The Cryptopunk Ethos and the Future of Freedom - Dr Steven Waterhouse

so i'm here to talk about trying to get people to remember why we do this thing and hopefully it's not just about making money although it's fun um it's there's something about this industry which is unique and has a lot to do with this concept of punk so i'm kind of a little bit punky today i grew up in the uk during the time when i guess it was kind of like the late end of the punks but i remember going down to london and seeing all the guys the hair and like the jackets and it was super cool and so you kind of this concept of punk is all about this is the word for the day everyone has a new word for the day iconoclasm so an iconoclast is someone who rejects symbols rejects symbols of control as you often use in a religious context people who tear down statues people who break things punks are clearly iconoclasts and i think many of you are too but what was what was going on there like think about the uk even now like the royal family and all these kind of institution all these symbols of power and the punks came along and said screw you we're gonna dress how we want we're gonna do what we want we're gonna be who we want and sadly like all great movements it's co-opted and here i am wearing a you know punky leather jacket but and there's a gentleman here with a mohawk good mohawk and but the uh it doesn't mean that the concept doesn't mean these movements necessarily have to die out just because they get co-opted but they do right now our space is being co-opted this talk is really like a call to action is to say let's examine some of the things that are unique about what we're doing things that are fundamental to i'm not going to call it web 3 by the way fundamental to crypto and why we should preserve those and what they mean so the early internet was very much in the spirit of iconoclasm the idea of i just want to talk to who i want to talk to i want to like do what i want to do i want to get in touch with somebody if you were growing up in kansas and you were queer you could actually talk to someone in san francisco who lived an environment at least back then which was extremely um supportive of that lifestyle choice and you could feel not that weird like hey there's other people like me and this is very normalized now we're used to this idea that we can form communities internationally globally like that we can join a movement we can get in touch with people but this is a radical idea the idea that you could just talk to anybody anywhere and you know because i remember punks i also remember the early days of the web of the idea that you could actually access information you could publish information you didn't have to go through a uh you know a gatekeeper you didn't have to put something in the newspaper the idea used to be my parents would collect um clippings of when i was in sports teams in newspapers and magazines was like it was like what the heck is that all about now you had to get in the newspaper to be communicating um and the very earliest designs the the way that the internet is is architected is about an open system it's it's designed originally to withstand nuclear attacks the idea like things just kind of keep going this decentralization and the decentralized aspects of it the idea that it can withstand anything meant that it was designed to re to not just withstand nuclear attacks but also censorship but something changed right and this is the i don't love the word web one or web two whatever it's all just kind of the web right so just the internet but it's definitely not what it was supposed to be or i mean maybe it was supposed to who knows what is supposed to mean mean anyway these choices about what you do these choices about how things develop they're very small changes and i definitely reject the idea that there's a conspiracy theory i don't think that zuckerberg sat down and said i really really really want to control everything and get everyone's data and do all these weird things and the guys at google i doubt they do that too but the architecture of the way the web business models emerged i actually remember the very first i could do a history lesson here but i remember the very first banner ads and i was like ew that's weird like what we're going to do advertising now that's how we're going to fund these things but that's how it works the entire internet is really funded on advertising i mean e-commerce of course but the way that publishing works is is advertising based and so with a centralized advertising system it's natural that the the end the end game of that is a small number of players who have a large amount of data and that data is highly optimized to personalize things to you including advertising and then everyone gets sad and they realize oh what do you mean i've been manipulated you mean facebook's manipulating me the government's manipulating me it's like well yeah like that's normal like if you read 984 you read anything have you like studied history at all to understand that manipulation is normal in centralized systems it's going to happen no matter what kind of democratic state you think you're living in you're going to get manipulated and i think i'm not going to get too political today but you just have to look east a little bit and you'll see some manipulation happening on both sides so this this failed utopia and this this sort of like sad situation where people now compare social media to smoking cigarettes in terms of health dangers is um it's just a really unfortunate situation but can we do better like and why would we do better like what's what's what's what's going to happen the it's it's tempting to say that what went wrong was really just a search for profit and i think it's probably true right the the advertising architecture the centralized systems if you're running a company you don't just sit there and go hey i really want to do better good for the world i'm gonna do blockchain i'm gonna do facebook for social good that'll be good right we'll do that now you're just gonna make money right because that's what you're supposed to do you're not gonna sit there and act in a way that's against your economic interest and so i think when you're like looking at our space and hoping for the best you should stop hoping for the best my co-founder and cto jay gave a talk on the unbridled optimism he called it and again it's like there's hoping for the best that things are going to be okay and then it turns out actually it's not okay um so again we're not talking about nfts although i am happy to talk about nfts afterwards um so crypto not web3 we can call it you can call web3 if you like i just don't like the term um crypto kind of gives us another shot at trying again hopefully so i got into decentralized systems actually in the file sharing era back in napster and nutella i was working with the guys who built nutella um and that was also like this irreverent moment and it's like quite sad what happened to the music industry in the media industries and so on because of those tools but the concepts of decentralization then and the kind of idea of like what if we can change the system using this new architecture um when i then found bitcoin in 2013 and got involved in pantera and other things and then orchid the the these principles this idea of decentralization just made a lot more sense to me than what was being built already um often people think about decentralization as like it's like a regulatory hedge it's like hey if we form a dow then they can't come for us but the the same principles of why your system is now resilient to potentially regulation or potentially some other kind of takedown are the same principles that work as to why the system should be resilient to any kind of attack so at all kid we think a lot about uh you know attack vectors and the systems that you're building and how they can be targeted this concept of decentralization gives us the opportunity to think about how we architect things differently and what kind of systems that can build one of the things that really concerned me when involved in what was involved in web 2 early web 2 was that those same ideas of like this kind of building blocks and lego bricks of things you could plug together and build really cool applications and there was thousands tens of thousands of startups during that period in silicon valley where i was living and it was like so exciting it's like wow there's another company doing this another can be doing that right now the consumer internet investment space in san francisco and the bay area pretty much anywhere is dead you cannot start a company that goes after a consumer internet you might be really lucky but pretty much forget about it it's like why well because google facebook has apple et cetera they'll just do it anyway maybe they'll buy you maybe you get lucky but the innovation space has just reduced to like basically zero what's exciting here and i was here two years ago just before i got covered um there are now five times as many people here as there was two years ago and there are thousands and thousands of companies in the spaces that are now like hot in this area like d5 nfts all these very interesting spaces and these pieces of lego code are being plugged together and new business models and new ideas being created daily and that's great if that continues and this decentralized technology also allows us to build a lot more companies a lot more decentralized things it's not just good from like investment and fun things to do and probably better parties than facebook but it's also good from a resilience perspective you need lots of things in the world to make things work to be resilient just having one thing not so resilient yes what are the risks here what if we get this wrong well a couple of years ago i guess when kobu was kind of kicking along i i hate being the sort of cassandra here but one of the talks i gave was talking about how the this so we work a lot obviously i'll talk about okay at the end but we're talking we work a lot on privacy we're very concerned about surveillance and censorship and the things that we saw happening very quickly were increasing surveillance and i'm not talking about you know the cameras on the street i'm talking like right after the first um sort of lockdown started ending and i wanted to go shopping with my girlfriend in berlin we had to kyc to get into a store to go buy clothes you had to like actually fill in a form get a qr code scan that in in order to get into a store you want to go to the cinema same thing restaurant same thing and the european digital passport i have one i live in i live in portugal basically does the same thing when you scan that that information is being given to that store and then hopefully they don't do anything with it or maybe they do and the irony of things like gdpr in europe where they're like hey this is europe we've got gdpr everything's fine now you're going to be safe privacy we got you but then you got this qr code and because of the health issues you have to scan that and go in now you know i'm a big believer in public health and you know i i'm not like some vaccine denier etc like we can get into another conversation about that later but these ideas and these principles that get put in place these new restrictions that get put in place they don't get wound back you don't sort of go back and say oh hang on a minute we're now going to have a new law go in place that rewinds these old laws they just stay in place yeah it's just like it's fine we'll just keep doing that stuff you look up a little bit further north from here and you've got supposedly the best democracy in north america imposing sanctions on people who are protesting not going to get into who's right or wrong on here but the principle remains right now we have governments willing to dive in and lock financial transactions and say you can have this money you can't have this money because we agree with you or disagree you know we'd like we just don't like you so that you don't get that and it's very tempting when you're like um the side of like agreeing with those like these people to say well you know this is fine the government should do that because those people are wrong but what if the government didn't like you what if you're protesting something then the government's like oh so you kind of go this is going so central bank digital currencies which is what's going to happen if governments co-opt this decentralized space and make it centralized is it going to be make this stuff easier it's not going to require much to just press a button and click all those transactions are dead all those funds are dead forget it right you're just locked in pick your institution pick your corporation or government you start centralizing the technologies that we're building right now and you actually make things worse we're making things so much easier to censor and surveil because of the technologies we're building if we build them in a centralized way and if we ignore things like privacy and the ability to be resilient to these systems so really the stakes could not be higher we get this wrong i think we build a worse world than we had before so please let's not get it wrong right this uh this concept of decentralization and thinking about being more punk like being more revolutionary in the systems you build there's a race right now for attention in the d5 space just like get more money get rich quick all these things we're running out of time right everyone's like oh my god like is it almost the end of the party we've got to like take the money off the table quick right and in that rush we make shortcuts hey it doesn't matter if we make this thing a little bit centralized right now because later it's going to be decentralized everything will be fine right what are we going to worry about don't worry we're going to decentralize it later well that nato never really comes and then you're making tons of money you just keep it the same and then the regular gives you a call and says you're not decentralizing this because we want to censor it so yeah i i often give these talks where i think i feel like i depress everybody but there is great hope right the the stakes could not be higher things could get a lot worse but on the other hand i walk around here and i think i bump into like 10 people now working on zero knowledge provers like scalable architectures that you know are not centralized and that kind of technology could really change the game there are cis people working on bridges there are people working on layer 2 systems not all of them are like as decentralized i'd like to be but we're increasing the scalability and the more conversations i have with people here and the more people are coming in i think it's important when you meet someone new in the space trying to remind them what's the point like there's a lot of people i see some friends who also been in this space a long time and it's exciting you know we're like all being here we're you know kind of making it i guess and it's like just try and remind people what you're doing here and why you're doing it i would say the most revolutionary thing you could do is buy a crypto punk because i've got one but like maybe just be a crypto punk is better but think about like being more revolutionary whether that means getting involved in something join a dow something you really appreciate something really into actually get involved communicate we're all like kind of separated a lot in this world now and you know it's good to get together but like just don't sit back like if you care about what we're doing here and you don't want this just to turn into a facebook event like you gotta get involved um these are my coordinates i'm gonna do a little plug for our company at the end now you're all entertained um this actually we have a new version of this but what we're building an orchid um is a specific take on this so you have these architectures they've been built bitcoin it's like decentralized they're all they're all decentralizing centralized systems of control the bitcoin systems in control are focused around governments and banks right like printing money and controlling money controlling how it moves ethereum the first use case was decentralizing funding right the vc the old boys the angel club of san francisco that stuff gets decentralized through icos now we're decent selecting finance we're decentralizing the art world what we looked at was decentralized and communication systems so we looked at building and what we have built is a decentralized vpn architecture so instead of relying upon one vpn company you can rely on many providers in these systems what we're looking at now and where we're going is focusing on more generalized decentralized networks and also looking at what jay's been doing recently in case you don't know jay found a pretty significant exploit in optimism and sent it in and fixed it and got the second third largest bounty ever in history now um and uh it's that kind of work you know one of the things that we really focus on going forwards with orchid is not just the work we're doing here but also like looking out we're now on every evm chain we've gone full multi-chain we work with all the bridges and in doing that work because we have like this sort of hardcore security team and people who are good at these things we're looking and you know trying to come out and protect some of these blockchains so that at least that part of it works um we're available on mac uh ios and android um we've got a very innovative uh decentralized payments network uh payments architecture we're looking at more broadly general decentralized systems um other kinds of applications beyond bpns or with a focus on privacy um can i go back oh this is how to find me i'll also be here for the next couple of days thanks very much enjoy number [Applause]