"Cypherpunk Values meet Encryption: from infra to app" - Panel // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025

[applause] Yeah, my name is Payman. I'm founder of Fairblock and we primarily working on confidential stable coins. So if you want to make like a normal payment on chain as an institution, as a normal trader, a user, uh ideally your payment shouldn't be leaked on chain. whatever you are doing shouldn't be leaked uh just like normal word and that's like what we are trying to do make it seamless and fast and like compliant and passing it to

yeah so um glad to be gladly sitting here and my background is technical so I did a PhD in cryptography I realized what modern cryptography has been doing is really enabling big tech everything that we've been doing encryption um you know in speeding up um you know TLS sessions things like that there's clearly like two segments to cryptography one is helping big tech and one is empowering individuals and those two are actually quite different and that's why I um left academia to join crypto and I I've designed and shipped privacy protocols launching assets um but but these days I'm by by trade I'm a VC so um there's that

oh yeah uh my name in his way.

Hey guys, uh this is Cos. Um I guess right now in a pretty with a pis garden, we just wrap up a three-week like residency with privacy focused developers uh cryptographers coming from the US, China, uh Europe. That was fun, quite fun. And uh yeah, in terms of context, I found that the Venezuela has always been like privacy centric in the face of great powers. Uh so it's kind of tricky and also helping out with the economic space agency building post capitalist uh protocols which is fun.

Yeah, I just fully anonymized which is fun. [laughter] Nice.

Hello. Can you hear me? So my name is Victor Tron. I'm the president of the SW Foundation which is a kind of a spin-off from the EF was one of the first teams to that that spawned into a different foundation back in 2020. and uh and susum is usually usually discussed under the under the the label of decentralized storage protocol.

This is going to appear to be a storage protocol that has a very strong privacy features. This is how it fits into this kind of cyber bank vision. So maybe we can talk about these details and how it comes together with other solutions in this panel.

Okay. I guess um we can make it a little bit fun and

Yeah. Yeah. And obviously we are all always talking about cipher punk values and like this and that and privacy, right? But what's cipher punk to you? Is it like something like a ser like a just a Mr.

Robot series, something for like teenagers in campus or does it really affects you on a daily life basis as like an adult? Does it saves you money? Is it for big guys to like what does it matter to you personally?

Yeah. So to me I think there's this struggle between uh provide sovereignty, privacy kind of self-citative assets to individuals that's to me the may if you were to distill like the the core values of of the cypher punks I would say right um I think if we have cryptography then we don't have to have intermediaries in many many situations for for communication um for data in transit data at rest, right? And more recently for for assets movements and asset at rest. Um, and it's really about empowering individuals um to achieve whatever the goals may be. And and I think right there's always this tension between empowering individuals and kind of empowering nation states.

Um, and I think that part is is where the nuance come in. Um but to me yeah always at the core is it's how do we how do we give the maximum amount of power to individuals against surveillance um you know against unnecessary uh information collection so on so forth. Yeah, I gotta disclose I'm not technical. Uh I got into wet tree around 2010. So like pretty early on.

I mean there was no wet tree that wasn't coin. Um but I got in from the grassroots like you know political activism kind of things. So for me it's an everyday logic of being cipher punk being like slightly loner punk and like okay yeah the technology let's be optimistic but um in that logic like my life has been how do we use these technologies um it's really difficult to get the people on the ground journalists activists etc to actually tap into these technologies from a practical way so that's always been my struggle the last like I don't know even advocating for maybe since I was underage like 25 years maybe. So [laughter] it's like since forever. Um that's a struggle I think is being addressed.

I think this is the one of the best places to be to have those difficult conversations of how we had this very high ideas and technologies and how we ground them into actually being used by the people that are at the forefront or like you know having being cipher punk from the everyday perspective. Thank you. Well, so Cypher Bank is definitely the movement I identify most with and I would I would really emphasize the the kind of the social impact um aspect as aspect of it. How how it imagines the that um privacy and and and all these priv private interactions can actually shield protect individuals and empower individuals against the against maybe state actors, other actors kind of impeding on their on their liberties. and how how what what kind of social social change this can have as a result in in general I would say that that maybe kind of philosophical underpinning maybe it's a bit provocative question maybe I just kind of open it up anyway so how how about how about you think of of of interaction between humans individuals or okay maybe even not even humans just AI agents kind of being being generally if it's if it's voluntary and well informed it's kind of the the definition of value creation.

The best you can you can kind of get get out of any system is to enhance this this kind of value creation the most uh possible the best best possible way which means that you have to you must uh kind of uh yeah you must improve improve information. So basically must cater for the information information freedom and also kind of make the interaction economic interactions between people the the freest and most possible way basically eliminate let's say eliminate the four four efforts. So friction, fraud, fallacy and and force. Yeah. Basically any any any any kind of direction any technical uh solution that goes into these directions will enhance value creation in general and therefore kind of a has a positive impact on society.

What do you think of that?

Okay, perfect. So my next question is about obviously we didn't have a great great adoption for privacy technologies so far and there is multiple kind of technologies there is and there's different problems and but where do you see the actual blocker is it more of a psychological thing that like a normal person in the streets doesn't really care about privacy doesn't affect it like their day-to-day problems that much is it because of technology zk proves are like not that fast or like all of these privacy projects are very inaccessible. Um like where do you see the actual blockers like what if you want to choose like one problem that should be solved in next five years what's what should be

I I think I can answer this. So I think I I think maybe this kind of I approach it from higher level. So I think that this may be a general kind of confusion about you know private data and private and calculating with private data. So often often people mention like I don't know medical data is the most is kind of the best example of that. So people are very um against the idea of having the the the private and medical medical data or some sort of health related personal data exposed to the public.

At the same time would really like to use the aggregate aggregate statistics or aggregate um things that calculate from many people's uh private data personal data. And uh so what what we need to solve with this is kind of how to how to use personal data in a way that no no that information doesn't leak to be honest and also most people can actually benefit from the from the aggregate aggreate result of of of process pro process data like that and it's this conflict is also not resolved on the conceptual level. It's not clear whether what it means that people want to know for example the providence of of some high level data data calculate data whether the D was included I mean this also kind of maybe translates to the same problem in kind of AI where the LMS can include some personal data personal information about you still you want to kind of you want that provenence information about it but at the same time you don't want them explicitly expose your it's about you it's a bit of a conflicting or other than the conceptual level. So if any anything one of you can shed light on how how they imagine solved in the in the in the near future would be amazing.

So maybe let's do a quick show of hands. How many of you here use Telegram? Okay, a lot of hands. How many of you here use WhatsApp? Okay, a little little bit less.

What about Signal? Oh, great. Well, we are at the Cypher Punk Congress. So that it looks like everyone uses all three apps. Um so WhatsApp recently in implemented a solution for you to use AI without actually having uh your data being exposed.

And they use this very complex engineered well very well engineered system that use trusted execution environments to um effectively like run AI inference over over the data that that they have on you. and um and y'all works with pretty good UX and this was audited by I think recently by trail bits. So um you know since the title of the panel is from infrastructure to apps I think really the end users will use apps the original you know group of cypher punks are all developers they all like computer programmers um and and they're power users right and so if we build tools they're only for power users they're not going to reach the most amount of people and so privacy is essential privacy needs to be a key feature of these apps. And today all these applications need to kind of go all the way to to implement privacy, right? And I think to really get privacy everywhere, we need we need to build better tools, but also have these product builders realize that privacy is a key feature.

Maybe this is through regulation actually, right? That that things need to be encrypted uh at rest. Um maybe this is through just better tools. Um, but really the problem with over the past I would say 20 30 years is just it's really hard to build privacy into things, right? Application builders don't really know how to use it unless you give them a really good interface.

Um, there's still no way to for you to build a good end to en encrypted messaging apps unless you have uh the knowledge of how to use, you know, the current state of the art cryptography like of ratchet uh encryption and um, for example, like the MLS protocol, right? and and and and there's definitely still a big gap despite decades of work.

I mean, I I've been in situations where my mom has been a liability, so that's just communicating with her [laughter] be tricky. Um we we had a closing ceremony to our residency yesterday and we had the people from Peanut. Peanut has like been on the you know, you look into the Devcon chat, a lot of people are asking like, "How do I deal with Argentinian currency? How do I do payments?" And it's a trade-off.

is like to pay locally on like Mercado P was scanning QR code they had to KYC. So we did a peanut rose and we asked them a bunch of like privacy questions. I was like, "Hey, I don't know." People were going from like, "When can I as um sign up as a Chinese citizen?" It's like, "Well, you will still have to KYC.

That's not not really the greatest question, but like where's the code? Where is this? Where is that?" Eventually, we came kind of to this logic of like KYC is the real enemy regardless is the trade-off of usability, good UX like how to adoption like this is different kinds of things versus privacy. I think um that's one that's one logic, but we had a great opportunity with one of the most complex enemies of privacy being out there and being trending all the time, which is AI.

We had somebody come over to the conference and being like, "Oh, I actually had an AI in my pocket recording absolutely everything and then summaring what happened here and what should I listen to and what should I follow up with?" And we were like, "What the bro? like [laughter and gasps] can you can you like and it's it's a friend that I met like a couple of times. I was like well maybe I don't know like you know I don't feel comfortable talking to you like anymore because it's like becoming quite strange. So having that presence in the room that elephant in the room really allow us to talk about privacy more often to like common people like everyday people because now it's everywhere.

Now it's becoming a thing. Now it's not only big government listening. It's like everyday kind of like people. There was a massive attack concert here uh in Buenocidis and they were like doing the thing of face scanning people at the for at the front and people were kind of like celebrating and chilling. I was like well okay I noticed some people talking about it but it wasn't it kind of got normalized really fast which is scary but it poses very interesting like conversation uh sparks.

So anyway it's a great opportunity just to So last question um there is ideologies in terms of like if we should fight the governments obviously everyone wants to not have a surveillance government right if we should have the best application with privacy nobody's opposing it but there is reality as well right there is like performance issues there is compliance issues there is the use case design issues UX issues and the question is that when we are designing applications with privacy preserving application is it a race that We only have five years years five years left to make something that is pretty good privacy or we should take like a more slower approach and spend like the next like 20 years to make like the most robust mechanism that governments doesn't have any back doors or any controls and like it's good enough like it's completely perfect like where like is it cutting corners is it like we are running out of time

very good question so let me break this down so whenever we talk about privacy it's very important to talk about what type of privacy like so privacy is usually for information right what type of information are we talking about what are the possible categories out there well the most important one I would say is communication privacy right so that that's like all the messaging protocols are for you know and you want end to end encryption for that right so when I when I communicate with with payon right we there shouldn't be any intermediaries right should be like in person conversation and then there's data privacy right so your health information with your doctors um well your doctors may share that with other healthcare providers, right? And and um so so for your data privacy, there's what data that is and and maybe there's data custodians um and you know, we don't want data brokers to sell that data, right? For example, on social media sites and then there's onchain asset privacy and and that has really turned around the notion of oh we need intermediaries for for these transactions, right? So Bitcoin showed us we don't need intermediaries. anybody in the world can transact and and that's it turns out it's very very hard to get privacy for these onchain assets and that's I think right we we're at Ethereum conference that's we're all here for and I would say that's a very very different category and over there we have solutions we have the technology but really we don't have a social consensus on like how yeah how do we get there how do we protect individuals but also be able to potentially deter malicious nation states and then there's for for example voting privacy and and that's again very different than all the other categories ories and so we really had to look at each category differently.

I would say for communication privacy we have really really good technical solutions no back doors governments are trying to get control it we should say no communication is freedom of speech um you can kind of take that away from us right and for data privacy as well I I I think GDPR is a step in the right direction but maybe implemented uh incorrectly because everyone just click the banner uh and it's actually really bad so you know there's a lot of work and and I think for onchain privacy it's we're we're pretty nent like in terms actual deployment of these protocols in terms of TVL in terms of like market share of of privacy protocols um and voting privacy just in nency um you know most countries still do pay and paper ballots right um you know how do how do you do like this what is called corion resistant voting right in electronic manner um yeah it's challenges everywhere and it really depends on the type

yeah so I agree very much so some dimensions that are worth considering is of course what type of privacy in terms what data it concerns but also kind of I would just also like to separate between like the deployment of the technology and the kind of the maturity of the actual technological solution behind it. So for example I I totally agree that communication privacy is kind of a soft problem both both in terms of anonymity of the of the of the parties as well as the confidentiality of the of the content of course and also in case of like swarm kind of influencer messaging that also kind of mask any kind of metadata. basically it's zero zero leak protocols and and and I think I I also think that these are kind of ready to deploy and ready to be used and and there's no compromise we should we should get on it of course not not to mention that if you have a infiltration on your device it's a totally different matter but let's not talk about that and uh when it comes to voting yes so for example zk zk uh is is is quite a quite a beast so it's it's a lot of complexity and stuff and we really just I mean and seeing what is ZK research is quite scary in terms of the usual usual very conservative space of of of of cryptographic research how it's deployed usually it's quite a conservative um scene because for a reason and I but I think for example with with voting you're right it's nowhere near deployed kind of any any kind of a privacy voting protocol on the other hand it's a very good very good uh solution for ZK it's kind of a really feasible physical solution or for zero knowledge and as for home incubation that's relevant for AI and and this kind of person medical data aggregation I think it's a it's really for the future to decide whether the current direction is correct I'm really not sure and I'm also not an expert on these fields but um yeah so

well [laughter] uh oh my god um from the social perspective not being technical. I think like yes, we're almost at that point that kind of like almost running out of time. I think it's just not building one thing or the other. It's just having these spaces where the people that are building these technologies meet and using the technology to communicate across like who's building like using the technology to communicate online as well about these things. It's just like it needs to be cohesive like different groups are building different components for the same kind of logic.

We need to be aligned into how we use these resources. If everybody's like fundraising from the same kind of like groups and then like building the same things from you know perspective alignment like modular approaches uh yes and having more of these conversations is super important. Shout out to Cippher Punk Congress and thank you guys for what you guys been building. Yeah. So thank you guys.

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