Privacy and Public Goods: Vitalik Buterin & Roger Dingledine - Buenos Aires 2025

[music] So, we don't actually have any structure or plan to this as far as I know, which means we could

I received 10 questions uh from So,

yeah. So, I wrote up a couple of topics that I'd be happy to chat about.

Uh I guess we could get going with those. You're also welcome to uh you saw some of the uh the talk minus slides, so you're welcome to jump in with whatever topics you wanted to talk about.

Perfect.

Okay. I'll begin with the ones that I was pondering. So, you mentioned privacy a lot a couple of uh at the cippher punk thing and you've been doing blog posts and so on. Uh, yay, privacy, but also, as I was just saying, Apple has their own notion of privacy. So, we need to be careful what we what we really mean by it.

But also, the Ethereum world a few years ago wasn't known as the privacy blockchain.

So, you're it seems that we've gotten a lot of momentum with you saying privacy, privacy, privacy.

[clears throat]

How are we doing in practice at that at at the users actually being able the average users of the Ethereum world having that? So I think the relationship between uh what today gets uh called but the you know the crypto space sometimes to the chagrin of cryptographers and uh the privacy world is this uh very interesting thing right because uh if you uh look at the uh [snorts] histories of cryptocurrency even you know like as given by bitcoin people the very first cryptocurrency project was David Ch's ecash in 1982 and uh ecash cash it uh did not have decentralization. It was fully reliant on a server, but it did have uh privacy, right? [snorts] And then uh fast forward 27 years and uh we have Bitcoin and Bitcoin somehow has decentralization but it does not have privacy. And uh that was uh an [snorts] interesting shift that happened right and you can think about the reasons why it uh happened right but uh one of [snorts] the big limitations that we had with technology at the time was like we had no way to get decentralization and privacy at the same time.

Right? Chian and blinding depends on having a server in the in the middle. [snorts] And uh one of the big things that happened since then of course is uh the rise of uh zero knowledge proofs. And uh zero knowledge proofs theoretically are a thing that academics have been talking about since the 1980s. But like really getting them to production quality into the point where they're powerful enough that they can prove these really sophisticated statements like [snorts] really that started uh with I think Zcash launching in 2016, right?

And uh this was uh the this [snorts] you know like technological movements that you actually the I think a lot of Ethereum people have been uh very involved in like since uh since the beginning even back in you know 2021 the uh PSE team at at the foundation had been working on like circom a lot of other zk snark tooling um and uh we remember that uh the level of usability of uh all of that technology both for users and for developers. It's just been on this like big upward curve since then, right? So like who here has used Zcash back in 2017? So remember back then it took like 2 minutes on a laptop to generate the proof for a transaction, right? Then in 2021, it was down to a few seconds and uh back then though, you still needed to be a cryptographer to make your own protocol.

And then now in uh 2024 and 2025 generating a proof on a computer is less than one second and uh we have tools like circom and so like it's within reach of any uh developer here to build a uh privacy solution right and using zero knowledge proofs uh and so there's been this like big shift in uh what can be done and how easy it is to do a lot of things and at the same time I think also you know the blockchain like space has been like having this kind of moral evolution where it really started off as this thing you have Bitcoin trying to like free us from dependence on uh [snorts] powerful governments and banks and then the space I mean like shifted over to like basically at best uh trading $3 million monkeys and uh at worst uh you know like losing like some number of billions of dollars to exchanges being uh being being insolvent and the qu I think a lot of people I mean like even in the Ethereum world they've been asking themselves uh the question of like what uh is the thing that both is not the traditional centralized world and also is not you know like that like is not you know like some of the excesses that the blockchain world has seen And uh I think for a lot of people like privacy really has come out as uh this really leading answer. And so there like I've seen a lot of excitement from all kinds of people in the Ethereum ecosystem of like really yeah [snorts] building genuine uh privacy and uh not just Apple style privacy but uh privacy where you are [snorts] private from everyone including the uh the service provider as well and like really going deep and uh I think it's uh I mean from my view it's been a really uh positive change and something that I'm looking forward to seeing progress further.

If you could have it all, what does that look like? Does every Ethereum user have privacy for every interaction? Do all the other blockchains do that too?

Like where once this is all over, if we are wildly successful uh where how far do we go?

Yeah. So you know in the uh in the near term right we just announced you know the Kohaku project and that's a wallet level uh thing right basically at the wallet level making uh private uh transactions be something that from a user experience perspective like looks and feels the same as uh any [snorts] other type of transaction. And so at least sending coins around is uh something that can be private by default, right? And then you know can we go further? I think uh we would love to go further.

Um there's uh obviously a lot of technical challenges in going further. There's uh also a lot of these questions around uh you know like if uh you want to prove that you're not a bad actor uh then either because you have a a regulatory need or um [snorts] you know like because like we like actually don't wants to empower you know like countries like [snorts] North Korea with billion to oppress their people you know like and other countries with billions of Uh then one of the things with zero knowledge proofs is like you know it lets you [snorts] actually do things like proving you know like my my coins could come from anywhere but you know they don't come from one of those hacks that gave North Korea $2 billion and like that's like that's a new capability right but then uh you know there's these like interesting uh you know like philosophical ethical like other kinds of questions of like well you know like what is the version of you know like that uh if uh you know like if any that we do actually wants to use and uh promote and I think once you get past like basic payments once you get into like all some of this more general purpose stuff right then uh those questions tend to come up more uh then uh once you get into like general purpose applications there's things where like you just fundamentally have to make some information transparent because uh like it's just inherent to the functioning of the thing, right? You know, if you have a a financial market, like you want people to be able to see what the current price is, right? And you know, there's a lot of ways in which more transparency in financial markets is better, right? And like it get like the more you get into applica like application specific things, the more you get general purpose, the more like you actually have a lot of choices, right?

And so like [snorts] you know if we're talking about like should paying for a coffee and donating to charities be uh fully private like you know answer is unconditional yes you know racing ahead making that happen as much as possible once you uh get into some of these you like bigger and deeper things I think uh with what we call programmable cryptography things like these general purpose you know proofs we've uh unlocked this big new type of capability and I think we're still really getting like thinking and exploring about like what are the right ways to apply that to each uh individual situation.

Sounds good. So, taking a step towards the deeper things, the like the social side of things, uh,

one of the things that I've been wrestling with here at the Defconnect world,

I don't know this space as as well as the the people who've been in the cryptocurrency space the whole time.

And here we are in Argentina, which is having a a big economic problem these days. And here we are with a bunch of crypto people showing up to Argentina promising to save them all with crypto. M

and some of them seem to mean well, but as in this space where money is is involved, some of them don't. They're doing it for their own reasons. They're not doing it for Argentina's benefit. They're doing it because they want to uh either hype their their new project or uh or it's the disaster capitalism thing or something like that.

So, I've been I've been I I keep finding myself in situations where folks are like, "Hey, can you come to my conference? Can you come to my party? Can I get a picture of you in front of my company logo? And uh and how do So you you're in this space, you're famous in this space, I'm famous in [clears throat] my space. I'm trying to figure out which ones I should be endorsing and how I should be thinking about like how do I think about uh

showing up and saying, "Yeah, the tour guy is in a photo with uh with this company or that company." I I have I I haven't figured out how to how to frame the question, right? But do you have any advice for me on navigating a world that is full of people who mean well and people who mean harm and it's hard on the surface to figure out which ones are which.

I mean, I think you're right to be cautious. I u [snorts] you know there's uh you know there there's definitely uh a lot of people for whom you know Argentina is an interchangeable narrative and privacy is an interchangeable narrative and uh you know if the uh narrative you know had instead been you know let's do crypto military tech they would have like totally done that too. Um, [laughter] oh no, sorry. I mean, that's a eyebrows. Uh, uh, but there, um, [snorts] I mean, I, yeah, I don't think there's, you know, a magic one-s sentence formula because it's like every time ma like it it's kind of like market arbitrage, right?

It's like every time magic one sentence formulas uh exist then uh by the time it that that formula reaches you it's uh halfway there to reaching the people who are going to figure out how to [snorts] adapt to it and and exploit it and uh like make that formula no longer actually yeah like work work anymore. Um so like I think even the word cipher punk like honestly I think uh it's like at least twothirds of the way through to being gentrified at this point. Um [snorts] so no I think like find you know high uh like high integrity people and I think uh you know you can uh have [snorts] a feeling for who the the high integrity people are and often you know they have eyes for more of those kinds of people as well and uh you know be be careful and uh you know go through with your own moral compass like I I don't think there is a magic better solution.

Makes sense. So in terms of u of building community, in terms of building acceptance around the world, we heard Juan talking about the the high point of US suspicion of crypto. Um

one of the things that we've been doing in the tour world is trying to gain allies not just among the cypher punk enthusiasts, but find people in like in law enforcement who actually turn out to be huge tour fans and help [clears throat] them be allies for us inside their organization. Like there was a a a point a while ago where I had a friend who uh was he he joined the FBI but he was still a Torah enthusiast and he was telling me a story of being in uh in a meeting with Department of Justice people where the lawyers are like you know what we need to do today we need to make a [clears throat] law outlawing tour. That's what that's what's going to improve the government the most. And he was in the room and could stand up and say I work for the FBI. Are you trying to make my job impossible?

like why would you outlaw tour? I need this.

And having him in that room meant that they didn't work on that law that day. So I've heard something about uh like engaging with the UN to to to get them excite uh not just excited about but understanding about crypto. How uh how are you the Ethereum community doing at at getting the like do you have OFAC sta staffers now who are like no I'm I'm a cryptocurrency user. uh the next tornado cash I'm gonna be a user of it so so I'm gonna make sure this doesn't happen. How do you get people in these organizations that fear you to to understand?

Yeah. Well, one of the nice things about the Ethereum community is like that it is this very diverse community that has a lot of people who know how to make you know their local case in all of the situations that they're in, right? And so and in the uh example of uh you know like OFAC actually you know like Amin and the people from privacy pools like they've I think they've actually been uh doing a good job making inroads there. Um I think also uh one of our advantages has been uh that we're able to communicate globally and uh able to connect to a lot of people's desires uh for for for the future and uh a lot of their concerns globally. Um and uh that's something that's been uh I think really valuable and I think that's true both at the level of institutions and uh at the level of like all kinds of individual people.

Um another thing is like the world has been going through uh big realignments over the last few years right and uh you know these realignments uh you know there's been a lot of things that are very negative. There's also been a lot of things that are quite positive and there's like one [snorts] of the things I try to do is like to always you know keep an eye for the kinds of people who five or 10 years ago would have said that blockchains and crypto are a total scam that look now actually see that there is something like really valuable in terms of uh helping bu helping build a world where people like

[snorts]

us and them can cooperate and can and can do things like without being dependent on a very small number of of centralized actors. Um so and some of uh some of that has been in uh in very surprising places actually wanted to ask uh you since um I think you know you've been uh [snorts] very deep in like this uh other decentralization world that you know we've known about the existence of for a long time you know I feel like I've always considered myself part of this world like I used to tour back in the 00 since the 00's you know used Linux uh [snorts] since the uh uh since the 00 like what um do you think are kind of the biggest uh sources of uh like some of the distance uh and of disagreement that we've seen between you know the crypto world and uh this other decentralization world and what are like things that we can do to bridge that more? Yeah, that's an interesting question. Um, because you're right that a lot of the decentralized, peer-to-peer, whatever the words are, uh, folks look at the DeFi world and think, "Wait a minute, you've added money into this." And adding money into this is what is ruining it.

Is what is making it a

a different sort of community than the one that that we want to be part of or that we think we're part of. M so uh and part of that is it's going to happen because your uh because the systems that are being built in the cryptocurrency world are based on um capitalism as the building block are based on uh money is the resource that we will uh declare is scarce and therefore you can't attack the system unless you have too much of it and so on. So, I think there's definitely a clash between the like the altruism side of things, the I'm building this in I'm part of the free software community and I write free software to give it to my friends, the other free software people and they write free software and they give it to me and we're all a happy community and Microsoft and other huge companies are the ones doing it wrong and we'll ignore them as best we can. Um so it it part of it is a cultural clash I think where uh it depends what what building blocks you want to build on and and this is part of what I what I've been finding really fascinating in the Ethereum and Tor space where Ethereum uh has a mechanism that incentivizes people to do what it wants. This is the whole blockchain.

Get everybody like uh steering in the same direction in a way that

reproducing that on like a privacy network. Having a mechanism to steer everybody the way you want that enforces it using money and in and and monetary incentives

isn't isn't as straightforward.

And maybe nobody's invented the right one yet. Or maybe it's a fundamentally different space and blockchains don't actually solve every problem in the world. So, it's uh that's something that I'm I'm certainly thinking about a lot. And that leads into

the Torah community is based on altruism. It's based on people who have extra resources like I'm an I'm an an operator at the university and I'm in charge of maintaining the network and of course I've got an extra rack and the bandwidth is already free and I've got these extra computers. So, of course, I'll set up a tour really. It doesn't I don't have to pay much [snorts] to do that. my the payment is in my energy and my attention

and that altruism based world

produces I think a stronger tour network but a less scalable tour network and you in the Ethereum space have shown once you once you bring in the money incentives then more people want to show up and get the money out of it. So uh so there are pluses and minuses to whether whether you have a blockchain and whether you have

capitalism oriented incentives.

It's interesting. I mean you know so within the crypto world there's definitely people who actually think that Ethereum is like the corner that is communist and demands everyone be altruist all the time. So it's sometimes funny to you know I can get kind of whacked from both sides on this. Yeah. Actually one other kind of uh interesting thing right is that uh you know I think we in uh the Ethereum [snorts] community also a lot of people in the Bitcoin community have even been saying this much longer than we have right that you know blockchains are far from the only tool and I actually think this uh mainstreaming of uh zero knowledge proofs has uh really uh made you know like made that much clearer right because there's uh other like other tools that are really powerful tools Right.

And they're usable both, you know, in combination with blockchains and individually. Um, so actually one fun thing that we uh have um that that we've been working on, this is some uh you know like people who are kind of close to the Ethereum Foundation. So this guy, this is uh an air quality monitor, right? So it tells you uh you know the 1,200 ppm the CO2 level, which is like actually higher than we would like. So this room really should have more air filters.

um you know like you have PM2.5 various other things and uh you know there's actually a lot of good science right that shows that you know air is like the most underexplored uh you know like frontier of public health right you know our bodies you know our metabolism consumes six molecules of O2 for every molecule of glucose and at the same time it's invisible right and [snorts] uh one of and so one of the challenges though of course is like on the one side knowing much more about our air is super important for our health in the same way that like basically all modern health is data driven but on the other hand like this CO2 number it's like a freaking scary indicator right so I'm sure you know people here have seen you know the studies that like you could basically turn Wi-Fi hotspots into surveillance cameras well CO2 monitors too right so if you have just that one number how much the CO2 there is in a room then you can determine in when that room is occupied, roughly how many people are in that room, when people come in that room, when people leave that room, when people engage in certain kinds of physical activities in that room. And so it's uh like actually like pretty scary, right? And so one of the things that we've been working on here is uh that it's possible to put cryptography into these things. Like basically you can take a combination of zero knowledge proofs and FHE and you can collect that uh like bas like actually also differential privacy like basic like standard kinds of noising techniques.

You can take that data and uh you can make that data usable for a lot of uh like basically science. I'm like understanding like where the air quality issues are without actually infringing on the privacy of any uh one individual, right? And this is like something that's uh there are some like blockchain tie-ins as well, right? So like if you wants to incentivize people to like provide data, this is something that people are thinking of doing, right? But uh like the real hero here is pro is the programmable cryptography, right?

And this is uh you know like something that uh a lot of people in like our community are excited about and also like it's already been like quite effective as a bridge right because people a lot people care about health people care about privacy and you know these things uh like these things do matter to a lot of people right uh so that and so this kind of space I think you know embracing uh embracing the physical world embraceing ing the hardware more. That's also been one of our themes. So, that's been something that's really growing as well. Um, what actually one more question for you. Um, I'm curious cuz like I feel like lots of people have come to you with uh the idea that, you know, we should improve tour by monetizing relays and

you know what you need? You need a token.

Yes. um you know well what what what have your views been on you know like some of these proposals um over the years and like the downsides basically you know like how much of that is kind of culture and vibes how much of that is like no you know like this would this would like actually technically break things like how how do you see that whole question? Yeah. So, there are two pieces to why we haven't done a token yet.

Uh, one of them is it goes back to the the mechanism design. In the blockchain world, there's a there's a pretty clear like structure that steers people in the right direction. And in the tour anonymity world, uh, what are you actually trying to incentivize? You want to get more people to run relays and you want them to provide more bandwidth and you want them to do it in a diverse set of locations around the world,

but how do you actually verify the ground truth on this?

U in the current tour setup, you

tell the world how much bandwidth you seem to have

and we do some spot checking, but mostly we believe you because uh it's just for load balancing. Whereas if it were for how much payout you get, then people would show up and try to game the system more. And we'd have to have a much more robust bandwidth measurement thing. And then the attacks would show up where they're like, I'm spinning my wheels using bandwidth and you should pay me for that even though no actual users used it.

And from a from a location diversity perspective, you use what? GIP databases. GIP databases are garbage. So, we need some ground truth that's actually secure enough to uh to to to survive the new incentive structure where more people are trying to game it because they're trying to make more money. So, that's the like the technical side of things.

But also last night I was talking to a friend who used to have a privacy system and added a token to it and was telling me about how it completely ruined the community and the ecosystem because as they were doing their token launch like 10,000 new people showed up all being shark scammers and being like woo new coin and uh and afterwards the people who used to be there

submitting patches as volunteers are long gone. Mhm.

So, uh I guess the bigger answer is

all the like Silicon Valley startup people keep coming to me being like, I have an idea. So, this it's a great idea and 5% chance your graph's going to look like this and 95% chance you're going to be gone next week.

So, and you should do it because that's how startups work like the fail fast and all of that. And and in my world, the world without something like Tor is worse off. There's only one. If we lose it, then then we don't have it anymore. So, I've been working really carefully to scale linearly,

not to bet it all on some thing that either uh turns us into the next unicorn or more likely makes us go away. So, that's and that's that's more of a mindset vibe thing than a technical reasoning. [applause] But [cheering] but and I mean sure I come from the free the free software community and the cipher punk community not the Silicon Valley startup world where we don't have venture capital people. Our goal is to is to build a tool that actually keeps users actual users safe in whatever vulnerable situations they're in. So because we're in nonprofit land we can afford to make those choices.

Have there been uh any positive surprises in what kinds of people or what kinds of organizations have been helping to fund store recently? Yeah. So, we started off as sort of like the professor funding model where you go to the National Science Foundation or Open Technology Fund and other groups and uh and get funding to write research papers or maybe the funding is to write a research paper and in your spare time you also write tour um and that that scales only to a certain point. More recently, we've had some uh of the like foundations like Ford Foundation and so on finally like they started off being scared of the internet and they're extra scared of privacy and it took us years for them to realize that actually we're still around. We're still saying the same things we were saying.

But we have some more uh individual donations these days that have been going uh we've really been ramping that up and part of it is going to communities like Defcon, Defcon with an F where they're a bunch of security people who really value tour and also have day jobs. So they're they're happy to to chip to chip in. But also, we've got some like rich people who

are seeing why tour is so important in the world this year.

And getting those people to not just give us $20, but give us a million dollars at a time is is something that we need to get better at. And we're just starting to to to see some success at.

What do you think about uh physical world privacy? like about the the risk that uh you know the encryptedness of your signal over there is going to mean nothing because there's like a 100 different devices here that you know could potentially be uh reading everything and uh potentially see like know exactly what you type from uh from three rooms away and so on.

Yeah, that's a huge issue. Um and one way of framing that from the tour side is that tour solves only one layer of the many different layers. So, uh, I guess the the best example there years ago, I was doing a training for, uh, a bunch of, uh, Vietnam activists who had gotten out of Vietnam, but they were trying to help people still in country do like, uh, human rights work. And there I was, young Roger, being like, "Let me tell you about PGP and off thereord messaging and tour." and and they're like, "Yes, but there's a guy across the street with a parabolic microphone listening to me speak into my encrypted thing.

They hear everything I say. When I go to sleep, they break into my house and they steal my laptop and they put stuff on it. Can you look at my Windows computer?"

And and that it's a totally different threat model for those situations. So yes, it's something that I think about a lot, not just for us white men who are doing fine, but also for the people around the world who who really need safety and have real adversaries and tools like Torah are only one one layer and and some of the the like physical safety layers are really hard to get right. [applause]

How are we doing on time? I saw you hold up a Oh, good. We're doing great on time.

Yeah. Any more questions?

Yeah. So, you mentioned a diverse set of users a while ago.

It used to be that the investor finance bros uh didn't like the cryptocurrency stuff and now you've got Black Rockck guy going woo cryptocurrency as I understand it.

Um

is how how do you navigate that? Because I it seems like the crypto it seems like the finance bros their job is to build new finance instruments and the more complicated they can make them the the more payoffs they get

and they're fascinated by Ethereum because here you are with a programmable system so they can they can re implement each of their overly complex financial instruments in your thing. uh and you need them as an ally because they're the ones who are going to go to the federal agencies and say no this is important.

Uh how do you how do you avoid them capturing the whole thing?

Yeah, I think I mean like as you've uh already said you know the the capitalism in crypto is the uh ultimate double-edged sword, right? And uh people with uh huge amounts of money doing finance, they both uh you know bring in the capital, they uh they make numbers go up. And uh as much as we love to be dismissive about numbers go up, if uh if numbers had not gone out gone up, we would not have had the funding to develop you know like zero knowledge proofs and all of these other things. And but and then on the other side uh they uh you know they [snorts] grow the uh you know anonymity set and even when there's no an there's no anonymity you know the the metaphorical anonymity set right so uh if uh you're [snorts] you know a government in some country and you see that someone has bought crypto and that someone is uh using crypto like you don't uh immediately skip forward to you know like this uh this person is uh doing something that must be really dangerous. you think well probably they are a DGEN and uh you know this uh like this it's basically you know the the financial equivalent of you know the person looking at cat pictures on Facebook right but then on the uh other side there's you know there's definitely a risk if uh that side of the community starts driving the agenda right and I think uh two risks right one is that uh it does drive other types of people away and The uh other [snorts] side is that that it easily ends up leading to like the wrong kinds of choices being made on the protocol layer, right?

Like Ethereum and like network like could and many networks like Ethereum do go for 150 millisecond block times in the name of competing with Stratfi, right? But the problem is if you have 150 millisecond block time then not only does it become definitely impossible to participate through tour but also it becomes uh economically infeasible to have a node operating like realistically outside of New York right and uh it's one of these like things that's very easy to underestimate right because you might do the math and you might think well theoretically if you have an extra 100 milliseconds of latency you can participate but in reality like if or revenue goes down by 10% then like you're still going to get out competed over time, right? And uh so and then like this happens at all kinds of layers of the stack, right? Like there are people who argue that oh you like most users use wallets with intermediaries and therefore the Ethereum's account model should be fully should just fully embrace being intermediary dependent and that makes things simpler. There are people who argue that certain forms of cryptographic security don't matter because like actually everything uh you know like runs on real world assets right and so like this kind of risk exists right the risk that you know if uh finance like if a certain type of traditional finance becomes 90% of Ethereum then you know the quote pragmatist start arguing well these people are 90% % of your users and you should serve them right and uh I think a big part of the answer is like we need a strong core community that just says no to that right we need a strong core community that says you know the remember why uh we are here and uh you know remember that uh people who wants to make finance fast are a dime a dozen and uh there will be hundreds of projects like this not even within the crypto space but even the US banking system the Chinese banking system, all kinds of banking systems like everyone does fast.

We are everyone does big and you know we are in the world where you know Saudi Arabia is going to come out with kilometer tall skyscrapers in a couple of years. So the number of people who go fast and who go big is uh not in short supply. And so we in Ethereum need to focus on uh the things that otherwise would be in short supply. And maintaining a global geographically decentralized permissionless uh open and censorship resistant system is uh really at the core of that. And uh like we you need to have the you know the strong core community that uh focuses on those things and I think uh doing [snorts] that is one part technology it's one part community building and sometimes it's community building in order to build the technology and sometimes it's even technology to show credibility that's necessary for the community building and so those two things in relate.

Yep. Beautiful. [applause]

It's it's interesting to see the parallels there because we in the tour world also get pressure to make it faster, make it simpler, make it more usable, uh, and if our goal is to

have another VPN,

then of course that's where we need to go. But if our goal is to actually have something that keeps the the important activists safe in the important situations, then we need those other users because you need the the ordinariness. But we're not building it for the the people in Iowa who are not sure if they have a threat model. We're building it for the people in Egypt who are very sure they have a threat model. So keeping keeping in mind the people who who really need the privacy but knowing that you need all the rest of them in order to get there is is an interesting parallel.

Yeah. In tour, how do you think about uh user experience? Like how do you think about what user experience properties are important enough that you do really have to try hard for them because if they don't exist, people will just give up on the thing entirely.

Yeah. So part of it is speed and the tour network's been doing a lot better at that in the past couple of years in part because internet's getting faster and we've got a bunch of nonprofit relay associations around the world who run very fast relays and then there's a ch there's a there's a trade-off there between performance and centralization. Uh but in terms of of speed, having it be fast enough is important.

And there are all these other issues in the browser layer like making sure you don't break web pages and making sure that destination web pages are willing to serve users who want privacy. Like there was a case a while ago where Los Angeles Times decided that their response to GDPR was don't serve any news articles to anybody outside the [laughter] US. So you show up from Germany through a tour relay and they're like, "We're very sorry you're in Europe, so [ __ ] you."

And that that's that's not good for the experience.

So how do we think through u how to make these things work? Well, on the other hand, keeping track of uh of

So there's there's a story from a few years ago where one of my friends was in Iran back during the like green revolution times where he was doing trainings of a bunch of different tools. He was teaching activists and journalists there how do you use tour? How do you use open proxies? How do you use VPNs? How do you use Siphon?

All these other tools. And then he realized one day that every user he had taught anything other than tour to

was now dead or in jail.

And then he decided, oh my gosh, it's time to only teach tour. M

uh so part of the part of the the thing we need to keep uh focused on is

like another example back in the in when Egypt was doing the Arab Spring thing there were a lot of people who were like my government is stupid they don't know how to look at the they're not doing surveillance they just blocked Facebook just give me some way to get to Facebook

and those people

maybe regret

the tools that they used so our goal in tour is to give people security by default And if we're wrong and they didn't need it, okay.

And I don't want to do it the opposite where it turns out we're wrong and and that hurts people.

Yeah. I think my view on the UX is uh that uh the thing that ma like if you have to prioritize one thing, you prioritize reliability, right? Like I would rather have something that has uh 4 second latency all the time than something that has two second latency 90% of the time and two minute latency 10% of the time. And uh I uh because like that's what throws you off, right? Like when it fails even once often you just get into the habit of like well turn off the stupid thing, right?

And uh I like some of the privacy [snorts] tools that we have even in the Ethereum world like that's uh the big hump. Um, I remember last week um I had this uh situation where like I was like doing a private withdrawal and then it went through this like public broadcaster network that failed about 12 times and then eventually I figured out that I needed to connect with a VPN and like that actually uh solved it. Actually still needs to like try stacking that on top of tour. Um it's uh so no reliability um reliability is like like to me it's like the one thing that you need to have even if you take you know 100x hit on time and 100 and uh 100x hit on uh hit on speed

predictability.

Yes. Yeah. How um how willing are you guys to do like ugly custom tricks? So, like for example, if the LA Times uh block uh like if for example the LA Times blocks anything outside the US, like route people through the US for that and if like something else blocks everyone outside of Singapore, route people through Singapore for that and like just have a hard-coded list.

Yeah, maintaining that sort of list and keeping it working and up to date and so on hasn't been a thing that we think is worthwhile, but uh I'm not against it in principle. Uh it's just yet another thing that needs to be done. So, we're down to one minute. I wanted to to uh to end with thinking through the human side of this. So, uh we're each still doing this after however long it's been

and we could each have walked away and you know uh been happy with our previous fame or something. So, I guess the the question for each of us is what keeps us going like what and and maybe that's equivalent to which parts of this are fun. Um, in my case, the the the part that that's most rewarding for me is when I go to an interesting new country and new culture and I meet users who are uh whose lives are different because of my tool.

And that human interaction and community building is what makes me feel like I'm I'm actually making a difference in the world. And it doesn't have to be 10 million users. It can be like six users in Manila who uh who who were able to do things in their country that that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. So it's it's the human element that that keeps me excited. Uh why are you still here?

Yeah, I think uh for me actually like I know for a fact that if I uh if I did not go to uh you know an in-person event for like one and a half years and uh I uh I did read Twitter every day for for for one and a half years that combination would uh almost certainly lead me to like basically rage quit and retire and uh publish a hundred tweets saying like you know like why I think the whole crypto space is evil and deserves to Um [laughter] [snorts] yeah the like the inperson element I think you know it's like the it's it's the flip side of you know the greater internet [ __ ] theory right where uh you know it's this famous meme that you know on the uh on the internet everyone just like becomes a uh two or three standard deviations worse version of themselves. And uh if the internet is your primary life, the uh kind of uplifting positive side of this is of course that the real world is uh two or three standard deviations better than what you're used to, right? And so I come to these uh um events or sometimes you know like visit particular people, particular groups and uh you know like I see that there's a lot of people who are building things on top of Ethereum that really matter. I think it's you know in a lot of ways a similar kind of answer um answer to you Roger right that you know there's people working hard on making finance access like even just basic payments and savings accessible to billions of people that would not otherwise have it there's people who are making uh far more progress than I expected on you know like making privacy preserving payments possible there is uh even people in our ecosystem system, you know, like who have made privacy preserving Google Docs like way better than I could have imagined, you know, like I I use I I've been using Fileverse for the last one and a half years and it's like on the cusp where it's like finally not frustrating me and uh which like for something which is uh not only ends to end encrypted but also you know passes the walk away test is like actually a really high bar to pass. um you know there's uh [snorts] uh just people who are continuing to uh who believe in the uh underlying goals of Ethereum who see how the underlying goals of Ethereum in the current world are more and more relevant uh than uh before and uh you know who continue to be using like all t taking all of the things that we're building and uh like really [laughter] applying that and uh and and pushing things to the uh to the next step in building all of these projects that uh you know actually bring freedom and uh and openness to the masses and you know that excites me.

Did the COVID Oh, [applause]

did the COVID shutdown how much did the COVID shutdowns disrupt the seeing the humans and remembering that there are humans here? From from my perspective, I used to go to a bunch of conferences, meet a bunch of users and then suddenly years of not doing that and I'm like answering emails sucks.

So, how was that for you?

I think it's I mean it's a difficult one to answer, right? Because uh the uh biggest effect of uh of all of these things is always indirect, right? It's uh it's not just about uh you know the effect of you interacting with people less. It's also the effect of everyone that you interact with being a person that's uh interacted with people less. And uh you know I do feel like the internet has kind of uh and probably also the crypto world sort of turns dark darker in a lasting way in that kind of 2020 to 2021 like time span and uh you know we keep uh doing our best to work hard to reverse that.

Um, and then of course it's uh it's hard to disentangle like how much of that is COVID versus how much of that is just the uh ongoing march of uh social media being more and more um omnipresent and uh and [snorts] primary and uh how much of that is like the difference between you know the young a young ecosystem and uh a [snorts] more mature one. So it's definitely a thing. It's uh def like [snorts] it definitely happened. Um I mean on the flip side of course co was great for a lot of people's productivity. Um you know quite possibly the merge would have happened uh you know in 2023 instead of 22 but uh and then the other thing that it's uh disrupted right is uh that uh one of the things I really value about Ethereum is how it's a global community.

And uh like sometimes people say like oh you know why have this conference culture? Why go around on planes? why you like lose all of this productivity and you know what is the value of this and for me part of the answer is like that is the thing that enables us to have a cohesive community that is not just completely centered around everyone being in New York and San Francisco like basically how do you have a community that's uh actually uh like that's actually global and that does not privilege one place over all of the others right and uh like you can see how AI has taken the opposite choice and like AI is incredibly concentrated for that exact reason right and you know that [snorts] is I mean of course co uh in it prevented you know like in person interaction not just between cities but also within a city um but it's uh like making sure that we continue talking to each other I think is like for me it's it's definitely a priority

[applause]

Okay, we are out of time. Thank you for your attention. And if you want to see the next episode of the Roger and Vitalic Show, we're doing this again on Friday during the privacy stack uh uh uh interactions. So uh yeah, uh I'm going to hang out with my bright green shirt for afterwards and talk, but uh David has the next session which includes me and other folks. So, uh, I'm going to hand the microphone to David.

Thank you. Thank you. [applause]