Privacy, the Fundamental Right We Need to Ensure

Transcript

wonderful well we have the last session here before uh lunch and Sebastian from Hopper is going to be speaking about web3 privacy infrastructure so stay tuned to that thank you so much thank you so much thank you for the introduction here so welcome and uh sorry to stand in your way of the lunch break um yeah so the transition to the from the previous talk is going to be a bit rough so I'm gonna have to improvise a bit here so who here ever had to kyc with any sort of Exchange

yeah a few people so you send your personal data you know that is for regulatory reasons required to some centralized data custodian that you think is doing a good thing is that really helping us has regulation really helped anyone in crypto has it prevented FTX who talked to the most established Regulators on the planet kind of rough to answer that one right so I come from a world where we think technology and not regulation is what protects users that protects individuals and I'm deeply convinced that that is

what the crypto space is actually about is actually about empowerment of the user nothing else crypto is not here for business process Improvement crypto is not here for more efficient trading schemes crypto is exclusively here to empower the individual and if we think about from that perspective there's a few things lacking right there's a few things that are misdirected I'm Sebastian I'm founder of Hopper and I will talk about privacy you might wonder again in this notion of empowering the individual why is he talking about privacy right isn't this all about decentralization are we actually here in this you know esteemed crypto Valley to talk about

decentralization yeah all of us want to do decentralize all the things right all of us including this gentleman he'd be very happy about decentralization he'd be very happy not having to you know comply with the annoying regulations that we heard about before he's very happy about it as you can see anybody seen this gentleman anybody here got the iris scanned already now people who got the IRS scan please keep it that way good so um yeah there is not just private for-profit corporations that are very happy about

decentralization and avoiding kind of the hassles of the old world right there's other people who are very excited about decentralization there's other people who cheer to the notion of cbdc yeah is that the decentralization that we want is that the decentralization to enable any of these esteemed gentlemen to further their power structures I think it's not because they're not aligned with the values of empowering the individual so when I talk about empowering the individual and trying to actually avoid further pitfalls of decentralization I

think we should look a bit more closely at it realization in a naive way leads to more data harvesting I know it's a bit controversial but if we think about it to what does decentralization mean technically we're talking about peer-to-peer networks yeah all of this crypto stuff is basically just peer-to-peer networks so let's look at that so crypto largely is you know made for any of these add-ons you won't find them on LinkedIn by the way but some of the leading figures who drive the crypto ecosystem forward and they're Anonymous actors who you know use their human rights of privacy

to interact with the most Innovative crypto tools on the planet and you know typically we interface peer-to-peer infrastructure might be ethereum might be stuff like the graph might be ipfs for data storage um you know any sort of this decentralized infrastructure but as it stands these centralized infrastructure this pure technology you don't have contractual relationships right you don't have any sort of you know regulatory grasp over that and every time we try to exercise such a regulatory grasp we basically failed and it is not a web 3 failure we've seen that around you know Pirate Bay you know tauren that was kind of popular when

when I went to school which is basically Prelude to the web 3 movement right so basically we cannot exercise any power over true crypto Networks so still there's a problem and that is on all layers in our focus on the most fundamental layer there is data harvesting who the hell protects us from that if regulation isn't going to cut it my thesis is that strong privacy Tech is our only only actually useful insurance policy that protects the individual from the overarching powers of private for-profit

corporations of kind of misguided individuals and Powerful failing nation states now how are we going to get about it and now I'm going to start talking a bit more about what we at Hopper are building um first of all you might wonder okay like how busy how bad is that really right how bad is that really and it's Sebastian just talking hypothetical here do we have anyone here who ever used a crypto wallet hands up okay cool that's that's good how many of the folks who just had the hand up are running their own crypto node infrastructure that interfaces their

wallets very few hands up a few shy hands up okay fine now what actually happens when your crypto wallet you're using a crypto wallet that you know tells you how many eth you have how many Bitcoin you have how does it get that information gets it from the blockchain right what's the blockchain like where's it actually get stuff from it gets stuff from a server that somebody else is running for you one of the Dirty Secrets of the web 3 infrastructure and these these servers typically called RPC providers that allow your wallet to make so-called remote procedure codes allow all sorts of data to be extracted

and I'm not going to make the demo here in a lot of time but I invite everyone here to check out derp.hubernet.org if you have an ethereum wallet you can add that one with instructions on the page to your wallet and you will see everything that your wallet is you know leaking about you and there'll be some pretty interesting surprises in for you so of course they see your ethereum address but one thing that is not talked about so often is how all of that activity is linked to your IP address your IP address is your primary identifier in the web 3 and we talk about on-chain privacy and there's really smart fellows here talking about you know this ZK stuff and we're privacy

respecting l2s now and we have privacy l1s unfortunately having a hard stance right all of that still leaks information on the metadata I invite you to check them out and that's what we set out to solve at Hopper so what are we actually doing we built a data exchange layer that is kind of middleware between you the individual that is you know kind of exposed to all sorts of peers in a network which might be peaking at your data and if you don't want this peer to creep interaction on a peer-to-peer Network we want to provide a solution for that one so how does that actually work so how do we actually go about doing that what

we're building in Hopper is a so-called mixed Network so instead of you sending data directly to some server provider to another peer in the network data is being relayed through multiple intermediate hubs in such a network and what Alejandro who's sending data to Zoe is doing here is he is choosing relayers which relay data packets and thereby obfuscating where did it came from and where it goes to and that is for the ones here who are familiar with the VPN with Tor somewhat similar to Tor who here has ever used tour all docs good

so Tor is a privacy technology that is oftentimes associated with a dark web but primarily towards technology that provides privacy for sending data around um I think this association with dark web is a misunderstanding but fair enough so Tor is actually not so private how do we improve that point so in Hopper now zooming in on any of these nodes we um we do packet mixing so packets come into this node which relays data packets it transforms them mix them up and sends them out in different order so even strong adversaries such as your internet service provider the cloud operator you know that this computer might be running on or obviously again strong

nation-state adversaries cannot link right so only with root access to all the machines along this path where your packet is traversing you will be able to link sender to recipients and that is how mix nads have stronger trust assumptions than vpns or even like onion rotors such as tor now there were a few people here using Tor anyone using a Tor node anyone running their own tour notes no why not it's pretty cool privacy Tech that you guys use why you're not running a note that's weird I don't understand so why would you right why would you run a tour node it comes at non-zero cost

non-zero risk why the hell would you use a tornado something that bring the analogy of saying would Jeff Bezos run thousands and thousands of computers in a cloud if everybody would expect that stuff is for free probably not right so we are bringing economic incentives to such a mixed net but here's a problem typically the Guardians of money don't really like privacy so that's why we had to implement a privacy respecting payment scheme that is also censorship resistant and as it happens that is what blockchains are really actually made for so with the payment scheme where you see

the package um kind of being hopping from one relayer to the next on top and a payment scheme on the bottom that only when you provide a proof that you have done actually a correct job you will get paid that's kind of the heart of the um innovation of Hopper on incentivizing the decentralized relayers in such a network without any Central oversight without any kind of central operation but just bottom up control and yeah having a self-healing network and with that we are as we say changing data privacy for good but how can I actually use it right how

would you actually use such general purpose privacy infrastructure so what we are launching right now is the first private RPC provider so this issue when you connect like your your ethereum wallet to derp you'll see a bunch of data being leaked that's not great so that's why we are building rpch as the first truly private RPC provider operating on top of the hopper Network and thereby sending the requests from your wallet from your metamask or whatever you used to an RPC server which might still be centralized which isn't great but actually do you care like do you really care if the provider behind the scenes is centralized if a they

cannot mess with the data that they deliver to you and be they cannot data Harvest you there's really no practical difference of a centralized to a decentralized network you know of course I would hope that the power structures are not just all condensing into inferior Alchemy but I think strong privacy tag is Paving away to get us there so um if you want to get X's you can check it out it's an early Alpha available right now if you are working on a crypto wallet if you are working on anything that uses RPC providers and you think it's really messed up that your users are being data harvested by Third parties that you know you don't have any

upside on come talk to us um happy to talk about how to make the web 3 Wonder World a bit more privacy respecting thank you so much for your attention and happy to take some questions [Applause] fantastic before we send you all off to lunch you have the time to ask one questions Sebastian yes please so um there is like many good things in life no free lunch except for here so um

[Music] interesting trilemma that is called the anonymity trilemma which is you know proving that there's no free lunch between strong anonymity low latency and low bandwidth overhead so basically in that triangle you somewhere have to choose your sucker and um what you want to do with hopper is like we make that customizable to your use cases or to your user so if you say I work on a hardcore private wallet you you know um go via like three intermediate relayers you have latency in like tens of seconds to have a large anonymity set if you say hey I want you something that's you know quite a bit better than

a VPN it's even fine to send it like via one intermediate Hub that's kind of changed for every single packet that you send out so there's kind of fast packet mixing even via just one node it's basically as if you had a VPN that is for every packet just choosing a different route but yeah unfortunately no free lunch there and it depends on the specific purpose and a specific privacy requirements you have there if anybody wants to Mint their poab please come see me afterwards I think every crypto conference has to have co-ops thank you and happy lunch time