Why Ethereum Needs Milady? - Tim Clancy

Hi, my name is Tim Clancy. I'm a fan of Maady and the Ethereum mandate and all the crops values therein. Privacy for me is in the very literal sense of what we see on Ethereum with Tornado Cash and Rail Gun and the ability to break the connection between transactions. No one knows that it's you. No one can see everything you're doing online.

Privacy is also just an important right almost more as an abstract concept than something that everyone needs to physically engage with all the time. It's something to be defended. It's something to be cherished. And that's why I think a lot of the work that Ethereum and its allies are doing in this regard are very important. Maady 101 is a very hard thing to answer because it's so inherently different for everyone.

And there's a reason why explain Maady to me or I'll [ __ ] kill you is a recurring motif because it can't necessarily be explained without engaging in an act of self-discovery. And that's part of why we publish as many Zen and write as much as we can. But to me, Mady is an encapsulation of a particularly cipher punk portion of Ethereum culture. And so a lot of us, we might be word cells. Many in this community aren't directly engineers.

They're artists maybe, but they believe in the cause. They champion correct values. We support initiatives like freeing Ross, freeing Roman, trying to support the tornado cash trial, supporting privacy, supporting values like crops, building things that are censorship resistant and open source and free. And culturally, it's all of this wrapped up in a very cute veneer and a willingness to be zealous and aggressive about it. And so if there's anything that Malay can really be faulted about, it's that we love too hard.

We will love bomb you. We love Ethereum. We will champion these values. And it's an important subset to have in any community, I think, are the people who are willing to discard norms, not be corporate, say what's really on their mind. And that's what Moliv is.

Yeah. So the Zen here this time, this is issue number two that uh we've done with Mady. This time it's a collection of multiple authors writing about what they see out of the Ethereum mandate. So what crops really is, why they think it's important, how it matters to them. And you'll actually find a good answer in reading some of this about what Malay means to a lot of these people.

And we've got a mix of Ethereum application layer developers. We've got one of the artists who helped contribute to the actual mandate. We've got an Ethereum core dev in there and it's a mix of everyone who's really just bound by dawning the maady calling themselves matheades but you'll see a very different mix of like views of the future uh the degree to which we emphasize different parts of Ethereum. And yeah, it's it's just a fun piece of literature. They do these little uh very inspired by original cipher punk zen culture bootleg uh media that we'll pass around.

Right. So, the Ethereum Foundation mandate is a long document, 38 pages. I recommend everyone read it. There's some good stuff in there. A very clear expression of values from the foundation and how it sees itself as steward of Ethereum.

and more importantly where the foundation wants to find new allies and this is a very interesting part looking even outside of cryptospecific things other cipher punk causes other DAC causes people who can be fellow travelers in Ethereum's mission but either have never engaged with it before or aren't really into any of the financial aspects and so fundamentally beyond that statement of values the mandate is an employee handbook of sorts for the EF explaining how they intend to uh govern themselves in their mission. But the values are what really stuck with me and Malay and a lot of people outside the EF directly and that's the focus on crops. That's the censorship resistance, open and free software, privacy and security. And it's nice to just have that that direction as everyone part of this big Ethereum project to say like these are the important things like let's build software that is free and open source that's trustless that is private that everyone can interact with and I think that gives a certain lens with which you can view everything else being built on Ethereum and you can very naturally start to sift things like you know is it is it fully crops is it something that you can interact with for a thousand years or maybe is it something more more corporate and specific and it it just really uh focuses in where the foundation and certain elements of the community want to spend their time. The role of Maady in the mandate.

So the mandate is obviously it's an Ethereum foundation initiative. Malay is not a monopoly on Ethereum culture. There are many other groups in there. uh mady motifs did appear in the mandate quite clearly and there is an example the source sapuku license which is quite frankly hilarious and not a very serious license but it's the idea that like you should be so committed to these values that you will fall on your sword if you fail to uphold them right and so for me that's like a pledge to commit sapuku if you stop honoring the viral public license which of course you would ever the Mady art is out there. Anyone can remix.

Anyone can use it. But the foundation borrowed some of these elements and some of these ideas that there's this thousand-year project that we need to build for posterity. We need to build things that last. We need to build things that are beautiful. And that's another sort of motif that I think you could say was malady inspired.

And it's it's that building beautiful things that last really is a choice. And it's a hard choice that Ethereum in particular has consistently made. You can just compare to everything else in crypto that's making centralized shortcuts or taking the easy way out or choosing to market to one group or another for the benefit of a foundation or the benefit of token holders. And I think Ethereum truly remains this credibly neutral new internet because it builds that beautiful thing, takes that hard route every time. an entry point to Malay culture.

Well, if you find the Maady, talk to your local Maady. We're out there. There's many of us. We're all over the world. Go to an Ethereum conference and find someone wearing the shirt or handing out the Zen.

And failing that, a lot of people hang out on Twitter. A lot of people hang out on their own uh Rememia Network site, go to Ethereum events and talk to people. But to learn about Malay and like your entry point to Malay culture, you sort of have to just recognize, do you want to be a Malay? Do you want to pledge yourself to love Ethereum, to love what you're doing, to always have fun online? It's it's performatively cute, but not really.

It's it's actually cute after a certain point. You find that people are happy to be Malay. So, it's it's it's a way to filter for a while. Are you a tourist or are you going to be here for a long time and um you'll kind of naturally discover yourself becoming a Maady if you stick around long enough and want to be one. Uh Romelia Corporation as it relates to Maady.

Romelia is a company. They have an office. They have employees. They originally launched the Malay NFT. On top of that, they do many other things.

They throw various Malay events. They have a fashion line. They just presented a a a workware suit at New York Fashion Week. And so I would say Ramilia is in the same way that the Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum. Romelia is a a cultural touch point for Mady.

Obviously, Ramilia does a lot of important work like creating these scenes and fostering those editing efforts. And so I would say uh stewards of whatever it means to be a Maady. There's there's a relevant passage from this zen that maybe I'll just read for you. If you rebounded while reading, we urge you to sit with what made you flinch. Uncompromising values are not easy to receive.

And we understand this. And that's what I would say to people who have a knee-jerk rejection of mady. It's hard to receive maady values. It doesn't come across as a way of chastising someone if you're not quite there yet. But you should be there.

Crops are good. Free association is good. Free speech is good. These are all shared values and they're very cipher punk values. And I would say it's not a monoculture.

It's the same way that I would have to talk to someone who thinks all of crypto is a scam about carving out why Ethereum itself is good and has a different culture. And you know, we're building things that want to change the world. Mady is what it is. People wear it. It's permissionless.

There are my ladies of all different walks and sizes and shapes in life and uh you'll find friends there. The core message is very welcoming and very impassionate about what we should do to make sure that Ethereum retains its its edge, retains its hardness, uh does not stray from the path it set itself. Freedom of speech and limits therein. uh different opinions for different countries and different peoples but as an American free speech our first amendment is quite broad. I think this is good.

I think this is why it applies as widely as it does to such noble causes as saying that you know computer code is protected free speech. We can go back to the original cipher punk movement where Philip Zimmerman wrote PGP in a book and got it published and that was a way to work around government attempts to limit its spread as a munition. Um, I think unconditional free speech is important the same way unconditional privacy is important. And this is very uh incredibly neutral, very cippher punk thing to just put ideas out there and let them live and die in the free marketplace of discussion, right? It's it's censoring a financial transaction is wrong in the same way that censoring someone expressing a viewpoint even if it's idiotic or abhorrent is wrong because you're fundamentally violating something that you should just let them do and if they are wrong and are terrible you know you they will they will fail on their own merits right and so I view them as very uh intrinsically linked basically freedom of speech freedom association, privacy, freedom of transacting.

It's all about um resistance to censorship at the end of the day. Yeah, Neocer Punk is interesting to compare to uh the cipher punk of our our forefathers of yestery year. Uh we have a fun piece from Chuck Hamill in here and you know he gave a talk in 1987. We have an a bridged version in here. It was one of the earlier messages on the cippher punk mailing list was about this talk and it's it's interesting to see like the concerns of the day.

I think the biggest divider between the cipher punks and the neocipher punks are well the world is very different right so Chuck Hamill is talking about freedom of information like airdropping xerox machines into the Soviet Union uh we live in a very postsviet society and I think the new cyber punk concern is our own government performing mass surveillance on us to a degree that I think the early cyber punks might be horrified and could not have even predicted right to the extent that we all have listening devices in our pockets that are tracking us and they're using Wi-Fi to see us through walls, right? It's it's a it's pretty dystopic out there and I think the uh state capacity has ballooned and so must our tools to resist it, right? So, we have to take on ever more ambitious elements like Ethereum. And I think Neoherpunk has a um there's always been a cultural component to cipher punk, but now there needs to be a very organized component too, right? We need to make much larger systems and that's kind of what like all these decentralized blockchain networks are, right?

With hundreds of thousands of nodes. It has to be global in a way that uh just kind of the individual mountainman resistance of the early cyberpunk era uh might not cut it anymore. My favorite privacy tool has to be Tornado Cash just hands down, right? Uh Ethereum is the greatest network on Earth. I genuinely believe it's the strongest, most resistant.

Ether is its native currency. Fantastic way to transact. not inherently a privacy coin unto itself. Tornado cash gives me that ability. Plus, I feel like it's a very important action, particularly as an American citizen right now as the government is persecuting Roman storm and yet tornado cash is still fully legal for me to use that I make as much use of it as possible.

So, uh it's absolutely my favorite one. Yeah. What would the world look like when we win in the end? because if we haven't won yet, it's not the end, right? And so the fully crops world, it's it's a paradise at least in terms of digital computer utopia side of things, right?

Um the DACK movement sort of touches on more of the real world aspects but Cippy Punk specifically and CRO's values we'll have achieved sort of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation's vision of users owning their compute fully sovereign devices. You would have a device. You would buy it like a product. It would be a tool. It wouldn't spy on you.

You'd be able to use it. You wouldn't be in any walled garden. Your bank couldn't censor you. Your social media couldn't censor you. you could move from point A to point B and very voluntarily associate or disassociate with different elements.

Um yeah, that that's what the paradise would look like. Now, I don't think it would be immediately solving all of the world's issues, but at least digitally, we would um absolutely have neutered very effectively a lot of state capacity to oppress, which is a good thing.