Episode 338 - On Trust Infrastructure with Arnaud Schenk

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week Nico and I chat with our guest Arno shank and dive into the topic of how communities develop in the digital space starting with a discussion about the history of computer culture the rejection of Institutions by the mid90s internet culture how the seeds

for this were set by the' 60s counterculture we then switch over to discussing the key points he raised in a recent blog post entitled trust infrastructure we discussed the downsides and dangers of a trustless system the need for new institutions structures or norms to make it possible to build long- lasting online communities and how programmable cryptography may play a role in these Solutions but Arno also makes it clear that the post is not prescriptive but rather the idea of trust infrastructure is a starting point for a bigger conversation it was a lot of fun to chat about this and I do think this is very much an open topic so very curious to hear what you think about it now before kick off I just want to point you

towards the ZK jobs board there you can find job opportunities to work with top team teams in ZK I also want to encourage teams looking for top talent to post your jobs on the ZK jobs board as well we've been hearing more and more from teams that used it that they found excellent Talent through this jobs board so be sure to check it out I've added the link in the show notes also a quick reminder we are back with ZK Summit 12 happening in Lisbon on October 8th be sure to get your application in if you want to be eligible for an early bird ticket the ZK Summit is a one-day ZK focused event where you can learn about Cutting Edge research new ZK paradigms and products and the math and cryptographic techniques that underpin our favorite ZK systems all info and the application form to attend can be found

at ZK summit.com I hope to see you there now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors Alo is a new layer one blockchain that achieves the programmability of ethereum the privacy of zcash and the scalability of a rollup driven by a mission for a truly secure internet Alo has interwoven zero knowledge proofs into every facet of their stack resulting in a vertically integrated layer one blockchain that's unparalleled in its approach Alo is ZK by Design dive into their programming language Leo and see what permissionless development looks like offering boundless opportunities for developers and innovators to build ZK apps this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK Journey dive deeper

and discover more about Alo at al.org [Music] galot is the first decentralized proving layer with galot users can generate and verify proofs using any proof system for any use case you can use one of the default provs from projects like Aztec Stark net and polygon or you can deploy your own galot is on a mission to dramatically decrease the cost of proving by aggregating proving workloads from across the industry to better utilize underlying Hardware while not compromising on performance galot is offering Priority Access to ZK podcast listeners so if you would like to start using high performance proving infrastructure for free go register on gal.com and write ZK podcast in the note

field of the registration form so thanks again galot and now here's our [Music] episode hey Nico and I are here with Arno a co-founder of Aztec welcome to the show Arno thank you so much for having me and we have Nico hey Nico hi Anna hi Arnold so this episode came about because Nico you you had theide a I think you had gone to an event that Arno put together and you suggested him for the show so yeah I just was hoping you could share a few words about what you had in mind yeah I mean it came from multiple places for me cuz I've been also hanging around I think similar people to you have been uh alno in London these days um and so this

Narrative of trust infrastructure that alno has been pushing has been quite prevalent uh and then last week you hosted this hash it out event where a lot of Builders uh came came together to talk a lot about programmable cryptography and so I thought all these Realms intersected nicely there's a big intersection between hash it out and ZK hack in terms of like the people who show up so I thought this would be a really good fit cool so let's kick off I know I know we're going to be spending some time in this episode talking about this trust infrastructure but I think we should start with getting to know you a little bit um tell us a bit about your past joining aztech and also what got you first excited about ZK topics yeah cool so um I it's funny I reflected

a couple of days ago I've just turned 30 and I used to introduce myself as a high school dropout but I don't think I've done that very recently um because it's too long ago now too long ago exactly um but no i' I've been in uh startups and in Tech basically since I left school um always in quite early stage companies and um in about 2015 I moved to London uh to work at this organization called entrepreneur first um entrepreneur first is also the kind of VC or incubator where uh astec or became astec started Um Zack and Tom who I think you've had both on the ZK podcast right Z for sure Tom yeah um

Zach multiple times actually Zach multiple times he's a he's a good person to have on a show for sure um so Zach and Tom knew each other uh through family friends and they had started working on this thing that at the time was called credit mint um they worked on it parttime uh they join entrepreneur first to start working on it full-time that's when I joined them and then Joe who I think also has been on the ZK podcast joined us a few a few months later and the interest in ZK um I think was uh yeah it kind of came out of necessity so we were building this platform our initial idea was to try and issue this financial asset called a syndicated loan on ethereum uh for a bunch of reasons we thought that a

good asset to try and put on chain I still think it is but uh yeah we'll we'll we'll see where it goes um and along the way we built this this whole platform and uh we talked to these private debt funds which are responsible for for issuing these assets and they basically told us look we like the idea we like the the platform but there's absolutely no way we're putting these assets in all our transactions on chain completely publicly um and so we started well mostly Zach um uh Zach was animated by uh at the time what seemed like an irrational belief that he could pick up cryptography um from scratch um and roll his own crypto he did he did however those early iterations as I understand

were slightly rough yeah that's my way to put it the very I remember the the very first iteration which um uh yeah was out of a fever dream of of Zach for um a couple couple weeks of of intense uh introduction to cryptography for him and he went went to speak we had we got an introduction to Yen's Groth of grth 16 Fame and um it turned out it was completely wrong yes yes yes oh no this is funny I I want to do a quick throwback because there is an episode or I think the first episode I ever had with Zach was 2019 or something like that and I remember him telling that story of yans grod and like yens giving

him all the advice and kind of pointing him in a New Direction and just another side note is we just had Yan Scot on the show like two weeks ago too he's he's working at another CK company now indeed um his his new company by the way is is um I think going the same direction as as broadly like programmable crypto and and Trust infrastructure stuff so yeah I'm excited to see what what he does um so yeah anyways that that was uh when I met Zach and Tom that was late 2017 I had been paying attention to crypto but not actively in it for um a few years there was something really appealing to crypto maybe as a frontier as this sense of hey maybe this is an environment

um where we could get out of maybe these inadequate equilibrium equilibria that that we uh seem to to have found ourselves in um and I think realistically it was crypto was appealing because it was this continuation of the promise of the internet um uh I i' I've started making the distinction between the internet and cyberspace I think cyberspace is closer to the the idea that animated the early um creators of of what became the internet um cyberspace as a as a place right as a frontier as a as an environment um you know the the very famous Declaration of Independence of cyberspace from John Perry Barlo which um hilariously um he basically argues uh

in that Declaration of you know we're we're no longer uh going to be subject to the will and the power of states and um I always find it absolutely hilarious that he wrote that at Davos but um you know you can only win some things um but yeah I I I felt like crypto is a continuation of of that promise maybe um and I found that quite appealing and then yeah by accident got into uh cryptography and uh at first really quite basic cryptography and then ZK um and uh yeah that that was maybe the the start of of Aztec I actually left a de uh at the tail end of 2020 um I think I was maybe a little bit disillusioned

during the the kind of Summer of yield farming with crypto um it felt to me like there was this this Core group of people who were earnestly trying to create this new space and you know taking this idea of crypto as a frontier really really seriously um and then there was this uh wide uh because crypto like imposes limitations on you and uh it's actually um I think you you can only be productive in the space if you take seriously that what you're doing is uh not probably not going to look like a startup right it's probably going to be um slightly closer to uh well just to you know in the 1600s moving to the US

um and it has to be a little bit ideologically motivated and um it it has to be something a little bit deeper than just uh building uh something that gets a bunch of users very very quickly um yeah I don't know I I felt maybe a little bit disillusioned with where the space was uh in 2020 2011 what happened to the promise right yeah exactly yeah it's funny though that defi summer turned you because to me that was only the start of the insanity that followed and it was it's interesting when you think back to that era I mean it created so much energy it brought in a ton of new people For Better or Worse very quickly um but defi summer actually seems like a blip compared to what happened the next

year or the year after and it's funny because I think we're still we still have the sort of the spirit of the casino that was started then um with us now I wonder like I think it's also responsible for a lot of the disillusionment today and frustration today but it's just interesting that even in 2020 you were feeling it I was kind of excited by it I don't know if I spotted it as as negative I was sort of like also bored at home during Co and I was like this is fun I'm gonna try sushi Swap and lose F there I do I do think it's um in retrospect I think I was maybe a little

bit too um what's the word that I'm looking for I I guess I saw some people that to me felt like exactly the kinds of people that I wanted to follow um people who seem to be really living and breathing crypto and uh really Earnest in the space um and really ideologically committed to the to the space I think if it had just been oh we're all having fun here this is just a lot of fun I wouldn't have like had that strong of a reaction but there was the sense of this is the future um and the circularity of it um was kind of papered over and at some point people got quite hostile to just being like I I I guess this is the discussion of of the week um as we're

recording still um because I do think there there are really valuable things that have come out of of Defi and by the way one of the mistakes that I think a lot of um people in the in the space more broadly make is is to be uh almost like holer than now on on defi or people in the that have been attracted to crypto um I think you can both um respect what has been built and kind of like happy that there was this energy that got created but also aspired to something maybe a little bit bigger um a little bit more uh a little bit more interesting um and for us to finally have an answer of yeah but where does the yield come from um you know I think that's a that's a worthy aspiration

that's true let's go back to the story though so you were a bit disillusioned at that moment and did you step away or did you just yeah did you focus on something else uh I stepped away and took quite a bit of uh time off first uh did a bunch of ran a bunch of of uh reading groups uh which was uh funny during the pandemic but um was really really valuable did some maths Tut doing because I I left school when I did i' I'd always felt like there was some like basic uh maths that I just wanted to get more familiar with um and then I actually joined the set tech company uh called Higher Ground education as as um uh they basically did everything in education they built schools uh trained

teachers all all all the full stack except sh ship software so um I joined them helped them become a company that ship software um and then uh for the majority of the of my time off I also ran this thing called Polaris uh which is a uh a small Fellowship based in the UK all in person essentially the idea is expression of talent is just this fundamentally social thing and it really matters whether you find your way to San Francisco or whether you don't um and uh Polaris is U maybe this um the aspiration behind Polaris is let's gather some very very talented and maybe a little bit weird people uh that haven't found their way to San Francisco

and let's give them a a new group of peers uh that helps them just do more just be more ambitious try to be a little bit more um uh agentic to use that word um and yeah so that's been running for two and a bit years now um and has been a lot of fun but earlier this year got really back into thinking very seriously about uh about crypto um and by happen stance uh Zach messaged me and asked me to come help out on some of the uh kind of lead-ups to decentralization to launch at Aztec so I'm now back in the back in the space and happy to be back that's cool so it sounds like so you sort of took uh this time off and and moved more into the education or almost like personal

development like Polaris sounds like this attempt to Foster innovation in a new way I think education institutes are trying to do that as well in their way um like Higher Ground was education I guess I want to just very quickly try kind of make the connection between these educational environments and communities because yeah the next thing I wanted to talk about was communities and I'm just realizing though as you describe these environments and I think about obviously like the ZK Community or the ZK Summit like the ZK Summit is an event it's an event that's educational but it's also a community or it forged a community that's now maybe the ZK

community and also I think a lot of us you know made our first communities at school like it would have been in elementary school but then also in University you would have found your community yeah I'm just I'm just sort of connecting those two things all of the sudden that like they seem to be very tightly tied education and Community yeah yeah I think you get through education common language common vocabulary and sometimes common interest and then that is sort of a seed for people to gel together I the way I'd link them both is maybe um the first is in my mind thinking is this fundamental fundamentally social thing right you just think better when you're around

others and maybe I disag well yeah depends thinking about what but you know this hashed out week Nico you were at uh last week as as as we're recording I suppose in in my experience when you know the the expression of we're all touching different parts of the elephant that that kind of meme uh we're all touching different parts of the elephant and no one really knows that we're all touching the same elephant I don't know this one look at sounds it sounds weird I'll check it out yeah so people say you know sometimes uh when there's a new field or new set of ideas out uh if you're in that field you notice that there's other people people maybe a

little bit a feel like away from you um taking a slightly different View at what to you seems quite related right and um quite often we don't really connect initially like we don't really see that people are this is the analogy of of everyone touching different parts of the elephant right and and not knowing that hey I'm touching an ear or you're touching a leg and we're not we're describing the leg or the ear but we're not describing the elephant and that to me is is the way in which so uh thinking is this fundamental social thing like we're all exploring this idea space we're kind of grasping we're kind of grasping around in the dark maybe a little bit uh trying to figure out what's in front of us and um the space

is too large to explore purely on your own right there's a sense that you need to find the uh the walls you need to find the the the kind of limits to uh this idea space um or you you certainly like you benefit a lot if other people are exploring this idea space along with you because they will find that there's a wall over there that you don't have to go explore and you can uh focus on other parts um for for me the the maybe hash it out week uh and to tie it back to uh also Polaris or or what have you given maybe this idea that thinking is this fundamentally social behavior um it seems really important when when you spot a set of ideas that seem animating

to a small group um to try and bring that group to explore it together explicitly to kind of sure um get over this activation energy U maybe that you sometimes have to to solve for um before things really make progress um for programmable cryptography for what it's worth um I think we're all in the same room but we're not yet touching the elephant to come back to the analogy I think we're all in the same room and we're kind of smelling something um and we're all kind of we think we're all smelling the same thing but we haven't yet touched the elephant uh that's my sense of the stage that we're at that's interesting as you're saying this I'm also having sort of like a throwback to ZK Summit 4 where just

speaking of Zach Zach presented plon I think for the first time and this was the first time I brought ZK Summit to the US so before that it had been always in Europe and it was kind of like the it was the local Berlin community and then some ZK people flying in but when I went to San Francisco it was like everyone from Stanford and Berkeley and like the people that had written the papers that we had talked about maybe on the stages of ZK Summit but hadn't met necessarily or seen in the same in the same space yeah it's that idea that you're like everyone had been writing I mean obviously a lot of these people also knew each other this is not the first time they met but right I I felt that it was at least the first time I got to see everyone in the same

room and some of the works that were present presented there obviously went on to to be very influential on work that came from those people subsequently I was going to ask did this feel like two communities merging or the same community and like part of it was cut off from it and got to join back in it was like there's two sides to the community and it was like we've been focused on one side and then we were like adding this the other side but I think because it was further away from me I was very like like these were I was a fan of a lot of these people you know kind of like wow I get to have you in my event now and so yeah it's really cool even uh plunk by the way um started off

so so Zach had been we had noticed this limitation with the very first crypto system which gave its name to the company but uh this C Aztec crypto system which is just Sigma protocols quite basic um we had noticed the limitations and uh Zach had been thinking about some of the problems with at the time gr 16 was kind of the state-of-the-art still um one of the problems was was just like a per circuit um trusted setup which made a bunch of applications ABS absolutely impractical oh yeah and Zach had been toying around with these uh ideas that transformed into plunk but the secret sauce uh came from an interaction between him and

Ariel at a conference um I think they were aware of each other uh before but hadn't worked at all and Zach essentially mustered up the courage to go talk to to Ariel um and U nerd sniped him and that became plunk right so I I do I do really think this this idea that a lot of these um tasks that we have in front of us a lot of these um uh Technologies just require uh a little bit of coordination not not as in central planning but uh at the very least like let's all get in the room and notice that we're all thinking about the same things that's usually uh that's usually very productive yeah I think maybe what we've just described too is like the the sort of value of the

community side of it in education and and development and and invention um I think Nico you were about to you're you were slightly disagreeing there where I guess yes you can think on your own and you can invent on your own as well I think one could say that there's lots of inventors whose inventions died in the dark because no one ever saw them too 100% I think it was more getting out like problem solving sometimes is easier alone where where you can sit and lay out the problem for yourself and either you solve it or you find a roadblock and then you can start talking about it in a more social way but I guess people think in different ways the nice thing about like social thinking is the interdisciplinary aspect and like not fully interdisciplinary because we're

still all within a small realm of disciplines but we still have I guess like little Specialties little areas of interest uh that others won't have here here's here's maybe um some more Exposition and it's actually maybe a better answer to your initial question um and on of how like education and community and um and my my current work um connect I think the I I've had uh a longstanding interest in this idea of you sometimes see these small groups pop up uh these schools of thought or or just these small groups like I don't know the inklings so you know uh tolken and CS Lewis and um a few other authors or the impressionist in Paris um who

they're you know 5 to 10 people and yet they fundamentally change the direction of a of a field and I don't know there there's something really um I can't help but being be fascinated with the question of like well where do their ideas come from right like they how did they have to find each other for the idea to emerge did they find each other because they had similar ideas like how does how does this all work and a really good um or certainly like a I'm going to call it part of my Canon um my personal Cannon is this book called collaborative circles uh by this academic from uh don't know exactly when he wrote I think early 2000s um and collaborative circles is um five case studies of these small

groups and he tries to do a little bit of a taxonomy of these groups and also a set of stages that these groups seem to go through and um there the the inklings which I mentioned the impressionist a poet Circle um in the US uh the Ultras in the US which are the equivalent of the suff Jets um in the UK um and Freud and his Circle and um I the the key ideas that I got out of that is um first off you need these groups like these groups are fundamentally about at first building trust and the social interactions that happen within these groups of people egging each other on and competing but also collaborating and exploring the space together like that is just a fundamental um uh enabler for

new ideas to emerge and then um also these groups go through phases and those phases are you can't you know come back to those phases once you've gone through it so you can't always have the same group stay in the maximally generative uh where being very creative space um because at some point you just want to get to action right if uh these groups work well if you're embedded in the right group The ideas that emerge the kind of um behaviors that emerge Within These groups um they just impel you to action right you just kind of need to go out and do things and Implement them and exactly so so um this idea of hey maybe maybe there are some features of social

spaces which can be better or worse uh for the emergence of interesting ideas and also hey maybe we we should think of groups not not as these fixed things as these things that um stand the test of time but maybe a little bit transient uh that has impacted how I think about things uh very deeply wow I want to read this book sounds great do these groups exclusively emerge from in-person interactions that's the other thing yeah um well all of the groups that he writes about uh they did mostly because non- inperson interactions is somewhat New Concept right um to to a large extent um there's maybe the the link to um a good way to explore that that that

question um there's this other book that influenced uh Martin G if you remember him the Revolt of the public and uh this the second book is called no sense of place and it's the thesis is hey our media landscape really changes just our social landscape um so starting from he this was a book written in the in the 8S and he goes through radio and television and then the early computers obviously before the internet since it's from the ' 80s but um he he basically my favorite example to explain the thesis is there used to be a time where adults could behave in a way that uh was different whether there were kids in the room or not and kids would be

able to see only the adults behaving as the adults behaved when they were kids in the room and then radio comes along and television comes along and um you suddenly have kids seeing adults behaving like adults behave when they're on their own oh wow and that obviously impacts the dynamic between children and and adults and the authority that adults have in all that kind of stuff um and there's something to to tie back to to your question I think there's something about Current Online spaces which makes it really difficult to have this kind of very generative very like fledgling uh stages of groups where quite often you will just be too exposed to kind of outside observers you won't like be necessarily able or willing to

take the risks that you need to take in order to explore a very very early idea um and the cultures that create are maybe a little bit fragile as well right because there's always a sense of maybe I'm drawn to this other adjacent Community um in in a way that can be good but might also stop um the the kind of phases where I I talk about it as as like phases of radicalization right like you kind of radicalize yourselves into believing that you must act on this idea or this set of ideas um and I think it's it's much easier to Loop out of a rad ization um Loop than than it used to be just because you have many more influences um uh available to you I think this is a really good kind of

segue to the article that we wanted to talk about this this blog post you had written around this concept of trust infrastructure we're going to add the link in the show notes to me it's it's a it's a conversation about communities and their evolution how when communities went online they almost needed new rules or new ideals and values to be able to survive in this new environment let's jump in on that and maybe we can start with like how were communities formed in the past which I think you've actually covered already a little bit how did it change with the internet so my and by the way as a as a disclaimer as always mental models are there will always be counter examples this is just like a I find it useful to think about it in this way but obviously

it's not the end all and be all but um I always think about uh an American teen um in say the' 60s who wants to become an engineer and that American teen if they're really ambitious and if they're in the right social economic context Etc they will have probably heard of MIT and MIT is this um uh thing in the distance that is visible and attractive and even though they don't really understand what it means to become an engineer they know that moving to MIT is what they need to do to become that person and moving there is quite expensive um uh as in socially right you're kind of um removing yourself from your current social context um there's also a

filtering that naturally happens you move to MIT and a bunch of other people who want to be Engineers have also moved to MIT you kind of are in a somewhat homogeneous group um when you get there and then because all of this somewhat homogeneous group has also removed themselves from their previous social context you have status games and and kind of games within this culture which are really local to that physical space right um and uh the idea of hacker culture emerging in in MIT um seems like it seems like it could only have emerged from a space like a university right and actually as as you mentioned this I the I immediately thought more like the artists in the 80s moving to New York or

something like that like I feel like you have this in every group like a a location that you need to be in order for you to actually be able to tap into this thing you're trying to do and if you're stuck in your small town you can always kind of dream or do it on your own or get books on the topic but you don't have that back and forth in that community so you can't really quite achieve it on the flip side I do I you know I grew up on on the internet um and I do think that the internet makes it easy to find groups of people that you want to be around the the way I put it in general is like you have this in my mind this quadrant of finding a tribe versus being a tribe right acting as a

group developing this this uh distinct culture and online it's really easy to find a tribe probably quite difficult to be a tribe right again because you have so many overlapping um other cultures that are accessible and there's always this this chance of someone external looking in and you feel kind of awkward being cringe right uh to some extent you want to protect yourself with irony and oh I'm never I'm never as committed as as maybe it seems um to to the culture that I'm a part of um and offline is the reverse right offline is actually very difficult to find people um who you uh enjoy spending time with who who have the same Vibe as you but you put 10 people um in the same room assuming you do like some amount of

selection but you don't even need to do that much you put 10 people in a room uh like every week for a dinner for 10 weeks and they'll leave having like quite strong bonds right um it's almost you can't avoid it uh in in the physical world um and yeah there there's something to to me there's something really intriguing about this quadrant and also the way this quadrant is changing where as the internet um uh kind of diffuses out into the world I think uh it's actually becoming maybe slightly harder to be a tribe offline um and uh as the internet also gets noisier um I think it's maybe getting a little bit harder to find a tribe online than

certainly it seemed to me uh to have been when I was growing up when I was a teen so um yeah that that to me is the central uh problem is kind of we seem to be losing our ability both online and offline um to to form these groups um and maybe we can get it back you mentioned in the piece you wrote kind of closer to the end actually this concept of Eternal September which I subsequently went and looked up and I sort of want to Define it because I think as I mean we we and a lot of our listeners are in this ZK community and I'm just like we see waves of growth um yeah anyway maybe you can Define it and then we can talk a bit about that I I'll probably get the details slightly wrong

but as I remember it um this is before the internet as in the the networks of networks this is um when uh you still had networks that were quite local to University or to to a city or or what have you um or maybe just like a BBS um uh you know that that you had access to and at some point those different networks got interconnected um and I guess maybe to to back up actually so you have you have these different networks um that are quite distinct from each other and the most of them are associated to University um and so every September there's a class of freshman that um comes about and this class of freshman doesn't know the Norms of this online space they don't know the culture

they don't know who's High status who's low status what you can and can't say but because it's only every September you kind of you can always just slowly but surely kind of educate them in the Norms of the space right and you're used to that Cadence of like every September you know there's going to be some fresh faces so you're ready for it exactly yeah um and it's also just less noisy right you you can prepare you can prepare for it you can deal with it and then there's come comes this point of interconnection between these these networks and essentially you have um every day a new class of freshmen that stumble upon your space and they don't stay long enough for you to be able to build this sense of like okay well if you're going to be in this space maybe

consider behaving this way um you just only ever have new people um and I yeah I think the internet is is still roughly in that phase um of always having new people coming in I as I was reading that I just thought about like in our community have we had that point and I don't think so I think we've had waves of growth it's not as regular as like every September school starts but there's sort of like moments of hype and then a chill out phase and moments of hyp I'm talking about like our specific Community I I'm only I keep referencing this because as I was reading what you were writing I I could only think of the community that we've built and even this

just this last week I I was on a Twitter space is all about ZK communities and one of the questions was about like growth hacking and like do you want to growth hack and bring more people and we haven't done that at all overtly at least like we've never wanted to just get as many people as we can in large part because it's not a product like yes there's a technology that we're kind of trying to Champion but the community itself it's like about development and so there's been very little artificial growth or artificial like an attempt to make something bigger we have waves of interest and then they sort of chill out you have time for people to adjust to the way that maybe our community works and then sometimes

there's another influx and people come in with different attitudes sometimes they're more salesy sometimes they're more trolly like I don't know they come in with very different attitudes but we do see also those people kind of either adjust or leave and sort of C you know get into it but what I picture the Eternal September looking like is an Ever growing group yeah where where you where every day there's new kind of um attitudes and like voices that are very loud joining and I can just imagine that that becomes I mean then where's Community because they're not like then they're going to be potentially taking over that

that culture and and making it something else and leaving before it grows into a full-blown culture right potentially or you have new ones coming in and also changing it exactly I I guess there's two ideas that when when I think of Eternal September and you know the the internet and these communities online um the first one is is kind of linking back to uh collaborative circles and this idea that hey a lot of these groups are just transient and if you try to make them stable you're just going to compromise the dynamic um I think there I think it's important to recognize that as well that um there was a phase where um ethereum could all fit in a small

room in Berlin and um that's not the way that ethereum should behave now right that's just not a a credible um uh structure there was also a moment it's funny you say that because there was like a moment where it's all in one room there was a moment where it's one subreddit and that was or like a stack Overflow there's like one place where everyone could get all the info they needed yeah on ethereum and that was obviously a different phase from the one room and I just I hear people in ethereum who've been around a long time always like you know back to that time when you knew everyone and you could ask a question and they were so helpful because it's really nice right to have to have this kind of context shared context and um common norms and have a have a strong sense that we're um there

there's this idea of common knowledge right that I know that you know that I know um that I think is really important for for Healthy Communities so the first concept is yeah this this kind of transient accepting the transientness of these spaces and then you can make a decision right do you institutionalize do you dissolve like what what happens um if you recognize that uh that Dynamic the second idea is is one that I actually um to Toby Shan um from other internet which is um an online uh research organization um and uh just a a really really incredibly thoughtful guy on on community on on crypto as well um wrote maybe three or four months ago this this idea uh this this blog post

called um uh cryptos three body problem where he talks about um crypto being maybe a little bit um uh crypto not not feeling able not being able to draw on things that are not just code or markets as um coordination mechanisms um and the other ones are for example like Norms or law or um uh yeah you have you have a set of other coordination mechanisms anyways he um and I were speaking about this the ideas that we're talking about and he brought up this book by fukuyama uh called trust um which is really good I I recommend it um and fukuyama in this book I don't know if this is a fukuyama um word or concept but certainly he's the one who

introduced it to me um this idea of spontaneous sociability um where you have some cultures where you have this Rich tapestry of groups and forming a group for either your neighborhood or like to take on something that you know is a temporary thing that this community needs to solve for like forming these groups is incredibly easy it just kind of happens these are hyr societies right so um you have this this ease at forming these uh these spaces and there's because there's this Rich tapestry there's always an overlap of um these groups so you have if you have some kind of governance problem uh within uh Community you actually have a few different spaces within which you can

resolve different parts of this governance problem um and it just makes for a healthy um healthy culture right a healthy place to be and when I think of um both the dynamic that they you've just outlined just this idea of people reminiscing to when ethereum was smaller or when a community was smaller um but also people coming in uh as you know the equivalent of the Freshman during internal September um and feeling maybe excluded because everyone is a little bit unhappy that they're all coming in at the same time and they're not uh getting the the Norms right Etc I just think that both of those Dynamics point to us not having enough spontaneous social ability online right because the

truth is the the maximally healthy thing to happen is to some extent to have some groups declare themselves like we're good we're 10 people we're we're happy to just be this group um and we're going to whether or not we sustain ourselves uh longterm doesn't really matter we're going to grow at our own pace you can't come in but you know it's fine because you you can go to the next group over or you can start your the next group over um and we don't we don't feel comfortable doing that because I think the truth is um we have all these kind of aggregation effects um online where um winner take takes all for for these online spaces um and if you're uh if you don't kind of look into being in one of these groups very early on um because there's a set

of ideas that are um around or or what have you you just don't really have a space right you're kind of just in the in this in the ocean you're just kind of floating bobbing around a little bit I want to just wrap on the Eternal September because I also want to make sure we we made it clear what the Eternal part was so the September was every September these students arriving the Eternal happened once it wasn't only September and it was every month it was every day as we were also talking about this and thinking about your kind of unhappiness with defi summer I feel like that was an example of an eternal September I think 17 was an example of internal September

where there was all these new people but then a lot of them just left so 2018 2019 was a much smaller group it wasn't quite as small as the Reddit era but it was still pretty small I mean you see the same people all the time and it was like a lot of the writings were quite shared and the spaces were shared um but then in 2020 you saw that takeoff again and 2021 22 and in the in the sort of end of that as things shrank back it's it's again a new phase I'm I'm not sure how to define it I don't know what 2023 ethereum 2024 I don't know this the how

to map it even because it's so broad it's kind of like there's events all over the place there is no Central group of people that you can kind of like spot at conferences I mean you can see the OG from you know previous years but they're not all in the same space in the same way it's really interesting it's definitely like a much bigger thing now even uh you know etcc was is not too too long ago a couple months ago um in Brussels and the overwhelming sense that people got was there was this smattering of side events that people went to no one in the main event it didn't feel cohesive in in way right um I I I think it's a little bit too grandio but you

know screw it I'm going to use this analogy anyways um in my my sense of my frustration with the space is sometimes that it doesn't take itself seriously enough as a frontier my prototypical frontier in my mind is America like from Discovery to to today for sure and um there's something about 1600s America I think during the the 17th century kind of at the at the tail end or the sorry the the very start of 1700s there was maybe uh of of like uh immigrants right to to the US um there is a population of maybe something like 400,000 people U

this is not native populations right this is just people coming from England from Germany and and elsewhere um which is quite small still right and obviously now the US is 300 odd million people um along the way the institutions that it had to start and grow and establish changed um and some of them kind of had just stood the test of time mostly and some some of them didn't um and my again my frustration sometimes with the internet as a whole B really but certainly crypto as a as a maybe like an attempt to iterate on on the Internet is it still seems a little bit afraid of

being like a place that starts institutions right that still feels a little bit we're compromising on our on our ethos by trying to start institutions yeah and um I don't know that feels a little bit off to me I feel like maybe we need to accept that um uh we need to be a place that people want to move to and people won't want to move here if there's not a little bit like of a sense of well here's what you need to do and here's how you need to behave and here are the norms and um like this is this is the support structures that you have access to um and I can already sense people being like Oh you know statist or what have you I'm far from it but um I just again I I don't want to bring governments in

as much as I want crypto and the the kind of the space and the ideology and the uh the culture that is crypto um to really allow itself to be like okay we're we're serious we're space right we're we're going to um uh we win by helping people move here instead of just kind of diffusing in this shadowy way um throughout the throughout the world is there a fear you know when like code is Law and everything is immutable that any institutions we try to build now if they're flawed in any way we're like stuck with them yeah like is that why people aren't building so this is this is why I like this uh the cryptos three party problem from from other internet um the way I think about it is

um the call ethereum This Global consensus layer I don't think that should be uh there's not that much governance that should be added to that I I think like its neutrality its kind of unopinionated makes sense I I wouldn't want ethereum to be run as a company I I I I think that would just kind of compromise its ability to become what it maybe ought to become but having again this is this is why spontaneous sociability like is is very present object in my mind having a rich tapestry below ethereum of spaces that um are not just trustless right that allow themselves to maybe um build themselves

so that they're private to the outside world but within it um everyone knows who who's inside um uh maybe some where there's different trust assumptions right um where there might be some and you can you know map it on to I don't know that it's it's productive but map it on to layer twos layer 3es and this kind of like fractal view of what ethereum could become um anyways my my general sense is um not everything needs to be in this public Global consensus layer um we can actually afford to have um through privacy through programmable cryptography spaces that are um still tied to the space still tied to ethereum layer one in some way shape or form that use it for legitimacy use it to settle

things that do need to be settled between spaces um but that are also I don't know there's a sense of richness right that I want to see grow um out of the space um again this is not me saying like let's bring the world into ethereum I think actually we should um like build ethereum to be a place that people want to be um and people just don't want to be uh disembodied and trustless and all that kind of stuff I don't want to live in a trustless world right I want to live in a trustful World um and uh I don't think that implies compromising on what what interested me in in crypto in the first place I think you can both be permissionless and trustful right um you can have your cake and eat it too um and

to to bring maybe the uh vitalic latest blog post I think he recognizes this as well I haven't spoken to him about this but this idea of like hey um maybe we need to move past this ideological baggage that we acquired with the cipher punks and maybe we can have more um um I think that that is a I don't know that seems a really valuable thing to take seriously I I'm going to I mean we'll have the link to this article in the show notes so I hope people do read it while they're listening to this or before but I will do a quick summary of this because I think we're now diving into like the meat of this work um in it you talked about kind of communities small communities that as they grew they

eventually needed institutions and we know the kind of classic institutions and they evolved over time um you talk a bit about like you just mentioned the states and and sort of the Frontiers and as things were discovered and land was populated you know by the Europeans there was more institutions that were founded and the minute the internet started it was like once again we had the frontier like a ton of space and communities could form and there was sort of it was I mean it was founded in a way or like the initial culture of the internet kind of was a bit against the institutions of the real world or it was like even though it came out of Academia came out and the military it came out of

those institutions once there was the cipher punks they kind of developed this you know anti- institution attitude and from there they had to come up with new rules so maybe we can talk a bit about what were the what were the proposals of them they didn't want to create institutions in the traditional sense so what did they what did they offer up instead there are two uh books that again have have really deeply shaped my my thinking about where the the culture of the internet initially came from and the first one is um from cyber culture to uh from C counterculture to cyber culture which is fantastic um and the second one is is a book about the Mary pranksters um called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test anys the the broad

thesis is um you had this counterculture movement in the' 60s that had a bunch of causes but um certainly the effects were these communities that maybe had uh well quite an anti-institutional bent right like they didn't want to submit themselves to the expectations or the rules or the um the structures um uh that that were uh expected of them prior um and uh out of the counterculture and quite explicitly so so personal Computing um pops up in a bunch of different places in slightly different ways but certainly like the culture that became personal Computing and apple and the in and Silicon Valley um uh uh realistically came out of um uh this

small group of people called the home brew Computer Club when you read about the hippies and you read about these groups you get a sense that they have um just maybe a set of like core ideological beliefs right one is like maybe we should be leaderless right maybe there's there's like a a sense of that emergence is the um is the force that we should pay most attention to um and we're all interconnected the hippies have have these core maybe beliefs one one is being leaderless the other is hey maybe the only thing that you need to do is to manifest U things into existence maybe you don't quite need to act as actively um as as um you actually do need to uh in in in the world um and

that was a pretty dysfunctional set of beliefs it turns out in the real world right so um during the the 60s you have something like um more than half a million people at that various points live in on these communes in California uh most of them turn out to be uh turn out to kind of disappear right most most of them actually turn out to be pretty dysfunctional places where uh there's the the kind of tyranny of of structur lessness right if you read that um that post that certainly comes about lots of abusers lots of um bad people that get attracted to these structures and right at the point of disillusionment of these communities you have personal Computing and the internet early internet that kind of comes about

again funded and and populated by actually quite an overlapping group of people especially in California there again other places where personal Computing comes about but really California is the place where um it's taken most seriously um and uh funnily enough the very first Forum or one of the very first forums um is this thing called the well um which is uh the whole earth electronic catalog as you can imagine started by steart brand from the whole earth um catalog so again one of these original hippies and when you think about these early internet spaces and you think about these ideological beliefs of the hippies you suddenly realize that what was dysfunctional in the in the real world of like oh we're going to be leaderless we're going to be emergent maybe we're just going to design the system we're not going to act

on the specifics suddenly that becomes uh evolutionarily um uh productive right like suddenly that is actually the only way you can cope with online spaces because they're just too big and you have too little context and they're too disembodied and there's no institutions and there's no institutions right and so you have these online spaces which suddenly become evolutionarily fit right this this culture becomes evolutionarily fit on the internet and I think we kind of we've obviously moved away from that culture over time right we're we're certainly not hi all hippies or all cyer punks or or what have you but there's part of that ideological baggage which I think just lived through the internet um uh I I I think we probably all all

remember like the internet of the 2000s 2010s um which was very much around like it was counterculture right it was uh we will uh through transparency um uh kind of get to good outcomes and um yeah I I I think that has kind of turned out not to really be true right we just kind of turned out to be ineffective um in our Pursuits unfortunately let's define so that that connection between the transparent and this trustless because that I mean to me the current the concept of trustless was actually something I only encountered I think in 2017 when I joined this space I had always known the concept of like downloading and PP but I didn't you know

I knew you could get cool music and you could share your music but I didn't like this this literally the word trustless as a positive thing for me I only was introduced to that in 2017 but know that that concept is actually much older that is cipher punk I think this idea that you would create like the rails of a system therefore it can be trustless like you program in the rules so you don't have to worry about some third party kind of enforcing the rules but I think you're right to point out that like 2010's transparency element as well this idea that like all of a sudden you're sharing everything on the internet and even though in the past we knew that like people spied on their neighbors and used against them all of a

sudden it didn't matter anymore like I remember having that thought when I'd see people sharing a lot I'm like I've read a lot of history of like the cold war you're like wow like this could one day be used against you but I guess like I also was sort of allow allowed myself to sort of follow the the delusion that maybe we're past that like maybe we're in a post shame Society where you could never be like no info could ever be held against you and we're just going to share photos of our families online forever and all of our activities and it will be fine I um I think the internet because of its scale and because of the reach it gives you and The Leverage that it gives both institutions and and individuals it

kind of broke uh both like high trust groups that tend to be quite local and quite small because when they get too big just they assumptions of trust kind of uh break but also they they it seems to have broken a lot of these trust substitutes right imperfect though they may be things like laws and culture and institutions and all these kinds of things I I guess it just uh to to me the two maybe levers through which it broke it was one just the scale right you suddenly were encountering a lot more people um than you used to um and these people you had just a lot less context than you used to so you don't it's kind of quite difficult to trust them outright although early internet everyone trusted each other and then

everyone got screwed right um and early social media people did it again exactly actually every platform they did it again they did it on Friendster then they did it on MySpace they did it on Facebook every wave of maybe Eternal September right you have a version of this maybe but yeah um and then the the second lever is is this leverage point where um you suddenly a lot of people were suddenly in your world or a lot of Institutions or companies or what have you were in your world in ways that like who are they right like what why do they have um uh leverage in in my in my space um and you can't really inter the physical space in just in in your life right digitally mediated physical space

um and it's both companies but also the state suddenly had a lot of reach um into it just was able to see a lot of things right happening in in the world that it couldn't previously see and this idea of okay well you have like these two levers that both point you of like you're surrounded with a lot of people and a lot of companies or institutions or that you don't really trust but the natural reaction I think it doesn't it doesn't seem like farfetched to be like well if I can look at them back I don't have to worry about getting screwed right um if I can observe everything that's happening um I can just make my own decisions and um unfortunately that just stops working quite quickly right

because people do uh the kind of sociopaths and the the ill intentioned just like force you to be transparent but they themselves are actually um comfortable breaking the Norms of of these groups and transparencies can only be ever Norm right um uh L you be in in an actual physical panopticon um and on top of that you just get so much scale of information that you're just not able to evaluate everything all at once and you know one of the first things that well it felt um the first kind of dissonance that I um experience in in crypto is most people don't read the code right most people are just not able to read the code um most people actually get their sense of whether they can

trust something from these loose groups of online influencers and the scene and um they get a sense of like oh yeah curve is good but um uh maybe this other protocol is bad and um that's really lossy uh and just doesn't really work that well exactly for sure what then are so we've talked about trustless and sort of the the problems of extreme trans parency but um what's a trust infrastructure because I know that you know that was the name of your of the actual post is trust infrastructure so this is it sounds like a proposal for an alternative yeah there's a couple of like inputs maybe to um this idea of

trust infrastructure most of them are vitalic um posts around like making ethereum Cipher Punk again um which maybe like motivated me again to reconsider why I had been attracted to crypto in the first place and crypto is a frontier um and as a frontier that takes itself seriously as a frontier again like trying to reconnect a little bit with that initial motivation um there's also a lot of um content and talks U by the PSC group um at ethereum and gup sheep in particular around progam programmable cryptography and um maybe some of the the affordances that programmable cryptography gives you and um not well the way I frame it to myself is I also

um became absolutely uh obsessed with the early days of personal Computing and and the early days of the internet um and the more I read both books and and just like the early magazines like bite in you know 7576 the more obvious it got that people were justifying all this effort just because they found it neat right they found it appealing in a way that was self-evident to them but maybe looked a little bit self-referential or under Justified to the to to the outside world um and I guess all this mixed together in in this sense of maybe we had tried to justify crypto in slightly the wrong way you know maybe we were try to make

it fit into like a pitch deck that wouldn't be out of place uh in kind of a stripe fundraise um and actually maybe we just needed to get back to thinking about crypto as um yeah this this space this culture this Frontier and from from that I guess like the the focusing on uh on trustless that's always been maybe the the one idea in crypto that I found most frustrating again because I I don't want to live in a trustless world right I just don't think a trustless world is that good of a world to live in um so the trust infrastructure title is partly because I think this idea of trust is very important and and kind of um uh like underpins a lot of of our world um

and will remain as this kind of like foundational structure um and second I really want us to move away just from the word trustless because I think it's nonsensical um so trying to to get people to talk about trustfulness um in a way that doesn't otherwise compromise on um some of the other crypto ideals that felt like a valuable thing to attempt so one of the initial like I guess value props for even Bitcoin was a trustless payment system like I can pay someone without having to have this trusted third party which is s of the banking system is this I'm I'm not I'm guessing you're not pushing against this no no no no um it's it's really just this um okay so there

there's this uh project which makes use of of um cryptography and zero knowledge called raro and Rao's um goal is to give coordination tools for for uh at the start at the very least uh people in regimes like Russia or Iran or um these very illiberal places right the way Rara works is you have this app that allows you to prove that you're a citizen of this particular country um it completely anonymously and allows you to vote in alternative elections that's kind of the basic premise and obviously you could attempt to do that on ethereum layer one in the clear um and uh you'd have a horrible time right um youd have the

exact contrary effect um uh than than maybe you're hoping for um the way Rao uh does it in practice is obviously the proof of passport is like wrapped in this zero knowledge um ends up being an anonymous like you you don't have to reveal who you are you just have to reveal that you pass some conditions um but they also coordinate quite a lot with local activists because it turns out if you just have this external company that pinky swears that um you scanning your passport is not going to put you on some uh list in in kind of the Kremlin people are not really going to believe you right um so

you need this extra social layer of okay this is per this is someone who I trust who I know is like putting their life on the line they wouldn't do this if it wasn't real um and you need to gradually build up the sense of like BR mod takes what they're doing seriously and they're uh like uh they they're withstanding um attacks from the Kremlin and they're just like able to deliver on their promise of being secure and private and actually coordinate these groups um what I dislike about the world trustless and is if you take it maximally seriously what you would end up building is this um this Tower of economic games or some kind of like Tower of right um um around this idea of uh oh you need to

coordinate but you don't want anyone to be visibly involved um when in fact through cryptography you can have people um coordinate and conspire and be involved um in in uh quite trustful ways that remain private to the outside world um but within this like little group this little conspiracy um everyone trusts each other right they have to because at some point uh someone can always take a screenshot right like you can you can't really only rely on code you have to have some kind of social element to it and I'm I'm excited about Ryo um uh whether or not they're the ones who uh who win specifically doesn't matter that much but this idea of these tools that allow for um these disc compated groups to coordinate in ways

that um uh are real right like actually have an impact on um people's lives that feels quite exciting it's interesting though when you talk about the trust infrastructure you need this human component because when I think of programmable cryptography I still think of that in the category of lessness right the whole idea is that you have programm you have cryptography that anyone can verify which is definitely hearkening back to the cipher Punk's trustless stuff right like the idea that you build it people can verify but then no one has to run it and you don't trust anyone but you know it will be run correctly because the code or the cryptography is correct um yeah to me programmable cryptography

and like verifiable compute and these kinds of Concepts to me they still fall under that trustless idea the idea of the removal of the intermediary MH I I do I do think it's worth again like pulling out me trying to kind of kick uh the hornet nest a little bit with the words and just being like you know trustless no I think it's good though I want to explore it no I think it's like it's great so um there there's that component right the kind of Kick the hornest with with language and then there's the in in practice ice what I'd love to see happen over time is um the same things this maybe a little bit too storic but the same things that happen in the real world right where in your

first interaction you because you have uh cryptography as in privacy and you have um you can choose your uh what you reveal when to whom um very tightly you can have that initial kind of I don't know if I'm gonna want to keep interacting with you I don't know if I trust you but like here's a little nub of information that maybe helps the conversation get started and over time in that discourse you can gradually reveal more and more information about um uh each other and and kind of just build trust as whether it's a it's a pair or a small group or um uh a culture right um I think we're all parts of group chats where um we allow ourselves to say things even if it's unencrypted

even if it's on telegram right um allow ourselves to say things that we wouldn't say on Twitter um and part of my distaste is like that has always felt like something that people don't really um it it's always felt like something that we kind of paper over um in in crypto where oh no like all the coordination happens on chain right but that's not true right actually all the coordination happens Within These small groups of people that trust each other that have shared context um that can kind of bargain in ways that are not like are maybe like a little bit ambiguous at first and then grad get more precise um and I think like accepting that that's something that human groups want to do um is much

better than lying to ourselves about no no no no everything happens on chain and uh you know one address one vote and all that kind of stuff um so um the cryptography can be well should be trustless right you should be able to go look um at the chain of um uh both implementations but Al for example if you're if you're proving um if you do a proof of passport right um uh through uh cryptography you're kind of like attesting that you have this passport through um like a Zer proof over um some kind of signature in your passport that still relies on some key some master key being issued well at the very top uh level by the United Nations and by countries and you you still want to be

able to go inspect that chain and be like okay like this this was actually issued by the uh people that say that uh issued it Etc that kind of trustless I'm very Pro right like Aztec only does open source I think that's a necessary condition for people to um take these systems seriously I just want more richness post um uh these kind of quite neutral quite cold systems it sounds like I mean there's two pictures that have been somewhat painted so it's the transparent fully trustless which is like Twitter or like some onchain stuff and it's kind of like the state of today which I think we're seeing a lot of like dystopia in but then there's the old school institutions

and absolute privacy and non-transparency that like the hippies originally rebelled against that sort of led to this other poll and it sounds like there's I mean like all things you're going to have to find some mix in the middle probably to like have a functional Society online and one of the things we didn't really talk that much about although you just sort of mentioned it are the private spaces where sometimes private spaces can be used for corruption and conspiracy um but sometimes private spaces are needed for the community building to have the small group where you trust the people and you can speak o o openly and kind of like hearkening back to those I don't know what the

names were but those like groups of people around a topic that came up with brilliant ideas like the Freud group or the yeah the ones you mentioned earlier um yeah they would only function in a private space and if we're all online we are going to need some something like that exactly yeah I do I do want to um put my uh my flag in the ground of I think conspiracy has acquired this kind of like negative affect right this kind of negative sense I I don't see why it is in my mind um a startup a good startup is a conspiracy right um You are a small group you're exactly you're you're kind of um you're not justifying yourself to the outside world probably

to some extent your goals and certainly methods are a little bit obscured from the outside even if it's just because the world doesn't get care about you right for the for the time being um and that seems like a precondition to effective action for most things there are other things where you actually need the broad Global consensus that okay this is good this is safe this is legitimate um I uh you know as as you were saying this is not a this is not like a return like let's go back to these uh institutions that have lost all their legitimacy this is is in fact the well maybe we can tow the line right maybe we can walk the knife's edge um uh maybe we we can have like a little bit of what's good about trust and norms and

culture and law and uh quite a lot of what's good with um permissionless and uh transparency and uh legitimacy that comes from being just open as systems Zach um has this phrase of transparency for the protocol privacy for the user which I think is pretty close to um uh to the ideal maybe the the slight um additional like um or the the the slight it's not clarification but the the slight addition that I would add to that phrase is like privacy in the in the real world is a spectrum right um like I'm absolutely fine with uh you both knowing my full name I'd probably if you ask me like oh

to post this I need to see a proof of passport for whatever reason I'd be maybe fighting back a little KY I'd probably let you kyc kyc me right um I feel like we have you know we first interacted I don't know like 2018 or something like that I feel like I have enough background context um uh but um I definitely wouldn't post my passport on on Twitter um and uh privacy as this as the spectrum that is something that you should be able to reason about and have really strong expectations about as an individual uh or as a group that to me feels really important building tools that help you think about that and help you like deal with the Spectrum um in really productive ways that to me is maybe like one of the components of what

I mean by trust infrastructure um uh but but not the not the only one yeah it sounds like I mean it sounds like a it's a great kind of idea to think about and I think you've described a few pieces that could make up a trust infrastructure or trust infrastructures or almost like it's it's not quite instit like this is kind of just going back to that earlier idea of like there were institutions that were formed because societies and groups got bigger and on the internet there are maybe like unofficial institutions there are I mean there are institutions just that like there's constant rebellion and anger and frustration and no buyin I think in the trust infrastructure I wonder if there

isn't like the very start is like we have we need to be able to have a private group that fits five people and we feel safe talking okay that's like one piece of infrastructure maybe like some chat app that allows you to do it or or you're allowed to vote in private or something like that but I almost wonder if you have to start building back like institutions in that like that we trust but now in a digital context and I don't think just mapping previous institutions to this new world works I think every time you see people try I mean it might slightly work for a while but I feel like it often doesn't yeah the the three things that came to mind is the first one is my mental model

of maybe the battlecry of the internet is uh who the put you in charge you know that's kind of the the only reaction that by the way I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this podcast but sure um too late now no kids listening to this cryptography focused podcast I don't think but but that that to me is the is maybe the yeah it's it's what you know it's it's kind of this fundamental thing for with the internet um and maybe allowing yourself to only be within context where you're not going to be surprised by someone coming in and you know who the put you in charge that can be useful um the second slightly disconnected frame is I I think when people talk about um uh some of

these tools that we're building or that we we aspire to build um and when you get into the context of decentralization and kind of empowering the user Etc it's always struck me that it's able to um there there will be people that want to use these tools to create something new and there will be people that want to use the tools that those people create right the the way I put it the analogy is um in you have like bar openers right people that want to run bars and that want to create those social spaces and deal with all the uh stuff around opening a bar um and you will have people that want to go to bars um and those two people are not the same usually right um and I used to be a person who liked to go to bars and now I

feel like I'm a person who runs the bar right um but it's this conference but yeah I think sometimes you know a lot of the the talk of crypto ux or uh these tools not being good enough or or what have you fails to make the difference between well are we building for bar openers or building for bar goers um and I'd really like to build for bar openers first and foremost um and again give people a little bit more uh leeway to to build um as they see fit um and yeah the the institutions that do get built by by these bar openers hopefully they they look very different from the institutions that um have been built so far right th those ones are no longer adapted to the world as it is if only because at least in my life a lot of the

um a lot of the kind of uh groups or cultural affinities that I've I've kind of fostered or that I've resonated with those are no longer primarily geographical right um like I I have friends a little bit all over we're kind of like a disembodied group we don't really we're not like apology but maybe we should be um that's that's maybe the like the the the ultimate audience that I hope to build for is is maybe people who are um yeah already living in in that kind of uh slightly removed from geography uh world I think I followed this but polity what is that actually I may I may be misusing it a little bit but polity is is um like a

a distinct political group maybe is way to put pod is it that group you described the one of like the people around Freud um i' I'd probably make the distinction between like a like a small group like like the ones that we talked about at the beginning and PO is maybe a little bit larger um okay a little bit less cohesive necessarily um but distinct n nonetheless um I do think that for example the the people that were were um attracted to ethereum in I don't know like 14 15 16 like there was a distinct sense to them right they had they had like some sense of what they wanted to achieve they were coordinated in in a loose way um that maybe gets a little

bit closer um or otherwise people just people like me who I suppose just grown grew up on the internet right um there's a sense that that is I have um preferences that are much closer to mutuals on Twitter in my everyday life than people that I you know that come from the town that I was born in um uh in in that sense like I feel a little bit distinct feel more Affinity with my mutuals on Twitter than I do with um people that again come from the the town I grew up in yeah do you ever this is also to you Nico but do you ever like wish for that era of Freedom like the thing that got you excited at the beginning

when you were like oh my gosh the rules that I no don't apply here I get to like completely recreate things I mean that's how I felt 2017 but yeah do you do you look for that do you kind of like miss it yeah for sure in a in a in a hopefully slightly less naive way than I was back then in retrospect right um but certainly I think I think the world is just um there's this meme um from 2011 or so which I'm guessing most people listening will have seen in some form or another which is just um like born too late to explore the world and born too

early to explore the universe right um and that to me is that represent 2011 like the moment of crisis of my teenage years of like oh like maybe we're stuck um like the horrific realization that maybe we're stuck and the internet and you know cyberspace and then maybe crypto like was an extension of This Promise was hey maybe you have this additional Frontier right maybe you're not quite as stuck as you feared um unfortunately I don't really think that the internet has lived up to that very much right I I think that the internet largely um instead of giving us a new frontier it's just um there's a there's an update to that Meme from I don't know

2015 2016 just like born too um late to explore the world born too early to explore the universe born just in time to browse thank memes and I feel like that's kind of the direction we've gone in right is kind of oh we're just kind of distracting ourselves we're no longer this Frontier we don't believe it anymore um and coming back to hey maybe we can we can rekindle uh this sense that there's this there there's this like way to escape these in inadequate equilibria um maybe there's this new um space a little bit of digital a little bit of physical um through cryptography and through these coordination mechanisms and through privacy and through these new systems and hopefully new ins at some point hey maybe we can build something

better that that doesn't seem that far-fetched to me actually right and that's maybe what I see less well trust infrastructure is maybe like a flavor of this but programmable cryptography in general like that's what gets me excited it feels like it's a path towards taking us seriously as a frontier again yeah for me I come from a slightly different angle in that I wasn't as much interested in the frontier but more interested in oh can we fix what we already have these big information asymmetries in the world all this issue that our data is being collected I came from more of a background of like all right what are the Technical Solutions to these problems um so in that sense trustless this was often the goal

right can I still uh do social networks without trusting uh some Central entity um and I think trustless was a goal in the sense of yeah removing this trusted third party um trusting the people I interact with of course still has to be there and giving me the means to interact with these people is I think necessary and that's where like I don't know I feel like trust infrastructure feels right in a way to yeah K the hornet nest but also like build in that direction like almost like two two directions to the same goal remove the unnecessary trust in these

parties that we shouldn't trusting and give me the tools to actually trust the people I want to be trusting and eventually we're going to meet like nicely in the middle yeah yeah I've been playing with this Frame that programmable cryptography gives you three things it gives you privacy like that's the default right not the default but certainly like cryptography for privacy is is maybe like the standard framing um it gives you leverage you know ZK email or ZK or TLS notary and all the companies that had po like Pluto um was at hash it out week um last week allows you to take um take things that are technically yours but that are hosted on these platforms and you can like take it and

take it somewhere else um in a way that doesn't rely on the permission of the platform that happens to host that data or that information so it gives you privacy it gives you leverage and I think importantly it also gives you some sense of tangibility right which I think is it's easy to dismiss because it's not quite a feature but tangibility as in this uh achievement in this video game the skill based achievement in this video game that right now is just hosted on Steam hey you can you can take it and wrap it in cryptography and suddenly it's a thing right it's a thing that you can uh take into this different context of uh ethereum L one if you want to to do that or you can just take it into a different

game to some extent like you own that little blob of data um and having wrapped it with phography in ways that seem to me uh really different than just being able to do an API call and kind of reference it um in the traditional web 2way so yeah privacy leverage and tangibility uh to me are the the big affordances created by um uh by programmable cryptography and then you can combine those and hopefully get um the tools that you need to build these social spaces that are maybe a little bit well that are private but in more subtle ways if needed and allow you to coordinate that create like uh yeah you the the votes that raro tries to coordinate they feel real in part

because you have the sense of like this is only people from this country and they're unique humans and we don't have to worry about um the anti-il having been bit broken like these are just my compatriots right that voted in this thing um uh so yeah creating a little bit this sense of realness this sense of of tangibility um that feels very valuable Arno thank you so much for coming on the show and uh my pleasure kind of walking us through some of the thinking behind this article also like I don't know for me just like thinking back to the times that we joined or the early ZK Community how that's changed I mean it's just definitely a lot of food for thought on how communities evolve and change over time online what tools

there are today to like Foster that or you know what is missing potentially and trying to figure out that balance between transparency and sort of something more trustful I like that yeah thank you so much for having me and I will say a lot of these things are still kind of grasping in the dark right A lot of these things I think need more definition and playing around with these these tools and um figuring out the the edges for them so um if if anything you're like oh this is clearly wrong or you're like a I really like this but I want to explore it more um either way uh happy to happy to chat with with anyone that that's interested the same topics yeah I mean thanks Anna for for taking

this the suggestion I was really happy to to have these conversations was funny for me to be co-hosting an episode that was not a technical episode yeah true yeah all right so I want to say thank you to the podcast team Rachel Henrik Tanya and Kim Ho who's editing this episode and to our listeners thanks for listening