ETHLondonUK: Building Decentralized Solutions for Digital Privacy, w/ Dr. Steven "Seven" Waterhouse

hi my name is 7 and then CEO co-founder of orchid labs placed in San Francisco as you can maybe tell I'm from here and it's great to be back home and be part of this community which is definitely one the most vibrant etherion communities around it's exciting to be here and see all these hackers hacking on all the stuff here I'm here to talk to you about orchid and specifically how we've built privacy decentralized approach to digital privacy on the affair in Bahrain so a little bit older than some of you and I've been at this tech thing for a while I guess I guess it's still a thing and back when I got on the Internet when I was at Cambridge I think it was like 89 I got my first email address and sort of web browsers and the kind of exciting thing about at the time was just you just get out there and explore and talk to random people and random places and whatever your kind of niche interest was you kind of got into that and this is fascinating so supposed to be this like place where you could really be you know quite free and open and whatever your thing was you could kind of make someone else who that was their thing and and then things kind of changed and I think I remember so like playing I'm the first web browser to mosaic and then later when cookies were sort of the first proposed as an idea we were just like hang on a second are people willing to really give up the privacy for this convenience of this cookie that allows you to log into multiple sites and then then next thing you know you had cross-site cookies in other words cookies that really moved between sites and allowed people to track you on different places and this seems like a really weird trade-off but everyone went for it and then the next thing you had social media and then now we have phones attract you and just like the whole thing is just like we turned into this big massive every time you get online you're just really not sure what's going on are you being tracked like how much you're being tracked what they're doing the data and we see all of these trends now whether it's with companies or with states and countries where we're starting to realize that this trade off is something that we're just not sure we want our we want to kind of make right and when you get into the sort of statistics on global surveillance and what kind of countries are doing what kind of surveillance certainly in Europe we've now got something called GDP our which is both a plus and a positive and a negative as far as it comes to privacy it's a little bit easier to tell someone to remove your data but now the onus is on some of them and is to do that and it's kind of harder to innovate in the US yeah we definitely got a lot of issues poor old mark had to sit in front of the Senate and explain why and then when they tried to launch a digital currency Libre it got even worse China I think we're all very familiar with the Great Firewall and what's happening there not only that but in many countries there now actual internet shut down so you get elections on a national level or a local level and they'll just shut down the internet sorry you can't comment on what's happening so we're in this situation now where there's not only a lot of censorship there's also surveillance surveillance has become really a part of daily life and censorship which is the other side of this is a very serious issue now with what's happening on a global level now with the spread of this virus this very very serious covert 19 which is affecting the world and causing a lot of shutdowns of events restriction and travel the original one the original discoverers of this virus who sadly died in China was trying to get the word out on WeChat and trying to get a word out and different social media channels and was heavily censored and the actual data coming out of China is still hard to trust because it tends to fit this very predictable curve of how a not so serious virus spreads should look and who knows where that data is accurate or not so we start seeing a lot of this stuff actually having a real impact on us globally again on the corporate level we're starting to realize that you are the product literally you are the other way that Facebook and all and Google and all the companies have have made money and a lot of this is due to the the real inherent architecture that started off with the initial design of the Internet and the fact that you have to use servers and you have to say whatever the central server how am I going to make money on giving this free thing away well you know I'm going to track data I'm going to build models on different people I can send I'm advertising and so it kind of naturally falls into the situation where to give something away freely you need to have a product and you guys are the product the yeah so the collection user data is very critical and [Music] but people are starting to get the idea here that this trade offs not something I wanted to make and when you talk to the younger generation globally even though they're jumping on snatch up an Instagram my son who's 12 at 10:13 has said to me recently he's like I want to get an Instagram account but I kind of like do they own all my photos now and are they tracking me and what's going on is there anything else I could use and so people are starting to and younger generation start to realize this trade-off is something they might not want to make and they're looking for other solutions and many of the people here who are building products based on this decentralized architecture aetherium and other systems trying to give people those tools will focus on a very specific idea here which is the use of VPN so VPNs are not a panacea for all the things I've been talking about they certainly don't solve the cookie issue they don't solve the collection data by Google or Facebook but they sell a very specific problem which is the protection of the traffic information about where you're going and what you're doing and in classic VPNs the the architecture is essentially fundamentally centralized and so in other words kind of one way to think about it as a paid middle man in the middle attack so you have a man-in-the-middle attack which is somebody sitting between you and where you want to go and with a VPN you're paying that person to rack your traffic now maybe you can trust them maybe you can't and unfortunately the VPN space right now hi you're gonna help and in she's an expert on VPN suchlike really it's an in the VPN space right now I wish there was one one or two people who I could absolutely say yes you can really trust these guys and we've selected a number of partners who we believe are are great and actually adhere to the principles we're looking for but the reality is is that the space is very fragmented and it's even more so when you go to different different regions of the world and it's actually quite hard to know what a VPN is doing and sometimes there's a situation where the VPN company says they're not logging and then it turns out that after a subpoena or other investigation turns out that they are so we think that this kind of concentration of power lends itself really well to decentralized technologies and I gave a talk a couple years ago it's the word threesome I took them out this idea of what what are the killer apps in this space and hi if you want to hang out and come sit down yeah you sit with me I'll give you a sticker later and so the sense of the the decentralization really I think we've had a couple of actual killer apps the first one is Bitcoin so Bitcoin is a killer app which breaks the centralized control of governments and banks allows you to control your own money do you to have your keys used to having bank account and the second one is etherium serious killer app originally was the ICO we now have D Phi which is a separate conversation but the idea was breaking the the control of the kind of boys club of Silicon Valley VCS right it's like they're the ones who decide what's a good idea they just they're the ones who decide the snapchats a better idea than trying to put satellites in space and give us flying cars so that's what gets invested in please come with IC o---- is we get we got to experiment with all sorts of crazy ideas and one of those things you know Chandra the others and many of these things we actually don't do an IC o---- just for the record and so many of these ideas got the chance to have this experimentation aspect put into them the the the control of communications as I've been explaining is not only by states and countries but also by companies and so we believe that this idea and VPNs this one first example of this decentralized in communications and decentralize in the way that in this case VPNs --use could be a very powerful example of a killer app in the space and standard VPNs as I've mentioned before centralized non transparent meaning like who knows what this code is running on the server what's going on and also not incentivized in the case of the more free versions that are out there already in contrast we're a decentralized approach we're transparent all of our code is open source you can look at the server code you can look at a client code you can compile it you can write yourself you can build your own version of all code and it's also incentivized so what does that mean the recupera the the basic architecture is as follows which is that there is an app and if I could screen share on the screen I would show you but we have apps this is running orchid right now this app has a number of local hops in the case of a single hop which I'm running right now it's like a standard VPN I'm connecting to a provider some nodes which is then passing my traffic off to the Internet resource in the case of a website or it could be a game of cricket virtuality resource or it could be a whatsapp video call and then passing that back to me encrypted and I can also add another hop which is then I have multiple hops once I do that my Internet traffic is then private so in other words the person who I'm requesting from eventually the resource for this website doesn't actually know what my IP address is because it's bounced through a couple of people along the way the the providers in the system here somehow how do these guys get paid well you guys get paid using our currency which is the oxt which is an ER c20 token and the providers are then paid using us and so essentially it's a peer-to-peer architecture where we're not in the middle there's no one in the middle as direct communication between these two parties and then the next question is how do we scale this because we're using a theory much this isn't a theory and break I mean cryptic kiddies was this great example the ico boom led to a theory on blockchain slowing down significantly each time there was a big crowd sale well we invented this new tech new idea which you can kind of see in this really cool graphic it's called probabilistic nano payments so the actual currency of our network is not oxt the actual currency of our network is is these nano payments and what nano payments are is that if all of you guys are providers in this room and I'm sending nano payments to one of you and nano payments another one for the next one each time you get a nano pain with you like actually hang on a second take a look at this oh I see this one's not worth nothing and the next one you go to second I just want to have nothing on this one's worth nothing and finally you get something that is worth something you like that's confining else but this one imagine this is the winning one this one is worth a lot and Justin gave a talk last night and if you want to come learn more about the specific design of this he's available he's already main designers his architecture the idea is the expected value of your payment over that connection is the same as if we done every single transaction on chain and the advantage of this is obviously we're not clogging up the blockchain with all these kind of things and actually lends itself to a number of other ideas and we're very open to talking about different ideas we have of how you can use nano payments and different architectures not just for bandwidth as I mentioned before we use these multiple hops the hops meme isn't also connected to the rabbit meme which is part of our mimetic brand that the hops is very serious it allows as I said to have an IP anonymity on that level and was running and we're also of course very interested in supporting and discussing other other ideas around privacy there's the guys from aztec here i was a seed investor in z cash we're like very very interested in the ideas around the combination of decentralized approaches and privacy I have a new plug my own mail unless I've a new mailing list which talks about a lot of these in sections I've been talking every week about different ideas in this space and what I'm noticing especially just recently with a lot of censorship so that happening on the global health crisis I'm available as is Justin until probably like midday sunday and then will be in Paris next week or so we're based in San Francisco and also Berlin I was starting an office in Berlin this summer so we'll be back and forth to your quite a bit very excited to connect communities were hiring technical people business people marketing people and oh yeah oh yes right we launched the network in December we're currently listed on one of the US exchanges we're gonna be expanding globally and to lots of other other regions of the world love to chat to any of you and discuss partnership opportunities thank you questions do you have time questions how's my time I've got ten minutes tell me five minutes ten minutes okay great next who wants to go first do you want to ask me a question Richard any questions on the back no are we still on camera can we stop recording [Music] Mike added as the auto record so recording can you come out to my class my question later on can you answer my question later on yeah I'll I do it differently than the one I'll ask it now the I guess the general come and I have on that is that this becomes an encryption debate and so it's very similar to the idea of putting backdoors into facebook Messenger and what's up the internet like any technology can be used for things that we consider good and things that we can sort of bad and the things that we consider okay to do here are not considered okay to do in many parts the world for example reading about how some people think that the government sucks right well we're very happy in the UK to talk about how even if we've elected the Prime Minister we the next day were like all he sucks right it's gonna like it kind of an English thing the Queen doesn't start obviously but the Prime Minister always sucks so it's kind of at such a good thing about having Markey so the the there is obviously a potential to use any technology and the internet does have certain things I like that I don't think are good but I guess I look at it like this is that we are aiming to give you the VPN you expected which is privates and not logged for example and should people decide that that is not a good thing for society then obviously we'd be happy to comply with that but currently VPNs not illegal in this country at least they are illegal in many countries similar to agencies operate important ones in plucking at peas can you protect throw other government agencies that are acting as though it depends what the who's doing the logging and what part of the network they're in right so if you log in as a relay then that doesn't really help you if you're logging as an exit then the the IP move information if you use multiple hops isn't very useful to you There is obviously personally identifiable information in many parts of network stream and I would certainly advise people who are using public Wi-Fi for example to use a VPN whether it's ours or the people's right away because that router is potentially compromised one of challenges with the internet right now is that in spite of the things like SSL everywhere and that campaign to really make all websites use SSL a large fraction of of all Internet traffic that you use in different apps and even web browsers is still HTTP which is really unclear a lot of email clients are still they see insecure I think Instagram messages right now are basically set in the clear so it's quite hard for the average user to understand what's in the clear and what's not DNS information is in the clear currently there's new approaches of DNS of TLS that's going to help that in the future but a large fraction of the traffic that you're sending is basically an eclair and includes information about kind of information that's tagged into the into the URL or other IP information that identifies you so yes and one of the interesting things we've done with our system is that the traditional way of thinking about how orchid micro would be that we need to increase the number of nodes that are within the network and then we're gonna have this massive universe of nodes what we realize there's actually to your point is how do you know if you can trust the people who you're sending traffic to so let's say you set up a VPN server using more code and you'll mate trust you and so you're like okay I'm gonna trust him to do this thing and you've got some other friends who are so running systems so you can set up this little kind of micro universe of orchids nodes and you could route the traffic through it anyway so you give it to your friends almost for free you could set your pricing differently so we support that capability and the way you do it actually is you set up a smart contract which contains information about your nodes and your friends knows are doing it and you publish that and you can set that in the client and it's called the curator so our vision for this is that the the universe of curators will grow rather than necessarily like one of them may dominate and become like a large curator of nodes that are trustworthy the way we've set it up initially is that we've screened six different VPN companies and they're providing bandwidth and nodes within the network and that's the sort of default orchid curator but in some of the future hackathons coming up including Paris will be explaining how to actually adjust that and put in your own curated lists and when I was a doubt I guess is the year the Dow's I've been told tonight this is one that happens we're gonna put dowels in everyone's pockets yeah well relative to tor which mentioned tells a different idea satori is a browser with networking built into the browser source is working on an HTTP HTTPS level we're a system-wide VPN if you don't use a hardened browser for example you're still subject to JavaScript injection on the end which is not a reason where we we recommend using these curated a list of nodes that you trust in some way or someone else trusts like some nonprofit organization that decides that these are the you trust that these are good people and obviously with - structures you can then sort of vote people in an out or slash them out in different ways because the system-wide VPN versus a browser + networking architecture we we do get high performance so currently we've been doing user tests where people are doing video streaming over popular messaging applications using mobile hops including in some regions which would typically be considered how to use mission real mercenary mission real mercenary or combination of the two hmm yes good question there are other things out there those people looking to build mesh networking architectures where you just run these things out of your home and they they actually also as you point out just really doesn't add up to very much and a lot of people are doing that really from a perspective of well this is kind of cool like I'll help out I'll do this thing it's like a hobbyist kind of thing as I mentioned I was seen in westerns e-cash and I set up a Amazon Cloud instance and try to get the fastest GPUs on it and put a bunch of money into it and mine 0zi cash but I did it because I was excited to be part of and we could tweeted for me and that's kind of fun but the the reality is is that if you've got a DSL collection at home real cable modem at home and you've got pretty bad upstream and actually relford bad gals from as well you're actually not gonna be very helpful to most people but you might be helpful in some of the small instances are most the niche cases that I heard that I was explaining if you are running an out of a university dorm room you've actually got like ripping fast up and down and you kind of access access to sort of a couple of big machines maybe that's helpful but we also see this as a way to as we saw in the case of something like a theory of mining or some of the alcohol mining people actually set up little colocation facilities and they put a machine there and a couple machines there and they say okay well maybe I'll start my own little micro VPN business out of this thing and I know a number of people who have some like little lifestyle VPN businesses where they serve you know a couple hundred people or a couple thousand people then all of those are millions or tens of millions like other people have done and we think that's interesting we think there's a potential there for both doing it as a way to improve the openness of the Internet in a general sense and also to potentially at least cover your costs to make make some money currently no and we have some philosophical ideas around that yeah so we're looking at ways to do that what you can do in the system is as it grows a little bit more currently we have to sort us as well such a very wide network but a small number nodes on the system you can specify in the base in that in the one of the contracts that advertise your node parameters in there which say where you are now whether you really are where you say you are or where you don't say where you are is kind of something that actually goes into other issues around VPNs and whether you trust those people this all gets a little bit weird with things like cloud flow and just in general like how the internet really works today because what you really want is you don't actually want to say that I want to I want VPN to be in London what you want is a pickle of service what you want is the BBC and so you might be able to access the BBC from somewhere else so what you kind of want is you want to like search for can I get this service from somewhere versus can I get a server in this location [Music] but potentially and obviously we're talking about things that are breaking copyright law so we can't comment necessarily on all those things but we try not to comment on those things like that but I and we can chat more about that there are there's been quite a bit of pretty kind of nefarious activity among some VPN providers where there's people selling what the appear to be residential IP addresses and actually aren't and there was a whole market on that in the last few years which which led to some interesting abuses but yeah so one of my personal use cases as I would love to watch the Winter Olympics or the Summer Olympics covered by the BBC where there apparently are more countries playing versus when I'm watching in US appeals only one country playing like a bit of a surprise right okay okay gotta wrap it up I'm here Justin's here [Applause]