devcon 7 / why vpns are scams and what to do about it
Duration: 00:08:58
Speaker: Harry Halpin
Type: Lightning Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2024
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: 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.
The History and Philosophy of Cypherpunk
Rather than bend to knee to Donald Trump, the goal of the cypherpunk movement is to abolish the state in order to maximize human freedom via privacy-enhancing decentralized technologie. After reviewing the history of this deviant group of programmers in the 1980s, what philosophical and technical lessons do the cypherpunks hold for Ethereum today? Censorship-resistant digital cash was only one the start, and the missing parts of their legacy: mixnets and anonymous credentials for identity.
Logs for you anon
The removal of log events has sparked a discussion about its implications for apps that rely on events to display information. Without logs, developers would need to use specialized software to index the chain and search for specific actions, which is costly, not friendly with privacy and requires a case-by-case approach. This is in contrast to the current system, where logs provide developers with the freedom to query the chain anonymously, without limits, and without sacrificing any detail.
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: 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.
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.
Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem
Robertas Visinskis gives their talk titled, "Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem"
Bringing peer-to-peer networks to ALL the peers
The p2p networks of the Ethereum ecosystem generally draw the line to server nodes. True end users devices: mobiles, laptops, browsers, are excluded and use centralised APIs and gateways to access the p2p network. Removing sovereignty, censorship-resistance and privacy in the process. In this lightning talk, we’ll review everything that can go wrong when trying to include resource restricted devices in a peer-to-peer network, using the most popular tools and libraries.