Blockchain Privacy Introduction by Lane Emmel | ETHDenver 2023

hey everybody hey ml how are you good how are you a little nervous um it's 4 10 we're starting on time uh I'm Lane I am a blockchain core developer and like I think a lot of people here I didn't think a lot about privacy for a long time um Emily I feel like you probably are much more privacy savvy than I am secretly thinking about it yeah and then something happened and I kind of started to wake up to like why privacy is one of if not like the most important thing uh that we should all be paying attention to right now um I think a lot of you are familiar with stuff that went down last year uh with tornado cash um you know as a software developer who's been building blockchain technology and some privacy stuff over the past few years I noticed that it had a very chilling effect on my team my colleagues my my former colleagues my friends um amazing people who are exposing themselves by working on privacy technology so um here we are this is a little overwhelming all of this as someone who's been coming to East Denver since the beginning in 2018 I just want to take a moment to appreciate that we are here on the main stage at East Denver and we have hours of time dedicated to this important topic privacy I'm very very grateful to Danny and the entire East Denver organizing crew for making this possible uh to ml for the back-breaking labor of love that uh has gone into setting this up to co in the mobile coin team as well for the same um yeah I think ml is going to take it away and uh set the scene and tell you guys kind of what's in store for the rest of the evening I went also sorry mention you may have noticed that we are literally doing a rock concert here literally and it's in the process of being set up and we have a real band and we also have another rock star which is privacy okay sorry that wasn't funny anyway take it away Emil welcome everyone thank you for coming we are competing with a lot of very fun drinking events uh on Saturday evening so thank you all for being here um I'm an investor and a builder in the space I've been involved in privacy projects for a few years now um I think as Builders you know we get sucked into the day-to-day um but it's it's easy to forget the why of what we're doing it's easy to kind of just think about our next goals our deadlines Etc and forget why we have to urgently build the tools that we want to use tomorrow um and I think we take for granted the tools that we use and also the freedom with which we have just today to use them it may change tomorrow and in fact I'm quoting from Josh weihart from an event on Monday and that's there is this concern some of us have in web 3 that we're building something worse than web 2. something where you know we're we're giving our users a permanent record 100 visibility and a lifetime worth of security implications so I think that's something to keep in mind as we build in web 3. today what we're going to do is to zoom out to refresh our perspective we're going to rewind into history and look at the individuals and the civil liberties organizations that helped us bring us to today and then we're going to come back into the present to learn about how we can build privacy into our products one of the panels I'm really excited and scared of is the one where we start to debate a foundational philosophical question is there really a trade-off between privacy and security and how do we square that if you're building in the space I think it's something that will plague you for a while and you have to find where you stand on that spectrum and there's a key question also of is it really diametric are they really diametrically opposed on a spectrum and then finally we're going to hear from the people whose lives have depended on privacy in their Communications and we're going to end with somebody very special who breaks security as a professional at the end of the day what we want to do is to equip you with the ideas and inspiration to build features into your products that are going to help move us forward and definitely not bring us backward and as a final treat as Lane said we're going to have a crazy Rock concert it's taken a tremendous tremendous unimaginable amount of work to make it happen so most of that 100 of that was was taken on by our co-worker who's off stage uh and all the AV guys and the audio guys you see around you so thank you guys so much for working with us on this we're ready to start uh to hear from our first Keynote and so I'll just do a quick intro put my Roger Dingle dine is co-founder of the Tor project a non-profit that develops free and open source software to protect people from tracking censorship and surveillance online he works with journalists and activists on many continents to help them understand and defend against the threats they face among other accolades Roger was chosen by the MIT technology review as one of its top 35 innovators under 35 and he has been recognized by foreign policy magazine as one of its top hundred Global thinkers over to you jab tap tap this sounds good