DarkFi: The Coming Storm

Transcript

greetings comrades i'm excited to share with you today a project we've been working on for the last four years our project is an environment for anonymous zero knowledge smart contracts which is called dark phy darkfy is not a corporate startup you know dogfight we are a community uh and a movement um dogfight is a democratic economic experiment an e operating system for humanity

i'm here with my team of developers rose who will be demoing our very our prototype test net is working a lot on token engineering and ivan working on cryptography here's one of if if you go to the website suckless.org you will and read their code philosophy you can understand more about that um community of people and so

we're all here because we're brought together on this mission to solve problems like we are a lot of us are hackers and the hacker mindset is about uh trying to use technical means to solve problems you know that's what the haka movement was about and in particular everybody feels that in the next five years there is some kind of macro economic or political event of of tremendous significance um that's that's going to happen we can't exactly say

what it is what is is going to happen but we all kind of feel this instinctively and it's reflected uh in the movies that we watch like if you remember the movies in the 90s um they i remember in in school in high school i was drawing pictures um of tsunamis crashing into the city and we just won against the soviet union and i and it was like everybody was like okay what's next and everything was so boring and we had all these movies about independence day and godzilla and you know day after tomorrow where there was some kind of apocalypse scenario and then what happened what did we get we got 9 11. and i remember coming home from school and

you know in our house we did not have television but we did have a tv aerial which was illegal to use in the uk and my mom was connecting the tv area and she was going nothing will ever be the same ever again and it was every single news channel was was showing the twin towers collapsing and it was it was huge and the and the thing is when the last year or so i watched so much uh sci-fi and all of the sci-fi movies there's this apocalypse it's very dark it's very brooding there's something bubbling under the surface and the thing is is that we all collectively feel this this is something which is

uh being manifest in some ways by us you know and it's it's kind of like in the final days of the soviet union uh everybody everybody could see that what they were watching on the television was not what they were experiencing in their life the economy around them was collapsing um the reality they were being shown was clearly false but people could not imagine a different way of being a different society or a different kind of system and and and because of that people even though they knew everything was a lie they just

kept they kept operating the same way they kept living the same system and it's kind of similar to what we're experiencing now we can clearly see there are deep structural crises in our system and yeah it's nobody can imagine what comes next um and the salute the system itself has no solutions the system it only responds with more control more power more domination and empathy and meanwhile people are becoming so poor like people are really really poor and it's like the desperation is is really seeping in like people in the 50s used to be able to

work for two years and to buy a house on minimum wage it's wild like how far this has come and meanwhile uh both political power and economic power is being concentrated and centralized ever more in particular with cbdc's central bank digital currencies they're trying to push local banks out of existence and and and in an end result will be that everybody just has a current account directly at the central bank you know and and a lot of the left they're very excited about ubi universal basic income which is essentially uh the

the fiat coin airdrop for to incentivize people to use their system and when we brought china into the wef in the 90s the whole idea was oh the chinese would learn to be more like us actually what's happened is the reverse and china is is uh implemented this system of social credit scoring and what the west has done is the the west is going oh that's a good idea that's an inspiration and so what's now what they're trying to do with the cbdc's is they want to they want to create a system where they can incentivize citizens to behave a certain way whether where everybody is under

uh control of uh essentially uh a server inside of the central bank the central server in the central bank this so this system of surveillance that's being erected is an architecture of oppression uh surveillance is a war on society a type of war a type of genocide that we could call a society side and crypto is the best means we have of protecting ourselves from that system of oppression um if in 2013 the fbi uh released a report called the going dark problem and i

encourage people to look this up there's a youtube video the director of the fbi james comey is talking about the going dark problem which is that because of the edward snowden disclosures uh people had become more aware of the surveillance apparatus all around them and had begun to adopt encryption technologies and as a consequence this threatened to create a dark online zone that would be impenetrable to law enforcement and james comey calls this and calls this encryption technology the tech tool of choice for criminals so that's how they view us they view us all as criminals so the position of our organization is

actually that these dark online zones what allows the nascent emergent seed of true democratic society to come into itself to realize itself and there's a there's a beautiful quote from the movie v for vendetta where the main character he says beneath this mask is more than flesh beneath this mask is an idea and ideas are bulletproof and for me that that quote really captures the will of crypto it says that even though you can control someone through physical force you cannot control an idea and our ideas are

powerful there is an inevitability about them and sooner or later everybody is going to adopt crypto and you know yet there are people in our industry who are afraid and they want us to bend the need to power but history says otherwise change is coming new inventions and new breakthroughs practically guarantee it if you look at the history of any major technological revolution there was nothing no political force that could stand in the way of social change so my message to those people is stop worrying about your image stop worrying what others think of you

so if we look in crypto now there's a lot of projects that are very bland very boring and the thing is is that there is a certain network of people largely based in the us who uh from which this pressure originate and they always say you know and they always say you know like think of the first world consumer think of mass adoption what they really mean is think of my friends in the state who i need the support of to maintain my position because they get you know cheap dollars that they give to people who give them allocation in their projects but and the thing is those people they hate the free market

so the interesting thing is we look at what the market actually desires we look at what capture people's attention what is exciting is you know vitality dynamism intensity and if that wasn't true then you know we wouldn't our attention wouldn't be captured by heroic heroic stories about struggles for freedom so to those in power i say darkness is here your demise is inevitable you know when we are born we come from the all-encompassing dark into the world and then when we die we return back to the dark the dark is cosmic the dark is our destiny it lies

behind the curtain in every direction and represents freedom growth and life we have also been gifted agaris counter economics algorithm is the philosophy of uh uh many of the early people in the bitcoin it's a a philosophy that was somehow forgotten it was also uh ross albrecht's favorite book was alongside knight was a story about a group of revolutionary libertarian cadre who overthrow the us government through free market economics and free market trade and algorithm is about using counter economics and markets to create

these free spaces these parallel societies um and the funny thing is when i'm walking around and i see the bitcoin logo and outside in the street it's like wow we're actually living in this novel alongside night is like we're actually seeing this materialized right now a lot of the narrative inside of crypto is you know very focused on you know the first world and stuff like artfi game fi social media fi and you know stuff to do with the entertainment and celebrity business and this is the kind of site the cr the power will allow to persist and survive precisely because

it doesn't harm anything um and it's it's pretty much like i wouldn't say totally but kind of a dead end but with crypto any person can send to anyone else to any place at any time in the planet or you know we can make our own sovereign organizations which are self-governed and autonomous you know organizations which are uncensored anonymous and open source you know i really think there is something uh emerging that's extremely powerful out of daos and defy which is um the that people are or new concepts or novel modalities are able to

realize their potentiality before state influences can narrow them ideologically and what daos and d5 really do is they destroy proprietary models of power and capital monopolies and they will try to stop this at all costs because it it's it's a big threat to their power and i say let's wilt that power let's make things happen you know um and crypto anarchy crypto anarchy is the tactic of using cryptography to create a space of freedom which cannot be penetrated by the power and capital monopolies using coercive force it's a space of freedom which should nascent

seed of democratic society social structures that resist state control and totalitarian power from the start they are programmed with the code of resistance spaces which counter social atomization and promote voluntary communal bonds by those who cherish freedom and these dark spaces are what we call an alliance of democratic forces the darkness is coming and we'll sweep over our digital world it cannot be stopped since the benefits it brings are too great or the latent potentialities of humanity that are being pushed down will be

allowed to rise up to the top this is a great power that we must use respectfully remember every technological revolution in history had its naysayers who wanted to put the genie back into pandora's box but they were dragged kicking and screaming into the future against their will when the printing press was invented there was widespread revulsion at the fact that the working class had access to news and information and yet here we are repeating events i'm not making any judgments or edicts it's simply statements of fact take it or leave it this

is what will happen welcome to the agarest future let there be dark i'm going to give a very swift demo of uh where we're at with dark fight currently louder sorry can you hear me uh quick demo um and then i'm going to pass on to ivan who's going to give another quick demo um so just to explain briefly where we're at with darkfy fight we have a test net now operational on the test net you can

deposit send and receive anonymous tokens the tesla is multi-blockchain we have bridges working with solana and bitcoin and we plan to add ethereum and monero very soon uh the tesla showcases um two anonymous smart contracts uh the mint and burn which enable anonymous payments and in the future darkfor will be able to support any kind of anonymous contract and so this just showcases um you know some of its potential um so i'm going to start off well actually first i'm going to check

my balances typing with one hand here you can see i've got some tokens on there already so i'm going to deposit some monero and i'm gonna do so like this oh by the way you can find this testnet um on github at um github dot um slash dark renaissance slash darkfy and uh follow the instructions in the readme to install it and follow the tutorial at slash doc tutorial.md and for more detailed instructions

uh i'm going to need you to hold this for a sec thanks deposit xmr oh yeah so now i just made a deposit request uh to the dark fight cashier which is gonna i'm gonna deposit some monero and it's gonna send me back some dark monero darkened monero

so i'm now gonna send some token uh just picking up the address for monero i'm gonna transfer one of those oh and i have to one second it's going to give me an a warning oh yep okay so that was

transferring should oh yeah so so they just got sent to um the the dark phy cashier which is um issuing anonymous rap tokens in exchange for the token that i just deposited that are one one one to one redeemable um so let's just check if that came through balances if so we should see some xmr oh not yes oh you can't see just like screen oh

okay it's probably the engineer's connection's really bad um but i will go through ahead and just demonstrate how we would use the tool with the rest so um this is transfer and i will use i will send some ohms to uh i'm just going to send to myself actually address dark transfer [Music]

i sn1 so i'm now sending some anonymized ohms to another darkfy user i'll just hold the mic yeah sure so um this is the process that we're now going through is like central to how we anonymize the the coins within darkfie

so every time there is a transfer or like a state transition um the coins are burned and a fresh coin is minted so that's how we achieve this um anonymity which we define as the unlinkability between transactions okay that's lagging i think so this is enforced um with zero knowledge we create um mint and spend contracts and and then we write proofs that enforce their behavior um but uh we'll hear a little bit more about that in the next uh in the next demo

should i go wrong yeah yeah okay so the way you see this it's like built modularly we have all these tools that follow the unix philosophies which is like we allow people to actually build their own interfaces and their own scripts to dark fight so you the the narrative today's like crypto development is these monolithic pieces of software they're only work from the browser or only work uh as a single like black box binary or it's not ideal what you what we do and what philosophies we follow is actually the point where we can build and empower developers to build interfaces based on unix principles

when it comes to zk we we also want to follow these philosophies so we want to empower developers we want to we don't want them to be thinking about this esoteric machinery which is like zk circuits and how to optimize these circuits and how to write them we want to empower developers with a simple language that actually shows them i can't multitask that actually explains them how to write circus but without worrying about optimization we we want the language to be simple an example of it proof

so for example this is like piece of our language um it's like from the sapling payment scheme you have mint and spent this is the mint side of it and if you've ever written zk circuits you know that you like have to do a certain configuration and optimizations in these things we actually build our own assembly like language and we have our compiler like be ready to have plugable optimizations in it so we with this we empower developers they can just like write products and iterate really fast without uh worrying about what's happening in the back end in the machinery so with this kind of code that you see on the screen we can

actually compile it and it becomes it becomes like a binary code so this is like a human human readable version and what we can do with it is we can run it in a vm so this actually executes the oh so this actually executes the min

contract and uh does this real knowledge proof the software using behind this is zcash's halo 2 we use the complete api and that's how if we reuse the existing software we can easily build optimizations so having simple interfaces like this and having the workflow streamlined allowing like unix philosophies and approaches and letting you build your own interfaces we can allow developers to build many kinds of anonymous products and they can have anonymous dows anonymous auctions anonymous swaps anonymous futures anonymous market everything just simply done with with streamlined

tooling yes so that's the bm part and if where's the mirror okay do you want to finish on [Applause]