From ‘Cypherpunk’ to ‘Billions Onchain’ | Maxwell Saal - SporkDAO

[Music] hello everybody good afternoon excited to be here at The Ether night stage um excited for our next talk with Max from spor from cyberpunk to billions on chains take it away Max all right so before I get started how's everybody's eth Denver going going relatively good uh I was kind of hoping that maybe some of y'all would uh help me out at some points just once I get to the part of the presentation where I need your help you'll tell you'll be able to tell uh I do some volunteer work for eth Denver I do a lot of the speaker reviews privacy ACC creation that kind of stuff um so you know as is so often the case I procrastinated to the last minute on making this presentation and now I have something that's you know barebones at best but if you guys want to engage with me like please do shout out we can have a discussion and uh yeah hopefully we'll have a good time so I titled this talk uh from Cipher Punk Manifesto to billions on chain right I kind of think of this as being almost a contradiction I've been in crypto for about four years now which is not that long in the uh Grand scale of things but I've been involved with a lot of bitcoiners for much longer and I have to say like it took me a long time before I understood I guess what the point of all of this was and I still struggle with that question sometimes I want to kind of address well this is anyway the inspiration for this talk we'll see where I end up going with this but I think that where we're going as an industry is maybe not where we thought we were going to end up in the beginning and yeah we'll just kind of go through this and and see what you guys think so quick background for those of you who don't know I imagine many of you do so Cipher Punk ISM dates back to the late 1980s right and basically it was this idea as the internet was sort sort of becoming not just you know a military Communications technology but something that it became clear that everybody was going to use that there wasn't going to be any innate privacy and privacy is kind of a necessary thing for having autonomy for having some agency and some human rights on like online um so there was a group of people who were you know in Silicon Valley in these in the late 1980s and they knew that they were going to have to fight back against a lot of this surveillance a lot of this um centralized control if we really wanted the internet to be a public space right uh Bitcoin I think has really made this term like something that came much more back into the public sphere because you know Satoshi being from where he was coming from this Cipher Punk Forum back in the early 2000s um Bitcoin really was Cipher punk in origin and really came from these ideals of wanting to give people more autonomy on chain not having to do your financial transactions through a bank or VISA any of that stuff actually trying to truly make something peer-to-peer something that people could have individual agency with and you know I think we've all had our own Journey at this point we've kind of evolved through different eras of thought and I'm certainly you know done a lot of that myself so this is the second thing that I wanted to bring up these are kind of like the two core ideas I wanted to bring up in this presentation right the second thing is this idea that what we are doing right now is never is not something that we've ever done before well if you look back at Financial history particularly Financial history and by modern I really just mean 20th century this this whole speculation thing this manipulation of various stocks whatever has you like the regulations that we have right now came to be largely because of what we observed people doing without them and you know I was involved in some of this salana trading I imagine many of us were and this really kind of gives you some doubt maybe about about whether we truly are responsible enough I guess to handle our own currency or at least whether we are in the public sphere um so that's basically it those are the two things that I want to like lead you with before I get into a few hot takes and I'd kind of like anybody who wants to like engage with me to just like shout something out and we can like maybe make a discussion out of any of these things yeah sorry this isn't this is what uh tends to happen around eth Denver I really come at this with the best intentions but unfortunately here we are so hot take Number One banks are okay actually I know that this is going to be like really controversial but I think in the first world in particular your average person doesn't actually get much benefit from custody their own funds and probably doesn't really want to and I think this is really something that we struggle with a lot when we're talking about application developers like how do we bring people value right and are we bringing people any value when you watch people lose everything that they've invested on chain just for like naive like the level of of technical competence the Baseline level that you need to even operate in this space to me I have pretty much and I mean maybe somebody has a different opinion on this I think that people will never get there and maybe there's things that like AI agents or something like that they're going to make this all more usable maybe we're going to build better apps that people will be able to use with less technical expertise Le friction but I just don't see this current Paradigm in the first world changing now obviously I don't think that's the case in you know parts of the world where you have political oppression crypto is a great technology for fighting back against government control against people who you know really don't want people to have agency in their financial transactions and of course in South America too you can't even really build Financial value if you can't count on the currency that you're working with to maintain the value of the work that you put into it but largely outside of these political things and I do think crypto is very important for fighting back against those things I think banks are here to stay I think banks are getting involved in crypto a little bit more on that later and I just don't personally I don't see that changing I think that crypto is largely going to be a technology for financial institutions in the coming years uh if anybody wants to disagree with that I'm happy to hear you know some educated opinions on it but I'm not seeing anybody getting too ex eared to do so so we're going to move on to hot take number two and this I kind of alluded to before so decentralization is really important I really think that people and their communities have a right to live their lives the way that they want to right and I think that Financial autonomy is a huge part of that so of course being controlled by a central bank having your having so much of your life really dictated by the overall market and not just you your life your community I do think that's a problem and I think really why this ends up being important why decentralization ends up being important is because it gives people the tools to have an alter Al native in a situation where your government and your banks are failing you that's really when I start to think of of crypto as being more powerful but as a baseline thing as long as the the rest of uh social fabric I suppose is like holding together I think people are you know not get getting value out of this is a lot less obvious anybody okay yeah I can I can see you I can see you out there you're you're percolating shout out whenever you want we can we can talk about this ah yeah okay I me a mean this is sort of how I feel these days like when I'm talking about cyppher Punk ISM this is where we started we're like trying to be libertarian we're trying to have autonomy we're trying to take power away from governments and now like this is basically what you see on Twitter right is like everybody talking about how great it is that they can do Ponzi schemes and nobody can tell them not to or Solana I mean like I believe it was anatol who came out and like said on stage nobody cares about decentralization it doesn't matter and I think and then of course this last bit about you know us Bitcoin Reserve which I have very um I am very cynical about I think supporting that in general is a pretty cynical way of thinking where mostly you're concerned with a government pumping your bags cool I mean I also like having money I like being able to fly around world see cool places eat good food all that good stuff but bluntly it it does seem to be like diametrically opposed to what was supposed to be the point of all of this try buying a house exactly that's what created all of this the housing market created by uh TR buy a to most people cannot to buy oh definitely I mean I'm trying to buy a house I I am experiencing this exact phenomenon not good when we still have this is true and there's definitely social components to this and this is part of what I mean when I say that like decentralization ends up being a really important tool to keep yourself from being in an oppressed situation in that situation I completely agree those people who are being oppressed are not in these yeah and that's the disconnect that's the disconnect and and the next the the next question I have is do are you a resident of the United States yes obviously so I have I have a United States perspective to this and that's the caveat that I'm giving this as well so the cool little like drift down memory L we had there from like the 0 list SC was on um uh like to where we are now I know I'm just B um kind of implies that uh we have definitely lost our way because the the problems trying to bring you know groundbreaking availability of the technology to people is uh uh running in parall with a a speed running the entire economic process since the Templars into Oblivion faster than anything has ever been speedrun um and I think in order for us to overcome the need to use bags which I believe everybody uses not because they because they have no choice it's a frog in a pot situation that like you um are constantly looking for whoever's going to extract less value from you when yeah yeah but and and so like I I I I was listening to your opinions and what you were saying and saying it seems like you're fighting the apathy that is being generated by the system that you help create well I mean yes right and I mean nihilism like Financial nihilism has is having such a moment over this last year right um sorry I'm sort of losing losing my train of thought on that one but in the room we continue La of diversity continues to be when we have e we don't create resilient actual multidisplinary systems which are the most res no I do agree with that like fundamentally I think that like the family unit is like the most important human organization right have no you need more than just family no of course but that's what I mean I mean family as in the extended Community around you I think that's truly what people care about and what people see I've actually done a really good time of rambling through my time so um thanks for bearing with me I suppose move on to the next thing okay alluding to this a lot of people have told me over the last two years that the problem is just that the ux is so bad I disagree the ux is bad and and many apps are bad but even as we start to get better and better ux what's the point right like what are people getting by getting involved in all of this should I wrap it up by the way okay sorry so we will we will leave it at this particular like one of my points but I really think that we shouldn't be thinking so much about just making because ux is really a web two phenomenon right making apps that are like super easy to get into that are really addictive that have all these dark patterns that's not what we should be caring about in crypto that makes no sense that defies the whole point of what we're doing here so if we're recreating the same systems in crypto all we're doing is shoehorning something that doesn't really work in the first place back into a system that was designed to be something else um I guess I'll leave it at that uh just oh yeah last thing I want to say hope you had fun I work for a small privacy protocol in ethereum called Oxo where putting out something called privacy pools it's um similar to other anonymity pools but we're effectively giving people the tools to not associate with criminals in North Korea which I think is incredibly important for your average onchain user uh so check us out and I will be done thank you [Applause]