ETHBerlin³ Fireside with Chelsea Manning and Jaya Klara Brekke

foreign [Music] everybody how are you feeling awesome thank you so much for being with us here today my name is Evan McMullen and I am the co-founder and CEO of disco where we believe that you are the multi-faceted center of the party just as you are and you should reflect your data and your identity to the world however you choose I am so thrilled to be here today with Jaya brecky and Chelsea Manning from Nim the global decentralized privacy project Chelsea Manning is a whistleblower veteran security engineer at Nim and occasional DJ she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and received the eff Pioneer award in recognition for her actions as a whistleblower and for her work as an advocate for government transparency and transgender rights Jaya is the chief strategy officer at Nim she is also a research fellow at The weisenbaum Institute has a PhD from Durham University a geography department on the politics of blockchain protocols and is an occasional expert advisor to the European Commission on distributed Ledger technology she speaks rights and conducts research on privacy power and the political economies in decentralized systems so in light of this week's developments in our ethereum ecosystem I'm especially excited for us to discuss the role of consent and privacy amid the scaling of our world's most public ledgers in contrast to the transparency of networks like ethereum Nims privacy infrastructure enables the secure transmission of data using network protocols that obscure individuals metadata Footprints coins and wallets so jayak can you uh kick off by telling us a little bit more about Nim what are mixed Nets and what inspires you about the future enabled by these routing protocols sure um so yeah so Nim the core technology of Nims and mixnet and what a mixnet does is it takes uh traffic in the internet and it mixes it together so it takes everybody's traffic mixes it across three uh layers of nodes and adds micro time delays and basically ensures that patterns of communication cannot be uh discerned from um from observing the entire network and this is important for a variety of different reasons because when you can see the patterns of communication you can discern a lot about people's relationships so what a mixnet does is it protects uh you know both things like IP addresses but importantly also metadata and exactly you know patterns of communications so um what that what that means uh I think what people oftentimes don't understand is you know encryption is is not enough you can send you know encrypted messages back in enforce but just by looking at the timing you know what time of the day you send the message or the size of the message the message data you can actually understand quite a lot about what's going on and the nature of a person's relationship so say for example you are you happen to be sending a message to you know someone else at you know 10 o'clock at night on a regular basis it's quite likely to be quite a personal relationship um and there's you know from there you can do all kinds of analysis using new types of surveillance that's uh you know operated through a machine learning algorithms that really gives quite fine-grained information despite the content of the messages being hidden um so that's essentially you know a kind of quick explanation of mixed Nets um it is a uh importantly also a collective approach to to securing privacy um and you know which is kind of important also in kind of a deeper philosophical level because when we're dealing with the situation like today where we have mass surveillance we really need to start thinking about Mass privacy systems as well right to address the fact that um the way surveillance operates uh in a kind of in our contemporary world has less to do with looking at you know someone spying on a specific individual and has much more to do with what does the collective datascape reveal about any given individual at any given moment so even if I as an individual protect my privacy um the behaviors of people around me will still reveal a lot about me so you know that's why we need a kind of collective approach to privacy that's why we need you know things like mixed Nets to actually address this problem at that level Chelsea why now what experiences have you had and um what is it about the state of the Privacy Tech ecosystem that led you to this particular project right so Nim uh man I mean well I'll just start from the beginning so basically Harry Halpin who is our uh who's the person who really started uh and uh put Nim together as an actual project even though it had been through thrown around thrown around and floated around a bit um by a number of uh privacy experts over the years um he's actually started he actually formed the corporation and uh and raised funding to be able to to make this happen um independently uh I several people came up with the same sort of idea of creating a mixed net which is uh if you think if you think of how tour works um as a a as sort of a mixing uh and a um uh a connection like hop uh you know an anonymizer between different connections um a mixed net adds an additional shroud uh an additional layer of protect section around the packets of data and so I in 2016 independently came up with a sort of proposal for how to do for how to create a mixed net along with Yan Zu the uh notice at bcrypt on it on Twitter uh and uh we we both worked on this together uh just to sort of like throw you know um spaghetti on the wall proposal for what would be would we would expect if we were to improve upon the existing infrastructure of something like Tor or the existing VPN infrastructures that you that you see out there um what is unique about Nim though uh in comparison to other mixed Nets is that it has this additional layer which is the blockchain aspect of it which is designed to incentivize um people to run nodes and to be rewarded for running those nodes so while a user doesn't necessarily need to know anything about tokens or blockchains or wallets or anything like that people who run nodes on the networks will most certainly you know need need to and and will benefit from an understanding of how of how MA of sort of how how the the proof of mixing works because it's unlike proof of stake or proof of uh or or proof of mining you have proof of you have proof of mixing which is a a way of being rewarded tokens for contributing to the mixing process across the network because the math involved in running a mixed net with a secure enough level of encryption fast enough across the network is going to require an enormous amount of computational energy uh and and time and effort and it needs to be distributed across the entire network so uh in order to do that you need to sort of of incentive structure that isn't monitor that isn't based on existing monetary structures that isn't based on existing um uh you know institutional Frameworks or anything like that so that way a particular region doesn't get uh prioritized over another um you know especially for a you know trying to defeat censorship and things like that um so yeah so I you know it's all of these different things just really solved by um by this stack of solutions this infrastructure approach um by trying to secure internet the try trying to secure internet internet like um protocols uh HTTP type protocols your messenger type protocols uh your transaction your your you know um your cryptocurrency transaction type protocols all across you know a an agnostic environment um and be able to communicate with each other privately and securely at the infrastructure but with the with this at the infrastructure level at the low as low as a level as we can get it to be possible um so that way we can ensure that all of these communications can be private and secure and also come relatively fast maybe not uh maybe not fast in the beginning but later on down the line they can be fast so yeah that was what draw that that's what drew me to the prod to this project is that you know Nim isn't going to solve anything immediately it is a long-term project this is this is a at least a decades long you know this is a decade-long maybe maybe even longer sort of larger grander project to really rethink privacy and privacy technology privacy infrastructure so privacy infrastructure is not often something that we talk about in rooms like this where we are relying on the open transparency of our public ledgers well they should we absolutely should and that's why I'm so glad that we are here having this discussion with so many people in a position to be able to operationalize these ideas um so you know some of you may have have heard me describe public ledgers as equal opportunity surveillance apparatuses which is a phase that phrase that I I learned from Chelsea earlier this year and I think about it daily when pushing transactions to networks like ethereum where my interactions will be available to everyone on Earth and in space with an internet connection until the heat death of the universe uh quite the opposite of what we might think of as private um you know in web 3 uh you know based on the the quotes around the halls of this building and the way that we lead ourselves in the world we follow in the footsteps of The Cypher Punk movement um but you know Chelsea what does it mean to Anchor social and political change in the Technologies of cryptography and privacy and you know in your opinion what are cipherpunk values and why are they so important for us to consider right now uh it's it's actually a dichotomy right you know you have this this these two poles which are privacy and openness right they're two opposites right you want as much individual privacy as possible and you want as much societal openness as possible in that so it's really um about utilizing technology utilizing math utilizing um an understanding of information in the universe and the the sort of Economics so and the thermodynamics and the entropy of the entire universe and understanding all these different principles and applying it to trying to come up with uh a a new or uh at least in a more enlightened approach towards operating or in envisioning your Society of running you know so it is really about um trying to find that balance between your privacy as a as an individual and as a and and as a smaller Collective as a community and the sort of greater good of you know Society having openness and transparency and you know open Communication open debate open dialogue Etc so it's it's very it's a very difficult um you know it's very difficult to Define because these these there are so many forces uh within the sort of movement that are Polar Opposites really um I would like to add a little bit more to that as well like I think the interesting thing about cypherpunk thinking is that there is actually a a kind of embedded analysis of power um and that embedded analysis of power can enable us to Think Through the relationship between privacy and openness in quite useful ways um so one of the kind of like old school sayings of uh Cypher Punk culture is um transparency for the powerful and privacy for the rest of us right and um as a principle I think that's it can be a very kind of useful way to Think Through what is the role of public ledgers um also in relation to the people that then go about using them right um so you know I think typically speaking when we think about transparency for the powerful uh privacy for the rest of us we might have an idea of who the powerful are being you know governments corporations the usual kind of cliches um but actually when we're going about building alternative Futures and we're going about Building decentralized Systems uh I think there's a lot of work to be done there around you know who is the powerful and who is the rest of us in in that scenario right um and the way that we kind of think about that within Nim is is actually that when you're operating with a decentralized infrastructure and people become increasingly dependent on that decentralized infrastructure it is in fact the infrastructure itself that becomes the powerful and the users of that infrastructure are the rest of us right and what that means in practice then is that the actual operators and the way the infrastructure operates needs to be transparent and transparent in the sense of Open Source Code transparency in the sense of um you know the power dynamics of like you know who who has the the highest hash rate and you know who are operating the main validators in the network and so and so forth that becomes very important to have you know as open public information um whereas the people that are actually interacting with the system you know that is the rest of us and that's where we really need to start to secure people's privacy a lot better um but I actually think that generally speaking there is a little bit there's too much of a lack of analysis of power in the space right now when it comes to exactly these questions um who is you know who is the powerful who is the rest of us and what you know where where should how can we guarantee privacy from people that are interacting with systems I think a remarkable number of people in this room could be counted among the powerful in terms of the technical decisions in this ecosystem um I mean just that's that's another interesting point right meaning that actually like you know as human beings we operate in different capacities right so sometimes we're the powerful and sometimes we're not um and so there's you know again there's a bunch of work to be done around like okay when you're when you're coding a piece of infrastructure that other people are going to depend upon um then yes you are you you are in a position of power and you need to understand you know how you're actually you know executing that power and what that means for other people yeah our our roles our identities are not fixed and public and permanent right we you know show up as in in different capacities in different spaces and that flexibility is not offered to us by things like an immutable public Ledger um right before we got on stage where we're looking at a tweet said something to the effective um cryptocurrencies first crypto countries next how might we anchor the spirit of this intention bringing people together in in sort of the the Delight of these Technologies but how might we anchor that idea in cypherpunk values in a manner that is not going to um overly empower the already powerful and limit us from having flexibility in our roles and how we show up okay can I can I take this for a minute immediately yes um another tendency that I've seen in this space is that somehow you know there is there is a tendency to reproduce existing Dynamics in a decentralized form right so it's like let's uh let's reproduce nation states let's reproduce Banks let's reproduce the legal system and we'll just do it in a decentralized network which just seems like the biggest missed opportunity right if you know to actually have uh to move towards transformation of what these institutions look like a different kind of thinking needs to take place and that includes like throughout the entire Spectrum right so we had a little bit of a conversation around identity earlier where there is you know too much of a tendency for people to want to like you know put people's passports on public ledgers and it's like you know and it again it's like this problem of like this you know how can we get out of the the the let's say the the conditioning that we have um from the institutions and the structures that we live in at the minute to really move forward into something that is truly new a different set of of um ways of organizing social relationships that actually make full use of the affordances of these Technologies right and that's where you know uh selective disclosure credentials is much more interesting than than putting identities online um because it's actually making use of you know the Fantastic possibilities that we have with cryptography right it's pretty much My Views as well uh summed up I do think that I do think the existing infrastructure whenever it comes to this is one of the reasons why I've been a Critic of cryptocurrency in particular which makes me an outlier in this uh in this area but um I have it's it's not that I'm not it's not that I was never excited about blockchain or that I was never excited about crypto or that I was never excited about these tools and the ability for innovation in the space um I think that one of the problems that I've seen with cryptocurrency and with the the more recent sort of craze over nfts is that um it it it's really been something that's been benefiting incumbent systems and incumbent powers and people who are already who are already benefit benefiting from these structures and already benefiting from the from the existing sort of Institutions who have uh who have have benefited the most thus far um you know there has been some outliers there's been some people who have had a unique opportunity and they've been able to take it but um the sort of culture around these around uh you know from about 2013 to about last year I'd say you know the culture of CR of sort of the crypto space and the and you know became less about sort of cypherpunk mentality and much more about like let's get rich Let's make lots of money and it's gonna be crypto money it's gonna be tokens we're gonna tokenize all of our assets and I don't think that that you know that I I I've never really found that appealing because I just find that to be like a a an approach towards you know um reinstating a a more um a more libertarian digitally libertarian form of capitalism which you know I I think has its own in you know sort of uh structural problems um but that's getting into a lot of sort of higher Theory and politics and things like that for but for the for the moment like I'm going to stick more to the technical things which is that there are no technical limitations that say we need to reinstate existing in in you know institutions and infrastructure there are these tools you know whether whether it's blockchain or whether it's a mixed net or whether it's uh it's it's any kind of uh technology you know machine learning it doesn't machine learning is outside of the space but yeah but yet you know league is something that is also like has an enormous potential for you know uh being a liberatory or transformative force and yet it's being used to to train you better you know to train algorithms to show more ads to you right um and so you know I'm just I'm just very alarmed it's sort of the the the sort of the way that technologists have sort of given up or you know given in to the existing infrastructure and the existing institutions a lot um you know which but I've been wanting to resist against that and that's why I you know that's why I'm so excited about Nim that's why I'm so excited about some of the newer projects that are coming in and that's one of the reasons why I'm even here you know is just because I see that there's a lot more potential for Innovation now especially in the crypto winter so to speak yeah it is incumbent upon us when the tokens are not just going up to not transpose the systems that already are in place and to further entrench people in positions of power but rather to challenge you know what this looks like even when our bags are still pretty you know looking pretty good um so kind of to to that end um the the merge that we celebrated this week signals A Way Forward Beyond protocol fetishists and techno proof of stake proof of stake sounds delicious um but yeah we got to scale this stuff into the lives of everyday people uh but you know as as ethereum scales post merge and new users from around the world begin to venture into web 3 as we start to improve the user experience um of you know our application layer and and bring more non-financial utility into into web3 we must bring privacy to the Forefront of this work um so Jaya how should Builders prioritize privacy as our community matures Beyond experiments and conjecture into Global adoption um from Nim's perspective privacy needs to be there as the default um and you know the kind of complicated element to that is the fact that that that means across the the entire stack right um and Nim is looking specifically at the network layer and there's lots of other good projects out there that are looking at the application layer and and so on and so forth um I mean there is the addition there's you know additional complications around proof of stake right which I think like peop a lot of other people have been talking about which is um the the question of validator privacy and how that opens up to uh you know possible attacks um and that's something that we're looking at at Nim and we're doing a few experiments there to see how Nim can um help that situation by protecting the IP addresses the validators um but yeah it's you know it's really I think if we don't actually start solving these problems now it's gonna have you know some major major problems that are major major issues down the line um privacy needs to be built in by the default as a default and I mean I'm hoping we can get into this a little bit more as we go along the conversation because I want to talk a little bit about what does that actually look like in terms of like the Futures that we're building um because there is a tendency to think about privacy very much as this protective thing um but I actually think that it's it's the precondition for a much more in like interesting Innovation pathway but I think we can get into that a little bit later yeah I think oh sorry go ahead no go ahead so um you know in web3 we often hear people talking about oh we'll add privacy later we need to prioritize data availability because that's what smart contracts need as inputs um and we can consider the informed consent of our users and and the parties interacting later on um so you know as a as a prompt like is informed consent and data availability is that is that a set of two polar extremes is there a way in the middle that we can find where we can find compromise or is the importance of data availability to inform smart contracts just so valuable um that that's something that we need to continue to prioritize I mean I have a ton to say on this um I mean the here's the thinking basically um privacy to my mind it's just like it's the first step privacy is an intervention into the entire data pipeline from my from from our opinion um and what do I mean by that I mean that uh there is there is a bit of a kind of or a major misunderstanding about the nature of data um like in the first place um meaning that data is just this thing that's available it's out there it's kind of objective we just grab it and then we use it for something and it's important you know and so forth but actually the production of data itself is already a political act in and of itself is already a social act in and of itself um the production of data is the production of knowledge and the production of knowledge is something that actually needs to be in the hands of communities themselves not something that is at random totally just scraped from everybody's you know digital interactions by you know some megacorp somewhere and just sucked up and plugged into another machine like that is a form of knowledge that's not our knowledge it's not our the knowledge that we have control over and that we're kind of contributing to out of our own kind of uh consensual you know engagements with these Technologies so the way that I see um the way that I see privacy is really as a kind of it's almost a blockade it's almost like it's an intervention into the existing data economy which is a surveillance economy um to say that we want a different form of knowledge production and we want a different pathway for Innovation and I think actually like rather than holding things back it will produce a much more interesting form of innovation because it will it will it will translate throughout the entire data pipeline all the way through to machine learning algorithms right where all of a sudden you know people can have a say over uh not just the data that gets produced about them but how it then gets used later on right what kind of algorithms should be trained on this data why what are the data sets in the first place you know there's a it becomes a much more um let's say involved and consensual form of of innovation that can be in the hands and in control of communities that are actually going to go and use these Technologies instead of things that are kind of being you know force fed to us and used for to capture people in infinite Scrolls and AD clicking uh this goes this gets back to another reason why I was gravitated towards getting involved in crypto again and being involved in Nim is because I I've I've been for the last five or so years in the machine learning space and in the you know uh the the weights and balances world if you will uh so doing the uh and in this space um you know one of the things that that has struck me uh as being a problem and uh as being a problem that that tools like uh like Nim are vitally needed for to solve our you know we're ending up in in more and more situations where data collection is like is like not something that is intuitively seen as something that needs to be private for certain data types it's because it's not even just uh metadata anymore it's almost like meta metadata where it's like the amount like a perfect example of this is Tick Tock right when you're on your phone using the tick tock app every single microsecond that you're on the app is measured and every single interaction you have down to the microsecond is like measured and and they're able to determine how your personality type uh your background your age your gender your location all of this data based on how little you don't or do interact with the video that is being shown at you at all times so you're able to learn enormous amounts of information off of something that isn't intuitively understood to be private information it's your watch time and now we have tools that are you know coming into the pipeline where you know it it shouldn't be you should find it funny that you all of a sudden ever everybody had all these electronic devices have facial recognition and are able to really catch you know sort of the cues of your facial recognition your and what your your face is doing at any given time because it's being it's being prepared for they're preparing you uh for a time in which it is if you have to look at the phone and watch the ad and it's going to you know the the your phone is going to determine be you know via facial recognition system that you are in fact watching the ad for the entire for the entirety portion of the ad if you turn away then it won't it'll stop right so all of these different things that are not seen as private information or private or or being a privacy issue are becoming more to the Forefront of things that need to be countered things that need to be pushed back against and you know I think the technologists um have a responsibility to ensure these kinds of tools aren't being built but since they are being built we need we need to construct ways in which we can resist against that and immunize ourselves as anxiety against I think that's a great point that you know that we have an ethical imperative as Builders of tools that coordinate human beings emphasis on the human right the atomic unit of web3 is a human being not a wallet not a token not a platform and so you know we in this room have an opportunity to set guard rails for ourselves we are too old to uh to pretend that there are no negative externalities to our conjectures and suggestions so how might you guide us to think about drawing a line around what is possible Building inside of it to minimize risk and harm to human beings well one of the things that I find so fascinating is that um when you know if you think about technology if you think about somebody who like works I mean I'm using an example because I'm from the machine learning space um in uh for somebody who's working on uh data in data science right somebody who's working in data science it affects you know an enormous number of people with the tools that they develop and the the data and the data sets that they work with whereas a doctor or a lawyer are held to you know they're held to an ethical standard right a doctor has a Hippocratic Oath a lawyer has the bar association and uh you know various legal standards uh and ethical standards that they have to do but as a profession so these professions are held to a higher standard even though they're only really you're only really working with one client as a lawyer at a time and one patient as a doctor at a time whereas like as a technologist you're essentially working on millions of people all at the same time and that you're not held to the same standards um and I think that that is a that the sort of like setting a setting technologists up to failure for up for failure and as a as a class as a as a as a whole field um you know because you know we're really you know there is there really isn't a a common set of Standards or approaches for these things um because you know you would never go you would never go to your doctor and say uh or and or you never go here you would never go to a doctor who would say something like um you know uh you know like we'll just we'll just break it and then fix it later right you know that's you don't go to a doctor with that kind of mentality but that's the mentality that exists in so many in so much of of the technology space sounds like we need a Cypher Punk oath of Integrity Jaya what do you think yes yeah no I agree I actually just a funny anecdote um in 2016 I think it was I was commissioned by B9 lab to write a Hippocratic Oath for blockchain developers so I wrote I wrote a brief Hippocratic Oath for blockchain developers and then worked with them on a kind of ethical course as part of their blockchain developer course offer ring so yeah any reminders any any suggestions that pulled from that oath that uh that we might put into practice in this room um I'm trying to remember now what I wrote in there because it's actually it's quite a long time ago but there was some there there was definitely one point that was on Exodus the ability to leave a system if you need to um and I think that you know when you're talking about decentralized large-scale systems that's a really important thing um yeah and then there was a whole bunch of other stuff but I'll put I'll put a link out to again and kind of revive the conversation around that well in order to honor The Exodus and autonomy of our users let us remember that as we are modifying our nfts and considering whether or not they are transferable um so you know surveillance capitalism obviously isn't isn't going anywhere so how can we leverage privacy preserving technology as an intervention into the data economy paint a picture for us of the two extremes here um what happens if we do nothing and proceed as we are now and what happens if we full send on protecting the sovereignty of our users years um well first of all I do hope that surveillance capitalism is going away um hopefully it's not going to stick around uh no um so I'm kind of when it comes to painting the picture of how dark things can get um I think what we're going to start to see is a kind of curious blend between data and money so if you think about money as like an access token um I think actually increasingly our data is going to play that role so like if money determines like whether you can have access to resources or not whether you can you know enter this or that kind of airplane or you know club or whatever else um I think there's going to be we're going to see this kind of blend and you can see that happening also I think like tokens are actually going to play a role here um and that's also why I think this question of identity is such an important uh question to really think clearly about what are the ethical implications around that the new types of identity systems which we're building which hopefully we're not going to build but we're going to build something else instead um but yeah there's I think there's going to be this blend of of uh you know Concepts around data and money data is going to start to to function much more as money in the sense of fine-grained access tokens um and it's going to become more and more claustrophobic but in quite um Insidious ways so you know you know this kind of fine-grained modulation of right now we're kind of familiar with it in terms of our experience of online you know advertising and online realities where you know our realities are continuously modulated on the basis of our our you know um Prof the profiling that's happening and that's happening on a continuous basis but that's going to become I think we're going to start to see more violent sides of that um where it's not just the about what advertisements you're served and which already is having quite violent effects especially on the kind of mental health and I know we've talked quite a bit about mental health before um but actually like uh yeah it's gonna it's gonna have uh increasingly kind of um horrible consequences so that's like the horror picture for me um the the the kind of the bright picture of how things could be different I think I've talked a little bit about this already in the fireside chat but but um yeah it does look like you know I almost picture it as like this kind of Silence right it's like okay we we Implement you know privacy as a default and it's like oh okay we can breathe again and then we can start making active very considerate decisions around what data gets produced when and how and about who um and why and what that that data can then be used for and to have much more control over that um on an individual and on a collective level um I mean I really want to emphasize this this thing that data is not neutral in any way whatsoever data is always one particular way to frame reality um it's not just a kind of generic you know oh it's just it's just information about the world it's like no you know the moment you produce the data is already a decision about what matters into who um and and that's what I want to see a much more kind of active uh and considered Behavior around and in order to do that you need to have privacy as a default otherwise you have the production of data at random on mass um with you know very very violent effects that are coming yeah yeah I think it's it's critical for us to contemplate that gets down in the darker areas of my own experience so the premise of credible neutrality I think is challenged by by this idea that data inherently is political um and and so you know as as we move further down the stack and think about all of the the different layers that will contribute to this future um you know Chelsea beneath the app infrastructure and network layers how do you envision the role of secure Hardware evolving in light of all of these conditions so I think we are at a very critical time when it comes to Hardware development um a few things are happening kind of all at the same time um first there are some standards um so there are now uh there are now some architectures like Risk five that have be that have become made available um that uh are open source meaning that you don't have to go to a gigantic chips company uh with a pet with a bunch of patents to ask for permission to design and develop a general purpose computer chip that can run General software right so risk five can be uh you know it can do what an arm you know chip does uh like the ones in your in your MacBook m1s and your uh your iPhone and on your iPhone and iPad um and your Android Qualcomm devices um and they can do these things um without without having you can basically develop chips for this on a smaller scale with a slow with a smaller budget see there's more potential Innovation for smaller develop for smaller developers of hardware at the same time we've had the chip shortage which has led to an increased demand for Innovation uh in the chip space along with um the fact that transistors um that uh We've sort of we've passed Moore's Law and all of these uh all these manufacturers of computer chips uh whether whether it's uh specialized computer chips uh for microprocessors or if it's a general purpose CPUs or GP or Graphics processing units or Asics in the here in the crypto space um I have we've reached a limit in terms of like how many transistors you can fit on to a certain amount of silicon which has led to a need for Innovation uh in terms of like how things are arranged on the chip you know for instance the Apple socs uh have Apple the Apple M1 uh and apple M2 chips they move the GPU to be on the same part as right next to the CPU right next to the um right next to the memory right next to everything else so there's just a lot more efficiency and now one of the things you can do is you can add your security your Hardware security have these encryption standard we have we've had these encryption standards for quite some time now um you we already see this in ASAP where you can basically just do a lot of the same cryptographic function very efficiently and add a very significant scale but with a lot more specialization and Hardware as opposed to running it and on general purpose uh see on a general purpose CPU it's faster it's more efficient and so all of these sort of things are are happening all at once and so it allows us to be able to develop security enclaves it allows us to be able to develop uh faster encryption algorithms portable Asics potentially um you know obviously helium the the the the helium effort which wasn't wasn't successful but I think was in the right direction in terms of having decentralized A6 available um and I sort of envisioned that um there being a much more distributed uh uh you know ability for people to be able to do very advanced advanced encryption um and have very secure encryption algorithms that work very efficiently to scale uh on the edge of the network on the you know at the mobile uh at the mobile device at the laptop at the uh entry point Gateway uh points on the network um so there's an enormous amount of potential innovation in terms of like being able to develop Hardware dedicated Hardware uh or Hardware that augments um general purpose Hardware with uh security you know specialization in there um so I think that this is this is a this is a a very significant time in the fact that we are able to develop uh actual infrastructure uh for down to the physical Hardware layer and really ensure that the entire network from the uh from down to the atom is secure so sorry a lot I think I lost I think I lost some people I think it's important for us to to consider a full stack solution and as much fun as it is to play at the application layer and as wonderful as it is for us to hang out you know with our close to our protocols it is not that often that the folks in this room are invited to consider what is happening underneath yeah uh well I think what's what's significant is that we now have the opportunity where it was you know this was like an Intel level problem this was like an apple tsmc um level problem now we have the opportunity for smaller fabrication Labs smaller developers almost I I want to like I I see that I I see the possibility of there being the closest thing to 3D printing the chip space in the next decade or two because of the chip shortage because of uh new uh open source uh architectures being made available there is an enormous amount of innovation that that is possible and I think and I you know I'm really excited about you know the kinds of tools and technologies that we're going to see especially given the fact that everything the entire uh Tech the entire Hardware in the industry is going to socs so I think you know we we three at least agree that everyone should care about the fundamental need for online privacy and security and whatever that looks like in our new flavors of the internet um but the reality is that more often than not everyday consumers are not willing to sacrifice convenience to prioritize their privacy because it's hard to feel the loss of privacy when you're giving up one piece of data at a time when you're filling out one event bright at a time to go to parties um and you know Nim states that privacy should simply be the default of the internet so how can we incentivize and Inspire the builders in this room to prioritize the safety of our users fundamental right to privacy without sacrificing user experience and you know what do we risk if we fail to seriously consider these trade-offs right now with what we're building I mean that's why it's so important to think about what privacy can actually afford right I mean like what what you know positives can come out of uh privacy preserving infrastructures rather than just seeing it as a kind of patch uh you know to try and prevent you know harms um we really need to think about what are the kind of things that privacy enables um and to be much more forward-looking in that sense because you know the issue of privacy has been you know something that a handful of people have worried about for like the past you know a few decades and are trying to get everyone else to okay use pgp or whatever else you know like for a long time and it's you know it it just hasn't been that easy um to convince people exactly because um it is actually quite complicated like it's quite complicated to preserve your privacy when you're when you're engaging with digital Technologies um in fact for the vast majority of people it's it's pretty impossible and that's why again it's why we you know from Nim's perspective it's a collective problem that needs to be addressed at the collective of layer and that's why we keep insisting on infrastructure and that's also why you know when it comes to using the mixed net we do expect that there's going to be you know some uh people that are that will be interested in using the mix-net just off their own kind of bat but actually we're betting much more in a kind of B2B scenario um where the mix that is integrated into the everyday applications that people are already using because to add the extra uh worry you know in people's lives that it's you know they have to take the the decision to add privacy to their to their everyday kind of digital interactions is just adding more stress to everybody's lives are already pretty stressful given the the situation that most of us are living in today um and so it needs to be something that's baked into the things that people are trying to achieve in their everyday lives already um it's also not hypothetical right it's you know there are actual people who need the who this who this serves as a as an immediate need activists on the ground in all of these different places whether it's uh you know the uh whether it's the abortion bans in America whether it's um you know uh the you uh the Ukraine Russia War um whether it is uh you know what what whether it's surveillance uh in a country like China or Iran right there are immediate needs for people uh and I think that it's I think that it's unfair um for us as technologists to ask or to demand individuals make these kinds of decisions or have this kind of knowledge um I I find it very unfair that um you know people have already started blaming sort of activist failures in the United States in particular whenever it comes to abortion stuff uh for not protecting people's privacy enough but it's like you know if you're if you're somebody who has just had your entire life like and your entire expectation your entire Paradigm changed overnight um by uh by an institution that you know just completely pulled the rug out from underneath you um do you are you expected to suddenly have 30 years no of a knowledge of security and experience are you expected to instantly be an expert in this field and to do everything correctly and to do everything to the maximal extent possible to uh to protect yourself against potentially State actors state level actors and you know the the the truth is that you know we can't we can't ask individuals who have never had a background or in this field to to all of a sudden just you know completely change their entire life because uh because their threat model has changed all of a sudden um it's also unfair to assume that people don't care about privacy uh and in actual fact I think the the adoption of you know signal shows that if you make something that's usable and privacy preserving people will go for that rather than the other options and that's just something that we need to kind of um uh you know understand and not always see it as like oh people don't care enough you know this and that it's actually like the vast majority of people would preserve prefer privacy preserving Technologies um but they need to be usable you know yeah usability is just as much of a blocker to the adoption of web3 as technical scaling and some of the other problems that we might be more more familiar with child should be able to use an encryption so as we are democratizing access to encryption and contemplating everything that we've discussed here today um just want to thank each Berlin for hosting us thank you both so much for coming here and having this wonderful conversation I have one more thing this fire is fake I'm just I can't foreign