[music and bell]
So hi, I'm Harry Halpin. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Nym. Nym is a mixnet. That's a type of anonymity network to make people anonymous on the internet. So privacy is quite slippery and hard to define.
It's a holistic property which applies to a whole system. But I view it as built on top of being anonymous. If I'm anonymous by default then I can reveal information about myself from my my activities through different personas and that's pseudonymity. And then I can reveal information about my true name, as as where the the name Nym comes from, selectively. And on that level you consider privacy a kind of selective disclosure of both individual and collective information.
The original cypherpunks were focused very much on individual rights, particularly property rights, and also the right to free speech. Neo cypherpunks as a more global movement are probably going to focus on a wider set of values. One term I've seen used as communalism and being able to basically collectively form communities. For example, you know, network states or collectives, free software projects, and use the blockchain and these related technologies to govern those communities while keeping their activities private and selectively disclose. So it's really I would say if there is a clear definition of cypherpunk it's about taking cypherpunk technology such as encryption and anonymity technologies and broaden it them so they work for larger and larger parts of humanity.
Well, I mean as the co-founder of Nym, I my privacy tool which I enjoy the most is of course Nym VPN which I use every day. Other technologies that I use every day is I do use Signal every day. It is centralized but it's very private. I also uh use the Brave browser every day. It's my primary browser.
I use Brave Search as my primary search engine. I think Brave has the best privacy tech and best adware malware blocking. Um and you know, I do use Zcash. I use Monero. I really like anonymous hosting services like Njalla which not super well known but it's the former Pirate Bay guys.
And I look forward I to seeing using more privacy enhanced decentralized file storage. So these are the kinds of technologies I use every day and they're kinds of technologies I look forward to. Right. You know, I think the the real best habit is to try to use privacy enhancing technology by default and if possible technology not created by large surveillance based corporations. So what I'd recommend people do is get rid of Windows or Macs on your laptop.
Use GNU Linux. And then build it so that when you just start your machine you're kind of using as much privacy technology as possible. So your default browser being Brave. Someone asks you to use Telegram, try to get them to use Signal instead. Don't buy a centralized VPN subscription, use Nym VPN.
And these are what I use every day. And if you have the spare capacity and the systems administration knowledge, run nodes and validators for these systems. Yeah. Well again, I mean there has been this debate if privacy technology is really the right term. That maybe we need to talk about freedom technologies or anti-system technologies.
I do think there's been a large history since the beginning of time of anti-system movements demanding human freedom. You know, from barbarian tribes taking out ancient hierarchies you know, in Babylon and Mesopotamia um to the modern day where you have many social movements struggling for privacy. And I think you know, earlier with the early cypherpunks, the early cypherpunks through Tor and Bitcoin was also the original use case that gave us WikiLeaks. And WikiLeaks really terrified and and scared the ruling global elite. So now what can we do that empowers even more people?
Can we connect these technologies to social movements, to people that are really fighting for their lives in places such in Syria Ukraine Russia and soon European United States. Because these social movements, if they're mapped they will be killed off very quickly. And in order to have a genuine decentralized democracy we need the ability to regenerate and rethink our politics and our philosophy. And a lot of that may not just be in building technology, that's the cypherpunk focus but a broader cryptographers focus that formulates the philosophy of cypherpunk supports autonomy in all parts of life including basic necessities for survival and really builds a parallel society, a dual power infrastructure that can survive nation-state collapse or just withdraw. Well, I think in a world without violence and repression we wouldn't have such a large problem.
Because we could use the open internet. The internet was originally created as a open academic system for spreading knowledge. But now that we are in an adversarial environment, I do think it might be an eternal struggle against powerful centralized hierarchical authorities. We're going to have to always think how could the internet work in these situations. So the internet should be decentralized.
TCP/IP and UDP can work in decentralized manner but the dependent on the domain name system is a critical risk. People have been trying to decentralize the domain system since the days of Namecoin. Still hasn't been successful. We need to successfully get off the domain name system and build hardware open source hardware. Raspberry Pis are step in this direction but we need to get much more powerful so that the internet can survive even the collapse of centralized large servers and large gateways.
So things can be locally hosted and replicate and scale without a centralized point. And of course I am interested in Nym and mixnets and all of these kinds of technologies should run over anonymous networks such as mixnets. And I think this will empower in combination with privacy enhanced cryptocurrency such as Zcash and Monero and whatever else new stuff is coming out will really empower people to transact privately, speak freely and self-organize confident.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.
