The DarkTech Renaissance by Amir Taaki (Devcon5)

yeah it's very interesting that DEFCON is in a giant shopping more it kind of represent the peak end of crypto burner culture yeah I I was in Syria for almost three years and I was part of the administration approving technology projects or region of five million people and I was like oh this is a great opportunity to be able to deploy cryptocurrency on a national scale and I went to contact different Bitcoin organizations and most of them were not interested you know you know like they then there's a lot of really silly projects that people are focused on and it was very hard to get people to pay attention to any kind of a big big market opportunity for deploying cryptocurrency on a national scale so that's when I kind of realized that there is a money market and a lot of this rhetoric and the way it's used is as a tool to you know advance interests and there's like a machine where the money is going through and you know the this rhetoric is used to bring the fish along for the ride and skim off the top from them and the second point is is when I started to think about okay how would I deploy cryptocurrency on a national scale you know like the software that I need the hardware that I need the infrastructure that I need I realized that none of that exists currently like nobody is working on this stuff you know it's all very provincial small you know personal devices and small consumer projects nobody is really thinking on a large gun the opportunity that is available to us but you know there there is another group or there was another group that was interested about about big economical projects and this group that group was Isis and what they actually did is they minted their own gold and silver backed currency which was an area that was basically most of half of Iraq and Syria they they minted their own gold and silver backed currency because they wanted to challenge the hegemony of the US financial power and I have one of the coins here that's a genuine mices silver dirham which was the main currency of the state that they were trying to produce so those were guys that we're trying to think on a bigger scale about what they were trying to do right now inside of cryptocurrency there is a huge wealth of human resource around us that we're not making use of especially young people who realize that blockchain and cryptocurrency is going to be big in the future and they're looking to enter into the space and these are people that they have no family they're really dedicated they're really creative they're ambitious but the problem is is right now they just kind of end up getting used as tools working for companies doing slave work and and the the problem is is we have a big inversion inside of cryptocurrency space where there's this startup mentality which is like let's get loads of capital let's hire the best cryptographers and the best programmers and instead we're not thinking about nurturing our into the talent that's inside of our community there's a lot of young people and especially young people that feel disaffected by what's going on or sit or sense how we're not actually fulfilling the vision of cryptocurrency that we want it wanted to make and but the problem is is also we have a massive misallocation of capital and 90% of these projects exist now I'm going to fail simply because they don't know even themselves what they're trying to create you know they don't have a clear vision of the society or a lot of it's just rhetoric and a lot of it is just companies that have little feudal kingdoms and are trying to one-up each other you know like trying to further their brand and you know it's like I'm trying I'm building Academy in Spain so train developers to train hackers and its really incredibly difficult to get donations from people to support something this strategically important for cryptocurrency as a whole I met with Vitalik and and I explained to him about all these projects what exactly we need to build and that I have a company that's willing to put in a hundred thousand and I need to raise a hundred thousand from for other people and I need 25k from him and he was like mmm I think about it and that was a guy that before aetherium he was living with us we were supporting his work as well as other developers so and the problem with Vitalik is he had a low social intelligence so he's not able to discern like who his friends and who's not his friends and he has his tight cadre of people around him and there's a lot of rhetoric we have about decentralization but there are all of these hidden hierarchies that basically form like closed cliques or like cartels GAF word as well you know he's like oh my you know like it's like if we want to build something big we have to work together towards a long vision and gaff woods is like yeah it's cool we're gonna work we will work together bla bla bla he's like yeah you can do one of our grants for 100k what happens the grant gets stuck in the bureaucratic machinery you know so there's a very interesting story about Nikola Tesla who he was working for Edison Edison said if you solve the problem with my power plants you'll get a bonus of 50,000 they call it says that he solved the problem and what happened was Edison fired him because he will help felt threatened by what Nikola Tesla represented and he ended up being homeless on the streets digging trenches for people to earn enough money so there is this kind of we have to understand it where does the authority and where does this system of hierarchy come from is is not necessarily from the system that we have it's from the mindset that exists inside of the community right now all of these blockchain projects are going to fail because they don't have a narrative their discourse is weak you know that's the most important thing is the narrative because it's how you build a movement how you attract people together to go towards a long-term strategic objective you know right now there is what I would call a complexity oriented approach you know there is there is a noted tendency of engineers that what we do as engineers is you know we look at mechanisms and we like reduce the world down to mechanisms that we can exploit and we make a joke in programming in the video game industry which we say programmer arced which is like when programmers try to make video game art it's like cumbersome it doesn't look creative at all or for example any kind of software where the user interface is designed by a programmer they're very cumbersome they have like too many features so they're so there is a tendency of developers when they do software projects to create these huge unwieldy monsters in which there is this a collection of features rather than actually solving real problems or use cases in the market they exist and so you know so we have to first understand like what is it that we're going towards there is a lot of rhetoric about the state like what is the state the state is a system that that have a that you make use of ideology you know you have the priests of liberalism it have the military or the coercive force the police and the administration and the bureaucracy and all the technical knowledge and the state is a system that used people as human beings use people as tools do not does not help people achieve their individual freedom so instead of thinking about complex electronic systems that manage human beings as objects we should be thinking about what the tools that we that that we can build to enable people who have who share an ideology that we have like how can we empower this section of the market or these groups of people that we want to move forwards with and and the to to create that form of society where that free society we have to create an ethical philosophical society it comes through the development of the intellectual ideas and right now in cryptocurrency space it's becoming very difficult to solve problems because there is not any kind of proper analysis being done of the society we're repeating all the same mistakes we made from the history of technology no everything's our historical nobody's looking at the history of technology or the history of humanity so oriented against that we have to take a simplicity oriented approach now in this in the 70s UNIX was developed UNIX is origin is is where all the modern concepts behind the computer were were invented the network socket the file time-sharing operating system that was made by UNIX in the 70s what happened was at the time there were several big operating system projects like IITs multix MST a whole bunch of them and what they were doing is they were really big well-funded projects that had huge amounts of capital and they they were go they were going they were doing things very academically like bit by bit and they were focused on perfection and completeness and there was a group of developers who left from all these major operating system projects who would this disaffected by how they were going and they founded Unix and they took all the best ideas at the time and they developed this operating system they basically the way it was built was out of components and these components could be put together in ways that the programmers did not originally envisioned to create new functionality and that enabled UNIX to be adaptable and to be able to be changed for many different use cases and and basically UNIX delivered the operating system all the other projects ended up to fail and they put forward a new paradigm of technology which you know in over 50 years our computing paradigm has not changed the the devices that we use they've got smaller they've got faster but they haven't changed even something as simple as sharing a file is still really cumbersome you know and I see inside of cryptocurrency community there is a lot of focus on mechanisms and techniques but there is very little joining up the dots there's very little talk about structure and infrastructure like how can we go to areas where we have agreements with the local administration and there is a potentially huge market and we can deploy cryptocurrency a mass scale larger these are big opportunities in the market so you know one thing I've been interested in recently is about anonymous mixes which you know a lot of now that anima tea techniques they exist now they shift the burden from the verifier to the prover because when you have a blockchain everybody have to verify the transit transactions so they try to shift the burden to the prover but you know with a mixer we can actually we can actually you there's this you you can take some of these algorithms for example ring CT algorithm which Manero is not anonymous member when boys not anonymous zed cash is anonymous but it's a massive ruby goldberg machine with many moving parts which has a really big attack surface but there is a lot of really interesting research into anonymity techniques even ring CT is south which is manera is not anonymous because as a key size of 10 if you take a hundred thousand keys i implemented the algorithm took 74 seconds i basically was able to do a lot of optimization such as doubling the proof size which allow the the proof and the verification to be calculated massively in parallel which the verification you have these servers you have these sorry CPUs could aim the rice and thread Ripper with 32 cores and 64 threads if you have a computer with four of those you have a massive amount of parallel power but even now there's other techniques like there's a very interesting project called Zed coin and the guy they're very small team but they're very motivated and they've developed a technique called LaLanne tiss which is based off of Jen's graph one out of n commitment to zero so the Monaro so the ring CT scheme with these optimizations I was able to reduce from seventy four seconds to six and a half seconds and with the lantus scheme it should be able to should be possible to get because it's not linear speed it's logarithmic speed it should be able to get milliseconds performance but yeah so but starting with a product or several products we can add features to these products but through the process of of examining the market examining the traders the work that they do the processes that we have we can better adapt our products and our technology and we can abstract out that technology into a platform you know it's like I go to some of these talks and I hear people talking about you know decentralized derivatives and you know I'm I'm thinking myself and they're talking about mortgages and financing for consumers I'm really thinking myself why are we not thinking about how to create dark finance that we can use to leverage against government bonds to dump on the market to crash we can crash national economies you know that's people is not really thinking on a big level I see it's like the old rich they raised their kids from a really young age with all these elaborate rituals and ceremonies to maintain their power and their and their financial power and this this crypto nouveau-riche you see them buying yachts and Lambos nobody's really thinking about what we can really do on a big scale we can become a global superpower you know and we need to we need to develop a new paradigm of computing you know one which is seamless across devices one which allow human beings to organize economic on a large scale you know civilization the purpose behind civilization is that it allow human beings different groups of human beings to come together to build a society right now the technology that we use is built for consumers for individuals you see this in crypto in which in which a lot of people is developing products people like themselves in Silicon Valley when he said we should be thinking about we should be thinking about you know like you know like there were all these countries like Venezuela Iran Cyprus you know you got all this crypto news a lot of that is fake news a lot of it is not people use statistics but it's not it doesn't translate to anything real you know so those in my opinion were lost opportunities you know but you know the world is collapsing that we are entering into a new stage globalization is being challenged by new upstart nationalist movements we also have the rise of China and also the military sztyc geopolitical competition Russia has with America and we need to prepare be prepared to take advantage of these opportunities when they present them so that's why we need to develop our intellectual capacity in the cryptocurrency community there is a potential here that we can make use of but it's not just going to happen by itself we have to make that thing happen you know the technology that we use today is built for individuals we know we need to think about social infrastructure how to build technologies that enable human beings to collaborate on large pieces of infrastructure we need to take control the telecom the telecoms networks as well right now the entire cryptocurrency community is nothing there is nothing here and it's it's very weak and it's ripe for a takeover you know all that most of these groups are going to collapse you already see aetherium community kind of getting taken over by these groups like a census even though they're a bit thick like they at least are like moving towards some kind of vision and and so it's and so that's why you know we need to build that we need to build a system you know it's we it's it's a problem everything now is built off of personality and celebrity culture you know it's it's gonna like destroy our effectiveness as a movement to be able to make change on a big level so we need to build a new system and like I was going three years ago to try and convince people that we need there needs to be a change on a big scale the cryptocurrency is not going to realize is it's big potential and I realized that all of these projects right now they're corrupted the people that are in the power you know they have their worldview they have the things that they're doing that change is not going to happen from those people but there is a lot of people who who feel that something should should change want things to change and that's why we have to make a new system and we have to recruit the the people into that new system as well so so yet so it's end this we're developing a academy in Barcelona eventually after this first Academy we're going to develop a system of academies which is to train not just hackers but to train leaders or to train we have to create a new image of a hacker like a new type of hacker you know a hacker the problem is is that a lot of this right now is really sheltered and cut off from the actual problems that we're trying to solve and it can't just be it can't just be education about technology I have to be also philosophical philosophy education in ancient Greece they had a system of academies which was the basis of the system in ancient Greece it was where Socrates would recruit his followers like Plato and Aristotle and when Christianity came to ancient Greece they shut down the academies and all the teachers went east to Baghdad where they founded the House of Wisdom and and that was what side the Islamic Golden Age we need to start or an ace on sin side of cryptocurrency so you know right now I'm like raising like a hundred K because I have it matched by another investor but I'm not looking just for any people has to be like the right type of people people is like on a level that we we're moving in this in this direction not just gamblers so yeah there's a there's an opportunity in front of us if we if we prepare and we have the vision and we're able to develop our thoughts and our human capacity when opportunity presents itself and trust me there's going to be these opportunities we'd be ready to take advantage of that all right thank you [Applause]