"Stop Worshipping Tokens - Build Better DAOs",- Auryn Macmillan, Founder of Gnosis Guild

Hey folks, I'm Orin the founder of Nosk Guild. I don't I've had a long colorful journey in web 3, but I guess I'm just really captivated by the idea of uh of Dows organizations encoded as uh program organizational logic encoded as programs. Um and and then just a huge privacy uh and kind of personal autonomy advocate. [Music] Okay. So, Orin, hi, welcome to the interview.

Thank you for being here. So, for the record, we are in Berlin uh and the web3 privacy now hackathon. Uh you are mentoring here, right?

Mhm.

And yeah, and we have this like web three privacy academy discussion and just sharing your experience and stuff. So uh we'll start with you just u sharing your like life story a bit like few minutes just for the people to understand the context like how did you end up where are you now like when was your like life journey like briefly.

Yeah. Well this is this is always a fun fun discussion I think pretty pretty atypical uh I don't know journey into web 3.

Yeah. Um I just you know we'll see how far I want to go back but uh so I in a former life uh played basketball professionally. Uh so I I uh yeah was was out in Australia playing in our national league and uh kind of fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole uh after after seeing a a news broadcast about the dark web, about the deep web. Uh, and so I guess like the the other bit of backstory there is that I've always been a kind of closet hacker, closet nerd. I've been pulling apart uh and putting back together sometimes successfully uh computers since I was maybe 10 or 11.

Oh wow.

Um,

so you were like into hardware and

Yeah, I was I mean as a kid like that's what you can touch. That's what you can tangibly feel.

It's like Lego, you know.

Yeah, exactly. So I always enjoyed that. My my dad was he's a uh a sound engineer. He works he runs a recording studio and so he's been like my whole life I've had access to a big uh electronic studio where he would build all of his own hardware like valve amplifiers and all this kind of stuff built mixing desks and so I guess you know had a had a somewhat unique exposure there to to electronics early on to computers early on. Um, and so and to this like hack on mindset early on in terms of just being willing and learning how to pull things apart, put them back together.

And so yeah, I've always been curious uh and I um obviously started playing sports and and so that became the the kind of main focus of mine. But as a as a backdrop in my downtime, yeah, always been uh into hardware into into software. um have been a an avid Linux user for for decades now and uh have been a hobbyist programmer for uh or had been a hobbyist programmer for decades kind of while I was uh while I was playing basketball while I was in college. My my academic background is in psychology uh and game theory and research methods. Um, but yeah, anyway, so to to bring it all back to to where we're at.

So, uh, I saw this new news broadcast on uh the deep web, the dark web. I was like, "Oh, that's that's interesting. I'll poke around." So, I downloaded the tour browser, started looking around, and inevitably made my way to some marketplaces. Um, and everything was denominated in Bitcoin.

And so, the the kind of curiosity peaked from there. Uh, the what is a bitcoin? uh what does it mean when something says it's 10 bitcoin? What does that mean in Australian dollars? Uh and so yeah, I kind of started the rabbit hole there.

Quickly found my way to some of the uh early relatively early Bitcoin forums. And what really piqued my interest was uh some of Vitalic's early posts about the idea of Ethereum and in particular the idea of uh Dows of or DAX at the time. I think people were calling them decentralized autonomous corporations. um and and the idea of being able to program or encode organizational logic as a program as something that would execute in this uh kind of autonomous uh environment uh as opposed to or in addition to legal encoding. Uh and so that that kind of just captivated me and I've been obsessed with with Ethereum and with the blockchain and what 3 ecosystem ever since.

Uh I got heavily involved in the the DAO uh in 2016. Um and obviously that had this kind of meteoric rise was super exciting and then catastrophic fall and fallout resulting in the the the hard fork of Ethereum and all that good stuff. But from there made a lot of friends along the way and and have kind of worked in a variety of different uh roles in different organizations. everything from growth to product management to uh to solidity engineering and uh architecture and yeah everything in between.

Wow. Wow. That's pretty pretty impressive list of roles like you had inside especially like being with a tech background and going to product markets and how was for you this shift and why did you made this like and was it organic for you?

Well, so actually I think so my academic background is in psychology. I'd always been like a hobbyist programmer. I'd never done anything making professional. I'd never written any programs that

were used in in any kind of production scenario. Uh and so I think I never really thought of myself as an engineer. And so my natural kind of entry point into uh non basketball things like once I transitioned out of playing basketball professionally into other professional work uh my my kind of natural inclination was to go into nontechnical roles. Uh and I so started out with kind of community building roles uh kind of marketing focused roles, BD focused roles and uh I would get this constant frustration at being the person that's interacting with customers or users or the community and not being able to tangibly affect change on the thing that we're building. Right?

I would get endlessly frustrated as saying, "Hey, this user, you know, has this problem or this request or whatever and it going for months and there just be no response to it."

Um, and so then my my kind of next my my solution to that was to move into product focused roles. So product management type roles and there I had tangibly more control over what was uh being able to close that feedback loop but would still get frustrated at not being able to directly implement it. And so then move to to just uh writing code. Um and and I think the the combination of obviously having the the the uh hobbyist background in engineering uh along with reviewing and uh and I guess like at a at a high level auditing a bunch of the uh the the code that teams that I had worked with uh or or projects that I was interacting with uh had had produced. It turned out I had I don't know absorbed some of that information by osmosis over you know the course of of several years until like the first time I tried to write a a smart contract it actually turned out all right like it did what it was supposed to do.

Um and so yeah I mean I think maybe the the context there is like what I'm what I'm I guess all right at is just learning on demand like learning whatever skills I need to to be able to be functional in any given role. And so yeah, was able to step into to kind of more engineering focused roles. Uh and now I guess I've had a good bit of experience across many different uh uh many different uh roles within a whole bunch of different organizations. And so and yeah, I'm able to to translate reasonably well between them. Um and then yeah I guess like where where that's all led me I um after the DAO worked with a handful of different organizations most notably worked with Nosis uh led the conditional tokens framework team for for a while the conditional tokens are the uh underlying technology for the uh various prediction markets that Nosis uh was was working on also the underlying technology for uh poly market c and a handful of other prediction markets that still alive today.

Um and then uh when we at Nosis decided to uh wind down support for the conditional tokens framework, I shifted gears internally and founded Nosis Guild inside of Nosis uh to focus on designing and implementing the infrastructure for the Nosis DA. Uh and so then that team for the next couple of years did needs driven development for the Nosis DA. uh which resulted in zodiac uh as a standard for modular onchain entities. Uh and we decided to spin Nosis Guild out from Nosis in 2023 to start operating a bit more autonomously with a with kind of more ecosystem partners and then also as a kind of uh a venture studio type thing. So Enclave is our most recent venture which is a protocol for encrypted execution environments.

We're using uh the combination of zero knowledge proofs, fully homorphic encryption and multi-arty computation to create this really interesting alternative to uh trusted execution environments where you get these hardware guarantees where building kind of similar affordances for uh mostly for kind of aggregation based use cases um but using cryptographic guarantees and game theory rather than hardware based tactics. Mhm.

Yeah. I guess that's a somewhat long-winded way of getting to what I'm currently working on from where I was, but uh yeah, gives you a good background.

It's pretty messed but very beautiful story, right? How you ended up there. So, I have a few questions like regarding that uh bit uh because I'm really curious. So you've said that you've been like a professional basketball player and uh how do you think this shaped you and your mindset in like also like achieving things that you achieved or being in where you are like uh what do you feel was this like impact of having this sport mindset and what it is actually especially

yeah I mean I think the the biggest things that you take away from uh or at least I've taken away from playing sports at a high hole is is work ethic, right? Like just being willing and able to to really exhaust yourself, really push your limits both physically and mentally over extended periods of time uh in order to improve or kind of achieve an outcome. Um also there's a tremendous amount of uh interpersonal skill that's necessary to to compete and achieve at a high level in team based sports. So kind of understanding team dynamics, understanding how to interact with people uh in high pressure scenarios and in intense scenarios when when blood is pumping and testosterone is pumping and and you know like uh it's it's yeah it's those um being able to perform in those kind of environments and and uh keep a keep a level head and and uh yeah ultimately produce outcomes that you that you're wanting is is a critical skill set and then I think it translates well to to other fields. Um, yeah, I know that's

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

100%. I mean, I feel a lot here because like my grandfather, he's like a professional sport guy. He has like PhD and he's a professor and he's teaching teachers like who like train teaching trainers.

Oh, right. How to train. And I feel this influence a lot. Even though I I was not doing sports professionally, but I really feel this influence of my grandfather kind of like pushing me all the time like do go go go go go like go to the limit do more be the first and

that was kind of always there. So and I feel that is something really important like that shaped shaped me.

Yeah. And maybe like I said from the the kind of coaching side of things and and the theory side of things. I think another thing is uh the kind of get out of sports is um an understanding of process uh that an understanding of of failure being part of a process towards success, right? And that's that's made very explicitly obvious when you're when you're playing sports, when you're training, when you're when you're trying to improve at sports, you know, like you you cannot enter a sport and immediately be the best person in the game, right? You you it takes a long time, a lot of practice, a lot of failures, a lot of setbacks.

And so like having that that understanding and mentality baked in uh from years of sports then uh transfers really well into other disciplines, right? you can you can dive in and understand that hey you are going to you are going to kind of suck at it to start with. Uh but by by developing a process and and kind of seeing it through you can you can upskill into anything.

Yeah 100%. Oh maybe uh maybe you can give some sort of advice for people who want to start coding but never go there. they probably don't even start just because you know when you have the like more humanitarian side maybe education or background and you work in I don't know marketing products whatever roles and you don't go like hands-on on coding uh because I I feel sometimes that some people have this sort of barrier like I'm non-technical person I like that's not for me so what did you have this sort of like glass ceiling or like barrier inside of you and maybe some tools or resources that you could recommend just to easy try coding.

Yeah. So I think I did have a little bit of this like I said when I came out of basketball I I my natural inclination was to move into non techch or because I think I had that perception of myself that I not

you know I hadn't done any kind of real coding and and you know and not produced anything that anyone had used in production and so surely I couldn't go into an engineering kind of focus role or you know like I it just was beyond me to to do that in any kind of professional capacity. um my I don't know I took the long route for that I guess where it was you know it was just through building frustration over many years that eventually I was like I'm going to write this thing I'm not relying on anyone else to do it I'm going to get it done um I think the more practical route to that is just to like regardless of your role whether you're you're in a technical or a nontechnical role regardless of whether you think you might want to be in a technical role understanding being able to to uh to to being able to understand uh programming languages, being able to understand code is hugely valuable regardless of what industry you're in, regardless of what uh uh what kind of role you're in. Uh just because I mean it's like being able to understand another another if you speak English and German then you have a whole additional world like I I only speak English unfortunately. I have and I think the same is true for programming languages, right? If you can even develop a rudimentary understanding of of a programming language or as a programming kind of at a high level, then you open up access to a whole another world.

U one resource that I found really really uh valuable and I didn't read until much later, but I think would have been uh a really nice thing to read earlier on is this uh book. I forget the author's name. The title of the book is Algorithms to Live By.

Mhm. uh and it's essentially taking a bunch of uh computer science concepts and then applying them to everyday life. So things like uh sorting algorithms um or kind of memory management algorithms and applying them to to everyday life. So like a really interesting practical example of this from the book the the author is talking about um memory management uh and in particular the there's um a concept of uh first in first out or first in last out um or sorry last in first out. Yeah, last in first out.

Um, and uh, essentially the author makes the argument that uh, the the kind of classic uh, trope of like a a professor's desk just being a like absolute scrambled mess of papers, you know, uh, that at face value this looks like a horribly unorganized way to to uh, manage your your memory, manage your your your desk space,

but in practice it actually turns out to be very efficient, right? because it's it's like a physical implementation of this last in first out algorithm, right? You have a paper that you're reading. You put it down on the desk and more than likely the next paper that you're going to need to pick up. The next paper that you're going to need to read is the most recent one that you put down.

So, this last in first out. So, this chaos of uh of a of a desk just piled with papers actually turns out to be a really efficient way of uh managing memory, managing space. Mhm.

Um, which is is counterintuitive. Uh, but it's interesting to look at your interactions with the real world from the point of view of of computer science or from the point of view of uh of the the decades of research that have gone into uh efficiently uh optimizing algorithms in the context of computer science and how those actually can map quite quite well to the real world.

Yeah, thanks for sharing. I think it's very useful for people who like start to go into coding like to understand this experience and also actually have this example of you uh like showing that it's really possible and you can do this like leap and me kind of cool.

So yeah and yeah but I wanted to jump a bit uh more to your like professional side. Um so thanks a lot for sharing your stories and your the insights of your career. That's I think that's super super useful for people especially if they just in the beginning of their journey right to like know how it could be and then you can do this that and and somewhere else

and that's not always obvious because we tend to do this layer like life tunnel vision right

yeah yeah yeah

I think never happens so it's really nice to know that it's normal to be messy you know sometimes you have

a really interesting uh visualiz ization that I've seen a few times where it talks about it's like you have this uh branching pathway that's led you to where you are and it looks very reductionist right when you when you look at all of the possibilities you could have taken uh and you ended up on this one particular branch but then when you expand that out in the other direction going forward you realize okay I've actually got the same kind of complexity the same uh branching possibilities out out kind of into the future um and I think we we have a tendency to have tunnel vision there, but in reality have this this incredible uh diversity of potential things that we could do and it's it's just a matter of being willing to explore them.

Yeah. Yeah. Everything is possible. That's I mean also nice to remember that everything is possible and you can be anything and everything. So, uh yeah.

But let's jump a bit to glass guild. Can you please like briefly for people who don't know just briefly like explain what's that? Uh and maybe also like one quick take on DAO, how you see this as it like an entity and um also it would be cool if you could share some like interesting use cases of DAO nowadays like really successful and really cool ones because like when it did just emerged everyone was so hyped like yeah yeah D so cool so cool but now I mean at least in myformational bubble I don't see a lot of really really cool examples. I'm not into this bubble once again, but still I don't see really loud cases of like something cool happening with DA, but I really think that's a cool tool like and cool entity and it should be used more. So I I'm sure you have, you know, more like cool use cases of that.

Yeah. Uh so I guess to to give context on Nosis skel again, we we originally spun up inside of Nosis to design and implement uh the infrastructure for the Nosis DA.

Um that led us to a handful of insights on on best practices for designing uh and building onchain entities, Dows and vidual accounts. Really just like a standard for modular onchain accounts. Modular onchain. The idea being that you have a core account that we call an avatar and that you should be able to plug in any kind of arbitrary logic you want to control that account. Uh and critically uh in most cases you will not make all of the right decisions immediately upfront.

You know it's it's really hard to account for the next year's worth of of needs on the day that you deploy your account. it's even harder to account for the next two years, the next 5 years or the next 10 years or the next hundred years, you know, and so like long lived entities, long lived organizations will almost certainly have to grow and evolve and change over time. And so we we started talking about this idea of progressive decentralization and really um really advocating for building organizations that have the the capacity from day one to grow and evolve, right? to change how they operate, to change what mechanisms control them, to change the set of people that that have influence over it. Really, like for the organization to be a fluid and dynamic thing as opposed to a a static kind of immutable thing that that uh yeah has has relatively little uh capacity to to grow or has a huge amount of friction anytime that it does want to make a change.

Um so low friction progressive decentralization was was a big part of the the motivation for Zodiac the standard that we built on top of uh the safe. Um and building on top of the safe was really just this kind of pragmatic choice. It's the most widely used uh smart contract account. Uh it was by by orders of magnitude the most used at the time. There's now a handful of different competing standards but the safe still has has many many more users and much more value secured.

So it still is the kind of pragmatic choice for this. Um and then in in terms of uh yeah how how Nosis Gilbert's uh evolved since then we we spun out from Nosis um just to allow us to act a little bit more autonomously to be to continue being kind of experimental and weird and and uh then also to start you spinning up some other other ventures outside of just the the kind of access control tooling that we've been building. Um and so again, Enclave is this protocol that we've spun up and it's the idea behind that is essentially we're wanting to uh enable collaborative confidential compute. The backstory for Enclave is that we were originally trying to solve for uh secret ballots, right? There's this good reason that every every worthwhile democracy in the world uses a secret ballot.

Uh that's because uh the open ballots enable corruption, collusion, coercion, bribery uh which ultimately then create bad outcomes. Uh they they they distort the outcome of voting system. And so secret ballots are the kind of solution to this. The current state-of-the-art for secret ballots is taking a vote, writing on a piece of paper, dropping it in a box with everyone else's boxes, no with everyone else's votes, and shaking the box, right? Like that's state-of-the-art secret ballots.

Um, and the reason that uh the kind of digital voting hasn't hasn't supplanted that, hasn't uh um I guess become more broadly adopted is it turns out to be really really hard to build secret ballots in a in a in a digital voting system that don't leave a footprint, that don't leave a receipt that then someone looking to bribe, coerc, collude with, and and ultimately corrupt the voting system can used to enable that corruption. Um, and so this was the problem we wanted to solve for. We were heavily inspired by Macy, the minimal anti-ollusion infrastructure, which is voting uh built as a as a ZK circuit. The challenge with it though is that if you're using purely ZK, you uh in order to produce a proof about something, you have to know the the data that you're proving, right? And so in in the case of Macy, you have a trusted actor, the coordinator, uh who must decrypt all of the votes.

And so you rely on this this person, this party to be perfectly trustworthy. And if they are corrupted, then the their system loses its uh privacy guarantees. And so we wanted to figure out how do we distribute trust in that coordinator. uh arrived at this architecture using a combination of zero knowledge truths fully homorphic encryption and uh multi-party computation to enable that. So ZKPs for verifiability.

Uh MPC to distribute trust across multiple coordinators, multiple uh uh actors, multiple party members. Uh and then fully homorphic encryption so that we can encrypt inputs uh do the aggregation kind of tally the votes produce a cipher text output that can then be decrypted by the threshold of MPC parties uh and without ever having to decrypt any of the input or the uh the intermediate states. and then obviously ZKPs to make that whole process verifiable. Um, and I think the real light bulb moment with Enclave was realizing that voting is just one of a whole class of applications that benefit from this type of execution environment, right? That ability to take multiple inputs from many mutually distrusting parties, produce an aggregation uh and uh have that that aggregation that output be verifiable.

Uh

yeah. So this is this is kind of how we arrived at uh at Enclave and I've forgotten the last part of your your question because I got sidetracked.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I was asking about the uh real use cases that inspire and that is like really really working well because I don't hear much of them recently unfortunately. So I wanted to ask you.

Yeah. Yeah. No. So I I mean at a high level maybe I' I'd um I would say there's there's kind of two broad classes of Dows right one is is protocol style Dows that have a very narrow scope on what their what their members participants constituents citizens whatever it is uh can can do and like what the variables that they have control over are then these kind of broader more ser like DS you know they're essentially something analogist to traditional firms, traditional organizations that can have a very broad mandate. Uh they they don't have, you know, that that same strict set of parameters they have control over.

Um the former have been much more successful than the latter. So I'd say the former the best examples are blockchains themselves, right? Blockchains are Dows. you have uh a a a system that's being controlled by a a broad set of uh of participants. They have rules in how they they uh can engage with the system.

They have a consensus mechanism um that that defines uh uh how they reach consensus on what the what the current state of the chain is and then they have uh yeah a protocol that they must follow uh in order to to publish new information, publish new blocks. Um and so I think yeah, Bitcoin, Ethereum, uh some of the other blockchains are good examples of uh of Dow. Um but I think that's the question is probably more about that second class you know these these are more firm like Dows and I think the some good examples of uh these firmlike Dows that have been uh quite successful uh I think the Ave D is is is great is really highly functioning uh the Leo Dow seems to be progressing in that way quite well I think early on there was there was some uh questions around it but it seemed like it's it's it evolved really nicely Um, I think that the notice is is working its way towards being pretty functional. Um, uh, nouns is a really interesting case. I think it's I love the noun mechanism.

This idea of a a kind of slow start. Uh, you know, you you auction off essentially citizenship in the DAO once daily. Uh, and so it forces a slow start. Uh, but then it also creates this kind of slow attack vector. you know, if you're wanting to uh to to economically attack the DAO, then you either have to go and purchase uh all of the the citizenship tokens, the the announce tokens uh on an open market, which most of them are not listed uh or you have to sit there and win the auction for for uh you know, a year in a row or something like this.

So, it's it's an interesting mechanism from that point of view. Um, obviously Nouns has had some challenges as well, but uh, yeah, it's been a pretty interesting uh, ecosystem to watch and I think has been for the most part quite quite highly functioning and quite successful as a DA. Um, so yeah, I think there are some good examples. Uh, there are also a lot of really terrible examples or D things but and this is this is true of organizations as well as you think about startups. the the common uh trope there is that you know 90% or more of startups fail.

I think the same there's no reason that the same shouldn't be true for doubts, right? Most will be terrible, most will fail, but some will be fantastic. Um, in terms of tools like interesting tooling that's uh uh that exists or is uh maybe some of the newer more novel tooling that I've seen um I'm I'm a huge fan of hats protocol. This is a um a a protocol for essentially defining roles and and creating really uh dynamic uh role assignments uh within organizations and uh critically is is useful for creating kind of hierarchical structure within Dow. And I think this is one of the um Dow is a kind of a counterculture to or at least are largely seen.

I think a lot of the people that are interested in DA see it as a counterculture to traditional organizations and particularly to traditional hierarchical structures, right? Uh and the unfortunate uh reality of that is that we end up throwing out you know the last few hundred years of of uh of optimization of the firm, right? Like organizations firms are actually quite efficient uh uh organizational structures. Um they do have a tendency obviously to concentrate power uh but that that kind of hierarchical structure is efficient in terms of actually getting stuff done. And so I think that the challenge for Dows is uh to to avoid that uh centralization of power that capture uh so making making capture resistant organizations that don't throw out all of that uh that organizational efficiency that you get from uh from a traditional firm structure.

uh and this is what something like hats does really well is like say we want to have token holders essentially operate uh or or D numbers uh operate at the top level of the organization. Uh they get to define what the the the top level structure looks like and then seed power to uh to the the hierarchy to then decide how to operate uh kind of further on down the tree. Uh and so in this way you should be able to get both uh capture resistance and uh the same kind of efficiency that you get out of a traditional organization. Um and then another another tool that I'm really excited about is Metal X. Um so this is um essentially a suite of tools that uh finding the the kind of intersection between uh encoding organizational logic as programs and encoding it in in kind of legal systems and and yeah packaged in a way that's very consumable and kind of gets the benefit of both.

Uh so yeah two two tools that we're not working on. I think people should check out hats protocol and

okay yeah yeah I'm happy that there are good example and they're working operating and bringing something. So actually I expect in like some distant future it will be kind of a norm of I hope so but um shifting a bit towards like privacy since we are web three privacy we have to talk about it. So uh in your perspective like for many people you know privacy is something like okay I need to hide something but like can you uh expand a bit on the role of privacy in

Dow

uh and then just in general your take on the like state maybe of privacy nowadays.

Yeah. Uh so I mean I think Dows are a pretty narrow focus for it. I I tell you I'm probably interested at a slightly higher level there. Um so privacy I'll talk about how I've been talking about it for enclave but I think it's it's generalizable beyond enclaves. uh in in the case of enclaves we see two two broad buckets of use cases right one is where having strong privacy guarantees it's improves the integrity of the system right and so this is true for the voting use case that we talked about right where if if there's an information asymmetry if if someone's able to uh bribe collude coers uh then they can corrupt the system and produce and distort its outcomes um And there's a a class of use cases that fit the same uh the same kind of value proposition, right?

Where we're where having strong guarantees around privacy improves the the guarantees around integrity of the system. Uh sealed bid auctions are another private voting sealed auctions I think are the two the two really canonical examples there. They're the kind of beach head use cases that we're chasing for for Enclave is building out solutions for that. Um and then there's a a whole another class of use cases where the uh the value proposition is around access to or liability from from data, right? In the case of systems where you're trying to aggregate information.

Uh you traditionally have had to uh either take or give custody of data to to to one entity that then kind of does the aggregation. And so from the point of view of say uh a organization that wants to aggregate wants to wants to generate some information uh some insight from the aggregation of data then it has uh it will have a bunch of challenges in terms of getting access to that data. So take a concrete example, say a medical researcher, right? They have they want to aggregate some data from a handful of different healthcare providers and they have a whole bunch of regulatory hurdles to jump through uh in order to be able to legally take custody of that data. Um, and then once they have custody of it, they now have this huge liability because they likely have a bunch of sensitive data that if they mishandle or misuse ends up having uh the potential to have really negative outcomes for uh the people whose data it u and so I think yeah there there's this tendency for us to think about or for a lot of people to think about privacy as as this um I don't know like reclusive uh reclusive is trait, right?

You know, like I I'm I don't want you to know what I'm doing. And you know, people people immediately kind of uh fall back into thinking about some people immediately fall back into thinking about okay, you know, it's it's privacy is only for people that have something to hide kind of thing. But in reality, I think that privacy is actually this this um really important feature of systems both from an integrity point of view, but also from a an access and and liability point of view, right? You you can improve your access to insights as well as reducing your liability from from data uh by building systems that uh uh designed deliberately to not expose uh not expose sensitive data. U so yeah it's a fundamentally critical property for a bunch of systems to to either exist or to function correctly.

Yeah. So uh one topic we you already tackled a bit but just making a bit more narrow and I want you to introduce your term of like practical duralism that you have to people who don't know about it because I love it and uh also to maybe reflect on it from the opics of like privacy angle like and is it a part of it if yes like then why?

Yeah. Yeah. So this idea of practical pluralism, uh Kevin Awaki and I wrote a a short article about this a couple of years ago and that the core thesis is that uh systems and and organizations and societies tend to produce better outcomes, tend to be stronger, more resilient, more capture resistant when they uh embrace this idea of pluralism across the kind of full stack. And the kind of canonical example in web 3 of of pluralism is client diversity, right? Uh Ethereum somewhat uniquely in the blockchain ecosystem has uh gone to tremendous lengths to encourage uh a a diverse set of uh of clients of execution nodes and consensus nodes uh to exist both to exist and for people to actually use them.

Uh and again it's it's uh been a really difficult task to to incentivize those teams and to to to encourage people to actually run those uh those clients. But the benefit of it is a much more resilient network than than any others in terms of its capacity to uh to handle bugs in any one of those clients. Right? If any one of them has implemented the spec incorrectly for some reason then and and produces a bug that uh that that kind of knocks those clients offline then the network persists the network continues to operate because uh that client is only a small subset of the total pool of client. uh but the same is true I think across the whole stack in web 3 and across a much broader uh range of of of use cases and applications again from everything from protocol level things all the way up to to society level um at the at the sort of application level in web 3 I think it's really interesting and really valuable one of the the underrated value propositions about uh smart contracts is that they are a backend kind of open backend that any application can kind of plug into.

And so it's really really I think important and beneficial to have multiple front-end clients that can interact with any given smart contract or at least any smart contracts of of sufficient size. Right? If you think about say an AMM or AM yeah an AMM sure you've got unis swap for example. Uh, and there's literally hundreds of uh as of unique front ends that you could access that will ultimately route you into the unis swap uh contracts, right? Um, and that means that if for whatever reason the unis swap official application goes down, you still have an alternate route to to interacting with that.

And so it makes in again this layer of resilience um and a layer of kind of capture resistance uh which is yeah it produces better outcomes for for users in general. Um and again I think that that that same lesson is applicable uh across a whole bunch of different uh applications and venues well beyond just web three.

Yeah 100%. And um yeah that was interesting and thanks for like sharing for the people of this concept which is um quite elegant I would say and um I wish it was something more organic and natural and like a default I would say in our world so that we could evolve like and u then there is my next question like imagine we are 30 years from now

and um we on we have the internet that we wish for like private, secure and decentralized whatever you imagine it. So how does it look like and how does life look like in this case like when we're in this tech paradise?

Yeah, interesting. Um there is a I'm a huge sci-fi fan. Read read I mean I always have at least one sci-fi novel on the go sometimes multiple. Um, there was one that I read maybe a year or two ago now called A Halfbuilt Garden. I I can't remember the name of the author.

I'm really bad at names of people for some reason. Um, but uh yeah, it's Abu Built Garden is a really really interesting um uh novel just in general. Uh it's it's a totally different take on the the alien invasion narrative. Um but one uh one part of what I liked about it uh was this the way that kind of human society was organized in this you know near future uh world. Um it was I guess like post collapse of the the current uh uh current set of of governance regimes and whatnot.

uh and part of uh part of human society had organized into this uh collection of what they call watersheds um which were you know just just much more uh locally autonomous um communities that I guess were kind of uh AI enhanced. So they used a a a distributed AI of some description to to kind of mediate all of their interactions and ultimately kind of surface uh the their collective opinion and collective will on decision-m um in a way that was uh very I don't know lived lived kind of holistically and and uh in a in a kind of ecological balance with with their uh with their environment. Um and I don't know, it it seemed it was a lovely picture of uh of the future is one that I would I would love to see manifest.

Okay, we'll see. And um yeah, uh just quick maybe final uh recommendation for someone who is just entering the world of privacy. M uh maybe like I don't know three tools or three habits that you can easily like acquire and go for it and easily like much more private than like before like for like entry level.

Yeah. Uh a VPN.

Yeah,

there's lots of good ones. Um I am a fan of uh ProtonVPN. Um Proton Mail. Basically all of Proton tools are great. Uh so I I would highly recommend people check that out particularly folks are new to to uh dealing with uh privacy.

I want you to kind of privacy conscious. It's a it's a very accessible uh suite of tools. Um you signal uh or or session signal and session a great messaging applications. Um and uh and then I don't know maybe switch to something like Brave browser uh where you can uh yeah have a little bit more granular control about what uh information you you share as you browse. Uh they're probably three yeah relatively low uh low lift tips for just getting a little bit better at uh digital fra.

Yeah. Awesome. And uh final advice of you like for like the students of our academy like can you recommend one one piece of like cultural thing like I don't know film podcast playlist um book whatever that you recently was inspired by and you think it can like enrich like in general understanding of the world and like the life of

Yeah. I'm gonna go back to that book that I mentioned earlier, The Algorithms to Live By. I think it's it's been uh really impactful for me. Um and and it's definitely one that that folks should read. It's it's Yeah.

I mean, for me, I think it's it's in some cases justified my weird quirks uh in how how I organize myself and interact with the world. and in other cases made me realize that I was doing things that were really inefficient and and that could improve on and and yeah, it was it was just a fun read. And then yeah, again, for folks that are uh that are into computer science, then uh it it can help you kind of apply what you already do in in computer science to to the real world. Uh and then for folks that uh are not into computer science, they can help you to to uh take some of that learning uh and and uh understand it in a much more tangible practical way. So yeah, check it out.

It's a great book.

Yeah, awesome advice. So thank you.

Yeah, thanks for coming.

Yeah, it was a beautiful interview. Thank you guys for listening to us. Hope I think it should be very useful. Uh ciao. [Music]