Uh, my name is Lauren Harkness. I'm head of commercial at Brainbot, a crypto venture builder based in Mines, Germany. And Brainbot is one of the core contributors to the Shutter network, um, which focuses on commit and reveal threshold encryption. Before I got into crypto, I focused on financial inclusion in emerging markets, particularly in Southeast Asia. And I was uh for a while based in Singapore and then in Yanggon, Myamma.
And I was living in Yanggon in 2021 when there was a military coup. And um uh overnight um kind of the political situation unraveled. the economy collapsed um and the new dictator ended up uh basically mining the telco and the trady banking data in order to identify people who were participating in pro-democracy activities and then um either uh confiscating assets or arresting those people. And so as a result, a lot of people in Myanmar um basically turn to crypto in order to um protect their assets or protect themselves um or to move assets out of Myamma as they were fleeing for safety. And so I got into crypto around the same time.
Um, and I started collaborating with Brainbot on a community currency project for internally displaced people in northern Myamma. Um, we enjoyed working together so much that I was lucky enough for them to invite me to Germany and uh, join the team full-time. So I've been working with Brainbot for the past uh three and a half four years now and I've worked with them on a range of different projects. Uh as I mentioned earlier, Brainbot is a crypto venture builder. Um and so I've worked on a range of topics including um under collateralized lending platforms uh payment channels uh roll up to rollup bridges and then most recently on shutter network which um is encryption as a service specializing in commit and reveal threshold encryption.
I can um I can speak about my own experiences. I obviously can't speak for My people. Um, but the coup in February 2021 in Myamma um triggered both an extraordinarily difficult period, but also um in the early days of protest, there was something really beautiful. Um people flooded out onto the streets of Yangon and other major cities. Um, and they brought with them their real identities.
So you saw nurses in O scrubs and you saw engineers in their high viz clothing. You saw teachers in their green lunges. Um, and you saw drag queens um, you know, in full drag. And it was wonderful to see um everyone uh going out into the streets and um uh celebrating the democratic period uh that they had just enjoyed and experienced and all of the freedoms which uh they valued so much. Um unfortunately that kind of beautiful period of colorful um protest didn't last long.
Um the military dictatorship um introduced violence um uh sniping um some protesters and killing them and um arresting a large number of pro-democracy activists. And this is really where people turned to cryptocurrencies for the properties of um self-s sovereignty and um being able to make pseudonymous uh transactions. Um there is um someone I am aware of who uh was a very prominent um activist um and um media personality who advocated strongly against the new military dictatorship and he learned that um his name was on one of the arrest lists. And so what he did as a result um was he basically converted all of his life savings into cryptocurrency and then um together with his seed phrase tked through the jungle from Myamma into Thailand. And when he arrived in Thailand, he declared um uh refugee status and was ultimately um granted refugee status by another country.
and he was able to move to that country and then um use his crypto seed phrase to um access his life savings and really start building a new life for himself overseas. And he wouldn't have been able to do that without cryptocurrency because if he had um sought to make an international uh transfer from his bank account to his new bank account overseas that obviously would have been blocked by the military dictatorship. Um so that's just one of many examples. Uh but there were also people uh in Myanmar at that time who used um the pseudonymous nature of crypto accounts um in order to collect funds and distribute funds for pro-democracy activities. And so, um, I think that, um, you know, often times today, um, people are concerned about, uh, crypto becoming the world's largest casino or merely becoming a a playground for dens.
Um, but I think in many ways what we're doing is we're building the tools which uh, everyone uh can use. uh if they need it. Uh hopefully um we will never need to protect ourselves against uh authoritarian violent uh dictatorships like people in Myamma recently uh have to. Um but if that day ever comes, you know, for us, um it's the crypto and cipher punks um which are building those tools um and teaching people those skills. today.
I got into crypto because of that very personal experience in Myanmar. Um I haven't always been a privacy advocate. Um and I have not um had a long history in terms of uh developing or advocating for privacy preserving technologies. But I think that it's a good example uh in many ways. Uh the cliche is that people don't value privacy until the exact moment when they need it.
And that was certainly true for myself and I think it's true for many other people. Um the world is going through radical changes and we do see increasing authoritarianism um in many places we never expected to see it. So I think um we should continue building and not lose heart because many people who don't value privacy preserving technologies today um may suddenly value them very highly um at some point in the near future when circumstances change. Um, I also think that it's worth noting that privacy is not a singular monolithic concept. Privacy does not mean one thing to all people and in all situations.
Um, often times when people hear about privacy, they think about it uh in terms of secrecy. um taking some information information and hiding it away from everyone for ever and always. And that's not how I think about privacy. Um I think about privacy as being able to selectively reveal information to whom and um when and in what context I view as desirable or advantageous. And so um privacy preserving technology um you know can be used in a wide variety of applications for a wide variety of goals.
Yeah,
I'm not a builder. So, um maybe it's hard for me to give advice to builders, but as an entrepreneur, as someone who um promotes privacy preserving technologies um and their many use cases, uh I guess I would say that um the cliche is the focal point of any um useful technology is not the technology itself. It's the builders uh sorry uh it's the users um it's their goals, their aspirations, their experience and then um working backwards uh to in uh build technology which um which serves those purposes. Uh sometimes I feel that developers let the tail wag the dog. In other words, they become so obsessed with the technology itself um and with making sure that the technology conforms to some philosophical construct construct or abstract theory that they forget the user experience and whether that technology is
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.