DarkFi kills glowies: intro to the world's first anon DAO, anon markets, anon chat, ... | Devcon SEA

[Music] okay I will start now um so my name is Amiri I'm a free software developer for 20 years and a core Bitcoin developer for from 2010 to 2015 um I wrote the bip1 I made the first UK Bitcoin exchange I'm 10 years plus working on privacy technology I made the first privacy implementations in Bitcoin uh coin join stealth addresses uh in 2015 I joined the ypg and I fought on the front line for against Isis I was 3 years working in Syria for the local revolutionary government and in this talk I'm going to talk about darkfire so darkfire is an L1 for anonymous smart contracts it's like in the same way Monero is the anonymous version of Bitcoin darkfire is the anonymous version of ethereum so I will also today also talk about the app that we're building for users like what are we putting into users hands so let's begin let's have a look so okay that was actually let's just go back here so let's start with the name darkfire darkfire's name actually comes from 2013 where um there was a project that we founded called Dark wallet and it was founded by uh me and Cody Wilson who invented the 3D printed gun by vitalic and a group of Spanish hackers and uh you can actually go on YouTube and you can find the initial video which is an important piece of Bitcoin history but the but the name itself comes from a speech by the director of the FBI and the director of the FBI was said that it that the if people begin using cryptography wildly widely if the everybody starts adopting cryptography it threatens to create these dark zones in the internet where law enforcement cannot penetrate the going dark problem and he the quote is he goes you know the law has not kept pace with technology and this has created a public safety problem so you might go okay well why do we why do we need the you know the cipher Punk values you know Cipher Punk values what are they you know number one is anonymity and I'm not talking about when I say you know people go oh our project's private you know like oh we provide us no I mean strong anonymity in the sense that if they come for you they cannot find out who you are you are completely protected and there is no Gray Zone there there is only the project your project is either Anonymous or it's not Anonymous um also censorship resistance what that means is 100% pure Free Speech you can say whatever you want and nobody can shut you down there is no compromises with free speech it is absolute third third uh property sovereignity well that means we run the infrastructure we own the infrastructure they cannot shut it down they cannot they can't it's like in our hands in the hands of the community so why do you need these things well imagine a scenario where an authoritarian government comes into power and they begin oppressing your friends and putting them in jail and you need to mobilize to create a parallel free Society what do you do you create an anonymous onchain Dow you uh you communicate anonymously you raise funds uh into that Dow um you you allocate resources to people for different projects you coordinate the work using Anonymous infrastructure Anonymous task managers and then then people get paid a salary they get paid money they need to cash out they need to do OTC they need to trade it so they can pay for stuff and and people using this infrastructure are able to Mobil mobilize and um you know what I'm talking about is not a theoretical thing it's a real thing the time is coming and we all feel that within the next 5 years or so there is going to be some major event of huge macro you know economic or political significance right now they are putting devs in jail for making Anonymous software and when they are doing that they're trying to frighten people into compliance and it's like you know if I say something and you know it's it's it's I'm just saying you know some uh you know commenting about something and you suddenly go I suddenly go or someone says to me something and I suddenly go oh yeah no and I react really aggressively and you go whoa why reacting so aggressively that is not a sign of strength that is not a sign of power so when they are oppressing people and putting people in jail for making Anonymous software that is that is not that we are not meant to back off from that that is a signal of where they're weak and we're meant to hit them harder we're meant to push further and you know uh and you know people always go to go to us oh you know what about this project you know what about uh this other project you know dark F has no competition because you know there's all these projects go oh yeah I'm a privacy project blah blah join our Discord you know check out our Google Docs they are putting people in jail they're putting people in jail and if you are using Discord then you are obviously not afraid and if you are not afraid you're probably not doing anything important you know in England I literally saw the other day a guy he went to a protest and he just held up a sign and he said the politicians are corrupt you know Black Rock Etc they put him in jail for three years this and I I even read now that they are reducing the the time served for criminals in jail from 80% to 60% to make more space in jail because they expect more people to go to jail now more higher capacity because of these new spe laws how crazy is that they're putting people in jail and like people are really suffering right now people like the elites are trying to divide Society separate people from each other there's like they're actively hostile to the interests of the people and yet cryptocurrency as technologists we have this huge power of cryptography and we have not in in after billions of dollars of VC money you know the VCS they get the money from central banks you know they get it from their F their friends in Wall Street and you know they're not going to they don't put it into disrupting the status quo but then this industry which was meant to change things to have an impact goes to those same guys ends up you know cow Towing before them trying to ask oh please sir give me some funds and that's why we haven't been able to deliver like we that's why projects are going join our Discord join uh you know check out our Google Docs we haven't even built a chat app after so many years and now you're going on Twitter and you see project go oh I think the future is AI conscious agents communicating allocating research it's like have you built any of that no you haven't built anything it's just talking rubbish we haven't built the basics that people need and then people go okay you know uh you know dark five what you're building you know what about criminals what about the criminals you know everybody all the movies is is always is all about like you know mafias and criminals and gangsters there's no M that's not there is a the reason why people are are are you know like watching this stuff and they're going oh you know I actually sympathize more with the criminals because everybody feels that we're under foreign occupation by colonizer that's how dubious the law has become the law no longer holds moral weight and they turn around and they say you know for us people who are trying to G G our freedom they go oh that's criminal you know what about criminals they invented that label and they put that on us and we're playing the rules by their of their game that they invented if anybody's the real criminal you know uh they're the real criminals 2 million people died in the Middle East for absolutely nothing absolutely nothing 2 million people die shocking absolutely shocking things need to change and we are technologists and in our hand we hold cryptography I study a lot of math every day and you know when you're reading the math you discover mathematical truths and you go oh that is very that's very interesting and you take these mathematical truths and you piece them together to create cryptographic schemas and we use these schemas you know to defend Society from Attack by nation states you know that is Magic if anything is Magic that is Magic we are like Wizards casting a spell you know that um you know they used to say that violence cannot solve math problems that's what that means no matter how much violence the state uses with their man-made laws they cannot defeat the power of the cryptographers when we wake up and we realize that power we will become invincible because the trajectory of history when a technology whose time has come it can't be stopped no matter what laws they try to do we have bought sometime but do not be under the illusion that governments are our friend maybe the SEC has stopped has like eased up on breathing down our necks but they're not our friend the Crackdown is coming we have to use this time to build and to make governments irrelevant so oh yeah so you know that's the that's people waking up realizing you know that things are changing and this is the you know the Luna Punk uh fight so um yeah I just you know like okay because when we're doing cryptography we're summoning the power of Mother Nature that's how powerful that that stuff is and uh okay so I so this graph is actually well we don't need it we just talk about this so you know anonymity and surveillance are in a feedback loop the more that they crack down on anonymity the more it valid validates why we need anonymity and the more it pushes us to understand this is the value in cryptography C Cipher punk you know Anon PTP censorship resistant Sovereign infrastructure for the people for the community to allow us to build the the new paradigm the new economic Paradigm and the more that we're successful the more that they're like oh this is disrupting the status quo this is the thing that actually changes things and the more that they crack down that's that's the feedback lube and so yeah you see it there and so that's that's why this split dark F regi split it whether it's 5 years 10 years it's an inevitability it's coming at some point and uh so what's so yeah I so for example tornado cach case how they they the reason they put the tornado cash people in jail was because they made a mixer but it's not how they put them in jail in the same way it's not how they put Al Capone in jail they put him in jail using the taxes the taxes thing so with tornado cash it was actually uh uh uh three things the first was they had access to their internal signal chats and so they were able to say oh you said this and you said that so therefore you're like the CEO so when we were building darkfire we realized that we needed to have this like uh we completely Anonymous Communication System PTP we where all the messages are unlinkable nothing like that exists so that if they come later with chats and they go oh you said this then we go well no I didn't it can be absolutely anybody anybody can assume that identity and we use cryptography to you know ensure that we have spam protection and you know that it's functioning but we've been using that for several years to quote to do the dark F development and people they always go oh but you know how can you how can you do things anonymously ly well you know culture does not come from Reddit all the internet culture came from forchan that's like when people are in free speech zones that's when they like really explore you know the they explore thought and that's when um you know people are are are willing to like think critically rather than just trusting Authority and we need that more than ever and we built technology in the '90s and we were all Anonymous we're just join an IRC Channel and we start coordinating sending patches the the that not you know that we how we've got into this situation now where everybody's like oh but you can't run the internet with people being that's a scop they've sced us into thinking everything have to be like you know real name on Twitter with a blue check mark That's not how it was the internet wasn't even built like that the internet the internet was built by like people mobilizing together so and on ity is the is the is the real deal and um second thing with tornado cash was they had a d and the Dow they had like all the people had tokens in the Dow and they go oh well you've got this amount of tokens therefore you're like a board member so then we were like okay you know and we had this experience with Assange where people don't know but assange's case was bankr by assanal which you know raised 55 million to free aange that was was like that was done by the crypto Community but when we did it we had this da where where all the members were completely transparent and so it just killed the da because it's for it's a DA to like free a political prisoner by all means necessary and everybody's like oh well you know like I don't want to act in a d i could go to jail I'm just some random dude if I go to jail nobody will hear about me or care about me so and then secondly the da was participating in an auction so the fact that the treasury was public just broke the game theory of the auction in 2020 2021 everybody was talking about Squad wealth DS the Future Organization you know of uh ethereum of of of blockchain you know to mobilize community that Vision never came to pass and instead it just it just went into like defi dgen you know uh nihilistic coiny and the the reason why I think that didn't happen is because we were missing the adversarial you know anonymity in Dows where Dows can't do anything important they can't change things if people they can't like have an impact on politics if people are completely exposed and vulnerable so you know like we dark five built the world's first Anonymous dial the only Anonymous dial that exists in the world that infrastructure exists on dark fire and the third thing about tornado cash they ran they ran infrastructure we've built everything ground up you know completely Sovereign infrastructure PTP task managers everything and I and you know they're telling me I'm running out of time so you know um so you know I just talk about the UI because you know when I watch movies like okay Silicon Valley they've got this broken Paradigm where they you know try to capture as many normies as possible and tax them they they're like oh yeah people are stupid we just need to get loads of stupid people and crypto people have fallen into that trap where that and and that's why I read an article recently it said gen Z does not know how to use a file system and it's indeed like when you go on the Mac computers and you look at the file browser it doesn't expose the file system you can't access it so it's like literally not only are they designing the software uh to for stupid people it's actually making people stupid and we need to like we need to create uh software the software the vision of the future that we were promised in the Sci-Fi in the movies in the '90s and instead of trying to copy you know Silicon Valley you know the the like you know like all these garbage delivery apps that are made in electron slop JavaScript and they're just shitty and they lag like why why are we why do we think that is the authority why are we trying to copy Google why are we not building actually cool stuff why are we not building the things that people who are being oppressed actually need that's why people is looking at cryptocurrency guys it's a scam we haven't built the basic tools everybody's talking about very fancy stuff we need to actually put the things that people need how come darkfire darkfire project has has their projects which have 20x to 100x of our budget and they have not even built 20% of what we've built we've built much more than other projects which is a small project how is that possible that should tell you a lot about this industry and how industry is operating so I just go through some of the stuff you see we've got OTC swaps ZK compiler you know the consensus algorithm you know chat completely crossplatform Windows Mac Linux Android uh iOS and lastly to wrap it up you know you know they call us criminals but they're the real criminals and in the end history will be the judge of our actions and history will absolve us and anonymous is is offensive it expands spaces it expands the territory of Freedom as Satoshi said privacy is not simply a Normy you know people go privacy is normal privacy is special it's something we strive for we struggle for and this the Dark Forest internet rewilded with cryptography you know is how we mobilize to change things we are not criminals we are Forest Rebels and um this split is happening and cryptography is magic crypto regulation is an open and official provocation against Liberty and sovereignity all who advocate for it are domestic enemies of the people and must be absolutely opposed the right of the people to keep and deploy cryptography shall not be infringed thank you so much Amir that was a fantastic presentation Amir there are a billion questions for you on the mircat app so just come approach me I'm very approachable afterwards you know I'm around up next um we have Ash uh who is with too