Privacy and self-sovereign infrastructure!

Transcript

All right, fantastic. This even works. Okay, let's see if this slides. Oh, there we go. Great. Yes, thank you very much everyone for coming. Um I know it's been a long day most likely and this is I think the last talk of the day. So, thank you all for making it out here. Um so, this is much more of an ethos conversation over what we should be doing for the space long term. I think in order to actually try to accomplish what we set out in the beginning. Um this is not a specific picture on a tech stack. If you'd like to come talk to me afterwards about the actual specific tech stack that implements this, yeah, just come find me afterwards and I'm happy to tell you more about how to get like heterogeneous packets working in

real life. Um okay, and yeah, with that we can get started. So, I think fundamentally we should be very careful here in terms of what kind of technology we end up building and we should care a lot about privacy and sovereignty um just because otherwise we're going to build the sort of single biggest surveillance apparatus that the world has ever seen in a way that I think it's very dystopian to imagine at this point in time where like if your entire financial data lives on a single centralized place transparent to everyone in the world, there's nothing stopping anyone from especially nowadays with AI to essentially draw very large-scale inferences over essentially infinite amounts of data sets.

Um and really blockchains and cryptography, like to me they were always about giving like allowing people to do defense essentially. Like allowing people to be sovereign in their own right without being captured by a third party. Like I think like one of the biggest examples for this is like Facebook never really intended that they were going to be used to influence US elections. It just happens that they ended up having so much data that really there was nothing they could do about it. And I think with blockchains and cryptography and consensus systems and distributed systems, we actually have the ability to defend ourselves quite a bit here.

And yeah, so my mental model for how we should be thinking about this is always been World War III. And I've been told repeatedly that this is not a super optimistic pitch for the like for normal people that like most people don't like to think about bad things happening to them. But from a design perspective, it like if you think about sort of like is your system resilient in a World War III type scenario, it really makes it clear what kind of principles you should be following, what kind of designs you should be taking. Because if you just think about the best case scenario, you're most likely just going to replicate the mistakes that we've made honestly in Web 2, which is why Web 2 is so brittle in practice.

So yeah, the goal of the space and we shouldn't really forget this is to be sovereign. And with this I will say something I think that most Ethereum people in like that most of us here find fairly hostile, I would say, is a single decentralized network is still very, very centralized. Um and this really it just comes down to the point that the moment you have single failure points, you start running into this problem like what actually happens if you have a single failure point. And I will give you this example for example Bitcoin. In the case of World War III, Bitcoin or Ethereum will just not survive. Like there's not going to be global latency to like ship a bunch of blocks and

attestations around, right? Like it's very unlikely that these systems will actually be there as a fallback scenario. We really need local infrastructure that like that scales as much as connectivity allows. So like relying on a single global system, even if the single global system is decentralized, is most likely not a working proposition in case hits actually hits the fan. The other thing I would like everyone to get to think about is um I don't know how many people here think that a one world government is a good idea. Like I mean it'd be very efficient, right? Like I mean I can ask a different question. How many people here think that a one European government is a good idea?

So So if like no one really either thinks this or is willing to admit it, um but from that perspective we should be very careful to also not be building these like single one world government systems where you don't have a choice of exit. Because a fundamentally single decent grass network is still very centralized. Like it won't survive World War III. Mostly because as global fiber gets cut most likely on the eve of World War III and the satellites drop out of the sky the bandwidth will not be there globally to support like Bitcoin blocks blocks getting shipped around. Uh so they're just not very resilient in that sense.

From a social perspective they can be very easily captured. Um and I think we've seen this historically over and over again that over time the systems tend to ossify and tend to prioritize certain user groups of others. And this is not actually to say that you know specialization and ossification is necessarily a bad thing, but I think we should always keep in mind that like you would want to have the choice to leave. And to pick something else. So I think we should be really much very much designing for an easy migration path between different kinds of systems.

And yeah, so as a result we shouldn't be designing blockchains like single one world governments because most people here don't seem to be super happy about a single one world government. And I think over the long period over the long time frame most people won't be very happy about a single um sort of single blockchain for the world. Um I mean just think about how much the Bitcoiners kept advocating that like oh, we should only have one true chain and it turns out that the actual nice thing was we can have many different systems and they can feel independently to each other. Because fundamentally a single security instance can over time extract rent and harm users. Whether this is in the case of actually actively dissuading specific users or use cases or actively

trying to extract as much profit as possible. Generally speaking monopolies have never done really well in the world or well, they've done very well, let's say that way. They've done very very well. They just don't tend to be very good for the end users, the people actually want to use them. So users must always be given the ability to leave and you know, you could say this that well, of course you can always leave. You can just like sell all your assets. >> Mhm.

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>> here. So, it collapsed over the last 10-15 years though, but TCP/IP was designed reasonably well with that in mind. I mean, we didn't design around a single large server in the middle that serves every single website in the world. Um yeah, this is my talk on privacy and cyber entry. Thank you very so much. I think I'm out of time. So, if you have questions, come find me afterwards.