Empowering Builders to Make Better Privacy Solutions - Catsnacks and Serinko | Web3Privacy Now

[Music] and now we continue with the debate um let's call it the debate Sereno come on stage Sereno is a de in n and ala is head of coms in privacy and scaling Explorations give give them a small Applause and I will bring chairs uh you can intro yourself and I will bring chairs all right good afternoon comrades hello it's been warm here I see it's it's a tradition of web three privacy now events but we love that I'm Sereno I'm de L um well this is going to save me some time I got presentation later on name so I'm not going to talk about name right here right now too much I've been anonymity Enthusiast by Nature privacy researcher before uh supporting project as external like dark fi uh a little bit lunard with some guides and I've been working in him as a deil please um I'm Alia sorry um my background I suppose is in art and writing um and I've been in the crypto space for about six years now I work with the privacy and scaling Explorations team at ethereum Foundation I'm a coordinator across design Communications and EOD teams yeah cool um and this uh talk we would dedicate with generally speaking how to help Builders create a better Solutions and how to help them to kind of like solve more complex and more actual issues and I will start with super uh like the first question will be super fun and act that you asked me before how you define who is the Builder all right I guess I'll start because it was my question um so I I think that we we often talk about Builders kind of too narrowly we use it to mean developer which is obviously one very important role in in Building Technology but um there are also designers there are communicators there are Community Builders there are the people who kind of build the the social infrastructure around all of these things and kind of build the bridges to the people that we hope will use them and also kind of bring that information back to the people who are writing the code about what what stuff is getting used for what the needs are what the challenges are and kind of like uh all of these people translating for each other translating from Human to machine and back again I think all of those roles are are building roles yeah I think it's been said to me Builder is anyone who contributes um to the structures which um expanding the space within which um Freedom can can nourish that can go from deaths all the way to you know people in community very importantly so and not to just give like the GitHub contribution marks uh which can be empty comets but look what's actually the result and what's the aim of what people doing and then the question would be like okay uh at what certain moment you understand that person or or a group of people doesn't contribute meaningfully and in that sense how you would Define how the organizations foundations uh projects protocols should measure valuable contribution versus not that valuable and what what is this borderline between when the builders are really delivering a really scaling a really empowering versus uh it's just a noise around and it's not really meaningful for the goal vision and the story behind the project maybe sinko you can uh mention your lunar down on this experiences like because you participated in decentralized organizations and they are much more trickier in terms of measuring the contributions well yes I participated externally as a part of a community um helping with some guides on I think some of the solutions existing Solutions which um you know they aggregate in a Wiki um so people can find them easily in one place but also kind of one-on-one how to use them and what's the references to them this been actually interesting discussion because that goes through some you know Community discussion how to choose those um projects another part of the lunard Dow which uh I'm not part of is you know to be investing in the project which are not existing just yet in their developer teams let's not talk about that um that part is fully Unown by the way but maybe to your question I think I think how organization decides within its own structure they might have some okrs what have you um you know some incentives and they need to make themselves exist in the end sell themselves one way or the other make themselves useful but whether an entire organization or project is contributing being useful in building um something which expands the space of Freedom or what we you know autonomy or parallel structures I think the only the reality and later on History will judge whether whether that's actually the case or not and I think for that we need to put questions what we actually doing and how start within ourselves among ourselves and the culture we have how much we using the things which we building whether that's again building as deaths or building as Community managers building as marketing what have you but do we actually use and do we find useful other people we go to all these many conferences all these Primitives protocols as Solutions are they actually solutions to the problems we facing or not and I think that's a question that's an angle to look on things to help us to judge ourselves from presence and the reality in which we at and not let kind of like the the tyranny in future decide that in history it was useless doesn't make sense yeah pretty much what do you think there on maybe also an angle of privacy and scaling Explorations how you define if the things you were doing or your team members are worth trying and how you select the cost because generally speaking you're also doing lots of R&D and in R&D you can do R&D for years or like decades hundreds like just try keep on trying how you how you would recommend Builders to define the meaningful Way Forward yeah PSC is is kind of an odd case because we're uh we generally work in a very kind of experimental mindset and and so there's like um like failure isn't even necessarily a problem when you're doing an experiment if it doesn't turn out how you thought it would then you've just learned something right we're not trying to like necessarily build a product that will have a billion users if that happened that would be cool but that's not necessarily uh like our like first or primary goal um but I think that there's still there are kind of experiments that are worth kind of carrying forward and ones that kind of go nowhere um but it is it's difficult to put numbers on things or I I think a lot of the like metrics that you could point to don't end up actually being that useful like likes on Twitter or GitHub stars or like things that are kind of like accountable often um are like more of a distraction you end up kind of like playing for likes instead of trying to actually build a thing that is like as novel or as useful or whatever as it could be um so I mean to me some of the things that like get me really excited about a project or like feel like something is going somewhere is like it's not necessarily how many people use it but like how much of an impact does it have on the people that use it does it do something that nothing else could does it like fill a need that nothing else had um is it do people take what you've built and then build on it do they like take it to places that you didn't expect do they experiment with it in ways that like you didn't predict um and like do they kind of like take ownership do they take it and run with it and does it have longevity or is it it just kind of like something that people go oh cool and then use it once and never think about it again um and those those things are all kind of difficult to quantify um then let's talk about a bit uh Financial sources for the builders because lots of the independent Builders they're in this situation they need to go for bounties grants um hakon and stuff to kind of like uh pave their own wave and I've seen that within lots of the Privacy hakon lot solutions they just die after the haon so there like no no post haon development of the projects and there's one the different take which uh project was made last EDH burn noise a bloom wallet that was generally speaking is the same uh solution to rpcs and stuff but through tour uh like wallet with store integration and you have anonymity uh or anonymity and they continue to develop and maintain the project project for one more year it's still under develop development there's no VCS and stuff but how you would uh recommend Builders to where to put uh the right efforts to sustain the idea in more like at least let's say mid-run not long-term run but maybe midterm how they should approach this kind of like tricky thing of where to find money and how to sustain the project and move forward I mean this is just kind of a problem of Open Source generally right like where does the money come from if everything is free um and I think grants and bounties can be really great sources for something to get started but it isn't really a sustainable model and I don't know that I actually have an answer here I think and and I'm like the team that I'm on I kind of have the luxury of not having to think about it all of that much and like we do give out a lot of Grants but they're kind of Grants to try something out not not to like start a business and come up with a revenue model and try to do something that will will last for years and I I think it just it is actually very challenging to think about how to make something that is like private open source free and somehow also brings in money so I think it's kind of a challenge for it like for individual developers but also for like this space as a whole to figure out how to support the things that we think are important Singo well how a lot of world spins is that you work on something for a long time you prove that you can do that in a smaller scale and then based on that you go to people who might want to support you in doing that in bigger scale right um to give you some ramp how to Tech in particular crypto works is um you think about something you write it on a paper before you start to do anything you go with that paper to all different people and you hope that they going to believe that paper that you're going to turn that paper into code or into um anything which You're Building um I mean there is a certain Advantage because that means that you can actually create you know like put a thought um in s white paper what have you and get support like that on the other hand obviously there is a massive competitions because this is an many people figure out that this is a low threshold entry so there's lot of charlatans lot of snake oil and honestly sometimes I'm surprised what pardon me for excuse me for my French but what kind of is getting what type of figures of money in crypto industry and what honest projects are not getting supported but we cannot just sit here and like cry about it right like we got to think okay projects need to figure out their incentives models um and preferably present them in early stage as well because crypto do allow that permissionless LE um you don't have to you know go after Banks and something but of course there is this big VC game and chasing investors but you can replace that by by a dow for example if you know if you create um community and primitive working enough that's not going to be just like a donation based like donate through the Dow anonymously to something it's going to be good but you figure out your incentive model as a part of The Proposal then you kind of like make a dow or any sort of um formation like that being part of taking the risk and taking a possible benefit of that think you're working on and I think that that can quite change a game in a position of like you go to a VC or few VCS which um Can massively help but can also harm a project because one day especially if you're building privacy things um jurisdictions in with in which you started or made your um legal contracts and stuff will change the laws and the VCS will come to you and be like you're kind of going to like you know creep your mission a little bit and once you start a little bit um usually that means the game's over and then you come to the thing we talked about before you're going to actually build something it's going to be completely useless it's going to be some another balloon of if you lucky money but not no solution for actually any use case and then we are in this situation when protocols sometimes or projects or foundations think that Builders would come and propose wonderful ideas and then many hakam we see that is a random certain randomizer and uh not many Builders could imagine The Right Use case that sinka said will solve a specific need that is actual now instead of visual thinking in the future that maybe it's not applicable even now or we'll have lots of external boundaries like what uh recommendations you would give to builders to where to find the right use cases how to dig into right use cases where they should come from you should listen to people and you should listen to designers and Community Builders and communicators and the people who live in the places where you think that your tools are going to be used like I feel like crypto is so kind of enamored with I don't know what I call the Field of Dreams approach like I'll just build it and it's so cool that someone will surely understand and come and use it and then I don't have to explain anything about it or connected to anything that anyone values it's just it's so amazing surely the users will just happen but I think there's a lot of a lot of Disconnect from the like reality of most of the world and like seringa was saying earlier like we don't even use our own stuff we don't even like interrogate ourselves about what our needs are and how they would be addressed or or how like these kinds of tools would actually make things better for even ourselves let alone like people that we haven't met yet yeah sometimes sometimes it reminds me like um kind of bad salesman marketing who doesn't believe uh his her own project uh we talk about things on stage on conferences then the time's over and we go back to our lives and you know it's like you selling some like think you don't like so much and then your life is kind of like now I'm off that right I'm not no longer selling Donuts or what have you um and I think we can reflect on how this is happening within our own community and our own our own culture sorry it was a really good talk with um Richard stalman help the talk on hcpp just a few days ago and behind him was like a QR code with u Q&A you know scan it send a questions and then moderator brings the questions and Richard is like hold on hold on there is a QR code how between the QR code and the questions being cre here they got to me right um and he's a pro like massive programmer like a legend but he's like I would even prefer a written paper or people just raising hands even though I don't hear so much the organizer say is well they were sent through you know through the application which is behind a curac he's like was that application a free software oh was that application free software well Richard it wasn't okay delete all those questions who's got a questions here this is Hardcore right but on the other hand like if we look at it and we are like why do we not use the solutions we we building is it because they aren't solving any problems but at the same time like when we go to conferences like this we hear about those problems all the time mol has been talking about it quite a bit that we talk about it like if there is like a super scary only dystopian world and create fear seems like there is enough problems and we are aware of them so then how do we connect that and how do we create culture within which we not talking about something and next minute we just like browsing everything through Google Docs and you know sh applications which I run but who knows who so I think even address that and start to actually do Tech which is actually useful but also put effort in education because there's something especially the newer Generations the younger deaths and stuff there's been race through schooling where everything is running on this proprietary software so I like dark F approaching that that they might sound hardcore and they go everything through command line and stuff but they put a lot in education and a reasoning why to start doing our own stuff from like very basis of things and there needs to be a cultural and paradigm shift in understanding that it's not going to be easy but those of us who sit in this room can become like leaders on understanding and explaining them to the others and I think that's our role first of all uh we talked before with Alan from real Gan about um that I pointed that because of vitalik's paper many people will go to ethereum and like oh vitalic is into privacy now we're investigate to privacy now we are doing privacy things so there will be this kind of like U the vitalic for followers who knows that or uses his bets like signals on what will be the next big thing so lots of the kind of like a random people would come to the market and where you would recommend in which directions to apply their whatever resources uh Dev hours like which type of Technology maybe you would love to be better within the years which type of challenges they should solve imagine someone who never been exposed to the space and suddenly is here and look around and try to choose Direction which direction you would recommend for these people to go that's that's just a very broad question I think it depends on what what you care about um what you're excited about um and yeah are we talking about Investors are we talking about developers are we just talking about okay we can start with developers and then move to M but start with developers I'm I'm probably not going to answer the investor question I don't know take your money somewhere else I mean I think for developers there's like there's so many different like very exciting things going on that I think you can just kind of look around and think like what matters to you and who is working on that in a meaningful way um um like there are some things that I could say I think are pretty exciting right now like um one kind of general just like concept that I'm I'm pretty interested in in seeing developed right now is um sort of using the cryptography that is already everywhere to to like take these not so private applications and and turn them into things work in different ways like take people from familiar places into something a little bit more unfamiliar um for example your email your Gmail account your Hotmail I don't know whatever people still use that um there are like cryptographic signatures and cryptographic Primitives built into these things or like the um Adar uh identity system in India so like using those Primitives in ways that they were not intended using your like the signature that's attached to your email to prove ownership of things or to send transactions this is a real thing it's called ZK email it's actually really cool um or like or taking the um like the massive anonymity set that is presented by like the pretty creepy Adar system and using that to sort of like subvert that surveillance mechanism into something that is actually like privacy preserving and Anonymous and has a a certain kind of trust built in um that kind of stuff is really interesting to me like taking things that feel familiar already and using them in ways that they were maybe not intended hecking yeah um yeah I would basically just be repeating what you said what I said myself before I hope not all your mathematician fellas will now walk away the room um but I think the algebraic solution is not necessarily working right like take I I make a solution and I have to start with thinking like oh what kind of problem I have to create in order that solution to be working we got enough problems um we got enough Solutions which aren't working and we got actually quite some solutions which do work so I don't want to also spit on things I really like jerem's talk before here how W him and another folks and D or prey and AI we're creating on technical level but how it plugged into like social questions whether it's locally or whether it's internationally I think we can figure out also lot of those problems one of the things which I think crypto par is doing is by any means trying to respond to social problems with a technological solution and sometimes there's like a Twist so to also like realize where we actually standing on when we talk about potic TS and culture and when we actually talk about tech and not necessarily trying to solve one with the other um I recently seen uh Jared Hope from logos that they're building politically neutral uh stack and the question is like should Builders be political should what be political should Builders be political to do the right tools I mean this is a just an inherently political thing right I don't think that privacy is political I don't think there's any getting away from that and I think if you're talking about politically neutral infrastructure you're not necessarily like the act of building politically neutral infrastructure is quite political I think the infrastructure itself might be sort of neutral to politics but creating neutral spaces creating private spaces like protecting people or or kind of giving people the the tools to opt out of things um to like keep things to themselves to lead independent autonomous lives these are political acts I don't think that there's any escaping that that's not something we decided that's just sort of the way that the world is yeah I think political neutrality doesn't exist um and that's not it's one way or the other but there is always what kind of people which kind of places you choose to talk to will also Define who's going to benefit from the tech you can do very similar things you believe in some sort of tech Solutions whether it's coding hardware and stuff and if you would look from the outside two people might be doing same things except that one of them is going to end up to be used for a new king the entire town while one of them is going to end up to be in prison because they use they actually made a use case like a people from tornado cash you know so yeah if you look at them in a vacuum it looks like an apolitical neutal or something but it's never like that who's financing that who's going to be profiting from that and what what is actually they got quite some philosophy behind that whether I like it or not but there is some it's called the network states which is not invented by the those people but it's repres it's presented by them it's actually surprising I didn't hear about the political neutrality would like to talk with them about that then then uh let's wrap up with your recommendations since it's IDE iCal things we are doing here uh what people slash their book talks you would you would recommend uh for developers or Builders or designers who came to e Rome to follow read dive in to to kind of uh become more I guess ethical uh builder in that human rights sense or humanistic sense um I could say a couple that have influenced me a lot um one is it's I guess an essay called the future will be technical you can find it at Cool guy. website it's kind of an old piece it's really about secure scuttlebutt but it actually really has shaped the way that I think about um like people's relationship to technology and how it can make us more or less human depending on kind of how we approach it um I feel like the sovereign individual is it's almost a cliche to say it but it is worth reading and I think in the in the context of the kinds of things that we're building it it feels pretty important um and I also recently read one called Data in Goliath that I thought was pretty pretty informative about just kind of the um like the the structures of the the surveillance economy or like the the surveillance State um and how it affects like the ways that technology is Built For Better or Worse I haven't read now for a while I must admit except technical documentations it's is a bit boring but I think on the technical side I think like you know how Linux works and any coding stuff like can be very useful use ful um but there is so much of that and people like focus on so much of different things there's some stuff I'm not going to be saying for not doxing you know um what I always like come to back to when I did actually this uh the spring is um I don't know if you've read but it's actually quite nice The Art of Loving um by Eric from and the Art of Warfare by sunu uh these two coming together I think it's actually always is kind of like Roots you down because both is it sounds kind of like recipes but in fact it's rather like a philosophical and like how you understand life and you can like apply it on like so many things but for the rest I would reserve for this talk probably yeah uh thanks a lot uh thanks L for coming and uh I think the people could make questions to you there in the room and uh afterwards thank you very much thank you [Applause] [Music]