Decentralization Theatre | Migle Rakitaite [Swarm Foundation, WinPrivacy]

[applause]

To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take the arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die to sleep no more. Hi.

I'm Migle and I spent my childhood in a theater. I have seen every department that it takes to create something wonderful that will evoke emotion in a human being that perhaps will make their habits that they had yesterday to change today. In the departments at a theater, it can take anywhere up to year to 5 years to research one product how to make one item for the backstage. This is me in one of the plays of Han Christian Andersen. You have cinematographers, researchers, people building something that will evoke something that will showcase the future.

I wanted to start with Hamlet today because I think our industry became a little bit like the Hamlet. Decentralization, web 3, and even privacy, sometimes it feels like we see the madness unfolding in front of each other. We even document the madness, right? Hamlet was very much aware that he's going crazy and losing his mind. Yet, the outcome of our madness comes more often into the conference talks and the panels and then the Twitter feuds and then the etc.

etc. So, a little bit about me that I come from creative background, but without writing a single line of code for many years now, I'm hopping around different hackathons and I am trying to educate people why we need more communicators in this industry. So, up and around 2017, my best friend, who's a Bitcoin dinosaur, started telling me and trying to explain Bitcoin. And it took him almost 3 years until finally, when the CryptoKitties were coming out, so that was prior to '17, he was saying, "Miglena, I have to tell you about CryptoKitties because I told you about blockchain for like 2 years. You still don't really get it, but let me explain about CryptoKitties."

It took 5 minutes and I was like, "Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. So, this whole thing about Bitcoin you were telling me is just basically a computer and you can build a lot of different apps on this computer, right?" And he was like, "Yeah. Yeah, that's basically what it is."

So, what I'm trying to say is that for a very technical person, it took almost two, three years to explain what decentralization is. Um and that's why I do believe that in Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. And in the late in the last uh year, I've heard people starting to talk about decentralization from a very negative perspective. Decentralization theater as showcasing something that doesn't really work. And why?

Because we saw of the October 20th, 2025, when we had AWS servers crash and then unfortunately, half of the web 3 also going down under. And then I wondered to myself, it is not to blame or point the fingers that I want to touch this very delicate topic. It's to say that when I was doing my original research, I found such a thing called like swarm, which is decentralized storage. Then I read up about whisper, which is the communication tool. And of course, Ethereum serves as the smart contract navigator to steer the wheel forward.

So I thought, okay, if we kind of figured out the decentralization, why is it still not happening? Why do we go through this? Kind of feeling embarrassed, you know, saying we have the web 3, we decentralized everything. So, it is theater that we put on a front stage that everything is decentralized. Yet, I do think that theater is one of the most profound engines in human collaboration, resilience, and truth-telling invented.

So, in the next 5 minutes, I want to run you through three acts that I believe would help us to get closer to more privacy adoption and more decentralization adoption. So, first is the stage, and we need to start building with the hardness. So, I really like the idea that uh Josh Starks um shared with us that he believes that their traditional systems were built with very hard tangible items, right? So, the atoms, um the banks, the institutions. But then we gave the trust into the people, and we see what happens when you give the trust to the people and how they compromise their decision-making.

Now, when it comes to the blockchain, the systems, once they are deployed, the rules become programmable. It is hard to change, it's hard to censor. So, programmable rules is something that is hard truth. So, when I was thinking about the theater, right? This is the cardboard theater that we've been building because the ground up from the very bottom is not decentralized.

And that's why October 20th, 2025 happened. We started looking at the very front end and we started pretending that this theater is very beautifully built out. However, the back end of it was still very hard box. Right? So, even though we all agree that this is the theater that we want on the left side, um we're still our underground building.

So, remember how I said to build a good theater production can take years of research and collaboration between other departments? This is where I'm heading. Perhaps a lot of us have been split out into the different groups thinking that we are the only ones building this specific technology. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, we still need collaboration between different departments to make sure that our theater is sturdy. The Act Two, the cast.

So, in theater, as you can see in the picture there, I felt so accepted. I was the weirdo or the most colorful. I was the the odd one out, you know, um in any of the places that I would that I would be present in. And I never felt like I belonged, but I always felt like at the theater, finally I found my troop of people and they understand me and my quirkiness. And I think these are the people, too, right?

The original crypto rebels and the original cypherpunks. They felt like they did not belong and they found their people and they started moving towards something that will make them full expressive. And Estonian director, uh Eero Epner, he researched very in-depth that interactive theater can be used as a tool for democracy. But I want to point out that democracy here is not defined as a democracy in the politics. It's more about ethical collaboration and tribal decision-making.

So, this is where I also see us as the cast that we're responsible to continuously collaborate with one another to make sure that we don't end up again as the odd ones out in our small bubbles. The act three is the script. So, we have the infinite game on the script. For the most of the history, the script has been locked. The power to write the laws, to shape the money, to define the rules of the society are held by the very few.

Until the infrastructure itself becomes the mechanism of the control. And the script is only as powerful as the community's ability to read it, rewrite it, and protect it from being burned. So, what I'm trying to say here is that each of those different departments, in order to collaborate, truly needed to understand each craftsmanship and how much work and ethic it keeps on taking for you to truly bring it on the stage. So, I would love to see more honesty and collaboration within the privacy folks, people building very similar items, and sharing their research. But now, when it comes to the script, we need to leave it to the people to co-write it together.

There is a theory that comes from amazing um director and researcher of the theater Augusto Boal, and he created the tree of the oppressed. And this tree represents truly of the roots of how the theater started, that each performance needs to represent the ethics. And there is legislative theater, invisible theater, forum theater. So, there is a different types of the way people express and perform. And I felt like the invisible theater is that invisible layer of decentralization and privacy that more often than not is being forgotten and not being solved.

So, in my case, I thought, okay, how could it have we prevented October 20th? How about from the bottom up, we would have collaborated with the solutions that are already working? Perhaps someone was working on decentralized storage, and we could have tried penetrating that rather than going to the AWS. So, in my opinion, what is missing from us creating the theater stage that we want for the rest of the world to truly evoke the emotion why privacy is important is the willingness to collaborate more and treating the person sitting next to you as the collaborator and not as a competitor. Um tonight here after all of the conference talks, we will be live coding music that is stored on a blockchain.

That is something that never happened before and you get the best part, if you scan this QR code, you can upload any bit of sound that will be directly uploaded to blockchain and our coders will perform that song to you. So, I will not re-title this, but on a stage, I will want to invite four folks that are building somewhat similar things and represent different layers of the blockchain to have a very real conversation. What are we still missing in the decentralization stack and where are we lying to ourselves?