"How Artists and Hackers Can Save the Internet Together" - Kassandra, Silviculture Society

Hi, I'm uh Cassandra or KZG.E and um I am an extremely enthusiastic Ethereum community member. [Music]

So, hi Cassandra.

Hi.

Thanks for coming to our sweets interview spot. So, for the context, we are at DAPCON day three. It's about to finish. Uh we are in Berlin and um yeah today we we will talk a bit about anything or everything as usual.

Yes.

Uh and of course about privacy. So I will start with a bit of your introduction just few minutes like who you are what you do and how you ended up doing that a bit of your like personal such professional be all for people who don't know you.

Yeah cool. So I think I have a kind of a somewhat different background as a technical person in crypto than most others. Uh my father is a mathematician. Both my parents were a professor. So I had very like uh I already had some basis for sort of technical topics.

But when I was younger I was completely interested in other stuff. By the time I went to university studying like semiodics and I was interested in theater. I ended up like uh ba doing a lot of like arts and and uh theater stuff. I wanted to be a theater director and like choreographer and I got into computers because I was making some uh initially because I was making some dances with dancers where they were like zeros and ones and they would go through logic gates.

So you do like a very minimal computation. I thought this was cool because the dancers knew the rules. They knew how the logic gates worked, but the dance could look different if you told which one, okay, you're all you're a zero, you're a one, and then you kind of get a little bit of a different dance, but it's all the same dance. So I thought this was like uh kind of a very interesting theater work to do and I was uh had some free time as I was finishing a master's and um and I thought if I want to keep doing stuff like this maybe because I have a technical background I should actually learn a little bit about coding and uh things in in like uh computer science topics that then I could bring to this theater work. And so I had like a roommate I remember he showed me like a py IPython notebook and he was like x= 5 like I really started completely from the beginning in that moment and I'm like okay now x plus 3 and it's eight you know and uh I saw that I just started learning coding like on my you know it's a code academy I believe Python is what I started doing and I only did like the first 30% of this course and it once I understood stood that you could take functions and start mashing them together to make like a real uh something that does something somewhat useful like a big function where then you pass some parameters and then it just outputs I don't know the price of a hotel in X city something really really basic I went ah I get I just the light bulb turned on for me and I spent like a year just diving into any and everything as just like a raw code I think what I loved about It was uh this feeling that if you have the persistence and if you're just really want to make something which I understood from the art world I already had a lot of that that in computers you could just tech up so fast you could uh everything was available online with Stack Overflow and open-source repositories for you to just by yourself just go deeper and deeper and deeper and I thought this was really really cool and like I was like almost a junkie for this.

Um, just the feeling of how rapidly you could improve was so exciting. And um, so I was doing that and eventually at some point stumbled on the Bitcoin white paper, built some tools for encoding your own Bitcoin transaction by hand, very badly built like in Python with a lot of like raw hex strings. And the one thing I used a library for was uh the ECDSA signature,

the digital signature.

And so that was like the only part I didn't do like entirely by myself. And so I said, "Okay, how does that work?" And I guess that's when the prehistory of Cassandra is over and the new phase starts because yeah once I started to I really liked actually the low-level cryptography and or you know learning the actual cryptography topics and the math behind it and trying to implement those things by myself and from then on I was like uh I don't know it's been it's been all crypto ever since. Um, so yeah, I think that's a pretty different background is why I went so so deep into it. But like, uh, yeah, it's made it so that I really believe that people all you need to be a software developer is this this persistence, you know, you kind of maybe have to like bashing your head in that sort of technical way a bit, but and just like having this tenacity to say, I'm going to build it and everything else is details.

You can learn everything. And so I really encourage a lot of people who say they're not a dev. I'd say I don't know maybe you are somehow inside.

Uh wonderful journey actually that's not not often you can meet a person who jumped into from theater to like development and then to crypto. It's like a very interesting journey and um regarding that I have a question um because I'm a lot into art. I do that I consume a lot and for me like my art bubble and my tech web 3 bubble they are so far away from each other and no not so many people with like connected to art anyhow in our web three bubble. So what do you think uh tech web 3 bubble can learn from art bubble?

Yeah, I totally know what you mean that these bubbles are very far away. I have this very much. my social life as a young person was all arts people and now I'm like uh in this very different world and it's illegible to them almost. Um and so uh I think they can learn many things from each other and there are actually points of contact that could be really nice. Like I think for instance it's a lot of times it's art people who are interested in this like alternative living type situations like oh what if you know the dream in theater that I was always around is what if we could all live and work together on like experimental theater and like not have to worry about whatever like the rent and the this and the that and we could just make make this deep work over a long time and then develop something really new.

um people I saw this desire all the time for this sort of collectivist living and and new style living situations and I think in crypto you have something super similar a lot of the same desires of a way to opt out of like the classical living situation and to uh organize your life in a in a different way and obviously in crypto it's a lot more about using these uh technological tools in order to make that scalable or more useful or uh better somehow. Um, and so the big disconnect of course is that, you know, I think in most of the world, if you're not in the tech bubble, that you're very mistrustful of tech because we've all been uh somewhat abused by, you know, the the version of tech that is most distributed today. This like big tech, Silicon Valley stuff that, you know, uh, so those suspicions, what I mean is they're they definitely are valid. But of course the thing that I would want to push back on maybe is that of course that's not that that's not the entire entire field of possibilities of the tech. It's just one one part that has been um uh sort of deeply embedded in our lives.

But uh but that throwing saying that the problem is technology itself or like technological progress could potentially be naive and that actually we need more people like that who are distrustful of those things in tech right um so yeah I mean I I don't know but I see things I see a world uh where there could be more connection more interpulated stuff but I think with tech uh people in the tech world the tech bubble need to understand and sympathize with some of these um concerns and also maybe with the ways of using language right in tech we overindex on uh very quantitative things and objectivist things and art is often about unraveling or problematizing this and so like finding a common language is hard but um yeah I I do I am quite hopeful that there are ways that uh that this worlds can co-evolve in a nice way. I think it's just yeah we need to uh I I really think this site of artists and also like or yeah different um different types of people in the alternative scene and and young people uh could massively benefit from crypto but uh yeah that things need to be built and also put together with them in the right way and that's what has been totally missing I think I don't know I Yeah. So, I'm like of two minds. In some way, they're very very far apart and in other ways I see how they could easily be like co-conspirators. 100%.

And also, I think one one thing that is really missing for this art bubble is UX because those people they would never go into this crazy code thing for like built like by tech people for tech people.

Exactly. and and and and totally they need a UX which is actually legible to them which uh they don't care about any of the tech fancy tech just for the fancy tech reasons that that that's a good audience because neither should we tech people right those are just implementation details the real thing is to produce things that are useful in the world um on the other side too though it's like I think what these people don't realize the the arts and the other alternative living and so forth is just how like they have a different kind of UX problem or let's say like a scalability problem sometimes where they want to do certain things but then things break down right what uh if you have a a thing where I don't know it's like a chore chart

and then nobody you know uh nobody's doing the chores and one person ends up doing all the labor or something like this and things end up breaking down because they don't have maybe it's systems that could streamline some things allow them to be more scalable more automatic and so yeah I uh I on from the other side it's like they have not a UX problem but they have maybe like a scalability or like an implementation problem of some of their big dreams too. So yeah I very much hope we can all work together.

Yeah that would be a cool future. Yeah. Um but speaking about now uh can you tell a bit about like what are you involved in? What are you doing at the moment? Uh like part of what are you?

So yeah, I recently um uh I was for a long time working in DeFi as a working on um the liquidity provision side of decentralized exchanges and building smart contracts in in that domain. Um but I I recently left and uh I my new role I would say it's not in any organization it's the role I'm giving myself is just an extremely enthusiastic Ethereum community member. Uh and I'm very very happy in my new role to be honest. Uh because yeah I think um I had a great time in DeFi. I learned a tremendous amount, but I was also to some extent radicalized by um the way that the VC funded companies and the the whole uh sort of DeFi industrial complex is um guided by that and some of the decision making and and the uh sort of the path dependency around that where I realized that um it could be very hard sometimes.

Uh I'm taking it slow now about what exactly is the total next project but I'm very uh deep in uh trying to revitalize the wallet user experience embed privacy in there and uh get shared standards in Ethereum and around this and also yeah interested in um layer 2 infrastructure and maybe seeing how we can build that in a way that's different than some of this more uh VCbacked uh proprietary rollups. Can we have more like a public option? So this is a project called Ethereum R1 that I have been uh just sort of lurking around and helping out with too. So uh yeah very excited about some of these issues.

Uh okay and I also know that you are part of like silver culture society.

Yes.

Uh if it's public

uh yeah yeah yeah I mean

if you're okay to talk about

yes we were publicly. So yeah.

Yeah. Can you please like explain for people like what's that and what exactly are you doing and what's your purpose? So yeah, it's um uh that's a great question. I feel like uh what what is public about is we're a group of community members who um who I think most of us through different online forums, places like Twitter and uh and Varcaster and other places where crypto people collect and and talk um have all I would say some some similarities or certain alignments around Yeah. seeing this a long-term Ethereum project and maybe something around sort of like um maintaining the cipher punk core of this project I'd say is so somewhat what unites us and uh yeah besides that we're just this very informal um uh I would say sort of uh advice or ideas to uh Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum Foundation leadership on privacy security, censorship resistance, and credible neutrality.

And uh the form that this uh this it's entirely confidential uh but a way for us to be able to communicate in a one-on-one or on in a group kind of way to Ethereum Foundation and see how um uh how they're uh the choices that they're making are reflecting these goals and um uh this purpose. Uh so yeah, besides that, don't want to say too much because it's somewhat uh it's somewhat private. Um but uh but yeah, this is this is all that's all like public information is is great.

We respect your privacy. Thanks. we have to uh so yeah but maybe you can uh like expand on like your vision of cypher punk and maybe a bit on like if you agree with Paul on like new cipher punk like is this like modern evolution of that just how do you see in general this term

and why it's actually important

if it is

yeah that's a very very interesting question that uh I would like to think more rigorously Um because for me it's still a somewhat loose collection to be honest. I feel like I know it when I see it and I feel very I I somehow know that I'm aligned with the cipher punks and I am one of them. But I I don't know if I'll be able to super easily like you know nail down. And the truth is when you read different things you often see you know you get these bullet point lists of what cyber punk values are and what they're about but they're not they're never the same exactly. Um I do think like maybe to just start with like from the beginning you have this stuff from the early like from I guess like 80s and 90s and um here you have people like for the first time trying to define this thing.

Um, and it was mostly people gathering around um, cryptography and uh, like encryption technology at first, but generally different cryptographic techniques and ways um, and maybe open- source software as well and ways that we can put these things together to um, sort of uh, uplift the individual or the ways in which uh, people can collect and coordinate just among themselves. um disintermediating somewhat the state and state power. So to me this is what I saw as like the beginning or the core of cypher punk is let's use these technological tool we have this computer we have this cryptography this magical cryptography that was only invented you know or made public at least like in the 70s that we got this asymmetric cryptography and this radically changes something fundamental about the power dynamics between um sort of uh institutions and state power and individuals. Because uh before there would truly was no way we we didn't have any mathematical trick or way that two people two private individuals could uh uh any any two parties could uh start create a private channel. Before asymmetric cryptography, there was no way for two parties to create a private channel among themselves to communicate without at some point having a private channel where they, you know, maybe uh created a scheme or something uh or or passed a key around.

And this is much less secure and makes it much more difficult for if we're in the public square for us to be able to maybe uh get some privacy. Now, what does that mean? But here we just mean like our communications only we know what we're saying back to each other. Something just simple like that.

And when you change this when some magical math comes around that makes it that actually directly in the public square in a place where we know we're being surveiled and we could people could tap into our communications without ever doing something secret among the two of us. we can pass ac across public me messages and create this private channel this cone of silence among ourselves.

This is like a it's for me like you could almost see it as like one epoch and then a totally new epoch that should just completely reconfigure power relations. Um, of course it doesn't exactly work that way. Um but uh yeah I see this as like the motor this new cryptography this asymmetric cryptography was something a watershed change in sort of the structure of uh how we could sort of give power back to the edges instead of always uh concentrating it in the center. And then what the cippher punk movement is about is about recognizing that seeing a path for how we could actually sort of uh okay now the raw math the raw techniques are there for this to be possible but how do we make such a world where power is more distributed at the edges where the individual is more sovereign and there they have uh some techniques and a project uh some ideas some things ideological some tactics like open source ource software make everything in the open um um make it so that a free flow of information of these kinds of thing which is very interesting it's like paired open source you know radical transparency open source and privacy and which is like secrecy kind of all go together so um yeah okay so like that's the beginning of cipher punk and then as you mentioned that's uh maybe we're like in a neo cipher punk era or there's something out. And uh there's something new to talk about today because th that was this response to a changing world uh a sort of rapidly neoliberalizing west and this watershed new technology asymmetric encryption.

But now many things have changed on the and maybe the beginning of the internet. all of this nexus and you get this initial cipher punk moment um and and the like formulation of of the cipher punk ideology. But

as uh as your colleagues and you have all I think stated around these conferences here, things have changed a lot since then and maybe we need a new we need to reformulate some of these uh topics around the actual conditions that we had just like they had. Now we have an even you know uh the political landscape has changed since the 80s. I mean maybe some of it is still uh pretty much the same but other parts are really different. Also the technologies cryptography has uh thanks maybe to the cipher punks who sort of led the way. This stuff is really really important and powerful.

Uh we've unleashed just a tremendous amount of research. There's way new types of cryptography that some of those people never could have imagined maybe. Um, and uh, and yeah, just a very very different internet and tech landscape. So, I think

I don't know how would you I maybe I'd ask you about how how would you see the neo cyberh punk uh like what what are the how like what are the differences uh or how like between classical cipher punk and maybe what you see as like the contemporary cipher punk or neo.

Well, it's a good question. And I kind of freestyle a bit because I never formulated it for myself like specifically. Okay, what is that? And actually this term it's also for me at least it's quite new because I saw it in the thread of polar um and I'm like oh yeah that sounds cool like Neo because it's kind of gives this sort of refreshment even though maybe no one really understands what's behind but then like Neo okay like because the cypher punk term it's really kind of old school it's from the 80s right

and and so many things had changed like we have such a massive change of everything in just like one year like the tax the politics the world is going crazy and it's really uh really really different landscape really different technology really different people and really different access to knowledge and tech

so I think it's also a part of us because we are trying to tackle this cypher punk thing and make a course actually on that like what does it mean to be a cypher punk now and I also like in terms of like neo cipher punk I really like the term care punk

because it's uh a lot about the ethics and ethos of uh care, love and support.

Um because I think that's kind of a core value that maybe for our collective is something that we care about and like people around us I I think as well. So you mentioned it when you you talked about the redistribution of powers and I think this is the point because like a power is super centralized and how I feel the care and love for the society in general is like kind of to help to undermine this like vertical of power of this crazy people in power. We are going too much rightwing in my opinion globally

and that thing is kind of help us to redistribute the power weights a bit and give it a bit to people I hope so

something like that you know

that's really interesting that you pair this care thing which is also something which is like yeah the uh state power is this thing which seems seems like it's always ever increasing its um uh sites of of where it applies itself and like um if you uh you know some classical scholars of power like Fuko and so forth would say that like power got

everywhere it sort of exploded and it used to be you know you had this very stark also very intense centralized state power the issue was it couldn't get its hands on you so easily the king would come around once a year and maybe wreak some havoc and say you have to die or you have to give me your all your land or you have to go to a war. But then he goes away and then uh there's like this space in between. There are these margins and the margins used to be really really massive and now they've uh uh and throughout modernity uh you had this explosion and proliferation of institutions and surveillance technology and many other things that started to make it uh make these margins much much thinner and smaller.

Your king is here every day every day like saying you you you should do that you should do that.

Exactly. working to modify your behaviors and what is governing or what is power more than being able to sort of direct the actions of others. Now we have all these inputs doing that to us all the time in a very very different way than you had in a sort of like a classical period some some uh period before before now. And uh I feel like what the interesting part though is that you can never be total. There are always are some margins.

There are always some places where you're a little bit removed from that uh from the the uh from the empire and these are these things that might seem little everyday things like caring for each other are some of these sites where uh things are happening outside of only sort of uh from the central power direct lines going out to everything else of like how we organize and communicate. Instead, you can never stop. Always some grassroots something can is always emerging. And you know, there are many great examples of how, you know, no matter how totalitarian it gets, there's always a margin somewhere, a place where people are starting to say we have to take care of each other. So yeah, I really like this framing of care and I also in general I've really appreciated from learned from web 3 privacy now this feeling of yeah privacy can make more sense and be more active for people if it's situated in a larger understanding a larger project and I feel like putting together things like care and other things like this I think make it um uh it's ambitious and uh but it also I think is the right way to make it to really bring it to people to understand it in a way that it means something to them in their lives, not like some tech stuff over there.

Yeah. Yeah.

And and also it's like care about like me and my data. It's also sort of reframing from like oh I'm paranoid maxi privacy maxi I need to hide myself. Oh my god like don't look at me I hide my face. No, no, no. It's just a reframing that like okay u you are conscious about your data usage and then you care about this data not being given to like rightwing guys or to surveillance capitalism or whatever you know you kind of do like a soft resistance but it's just act of care you know it's like you have a sunscreen because the sun is kind of intense and you know the politicians and capitalists are kind of intense and you just this is like light protection you don't like I don't know overestimated.

Yeah. It's just a organic part of life, you know.

Absolutely. Two things out of that that I really love. One is this idea that I've never thought of it that way, but like as a personal privacy and uh and online privacy as just a form of self-care. like uh my my girlfriend always says I need to do more self-care like in the morning, you know, put some stuff on my face that I never want to do and so forth, you know, and it's like but that self-care is the thing that's always brought to you like this not about it's just it's not about wanting to look a certain way. It's about caring for yourself.

One can sort of frame privacy the exact same way. This is just about having this uh you know care for yourself, your identity that your your self-worth is also wrapped up in in this privacy. And the second thing that I love from what you said and I fully agree with is yeah this idea that resistance and resistance to power. I think most people feel very much like this is

um so difficult so why even try

and so because they frame it only as they need to you need to make the total revolution

and of course this is extremely difficult and complex and scary and traumatic. Everyone is so afraid about this the the difficulty of this kind of resistance and so you uh you get demotivated and you also don't believe anyone else who seems like uh idealistically believes that such a project could happen you go yeah I don't believe that you think you're going to overthrow x whatever state power something like this uh not going to happen um but I think reframing resistance as these uh and it happens all the time but uh as these daily small smaller sites of resistance as actually being very powerful is uh super important and useful. And in the context of privacy for sure, because even if everyone did just a little bit of this daily practice, the compounding effect of all that could be a lot more obfiscation, a lot more freedom for people to have a bit of distance from these sort of um uh yeah, the surveillance apparatus or these um yeah, these very concentrated centers of power that uh can rule our lives in a in a difficult and stark way. And

so it doesn't need to be the total project of overthrowing everything to get some distance from that. Sometimes it's just little all the tiny things, all the daily things and you put them together. Uh and maybe this can be a way to people a bit more hopeful that resistance can make sense and can be useful for them in their in their actual lives. And you don't have to be a hardline uh you know communist uh whatever project you might have. It doesn't necessarily have to be that uh for you to get some benefits from from thinking about the screen.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Just I don't know this accumulation of power and capital has this like deadly radiation on everything alive.

Yeah.

That's how you kind of just protect yourself in a really small act of care.

Yeah. Ex. Exactly. and that like uh that again you don't need to topple capitalism completely or or X or Y to still have a slightly different relationship and that slightly different relationship can be super productive and I think many people get demotivated by thinking ah but then I'm going to be some sort of hypocrite because I'm going to say I'm resisting but of course I'm still entrapped I still have a job or a corporate job or a this or um you know I still want to go on a vacation. So, does that mean I'm And it's like,

no, it doesn't have to be one or the other. One can embrace these contradictions more and uh you'll a be happier to you don't not to have to pass your own purity test and also more motivated to

I feel like that's a strategy to actually get everyone to submit and say, "Look, you're never going to really be able to do it, so just stay on stay on Twitter and don't go off." You know what I mean?

Uh so, uh it's like a strategy from them. Uh so uh yeah I think these are very important things to be honest.

Yeah. Uh do you want to speak a bit a bit about wallets?

Yeah sure. Exactly. I feel like I said I've said so much about power and cipher punk and nothing really about privacy yet.

True.

But that's for me that's a fundamental thing. So for me like when I think of privacy for me it's like being cipher punk and being conscious about how your data is used. Is it like resisting the power? So for me it's kind of the same thing or at least super super aligned.

Yes, I I definitely agree. They're similar, but yeah, it's be nice now to go into some of the practical nuts and bolts because yeah, what what happened for me is um I read so I uh to to get into the wallet stuff and wallet UX on on Ethereum. Uh but maybe also keep with my a little bit about my background too is that I it all started for me when I read I'm a reader of Vitalik's blog like many of us

and I read the um stealth addresses. He has a on his blog he has a piece called an incomplete guide to stealth addresses. Um, I read this one and uh just out of pure curiosity and I think it had already been out for maybe a few months, maybe even almost a year and I was surprised because I had never heard of it.

Mhm.

Also, it was extremely simple cryptography. So, it I like you heard in my background, I learned about elliptic curves and elliptic curve digital signatures. So, this was just like the very basics of that. So I could fully follow all the tech here where in some of parts of Italics's blog at least in those days there were definitely things that I could not follow or were you know were beyond my level but this was fully tractable to me and then I was somewhat impressed that uh I didn't see a lot of activity around this and often with a vitalic blog post especially something so approachable like this was very clear path about things that people could do to sort of take up what he's telling about and and implement things that would utilize these stealth addresses in Ethereum. uh but nobody was really doing anything so or maybe a few uh there there were some I eventually I found those who were but it was uh not a loud thing at all and my my view in that time as well because I'm someone who was defi I was building around unis swap so I always saw unis swap and I thought always thought it was interesting like ah I get it if you want to if you want to make it in crypto readalik's blog and then just do what it says you know and like what I think was amazing about unis swap is like It was just uh took the sort of ideas.

It wasn't directly from the blog but some Vitalic had a post. There were some others all thinking about it. I think unis swap succeeded because it just implemented it with nothing else. Don't the thing you don't want to do is go oh how can I turn this into something even better for me or add more bells and whistles and like unis swap is such a success because it was just the basic idea. the basic ideas, the people who really knew what they were talking about said I think there might be something here and he just implemented radically exactly that.

So that was always my thesis on like if you want to be a crypto founder go find those things and then just uh it's amazing how often nobody's actually tried to build it and then those who are trying to build it are trying to build it plus many many other things and very few people go I'll just build exactly that. Um that's a beautiful advice actually. Yeah. People who want to do something because like how do you get the idea right? There are so many you need to validate it.

You need to find people. It's not that easy. Right.

Exactly. And I think often people though they they miss in plain sight that um that there are these gaps and it's we're such a nent industry that how far you can go by taking a simple but really exciting idea and simply just do that. try to limit all the other noise and just do uh sort of follow the the design idea there as as cleanly as possible. Uniswaps is this great example of that. So that was sort of my thesis already.

So I saw this thing and I saw it's like something I could totally totally understand and wasn't seeing that much activity around. So I said okay well I had that's my thesis on how these things work. So I built like a uh first thing I built around that was like a rust library for just doing the low-level cryptographic operations for these stealth addresses. Um and the goal of stealth address is to have a way um for people to transact more privately. What it gives you more concretely is transaction unlinkability.

Meaning uh I would say maybe the simple way to say this is receiver privacy. So you can see that the sender sent something. You can see how how much or what they sent, but where they send it seems to be truly to some an account that you can't link to any identity. So the receiver gets some privacy and in a sense the sender gets for privacy the privacy of who they're sending to or where they're sending the funds. Um, and so stealth address is just a really nice, really simple scheme to make this have a better UX because you can already do this today on uh uh on Ethereum or on Bitcoin or any blockchain.

But you have to as the receiver you would have to first generate a fresh random address and then over a private channel give it to the sender and one that means every time you want to receive something you have to do some work so it's a little bit annoying and two you have this private channel so if somebody were to find where I told you hey this is my secret address it would break the scheme and so stealth addresses just allows us to just have a one-time setup and then every time anyone wants to send to me they can use my stealth meta address address or my stealth public key, however you want to think about it, to generate fresh addresses that on my behalf.

So that's that's the scheme. That's the idea. And the goal is to, as you can see already, improve some UX of something you could already do privately on Ethereum today, but almost nobody does it. certainly not for every single reception of uh every piece of funds because it was way too much work and friction that every time you'd receive you'd have to first say, "Hey, I'm going to generate a fresh address and then send it to this one." Then you'd have to keep track of all your funds in all these different addresses and the wallets are not set up for that.

So, uh that would be very manual thing um and very difficult. And so in the end, in practice, people don't uh people often reuse the same address and addresses over and over linking all of their onchain activities in a way that's quite unsafe or at least uh makes it very very trivial and easy. One one just go to an etherand link and put your address in. I know everything you've done on chain. Um uh but it was there because it was that was the that's the cleanest and easiest and safest in some ways way to interoperate with the chain for now.

And so all we need are these UX improvements. Stealth addresses are basically sort of a UX improvement there to to empower people to to get some more privacy. So that was the beginning.

But from there I went down this rabbit hole because of course it's not quite enough. You can you can make the cryptographic library so people could use that. So um but you of course need to get people to actually start using it. And then there are many questions about well okay now you can receive funds privately but how can you operate on those privately received funds and interact with the chain in the ways that you know and love and still retain privacy. Um how can you do this with a good user experience where you don't need to um fund each individual address with uh gas tokens in order to operate on that address and maybe not have to one by one uh use these addresses.

And so I started to think about all these problems and frictions in the wallet and realized um over time or started started to think about a potential model for a more modern wallet that would build in privacy seamlessly for you with things like stealth addresses. But you also have to add other uh technologies in the stack. You need other parties like pay masters or relayers to relay transactions on behalf of other people. you need these mixer technology as well for certain things for instance for the sender privacy or untraceability of transactions and uh many many other little details but my my end goal what I'm really interested in is I think it's going to be very hard to bootstrap real privacy lots of users who are already using Ethereum but don't get much privacy with the current techniques um where you really have to seek it out it's very appsp specific and like the uh the low the actual wallets that everybody utilizes um uh are not in any way private and if you want to do private things but also interact with different applications you'd have to figure out how to do that yourself by hand. There's uh or each privacy protocol would have to integrate every single application in order to make a private way to interact with that.

this did not does not seem scalable to me and privacy gets way better if it scales because actually we need a big anonymity set to uh for the privacy to actually be robust.

So my end goal is simply to have a wallet user experience which has par or even a lot better than what we have today.

The important part is that users aren't there aren't using this wallet just because of privacy. they're using because it's a great wallet and that they they uh they can do everything they could already do with the wallets they know and love, interact with all the applications on chain um in a generic way. Um, however, the privacy is baked in and maybe some other features as well like chain abstraction would be nice and the tools are all so I started looking at all the different EIPs and all the tools that we might need to build this up and uh in my opinion especially just post the Pectra hard fork all those tools are ready. we have like uh these Legos um and somebody just needs to start putting those Legos together to make like a new wallet standard, a more modern wallet standard, which is in my uh to me the key change from what we have today is to break this idea that we operate address by address and ECDSA signature by ECDSA signature. When we do operations on Ethereum, even in Bitcoin, when you say I want to do an uh I want to authorize a spend underneath, you're actually touching many different addresses, many UT different UTXOs and signing each of them.

And this is abstracted away at the wallet layer. But Ethereum wallets are less abstracted. It's like we interact with Ethereum on almost like a lowlevel. Uh to me it's like our wallets are as if we uh never shipped solidity and everyone would have had to write in assembly and I think it's a great fallback that we have. This is the low-level way to interact with the chain.

But while it should have more modern abstractions and only if you know you lose all the software that makes these things nice UX and easy, you could fall back on you know actually getting in direct private keys etc the credentials you need to sign one by one to create the transactions the way we do today. So uh this is like a huge passion of mine. Uh, I'm really hoping to see us converge on new standards in in wallets and authentication and I believe finally that we can pair it with this ethos as well. And I think we've never seen a wallet which uh says, hey, maybe it shouldn't even be called wallets anymore, right? It's like this is your identity freedom tech

thing. This is the thing you can use that protects you um and allows you to do these awesome things in the digital world like um yeah have your own payments fully disintermediated from the state know what you're doing online own your own data all of this and like uh sort of frame it also as something uh cipher punk and ideological and um and hopefully like cool even in my opinion. uh or at least useful. Um and so I see this opportunity in the wallet space um or in this authentication layer of uh of uh blockchains and Ethereum more specifically and I'm very excited about and then here comes a question what do you think uh which data should be on chain and which data should be private

if we talk about wallets or the centralized ID. Yeah. So the question was um what uh what data should go on chain versus not. Um and the truth is this is where is emerging. Um it uh my goal my focus is really on just the the making sure or helping shepherd us towards these user experiences that will actually be exciting and um not focused in a niche way on privacy that doesn't let it scale.

But these details like exactly which technologies we use here. I'm actually pretty open-minded. Like I spoke a lot about stealth addresses. I think they're an interesting primitive but maybe it turns out all this stuff could be implemented more like entirely inside of a mixer technology and I'm I'm open similarly which data should be on chain um for now it's it's uh more difficult to obiscate for instance like the balances of different tokens you'd need like a totally different token standard or to be on like a fully private rollup or something and so uh I'm not as focused on this but this data could also be private Um, and so basically I think it it'll emerge and I'm following mostly the practical which things can we already get now and can we ship in a way that gives like a seamless user experience that gives you something futuristic that you feel good about as a user. Um, and I see a lot of opportunity like in the wallets and in this sort of address abstraction where we where we uh operate over a much uh more intricate address space and utilize mixers by default.

Um, so I definitely see that for me the I'm mostly focused I guess on sender and receiver of anything or any operation that you do on chain being uh the user having the power to selectively disclose when and how that links to real world identities. Um but that these actual operations can be uh can be certain parts can be public. Of course, when we get to identity, there are things that you need to be I think I like to put as much on chain as possible, but a lot of that should be in a privacy preserving way. So, it depends what you mean. So, uh the the as much as we can put on chain that's feasible and possible or at least linked to the chain, great.

Um but many of these things should be privacy preserving. Certainly in identity systems, uh we don't want everybody's name and a phone number and uh date of birth etc. um in clear text on these forever systems this seems very scary um uh so yeah somewhere in the middle but I'm I'm quite practical I think we'll see it'll it'll emerge okay uh final almost final question like we are 30 years from now

and we won we have the internet of our dreams like cy punkish private secure school UX and artists embedded

uh how will it look like and how the life would look like in this techn paradise.

Ah, great question and I really like this question. I think um for me especially it matters how many years right in 30 years from now what I see as possible or my kind of dream is actually not that I don't think we necessarily going back to like state power like fully unravel and topple these uh major institutions that we have but I just think there will be this open public substrate that people will have the ability to opt into um and that these states will not see those as things fully just on the margins that they sort of need to eradicate or that are somehow like illegal but more like something that they have to accept as sort of extrajurisdictional zones among and within them and they will also use these zones to collaborate across borders as well. So I see like crypto and a lot of these more and open free open source software and privacy tech um as things that will be there is like this fundamental thing that humanity and and uh individuals know about that they can tap into. You will still have these superructures on top like states and state money but you'll at the same time among and alongside have things like non-state money and uh systems of governance and coordination people living at you know I might have an uh American passport and the Zuzaloo passport and I might use the Zuzaloo one more often and actually organize my life around that one. um and allowing people this like other option.

The other one has some different properties. Maybe you can't call up you don't have as many central parties so you can't call up uh tech support uh in this uh but uh but yeah and this will be for everything for governance for uh for like uh coordination for financial activities which we're already seeing emerging right you have like your crypto bank versus the real bank and they have somewhat different properties but they're starting to live alongside each other and people can organize their lives entirely around crypto stuff means means a few different things again means there's no tech support you can call up if you make a mistake but also means you have a lot more sovereignty um and people will sort of mix and match these things and uh this is what I would be very very happy about and and again seeing that these other powers actually have to accept these things and it's it's like it's not a tension destructive relationship but it's actually like a happy relationship where where it's good for everyone that they can opt out it sort of relieves the pressures of the state a bit so this is what I'd be was excited.

Yeah. So, my last question, can you please recommend some uh car cultural or art artifact for like people that you like and you think might expand someone's like perception of life in general?

Specifically in the arts. I mean, I'm I uh that the varying diverse interests that might be useful to people, maybe not at all. So, but uh I'm a big fan in um in cinema. I'm a big fan of like uh Tarovski.

I think it's a very interesting uh these movies always confused me in a way that I loved. And so if you like to be kind of challenged and confused by what a movie is and how it works, this this always felt also like it was looking towards the future. It's from a while back but sort of open uh dispersed way of looking at the future maybe. Uh yeah in philosophy I'm this major geek of uh different continental philosophers and I feel like uh Duloo and Guadia are still like an interesting place to go to to feel this anarctic spirit and a lot of things that I think would resonate with people who are also interested in privacy. So like the first this ryome chapter much talked about in the in the thousand plateaus is an amazing place to start if you're into this kind of thing.

And then uh

yeah what else? Um uh in art and in uh yeah I still think the more I the more I think about it the more I am in love with The Matrix. Oh, what a great movie. just so so accessible, so real about the conditions of our our lives right now and where we are and uh amazingly preient. So if you like something way much more easy and fun than those other options, you know, revisit the matrix and see uh see how much you identify with what it's really like there.

Wow. Thank you. That's a wonderful Dwight three in one.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. I hope

for watching. Ciao. This is something [Music]