devcon 7 / cypherpunk for centuries coordination and secrecy across the ages
Duration: 00:05:30
Speaker: Evin McMullen
Type: Lightning Talk
Expertise: Beginner
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2024
Lunarpunk Endgame
Global surveillance is a static world where change is surpressed and society cannot evolve. In contrast, an anonymity-enhanced world resembles a forest. New civilizational experiments blossom like flowers, radiating outward from the freedom-fighters of the future. The lunarpunk end game is to enable a new ecology of social orders. This talk will describe the grand vision of lunarpunk: multipolar space-faring civilization, human speciation, and the reproduction life throughout the cosmos.
Keynote: Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again: Why we need privacy
The Web3 revolution seeks to address the sins of Web2. However, in doing so, it’s created an even worse outcome for users - users’ data is publicly available and makes them vulnerable to state-level censorship and adverse actions. This talk will address the philosophical as well as practical considerations of privacy in Web3. Privacy is an industry-wide issue and sits at the heart of all that is Web3. Understanding why privacy matters involves recognizing that it is not an isolated concept bu
Keynote: Glass Houses and Tornados
The Tornado Cash sanctions and criminal prosecutions have challenged longstanding assumptions within crypto about the limits of money transmission licensing, money laundering statutes, and sanctions laws. They've also revealed a longstanding assumption from some in policy and law enforcement circles: that blockchains have always been and must remain transparent. Neither assumption has served us well and the time has come for legal certainty. This talk is about how we get there.
Tending the Infinite Garden: Organizational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem
This presentation will discuss the findings of the academic paper "Tending the Infinite Garden: Organisational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem" by Dr. Paul-Dylan-Ennis and Ann Brody. Our study examines the decision-making processes fundamental to Ethereum's protocol governance, drawing on interviews with Ethereum's core developers. We identify a central worldview in Ethereum known as the "Infinite Garden" and discuss how Ethereum's social layer is crucial for upholding cypherpunk values.
Keynote: Lessons learned from Tor
I will share lessons learned during Tor's twenty years as free software fighting for privacy and human rights. We'll talk about distributed trust and privacy by design, how to help people understand the good uses of your tech, getting allies in both cypherpunks and government, why transparency and community-building are so essential to trust, and successes from other spaces. It may seem like the crypto wars never really end, but we all have a part to play in saving the world.
Keynote: How to Properly Open Source Software: Lessons Learned from the Linux Foundation
It can be challenging to properly open source software: there are licenses, IP, security reporting, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In this talk, we will discuss the best practices for open source software development learned from almost 25 years of experience at the Linux Foundation. Attendees will learn about how to set up their projects for a variety of potential goals, including things like maximizing security and community building.
Financial Nihilism vs FOSS Culture: The Battle for Ethereum’s Soul
In recent years, the Ethereum ecosystem has witnessed a stark dichotomy: the rise of financial nihilism through memecoins and rampant speculation on one side, and the foundational principles of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community, emphasising public goods, interdependence, and intrinsic rewards, on the other. This talk will delve into the experiences of interacting with FOSS developers, shedding light on their views and concerns regarding Ethereum’s current trajectory.
FOSSify yourself for privacy and security
You will leave this workshop at least a bit more cypherpunk than when you came. The session will introduce FOSS stack of tools for all platforms. We will discuss free operating systems, GNU/Linux distros, GrapheneOS, secure communication, browsing, hardware options and secure environment for handling your crypto or Ethereum validators. The workshop is interactive and open to anyone to participate. Join us to find free and open solutions to your problems or come to share your favorite foss tools!
Making defensive technology offensive: How to get cypherpunk ideals to the masses
Cryptography is an inherently defensive tool; it hides your information from adversaries. This is crucial to prevent censorship or monitoring of your data. But it's often sold to consumers with fearmongering about all-powerful malicious actors, which is often ignored by all except the privacy-conscious. We explore real-life examples of offensive cryptographic affordances like interoperability, efficiency, and user consent as stronger motivations for the masses to migrate to cypherpunk tech.
How scaling impacts privacy
This will be a presentation or panel discussing the positive and negative privacy consequences of scaling to mainstream use. By considering the data stored on blockchains, now, we can speculate about the use of it in the future and how it can be analyzed at scale. We will explore specific data types and common use cases, including data mining. The goal of this session is to help the community know how privacy will be impacted when cryptocurrency reaches mainstream use and explore the societal consequences of personal data collection and decentralization of systems.