'd argue that it's almost the opposite where like you know the issue with the dark force refers to this like thing in in most blockchains with like mev attacks where you can see the mempool but arguably in my opinion that's actually a an issue of an overly white forest right where it's like the problem in my opinion is that the mempool is too visible and everyone can still surveil the menthol and see exactly what everyone else is doing and that's kind of a problem that's sort of what i spend most a lot of my time working on is like how do we create encrypted mempools but anyways but so about like you know how

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

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

for those who don't know the sci-fi three-body problem three-part series it says that um the universe is basically full of life and because of this there's like this complex game of theory that plays out where um the best strategy is to instantly destroy life as it emerges because otherwise you it might attack you so you have these civilizations the most advanced ones which are just like surveilling the entire entire universe and just waiting for life to emerge to to send nukes but uh the solution to the dark fires in the book is that the the earth needs to evolve like a shield you know like a kind of membrane around it that protects it so it's also a situation it's kind of

a misnomer because in in the sense of how we're using dark because for us dark implies encryption uh you know like uh defensive membranes but uh in the case of the book the dark applies uh exposure the that everyone's hiding behind these forests these trees but if they're if they move their head they'll get killed in relation to your question uh i think it's definitely part of the same uh kind of collection of ideas so uh when i talk about the forest i usually give a a kind of anecdote which is that um in uh after the late ice age so like ten

thousand years ago um all of europe was covered in forest um and in ireland where i'm from uh over time these forests evolved to be like the center of society so um out of 16 000 place names in ireland 13 000 of them refer to trees in the name and many many irish surnames have trees also referenced in the name and even the irish alphabet uh was first came from it was named after trees so trees had this like amazing legacy in irish history and they were also the spiritual center of society um so they're sacred sacred places um and what happened was and they were community owned actually in the britain

law it said that the trees were like collectively owned and if you damage them you'd be killed with really high penalties anyway uh during british colonization these trees were cleared and they were cleared because it was very profitable but also because um they were where irish people were lived but also organized and were able to stage like guerrilla attacks so they were the primary line of defense for irish people and after they they were cleared um the the the process of colonization was like basically uh easy because there was no defenses um so so i see a similar kind of uh thing happening now to in the interaction between surveillance and

society uh it's this kind of encroach encroachment which is which is removing the ability of people to resist or to even have like sanctuary and spirituality in the digital world i i haven't thought about it in relation to the book you mentioned on legibility i haven't read it but i think it's it's part of the same response you know so it's very the same feeling one thing i also remember from the manifesto it talks about you know creating the space that's like impenetrable by law enforcement and and of course like law enforcement is very much something that's you know political thing connected with you know nation states today like mostly so i'm

i'm curious like what in this forest desert analogy and and and maybe in general in terms of like this intersection between you know this world and like today's nation states and political systems like how can yeah we just be curious like what your thoughts are on that i think uh our goal is mostly to create these dark safe spaces in which uh remember like the us said they kill people based on metadata like this was a famous quote i think what we're creating is these safe ecosystems where we can not hide but just like live safely in and with these we we are able to express

all our full freedom in our financial systems and our political systems like zero knowledge technology allows us to do this in a in a very proper way i just have one thing to add what ivan said about killing people based off metadata is uh they have a new type of u.s drone now which is called the rx-9 and i only heard i heard about it in concept like two years ago but literally one month ago is the first example i've seen of it being used in a field and what this drone is is the missile instead of exploding on impact what it does it has ninja swords it's

called a ninja missile and the swords come and they slice up a single human target so they have now ninja they have like missiles drone drones which are run by artificial intelligence so it's automated weaponry and these can fly in the sky for hours and hours on end tracking like a huge area of ground and when the ai detects someone who match his face match a certain profile um it launched a missile and the missile go with these ninja swords and and they had a picture of the body of the person literally it was sliced into pieces his hand was here he's like a bit of his arm was here he's literally cut into

little cubes by these swords and it's just a tiny like one person it doesn't cause any collateral damage so also china unveiled now that they have they've made their own version of boston dynamics if people search china big dog on youtube they literally have like an art like rows and rows and rows of these as a big flex so uh for me that's a that's like a terror scenario where you know okay right now you can they're using these ninja weapons on you know brown people in the middle east like who cares but you know like how what's the what's the

threshold when you know the economy is going bad you know they they're trying to extract more wealth from people but it's not working you know people are becoming poorer things become more unstable you know what's the threshold before you know they cross over into using like ninja missiles on people in in in developed nations in their own backyard i saw a video today on uh facebook's metaverse where they were like they were essentially bringing up all of these uh conflicts in the developing world like the tiguan conflict in ethiopia which is a old conflict about ideology between you know different factions that have like

long-term history but the the documentary literally reduced it down to um oh there are brown people killing each other uh facebook doesn't have censorship there you know and they had like a token brown person crying on camera and it was like this call for like surveillance for the surveillance censorship architecture to like be policing like people on the internet so then we're heading in that direction fully there's like enough voices they're pushing for it and it's the strange thing is it used to be the liberal classes that were defending freedom of speech now they're the ones actually calling for censorship so crypto is our best hedge against that ai

surveillance you know censorship futures like you know our means of and i i say let's push for like maximum defense let's push for maximum maximum equipping of the people like everybody should be a minute man everybody's you know the the old idea of you know there's there's no army you are the army like the best defense is not on the edges in the periphery it's throughout the entire organism a good immune system you know where people have a sense of community you know people are like in touch with each other or like uh are looking at what happens in their own local neighborhoods this is the vision of the future the crypto is transpiring the vision of the

ai mega machine is is is one of uh you know that that mean people talk about which is um the great reset you know they have their website they took the video down but the website it had a video and the quote in the video was you will own nothing and you will be happy that that's the future they're giving us like that we own nothing we're just like constantly moving around place to place living on the edges doing odd jobs to survive anything we need we have to rent it you know we're already exploited by paying rent to landlords you know our parents generation who they got stuck in this algorithm where they get credit from the

bank and they buy a property and they don't and they just buy and hold the property it's like the bitcoin maxis they're like i'll just hodl you know and then like the rest of us the millennials and zoomers we're like paying these exorbitant rants that just keep skyrocketing i mean you're mentioning like drones and you know these robots and these things and of course those are like you know things in the physical reality and now you know these other things okay there's like crypto and you know you can make your transaction maybe from your phone your computer and you can have some activity there but you're still you know subject to you know wherever you live i remember um you know when i read the sovereign

individual this book that like predicted like so many things right but like one of the things they also picked in this book was that there would be an explosion in the number of nation states and you would kind of have these big states kind of crumble and there would be this renaissance where people like create new countries and with like you know different different rules different ideas so i'm wondering is like do you think this is is is something like that possible you see something like that coming or is it focused really more fully on this metaverse or you know digital realm yeah so i'm very optimistic um about because

so ethereum foundation you know they tried to create this radical markets vision and from the top down and it never really got adopted by the community you know there was no enthusia there was no latent enthusiasm for that but d5 started off as something that was very nihilistic it was about just making gains and it still is like a large part of it but what we see is that there are some um tendencies some dire some democratic tendencies that exist and these are threads that kind of need to be drawn out and so that that's what we we're trying to do and the important thing is is these networks they're very real they're not just cyber or virtual

there is um uh like like we're seeing now with the free ros style um which they just raised uh 14 million and you know that's something that's that's very real and impactful and um and and i i think it was the the uh owner of uh ave who was talking in efcc he was i saw a speech by his in which he was talking about how it's basically a rallying cry to d5 users that look we have this liquidity we need to start branching this liquidity to local communities we need to start making things move making things happen um so

this process that you talk about the the feudal breakup which happens at the end of empire which happened for example with the roman empire when it broke up it's it's something that's in process like we're seeing in europe now the breakdown of the european union the rise of these these nationalistic uh feudal entities like europe is is definitely heading towards a feudal reality um and the the the also the big shift from a unipolar us-centric world where a lot of their dominance and power is based off of the petro dollar financial network which is now being being challenged by these emerging powers of russia and china

uh but also this uh emerging crypto class which although we're quite small in terms of significance um the we're exponentially increasing and you know like there's something to be said for a technology whose time has come when in the past you know uh the printing press came or many new technologies came which an old class whose power was threatened um you know wanted to stop that technology from from you know embodying or manifesting and but they they and they had to be gra dragged kicking and screaming into the future against their own their will but it happened and

you know the thing is is you know we don't have to worry about crypto adoption happening or not happen happening because it's going to happen it's it's practically an inevitability based off of the the strength and latent power of this technology what we do have to to worry about or think about is um how how is it going to manifest itself in in the future like what is going to be the the end result you know and we have at the root of the base of this thing the ability to shape its outcome through uh the paradigm the mental paradigms that we form which is how you know typically

scientific the kenyan conception of scientific revolutions where you know for example when the copernican theory first came about it did not explain um the motions of the stars and the planets better than the ptolemaic model but all copernicus was saying is that you know here is um another theory which i feel is more elegant like a better explanation but it still took a lot of research and development of that model by scientists to make it competitive with the ptolemaic model and eventually take over the from the metallic model usually in a when there's a dominant scientific paradigm you know there is enough paradoxes and

inconsistencies that start to arise about and the model the the dominant mental model has to be patched so much that it starts to like start to sag under its own weight and then what nest whatnot what basically give the impetus for this shift in consensus among the scientific community is when somebody is able to you know uh when when an opposition voice that has been uh promoting a another paradigm that paradigm you know starts to win gains and you see the same thing with many historical struggles where there is initially a small group of people that you know they they were a minority

voice but um you know and and and maybe struggling for a long time and but then you know events start to shift the balance in their favor because you know their their thesis becomes validated and essentially where we have a thesis about the crypto market which is that crypto is fundamentally antagonistic with these powers there's like no way of resolving it you know you can clip the wings of every you know crypto project in the space or and and you know try to um you know toe the line uh but essentially the only vision of crypto that will be tolerated is a crypto which is harmless

which has been defined and we know we might be saying well that's suicidal because the us is losing its edge and it have so much intellectual capital not only intellectual capital but you know that's the main thing of crypto in based in the us and yet they want to cull their own edge over the rest of the world but you know we're not dealing with a rational um elite class we're dealing with a self-interested neoliberal elite class you know that wants to maintain global hegemony you know the you know the uh trump trump tried to withdraw uh from you know an overextended u.s empire but what we saw is that the deep state is

too powerful like the deep state has its own interests that are orthogonal to the interests of the of the populace so you know you mentioned this uh multi-polar world and so okay you know reading your stuff i know you're a big advocate of like anarchism um and so one of my sort of i'm actually a big fan of multipolar systems because one of my like sort of theses on society is that effect i i think that when you get into like in sort of a hyper anarchist system what ends up happening is that power will

you you'll get people who step in to sort of be these you know whether it's through demagoguery or like pop hyper anarchism leads to populism which then leads to like high levels of centralization and like dictatorship while when you instead go for something that's more multi-polar that you can like play the game theory of it against each other to prevent the rise of a single centralization centralized system so like my theory is that like you know you either if you if you try to make something too decentralized what ends up happening is you go in these like cycles of hyper

decentralization and hyper centralization and these like big you know swing swings that keep going forever but meanwhile like you know if you start something that's somewhere in the middle you can actually sort of have this like you know dampen the level of that swing and that's kind of what i think was was sort of brilliant of the original founding document like system of the united states where like it was designed as this republic rather than a democracy knowing that like hey you know a pure anarchic democratic system will lead to hyper populism but like so by having this like sort of multi-polar

republic e system you can do that and i think the same thing applies to like economics where i think that like hyper competition leads to monopolies the way to prevent monopolies is to allow for oligopolies to form where these like powers are like holding each other in check and i think the same thing applies in a geopolitical sense which is kind of what you're talking about um yeah what do you think about this like how do you how do you how do you reconcile your like the views on anarchism with this like empirical swings that we've seen historically yes so we're not uh anarchists um

we do have a lot of sympathy for the anarchist position we're actually democratic confederatists um you know we're big fans of abdullah chalan who was the leader of the pkk and wrote a series of three books called a manifesto for a democratic civilization and so in so let's talk about first the the good points of anarchism that we sympathize with so first of all um the anarchists you know um they okay they they they ca so in the time of uh the enlightenment you know there is there's the ideology of

um liberalism was one main contender and then there was ideology of socialism and you know nationalism was an outgrowth of the socialist movement and another contender was the anarchists and anarchists did not achieve power in any meaningful way um they also criticized you know capitalism but from the side of the extreme left um and so whereas the marxist said that you know capitalism would be progressive the anarchists you know they seemed there some they saw the system that was emerging as something that was ultimately doomed to decay um but you know they also had um

uh compared to the marxists they had a much more realistic conception of power and the state of the critique which of of the marxists which was that you would end up with a bureaucratic state which would be more dangerous than uh capitalism itself which is which is what happened and the uh they were they were also right in the the nation state was a huge loss for the values of uh equality and freedom and they argued instead for confederalism um also their their their views and criticism of bureaucratization industrialization urbanization

were for a large part spot on incorrect they had an ecological dimension to their critique um and uh they were also they were also correct about um uh their analysis of of of the marxists as as not as being a new form of uh bureaucratic state capitalism so and and now about anarchism where it started to grow wrong is that anarchists came from uh the enlightenment and you know they were kind of corrupted by positivism so um and and part of that was you know their demand the the state be abolished like

immediately and at all costs which was is completely unfortunately like unrealistic and and utopian and a big a big obstacle was their opposition to any type of authority even like legitimate forms of authority which meant that they had an inability to uh conceptualize uh you know the what a system for what we were talking about the democratic nation would look like and how you know we can work together to uh enable that vision to put the steps forward to have a strategy to enable that vision so

you know we we criticize the anarchist movement on on that basis that yes there need to be some type of strategic thought there need to be some form of leadership there need to be some way of people moving together you know but but in terms of the the values or the critique we we agree with those um i decided to quickly add some thoughts on that um because i thought that suddenly the the way that you frame the question is very interesting in terms of these kind of the kind of ebbs and flows of history and it's kind of marks marxist in a way um but the i i agree with you and i and i think history does

have phases and you know it's it shouldn't be our goal to work against those kind of ebbs and flows of history in in in a way and so that's the issue that um that we have with the concept of utopia um which is sometimes promoted by people in the crypto space where utopia assumes that you have a future society which is perfect and and so it's unchanging uh which sounds like a really bad thing it sounds like a a like a authoritarian mega state um so instead like we we should have this kind of future which is like subject to the natural ebbs and flows of history um and in terms of those kind of phases

i think we're in the miss in the middle of a shift at the moment from this kind of materialist era uh into something more ideational and and this is a pattern we see throughout history um where you know we have these kind of religious ideational phases which are followed by more material phases and we just had in the west this kind of flip fairly recently you know we had the middle ages followed by the enlightenment and followed by the modernity where the enlightenment was kind of a uh a mixed phase which mixed uh religious elements with materialist elements um and we see throughout history that these moments of transition are actually the most generative um and

i think we're we're in the midst of a kind of transitionary era where we have both these materialist tendencies and the ideolatial tendencies um and crypto is a really good example of of a movement which demonstrates both aspects um but there's also a kind of pattern that we see a lot where uh these kind of revolutions especially recently revolutions get captured by more organized groups so you know all across the arab springs various revolutions one after the other co-opted by militant islam so you know there's also the risk that that crypto could have it's vulnerable to a similar kind of takeover and that's why we also really emphasize that crypto develop its own

kind of ideological position you know in its own its own voice and so that it's organized enough um both practically but also philosophically um to resist that kind of takeover is that another thing i i i think was mentioned in the manifesto maybe or somewhere else but this idea of like a moral fiber and you know civilization having a moral fiber like what's the connection between crypto and yeah and sort of more fiber the this this is actually a version of the philosophy again atlan uh

especially his third book where he talks about the um the moral and political uh fabric of society um and that's a really interesting concept because he kind of talks about he says like okay there's something outside of the nation state which is society but what constitutes that society and its values and so he tries to do a kind of history of like there are places like he calls nations where which are these kind of ideological consistencies where um the the people's political will is expressed and so that's what maryland political uh society is it's basically the the the emergent political and moral properties of the of the society um

that they uphold so it offers a kind of a new access on which to build like governance systems um uh and and and that's what we're referring to in the manifesto yes so if you look up the definition of uh society on wikipedia it will say society is defined as the social relations between a group of people but underneath a dominant morality and politics so when we when we talk about uh empowerment of society um a big question is uh okay so how is that political system and what is that moral framework does it does it exists to

empower society or does it exist to disempower kind of society you know in favor of like this state so um you know in terms of and and uh chilean so typically when people talk about politics the way people talk about politics is that politics is you know the study of power it's the practice of power but that is actually a kind of corruption which is a consequence of the ideology of the system that we live in today because politics is is the activity that we as people engage in

um you know that's concerned with concerning uh our freedom our security our well-being um and you know uh the the way that the system conceptualize uh politics now is that you know people are pre-political you know people have like innate desires that they're born with and that they can't be changed but um actually the way that you design your political system or your institution can actually um actually has it has this kind of feedback loop with the kind of um the kind of values that people have in society and actually the way that you design your political framework can

assist people in becoming more individuated and people to become more spiritual to develop a more public nature when the goal of politics essentially is to multiply public spaces and when we are engaging in this kind of discourse of politics with other people what we're essentially doing is you know we're learning to empathize with other people we're learning about how to negotiate for our interests you know with we're learning about how to uh do discourse so um that kind of nature uh is is a very healthy uh tendency to encourage um in terms of society and so when we talk about uh

uh morality we're essentially talking about the ideational aspect the the belief system because we were talking earlier about paradigms and how paradigms act as a form of consensus that get people who who have knowledge of techniques you have this form of power over the material world to get them to kind of work together in a coordinated way towards realizing some kind of vision of the future and so that's like that's important to instill into people it's like otherwise you get this reality where you have you know uh the visionary is like one one dictator at the top and you've got bureaucracy and you've

got devs at the bottom who are just essentially tools after tools are being used to implement the will of somebody else like a giant mechanism and the consequence of that form of human social organization is that it leads to a type of technology which become overly complex which is which is type of mega techniques and that's why we have so uh that's why the systems that we use today are very inhumane because they're made by gigantic corporations which you know enslave developers the developers are just they're just a tool in a big apparatus we need to get away from this vision of technology

the both the user and the developer need to become synonymous you know people need to participate in constructing the paradigm just to add amir's thoughts about morality and these things is like we as skilled developers must like feel the need to to help our society the people we live we live with and uh in order to like amir mentions that like programmers are being degraded into robots by their oppressors who are usually their bosses in a company uh crypto allows us to fight fight against this so we can finally like capture value um capture value in the in in our own projects not having to work for uh for a paycheck every month but actually like if we're skilled enough we can

we can fulfill our moral moral need to help our society so you know it sounds like what there's a claim here that's being made that like society is civilization has these like ups and downs and like you know there's a book that i like uh or like by peter turchen it's called like secular cycles and it kind of like shows that like hey you know society does have these like very clear ups and downs and it's almost like very malthusian in a way but like um you know the the there's this quote which is like the uh uh hard times create strong men strong men create good times good times straight weak men and weak men create hard times strongly friend create many

attendees many attendees create weak friends weak friends create a few attendees you claim that it's because of this like sort of moral degradation of society um and the question is i guess like so you think that there's a way of reversing that like can do you think that like we can fight against these cyclical trends or is it sort of um inevitable like i mean i know like your twitter bio has the has the quote about like uh you know society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and fighting by fools and like you know you i guess obviously in a way personified

this idea of like hey you know you know with your like stint in rehab and stuff like do you think that there's a way of like reversing the moral like change like with direction of society or is it sort of inevitable um i just want to say quickly before i pass the others that um there's also a kind of um geography to this discussion where different parts of the world undergo there are different step parts of the cycle at the same time so i think we're seeing a shift from like the western centric paradigm toward you know like societies emerging there in africa and the middle east and so i think possibly

the west is beyond saving maybe um but these are new societies that we can put our attention on that you know are like in a really good position also for adopting everything that's happening now in crypto jordan peterson seems to be on this like mission to like see like hey can we use like narrative new narrative structuring to like reinstill like moral fibers within society like is this a worthwhile cause that can be accomplished i i think the uh if you you know uh john mccarthy he uh he's the guy that invented the term artificial intelligence he also invented

the concept of the time sharing operating system and computer networks and the reason why he invented that was because he was a communist and essentially what he was seeing were you know there were these giant computers which you know if you wanted to use them uh you had to make an appointment and they were owned by military and um and in industry and he had the idea he was like what if a computer was shared between everybody what if a computer was like a electrical utility you just go you plug into the

wall and you can use a bit of that computer and the outcome of that was the the forming of uh of the project by j.r licklider which i forgot the name of it right now but that project led to the development of arpanet which led to the development of the internet it was a direct lineage and then also from the basis between the for the modern conception of the operating system which became realized with unix so that massive leap in computer architecture design happen because of a guy who had

a certain ideological leap or mental leap that other people were not able to think about i give another example um i read all of the letters of ada lovelace that uh uh between her sister and you know other people including charles babbage charles babbage uh create he designed the first computer now the computer did not get built because he you know was uh very artistic and he kept changing the design and he kept arguing with people and you can see in ada's letters that she was very very frustrated because she realized

that this was something of huge magnitude this was in the 1840s the first computer would not be actually built until world war ii in the 1950s where it was built for the war effort but in the 1840s you know ada lovelace she was trying to get babaji's computer to be realized and she was the first programmer uh she she was designing computer programs on paper and she was a she was a woman she they she was she was obsessed with mathematical beauty but also the social nature of reality and um in her papers you can see you can see her writing where she's saying

that the computer is a tool that will have uh tremendous significance the uh there should be one in every single person's home the people will be able to create music on them people will be able to create artworks with them and the thing is that that time nobody was able to see the importance of the computer except ada lovelace everybody else thought that it was just like an interesting kind of tool for uh industrial applications they didn't realize that there was a greater social magnitude and so there wasn't as big a push to get this device realized it was one person who sadly was way ahead of her time it would not be 150 years later

50 years after the computer was built in the 1950s when people would start using computers to make computer graphics and artwork and etc so you know uh oftentimes uh oftentimes it you know um it's like when i look at the vcs now there's a lot of mid iq range normative vcs who they go what's next what's the next big thing in crypto nfts blockchain gaming you know they just they're just saying like whatever you know cool thing that they've heard around they can't they're not able to imagine what the future is you know it's

whereas what we're seeing now with zk is like holy crap it like opened up a huge new design space like an untapped design space there's so much great things that we can create that we dreamed about 20 years ago and in fact you know the the vision of the unix operating system that they wanted to make back in the 80s it was constrained by you know resource constraints by uh uh you know uh by the tools that they had available to them then uh by the uh you know like they didn't have zk cryptography you know uh they didn't have like uh consensus

algorithms the computers were slow but they built something that was the changed the world changed the world of computing and what with what we have now is we have the tooling and and and the economic resources and the computer power to fully realize that vision that was started in the 80s and so and there's there's been a big break like the computer has not changed since the 80s we we're still using the same type of operating system i mean like if i open uh if i want to like edit something on on a document people are using google docs you know if i want to edit a picture i

have to edit create the picture and send it to someone but like now we can network the computers we can we can create applications that uh enable new forms of human activity that weren't before possible you know ross albrecht when he made the silk road in the beginning he said oh you know i'm just making an economic simulation let's let's see where this goes you know that's that's what he said when he announced it i'm working on an economic simulation you know let a thousand simulations bloom i guess maybe this kind of leads into like darkfy and what you guys are building right now so like what are what do you see as like

the big problems that need to be tackled um yeah what what do you think are like the big ideas that like crypto can help fix obviously one of them you know obviously there's this idea of privacy but like even within privacy what are like you know do you think it's privacy of exchange privacy of communication privacy of what are the problems that you that you hope to be able to solve well we want to firstly like we want to solve the thing of getting back our sovereignty all the current chains are just being uh they're being surveilled and controlled and uh

people just don't have their privacy left anymore like finally we have this these zero knowledge mechanisms that are built and we're able to use them properly uh also in dark fight or one of our goals is like empowering developers so what we are also building is like a simplified simplified tooling and simplified mechanisms for developers to just be able to use and write their own zk algorithms on products so we can build with zero knowledge uh most of these things are completely anonymous so we can finally have anonymous voting anonymous dows we can have futures markets with like different kind of liquidation

engines amir actually has a really cool design for this you can maybe mention uh we can also like help journalists and whistleblowers to to leak data to like encrypt and sell this auction this data in zero knowledge and this is all finally like hidden from any kind of adversary who is just watching what's happening on the chain and you avoid many of many many consequences like also by using mixnets and parallel networks one of them is actually i spoke to one of them uh earlier last week is nim and it's a mixnet that also allows us to

to hide our traffic so then these mixness combined with zero knowledge uh gives us the ultimate power of just uh being able to hide anything we're doing on the internet and uh be safe and just uh to be sovereign yeah i think that was beautifully said and i just add that like from the kind of the technical side the the main problem that we're trying to solve is also that we have this uh incredible technology which has been developed over the course of crypto which is zk um but so far it's very obscure and it's it's very hard for developers to use or understand

and so the main problem now is just to make tooling so that it's very easy for developers to make any kind of uh privacy application and there are many then problems from the product side that like developers can solve like i i haven't mentioned like each um the whole technical paradigm right now is defined by surveillance surveillance so for each tool that's based off of data harvesting you can build an anonymous um decentralized and and like crypto incentivized alternative um so so that's a big that's a big concern for us yes and uh continuing on zero knowledge we are building a smart contract

language a virtual machine that executes these and also like an optimizing compiler because it's very difficult to write circuits in your knowledge uh you have to know you have to deeply know algebra and how things work but since we want people to prototype and build products we will we decided like instead of doing this by hand these optimizations we can actually just build a compiler and probably the the computer is faster than the brain and can like figure these optimizations out and and make these zero knowledge circuits a lot a lot faster um the thing about the language we're building is it's uh

it's a c it's a c like syntax so basically anyone who knows anything about programming can just implement this implement products in in this language it's uh synced as well so there is no kind of a circuit configuration you don't have to think about these the compiler solves this for you well you just implement your uh your uh your algorithm your logic or what you want to do so on our in our documentation we have also examples of these the zero knowledge backhand we're using is is halo 2.

we actually did some research on the community and what they want and even though halo 2 is a bit a slower implementation of the zk mechanism for zk algorithm uh the big point is there is no trusted setup and this immediately there is an implication of being more trustless systems like many other projects are building with intel sgx or they're building with trusted setups they might be fast but they will always like sgx will always be a black box and you cannot always trust black boxes even though they might be just fine and in turn so i've mainly been focused on

reviewing their research and applying their research so we have several lines of research so one of them is in terms of the zk algorithms themselves so right now halo 2 is an algorithm that's very much optimized for anonymous payments that's why the kind of algorithm was developed by the z cash guys but we're more interested in the whole kind of gamma of um applied kind of zk so um there are there are other kind of trade-offs you can make with other zk algos which for example can allow uh

complex data structures to exist inside of zk so if as long as so if you have for example um the basic primitives of a set then from a set you can construct a hash map and then from a hush map you can basically construct like any sort of complex data structure um and so you know there's a different way of optimizing zk algorithms uh one of which is um you know unknown order groups so you know we're interested in in you know maybe taking maybe uh you know keeping the same keep uh replacing because right now everything's based on elliptic curves but you know

there's other types of unknown order groups which you know you use other mathematical premises for example you have ideal class groups you have a more risky newer construction which is jacobian hyperelectric curves um so uh yeah and then we we also kind of prototype our algorithms in sage math and you know another interesting idea is the the compiler that we make right now has is very much tied to the halo 2 back end but if we wanted to have it customizable with different algorithms on the back end then what we could do is we can develop a sage-like

intermediate like polynomial kind of uh uh tooling from like algebraic like kind of compiler and then you like implement the algos on the back end i think this is the approach that item three has taken with their their compiler enables them to iterate with other algorithms very quickly um um you know starks uh there's different types of uh recursivity so the recursivity which is used in halo 2 so you have these two attic curves which can where the scalar field is the base field of the other and vice versa and so you know you you can create a verifying circuit inside of zk and then construct all these proofs that

you amortize at the end you like combine them into one using the bulletproof trick but there are other ways of doing that for example uh people build a stark verifier inside of like a um zk i'll go like halo 2 or or gross 16 and then uh and and starks is recursive so you know that's that's one way of it also um zk um the user creates the proof uh but if you have some kind of state that needs to be updated based off of secret information then uh you need a way to poke the smart contracts to update the state so that's where other kind of mechanisms start to

come in which we're we're we're kind of uh developing um and yeah and then and so for example the amm uh it's basically impossible to make a anonymous amm because you have these two paws of capital where the state gets updated and that's globally visible to everyone so the the main technique that people use to solve that is batching but the problem is if the batch is too small it's not anonymous if the batch is too big then the price moves against you and is capital inefficient so the actual market mechanisms that we build in zk have to be completely different uh because we have a different set of constraints to not have to deal with these constraints

um there is as i said the complex data structures um which we're researching into earlier but also um you know you have to have a blockchain as fast and so then they kind of shift also the focus uh heavily on to bridges so we're very much thinking very much like the cosmos model where you have different um nodes that are running very fast and you have bridges in and out to execute functions on the different smart contracts um i know a lot of people are like in favor of the ef l2 model i just don't see that as the future especially given the kind of shift um in the mindset of crypto away from

this like this this single chain model to this like multi-asset many-to-many paradigm um so yeah we're doing like a lot of um kind of theoretical research on the side you know and then in a pipeline applying that and then that applied or prototype research making it into maine where it goes into products so we can currently have all these tracks simultaneously um and there are also some interesting things that uh rose is also doing with uh token engineering which is another technique that you could use to get around

uh restrictions with anonymity so for example the way tornado cash distributes rewards to the people who are staking is they they have this amm where the reward is stripped into one side but everybody who's staking in an epoch gets minted token one to one so that's like a a financial solution to a technical so like an uh technical problem so we can also leverage that so in terms of like what's possible with the tech um actually a lot is possible like you know it's you just have to like be able to think differently and that's that's the new design space we talk about like it's a door which is opened and it's there to be explored for everyone and we want to

we want to bootstrap this ecosystem