Sanctuary, Together

Transcript

Um thank you Nathan and thank you Vitilik. Uh and good morning everyone here and uh to people watching online good local time. Um, Vitilik as we just heard um closed with a very difficult question, a challenge like whom do we actually still trust and uh he of course answered a little bit with openness and verifiability. Uh but for the even broader question like what kind of system uh can rebuild this kind of trust he gave us a open invitation uh namely that we need to figure this out together. So um in this keynote I would like to make the word uh together more operational and it began with something that I did at home uh last month. A local agent helped me setting up my home

solo staking node. It's a very small computer that also helps secure Ethereum uh on the same machine that runs that local AI as Vitalik said is local first and the local agent synchronized the node and check its starting checkpoint against three independent sources and then it audited its own machine and flagged 13 ways some zero days um that uh others could be using to access this machine and closed them all uh on my review. And the keys of course don't uh live on that machine. It lives in a small uh box, the second box that only I touch. And I made that offline with the recovery words on paper and send a deposit myself as instructed. Um but the good thing is that all this I figured

out uh not by myself but with this uh local agent with a sandbox around it within about one hour and so the validator is now waiting to activate. So obviously local agents made what previously was demanding tasks much easier now and the hardware and the deposit of course still cost money but then looking after the note taking the attention those cost now dominates who can try this at home and so um this what I learned is that someone still has to decide what is worth checking and keep checking and across our community we can now much more easily share that work as prompts and make room for one another uh to check together and so the agent

bringing the expertise is upon us but then the care still has come uh to come from us. So for those of us building those tools together there's a very useful test here. Can someone use our work with more independence while still knowing where to turn for help and asking for help now should be an ordinary part of taking control of our own tools. And so this is verification and as a shared practice. So this community as we all know grew up on a three-word uh idea uh don't trust verify. And here I want to add another word uh together. A proof on chain can settle a claim and people still have to check it and the institutions still have to answer on what they find. and

sanctuary technologies protect our keys, our messages, our devices and Ethereum belongs in this wider sanctuary uh family. So as a cryptographic world computer, the rules and executions we can independently check but we also need the wider community who help us challenge when something goes wrong and those relationships uh makes this protection usable. So some of us here write protocols, some of us work in civic tech, civic technology, some of us in privacy, open source safety or the open web. So DevCom belongs to all those neighboring communities too because our experience translating instructions and maintaining those relationships and helping people can help Ethereum to

protect together. So in Taiwan uh as minister of digital affairs and our cyber ambassador I have seen four practices that may help. It's a everyone checks and then uh big tech answering to the people and communities govern together and finally we move together. So the first example is from Kofax. Think of a suspicious maybe a fishing message maybe scam arriving in a family chat usually end to end encrypted in a chat group. Someone shared it out of concern. Now we the people can check the messages while respecting the person who sent it because we hope that they will feel welcome enough to ask about the next one. And so this is Kofax. It grew out of GZV or GovZero. It's a Taiwan's

volunteer civic tech community. So in Taiwan, anyone can forward a suspicious line message to this open-source Kofax chatbot and volunteer editors write and maintain replies that everyone can read and check together. So anyone can add more evidence or challenge an answer and indeed train an agent together that is the first responder to those new messages. So the moto here is very simple. Everybody can fact check all the fact checkers. The code is open and in Thailand the Kofac Thailand also reuse the same open source code to empower their communities. And when the Taiwanese government joined the Kofax uh by sharing our corrections quickly, we call it humor over rumor. Um the

correction that people really enjoy having fun sharing has a much better chance of reaching the next family chat. And so the important part is that the correction itself stays open even from the government to people's correction. And so this is a habit that we can practice in our own projects. For the next answer that our project publishes, we can name who handles corrections, link the evidence and show that what feedback improved the answer. And checking also needs somewhere to lead. A person who spots a scam also needs a way to get a people with power, usually big tech, uh to respond. And we should expect the people running those platform to explain their decisions and respond um publicly to those affected. And that

brings us to the alignment assembly. So in 2024, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs held this assembly online on deep fakes and online fraud. We sent 200,000 random text messages to SMS numbers around Taiwan. We received about 1,700 valid replies and from those we chose randomly 447 people to deliberate in a long afternoon in the 44 online groups on Stanfor's platform and after hearing from each other each person have to convince nine other people on the same table and they crowdsource the law together. So today Taiwan's fraud crime hazard prevention act places obligation on all the largest ad platforms. They must verify whomever commissioning or

paying for an ad and name them on the ad. And that includes anyone who pay to boost a single uh post. And then we have our own crowdsourced community fraudbuster that anybody can join and flag incoming scam and fishing. And so it has received millions and millions of reports and then the authority check those reports and notify the platform. And according to this crowdsource law, uh the platform has 24 hours to take the ads down and uh prevent future similar ads. And then if it fails to act, if somebody lost 5 million, then the platform is liable for that 5 million.

So a public reports bring evidence for review and then official notice starts the platform's duty to act. And so paying for reach of course that is very different from the free speech. In Taiwan, we uh insist that speech must remain anonymous, privacy protected. But once you start paying for reach uh then it's um our people's collective will uh that KYC is then imposed on it. So um for the end to end privacy this morning, I hope we can carry both commitment with us. Privacy for people and accountability for the reach that the big tech platforms sell. Now communities also need a say in the tools that we rely on. I serve on the inaugural board of roosttools which builds open safety

tools. We have a review tool uh coupe that is free and open source. It's self-hostable. So any community can review any like child safety or other code of conduct reports on their own infrastructure without uploading everything to Microsoft PhotoDNA or some other big tech. So the committee controls the data and keep all the child protection duties to itself including getting reports and acting on them. And because the software is free and verifiable, the people doing the review um can focus their time on training on lasting support on the committee forum.

And so it's just like the people behind Kofax when we plan a service we also need to budget for the care work and for the people who carry the care work. The people reviewing reports need a say in how their tools change. So for any small community, this can begin with a very practical conversation like in your project who is receiving this kind of flags and reports who can act and who supports the person doing the review and answer gives the next person somewhere to turn. So this afternoon uh vitilik and I will explore how those open agentic systems can protect people and can enable people taking real responsibility instead of diffuse them away when something goes wrong.

So we also need cooperation across communities and countries at Davos in January Canada's prime minister Mark uh Carney uh put it very plainly. He said middle powers must all act together because if we are not at a table then we're on the menu. Uh cooperation gives all the middle powers and our communities a joint say in decision that shapes our lives because for all of us that means we should write the rules together. A city, a small community, a municipality, a small community can all contribute something essential without being able to set all the royal rules alone. So working together, let us keep our own voice while building something

that we can share together, a federated civic infrastructure. And so I think what is important here is that anyone who needs a sanctuary is part of this community of essentially middle powers that can build but must federate and give what people with limited time a way to contribute without owning the world's infrastructure. And my favorite uh story of that how that came to happen uh is the GSM is on the mobile phone in Bong uh May 1987. Four European governments back one share standard and by September that year operators from 13 countries had signed on to the standard called

GSM. And those agreements are important because they help making roaming freedom of movement possible. We could land in another country like in India and start using our phones um immediately. A traveler could call home without first understanding the standard. And here in India this morning I pay for a taxi cap using UPI. It's a seamless. It makes interoperability very familiar in daily life. So by working on those shared standards that let people on different apps pay one another uh we can take that lesson and build different interoperable standards across all the different parts of the agentic stack because the agents that we bring home also need this kind of freedom. uh vitilik asks for

interoperability and user control and for agentic systems uh it means the context that we control the agents that answer to us the models that we can freely choose and move and also protections that all of us can verify. So local first and then free to roam. And so um later on uh we will learn from various different uh parts of the Ethereum ecosystem about how cryptography can withstand quantum and now agentic attacks. And we will also learn about formal verification, the mathematical evidence that code follows stated rules and the speakers who follow will show how Ethereum teams are tackling all of those new challenges.

And I think for the postquantum transition in particular, the work is not just technical. It of course has keys and signatures and proofs, but also about each person maintaining their own node and understanding how to stay vigilant to all those new like 13 new attack vectors that my local agent uh sent to me. And the migration plan also need very clear instructions to so that someone with just a paper backup can follow with time and help to make that move. So our test is that whether everyone who relies on those wallets and apps and agents can make the move with us and with their privacy intact. And so I welcome you to scan this QR code. I'm pretty sure that the Defcon app will not

crash because I tried it. Um and um it is uh basically the idea that we're crowdsourcing also our afternoon talk. Um I will first talk about civic AI for self-governing communities and then Vitali would join on how to make agents safe in the open and we commit to answer each and every of your questions. So please uh feel free to scan the QR code and sign into the defcon app. Now um as I was mentioning um anyone who needs sanctuary already belong to a larger community that also needs sanctuary. So although as Defcon says uh we're all born free, uh we must free the future together because the