Towards a Privacy preserving Web3 Stack Adrian Brink

fantastic welcome uh yeah welcome to this talk on human coordination and privacy in web 3. uh i'm adrian i'm the founder of well one of the founders of honor uh which so on a very high level is a system for economic self-sovereign coordination and privacy preserving protocols i'll quickly start with talking about what are the current forms of human coordination so the most dominant form at the moment really is governments which are directed by mostly democratic elections that sort of steer a country or community forward right this is pretty much what we have in most of the western world and pretty much actually mostly around the world this is sort of the predominant model at this moment um one thing to consider though it's a very lossy process right when you go from because you go from basically an election which is a binary choice on whether you want to have person a or person b um and you try to condense down like what are your views for the world you may have crazy views right you may be a gun loving uh climate change activist that loves nuclear power um this pro exists um but you are in this process via an election where you go well i have a very complex view of the world and what i want to get out of the world and it's being reduced to this binary choice where you have to figure out what is the least worst candidate that probably supports the majority of the points that i want to get across um and politicians actually in even a worse situation because they have to figure out the opposite uh side of that optimization function which is i need to be get i need to get reelected in four years from now what is the majority subset of the population and what points do they have in common across the entire spectrum so they have to combine a bunch of viewpoints in order to get reelected this leads to a like a focus on a lot of like not even the french opinions but a lot of things that aren't majority viewpoints easily get lost in this process so i want to start with two videos because turns out you can just walk into the state capitol it's like down the road and so like on monday evening i was bored and just walked in and they're actually very nice and it's a great co-working space they have power plugs in the library and like a cafeteria where i'm certain no one's trying to steal from me so go check this out uh but then on yesterday i went back and you can actually watch the legislative sessions um because i have like a nice balcony and so i recorded like two short videos if they work on the senate oh you can see it nice i just can't see it right there we go and i now have to like go over here to see um so what i want you to sort of the context is pretty boring um they're talking about some bill to teach police officers how to not entrap miners when they arrest them uh seems reasonable and i don't think they should be like hotly debated but the problem is right so these are 60 seats roughly um of people that get paid full time for that job right you look at this and they're like maybe 15 people there um so 15 p like the rest didn't show up for work really um and but the better part in this entire thing is just watch what the people do um it's like in the at the front there's just a group of people chatting next to the speaker who by the way if you can hear the audio if you could hear the audio is just like droning on and keeps losing his point um on why this bill is important a bunch of people are on the ipads a bunch of other people in the background are still just walking around and chatting with each other and i have to tell you this is the first time i ever walked into a session like this anywhere in the world and it is pretty terrifying because to a large extent our existing systems are based around the competence that we saw in these videos so if this is even an average we're probably doing very poorly on a global scale um by the way also like uh so i spoke to a bunch of people that said they didn't want to go alone if you're interested i'm happy to go back there tomorrow they're very friendly people um so you don't have to wear a mask i asked a guy about it and was like kind of i don't know um it was a very confusing experience um also if you're coming to devconnect in amsterdam i'm trying to do the same thing in amsterdam and see what local democracy is because i think we should be figuring out the people we're kind of competing against like can we build better systems than these and to me honestly the answer seems pretty obvious um right but let's go to like what are requirements for human coordination um two of the big ones are common sense making and a shared reality uh we are starting to have really big problems if we can't agree what the current state of the world is right if we can't agree on what the basic facts are and it doesn't actually uh like if we can't agree whether a thing is happening we can't potentially consider this a problem or come up with solutions to address this problem right so and the bigger problem is that um i mean i'm probably not alone here in this room in the last couple of years democracy seems to have rapidly eroded much quicker than i expected which is a very terrifying realization but it really comes down to the fact that we don't seem to see the same view of the world anymore and so we don't have a shared reality and hence we can't make choices on what we should be doing the second big process is a process to coordinate effectively in order to achieve pareto optimal efficiencies here and really this comes down to what you just saw is the process we currently have once we have an understanding of what the shared reality is and what i'm proposing is that with web3 we can actually be building much more efficient efficient systems in order to facilitate this what do we want to get out of life as humanity yeah it is oh yeah i'm also if there's interest let me know you can reach on telegram we may call this the capital dao it'd be cool so what do we need for an ideal system to facilitate human coordination this is not an exclusive list but i would say that two of the very important points are we need direct coordination between thousands of people as in thousands of people need to be able to express their preferences what they want to get out of the world in a better system that is a binary choice every four years on an on a ballot right so we need to have a system that where i can say well i care about climate change and animals should be treated right and i think we should stop invading other countries right like this is sort of i but i can define this very broadly and if and we need to have the ability to have thousands of people do this so that we can see what what people want to get out of society at large and once we have this we need a process or something that enables binding commitments that are enforceable and here blockchains are very obvious solutions because they allow us to send signed messages that are potentially executable on chain and hence can be seen as binding commitments right because otherwise you always have this problem where thousands of people say they want x but they have nothing at stake so they say they want x y and z and they want everything at the same time but real life has trade-offs and we need systems that recognize this oh and maybe also the other very important point i think we need spectrums because sometimes i have preferences for very short ephemeral interactions right where maybe today i want to buy carbon neutral coffee in starbucks but it's a one-time thing um but there are other cases where for example i may want to signal and say to the world that i want to buy clean energy all the time so i need a way to make permanent commitments to what i want to do in life i have to say daois are often hailed as this sort of savior for all i don't think dallas here are the solution daos are like very very cool efficient programmable joint stock companies they don't fundamentally solve the problem of how do we get a thousand people into a room to coordinate across like to come up with a shared vision for where we want to go by the way i'm going to come to privacy in a sec um all right actually let me quickly fix this here so um i have somewhat of a propos i'm this is a proposal for what this kind of system could what uh kind of system could implement what i just spoke about um and it's intent gossip and matchmaking um effectively intents are small pieces of programmatic code that allow individual individuals to express complex requirements that are one-off uh as in for example i may want to buy a crypto punk that is carbon neutral now so i can write i am willing to buy a crypto punk for x price as long as it's carbon neutral and the nice thing is these things can be ephemeral so we can have hundreds of millions of them floating around and so if you can imagine is a large super intense and they don't actually have to hit any chain they don't have to be settled they aren't consensus relevant not everyone needs to have the same global view of all these intents but once you have this you also need an economic incentives for people to look at different kinds of intents and say well which ones here are combinable which one which two intents can i take and put it into a transaction so that the people get what they want out of them right because so the simplest form of an intent is a trade actually it's like i want to sell some bitcoin for some eth and then someone else across the world could actually sell some heath for some bitcoin and there needs to be an economic incentive that someone looks at the soup and figures out that these two things are matchable and settled on chain the nice thing here is that intents are very flexible as in they can be thousands of intents to a transaction so you can have this traditional example of a three-party trade ifbtc want e you have eth one dots and some third person has dots and one's btc no one has a direct match so like no one can trade directly with each other um but if you take all three of them together they're settled on chain uh and this scales to thousands so you can imagine a scenario where a thousand people don't have any overlapping wants um but if you take all thousands together they're settlement chain um the nice thing is this also enables full counterparty discovery because one of the big things we have right now is that pretty much every system like every time you want to interact or trade on a blockchain you're trading against the central counterparty whether that central counterparty is coinbase or unisof it doesn't actually matter but you have to know the counterparty that you want to be interacting with whereas in this proposed system you can go i just want to buy some bitcoin and i'm willing to sell some ether and anyone that can satisfy this intent can settle this on chain yeah and they're just really fully programmable pieces of code the last thing here is also validity predicates they are there to enforce long-term preferences around for example buying carbon neutral energy and by the way i'm maybe jumping a little bit between abstractions here but sort of a trait is a very simple form of coordination but this kind of system generalizes to incorporating the cost of carbon into a thousand people wanting to purchase nike sneakers this is it's all just a matter of writing this it is not a matter of whether the system supports it um yeah so some examples of what you can build um buying co2 neutral starbucks coffee once uh so subscribe permanent to co2 neutral energy um or actually the city of people like a thousand people in denver can commit to funding a local duck pond because they'd like it i don't know right coming to privacy so why does privacy matter privacy is what leverages the playing field in asymmetric information games and by the way there is a link between privacy and human coordination because you need privacy in order for human coordination to actually work in practice so but what are what do i mean by this first bullet point well think about your interaction with facebook facebook itself is very very private you are very very public it's a massive informational symmetry where you don't actually have a lot of power if the roles were inversed and you actually owned all your data and facebook privately and facebook was transparent this leverages the playing field the same applies to nation states generally speaking societies where individuals have a lot of protection are i think what i would call more just and more enjoyable to live in than where the government can surveil everyone but no one can fail the government um and actually the second point is not having privacy like everyone keeps saying that well if i have nothing to hide i don't need privacy the problem is that not having privacy changes your behavior and i'll use the example here of a u.s mexican border art gallery so the art gallery kind of displays the atrocities that happen across the border or that happen while crossing the border um if you go to this art gallery in the physical world uh you probably find right like you like to tell people that you are there you like to talk about what you're seeing there uh you can build in an informed opinion without fear of prosecution this model will change quite a bit i think if at every art gallery there's a government official standing there recording your name what time you came there who you came with who you spoke to what you spoke about what picture and for how many seconds you viewed it how your pupils dilated while viewing it like but this is the current model of the internet this is so you go to a virtual art gallery and all this data is being recorded about you and this changes people's behavior i have some references at the back that link to some studies that show how if people know they're being watched they change in order to fit in or because they're afraid of being prosecuted and there's even so here you can sort of say that more privacy leads to more truth and the third thing is privacy fights against surveillance capitalism one of the problems with facebook knowing a bunch of data about you is that they can do micro targeting as in they can create your own individual hellhole where you are very incentivized to keep scrolling this is pretty much the optimization function facebook is running and tick tock is running too which is how do i keep the user as engaged and possible it's like this is the they could show you pure violence if this is the thing that keeps you scrolling every two seconds this is the model right and so by not having any privacy in our digital lives everyone just opens themselves up to be put into these filter bubbles because large scale organizations have an incentive to show you the thing that enrages you the most yeah due to all these above points privacy is what fundamentally makes human coordination possible because it is what allows people to individually express what they really want to get out of life without being afraid that other people may judge them for it right like this is the important thing uh people should not be afraid to express their opinion because they think some other people on twitter will yell at them for it um this is where we're currently heading though which is terrifying um so what is the current state of privacy in web 3. um i thought it was bad before i came here but then i came here and i realized it was way worse so 99 of all systems are completely transparent and probably 99 of all users aren't remotely aware of this uh on sunday i had a great conversation at the super bowl with two guys who were completely convinced that the theory was fully private um they entered the space three months ago it's not their fault like the intuition that public blockchains give you are just wrong right like they give you the intuition that there's a sort of this hex address that maps in no way to my real world identity but the reality is that um the amount of metadata you're leaking on a public transparent chain is enough to de-anonymize you and certainly to figure out if you ever like i don't know if any of you did this but if you ever link your nft to your twitter profile uh everyone that spends a little bit of time will figure out exactly your financial history on ethereum like it's trivial um and this is like not even a sophisticated attacker analysis does this way better at this point um so yeah if you ever sort of give in actually we all doxed ourselves when we try to get food um because we all got the arbitrary tokens and ethereum addresses don't change between networks so yeah unless you are very careful like you should have public addresses for the specifically for public interactions that don't ever interact with your private addresses um yeah and then the second point is even though the pseudonymous nature is being eroded coinbase released this very nice thing to be locally compliant in the us which just says we will collect all your data and we put it onto a private bulletin board that we share with all the other exchanges in the states and globally great um i have to say there has been some amazing work done um so zcash clearly has been leading the way there i think zcash in 2017 started making a lot of the things we do nowadays possible um yep um okay quick interlude on interoperability the world will be multi-chain because assets are very expensive to create as in it's very hard to create a hard currency but it's very cheap to get 20 software developers into a room to write new software to try those assets out so generally speaking the model will be that assets will flow to state machines and not state machine state machines won't come to assets as in cool new applications aren't going to come to your favorite assets your favorite assets will probably go to the cool state machines okay coming back to privacy so one of the big things which we've actually been starting to work on is privacy solutions need to be acid agnostic so we're building something called the mask the multi-asset chiller pool you can think of this as uh it is a unified global privacy set for your nft your usdc your usdt your eth your atom your near it doesn't matter anything that's interoperable can flow into the privacy set into the masp and gain full privacy guarantees that zcash currently off like zcash currently offers fosec okay two more minutes uh okay i need to hire up a little bit um oh yeah we should start attacking this the governments are going after the real world use cases anyway already just look to canada this week uh people are starting to realize that it's way easier to free someone's bank account than actually have any sort of due process or allow dissenting opinions and but more generally speaking going forward we need to provide privacy not just for assets but generally for human coordination because long term this is really the problem that we need to be solving it's not how do we make our usdt or nft private it's how do we enable humans to coordinate across the globe in order to like not blow up the planet due to global warming or due to nuclear war all of these things are sort of global problems that governments are honestly failing to solve which i now know why practically speaking this requires that we can build tons of new circuits so i think one of the most exciting areas anyone here could go into is zero knowledge proof development and circuit development yes i will shut up in a sec okay there we go uh yeah conclusion the world is falling around a part around us this is all very scary this is like not that great we should be doing something about this i i don't think i'm the only one that feels this way um autocracy is a very easy answer by the way uh global sense making it's very easy if there's just one guy at the top that has to coordinate everything but i actually think web 3 can provide very good alternatives and we should be thinking not about how to build the next ponzi scheme um but rather how to build tools that actually impact humanity um oh yeah and if you would like to yeah more references check it out also message me if you found this interesting also if you're interested in going to the center tomorrow let me know thank you very much