All right, everybody, this is a mirror because we've lost a little bit of time to project
our issues.
I would love it if we can give him all the time to present, and if you've got questions
for him, we can take it into the hallway, I want to get your questions, but at the same
time, I want to give him all the time necessary that he needs to show off what he's working
on.
This is, I forgot, darfies, zero knowledge cryptography for anonymous unsensored organizations.
Yep, I will do, I will do an intrarier as well.
If stickers, if you haven't got them.
Okay, so how do I, how do I fall screaming, can I help him?
Super and plus.
Oh, arrow up.
Eyebrillant.
And how do I switch?
What up?
Yeah, I'm eating.
Oh, I don't know exactly.
This is too normal for me.
Oh, yeah, there we go.
Why can't we just have a Mac?
Ooh, no, he didn't.
Okay, how do I?
The hell?
Okay.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Amir Taki.
I'm a free software developer of 20 years.
I was one of the first five Bitcoin developers mainly worked on anonymity and privacy tech.
I made the first coin join and stealth addresses on Bitcoin.
And in this talk, I'm going to talk about Darkfire, which is an L1 for anonymous application.
So, you know, what does that mean means like anonymous payments, anonymous communications,
anonymous DAOs, all the tools that we need to build anonymous unsensored organizations in the internet on the internet.
So, you know, we're at Phos Dam and, you know, when I was, you know, 15, 16, I was very inspired by the internet.
I was inspired by free software movement and what it meant for the future of economics and, you know, people organizing together.
And I saw, like, this huge potential for what Linux could become.
And today, you know, we went through this period, post 2000s, where, you know, Ubuntu, the open source kind of movement.
This one ideology stuff was all about, you know, trying to play catch up to Windows.
Trying to be, you know, the next thing after Windows, and we were always one step behind.
And the consequence of that was the, you know, Linux was always just a shitty alternative.
And today we're undergoing a kind of Renaissance.
This is like my view in Linux is where people are trying to understand what went wrong exactly.
And actually the, the value proposition of Linux, which, you know, proprietary software is a company gives a piece of software to its users.
The users consume that software.
And, you know, when something's wrong with the software.
I mean, this is a story of Storman and, you know, why he went and hacked the printer.
When something's wrong, you're just reduced the banking, the organization.
We all see that, you know, I don't know, sonos speakers or reddit.
You know, some unpopular feature and the users are just reduced to making petitions.
They're completely powerless.
And, you know, even read something recently, which said that, you know, Gen Z doesn't know how to use a printer.
Gen Z doesn't know how to use a file system.
And the fact is this Silicon Valley proprietary paradigm.
It creates software.
There's deliberately engineered for the mass market for, you know, in, and there's not my words.
This is what they, how they see people is low IQ, normie cattle.
And the fact is that the, the, they're doing that because they're like,
this, we need to onboard this huge amount of people, but not only this simplified view of a human being.
It actually ends up people become like that.
And, and, you know, when you, when you look, for example on the Mac, you see indeed that the file system is hidden from you.
So, you're not, it's something you're not meant to know about.
In fact, you become disempowered as a user.
So, us as Linux people, we're starting to realize that a Linux, it's not Windows, it's not Mac, it's a Linux.
Linux enables people to build infrastructure to become powerful.
However, we've, we've come and reached a kind of standpoint where, you know, we're creating applications and people use the applications.
And they're, they're all run locally, but they, you know, a lot of what we're doing today is like collaborative.
We're like, we're organizing together, people are mobilizing, people are, you know, the internet is connected and people are going to change.
You know, how do people do that? People are using Google documents.
People are using surveillance capitalism, big tech.
And so, we haven't been able to put forward a paradigm for that.
I mean, even this conference, like you look at, it's sponsored by Google and Microsoft.
We, as a free software community, we don't even have the economics behind that.
So, you know, dark-fi, this is our project, which is just a small piece of this larger puzzle.
But what we're interested in is strong anonymity.
Because, you know, the early days of, you know, cryptocurrency when Bitcoin was starting, a lot of us thought we believed fairly strongly that this would usher in this new age.
Because, you know, had this new form of, you know, money on the internet.
And, you know, there's one of the main reasons I go into it was because I saw the potential for how free software could provision infrastructure.
And we could use that to scale up.
And that, that didn't, that vision of, you know, agarist society.
It didn't come to be, and instead, what we've got is institutional capture.
And, you know, our thesis is that a big reason why this, this is because of the lack of anonymity.
If you're creating a movement on the internet, political movement, if people are not protected,
and they're going out there and they're trying to change the way, trying to actively change things.
If you don't have the means to defend yourself from attack, you know, like, you know, you're doing something, it's challenging the status quo.
You can't survive as an organization in the internet.
Now, we live in a very interesting time now as well, because we're in inflection point where, you know, five years ago, ten years ago,
you know, you would tell people about, you know, how technology was being used to create this architecture of oppression,
and people thought that was crazy.
You'd tell people that, you know, London has high stress, CCTV, and, you know, people didn't, people like, it's not really happening.
But then Snowden came out, and that suddenly became a lot more real for people.
And then, you know, even a year ago, two years ago, there was this attitude amongst people, where they were like, okay, yes.
We know that things, we know that they're spying on us, we know that, you know, people are being divided, and, you know,
the social fabric is being broken down, but there's nothing we can do about it.
This is all pervasive nihilism, but more recently, there is a shift happening where people are becoming optimistic,
and people are like, we actually have the power to change things, and we can mobilize to change things.
And this is where we as technologists come in with this means to be able to change things.
And, you know, in dark five, what we're using is zero knowledge proofs, and zero knowledge proofs, most of you probably know, but some don't.
But zero knowledge proof is very powerful piece of kit, because what you can do is, you know, normally if you have a function, let's say it's a function, you know,
the proofs, and it takes three parameters, sx, y, and it computes something, can it outputs some value, and I give you the output, that function, I say this value is the output of a function, and then you go to me, okay,
okay, how do I know that that's true?
Normally the way I do that is, you have the function, I give you the inputs to the function, you put it in the function, and you get the output,
but zero knowledge proof, you don't need the inputs, and you don't even know what the inputs are, you just know that this was computed as the output of a function.
So you can construct statements, like, you know, here's a set of like, I don't know, people that can vote in a vote, and then each person when they vote, you go like, okay, here's my, I have one of these votes in the set,
and I've constructed a vote, and I've constructed this nullifier that now means I can't double vote, and there's no way to cheat that protocol.
And so, before when we are constructing anonymous applications five, ten years ago, you know, I had to know this, you had to know a lot of very specific math to construct a schema, but now it's a very general toolkit.
So you now have the ability as a developer to go and construct any anonymous application, basically, and there are even more interesting calls, tools coming, like, intent in, in distinguishability of the application, which means that you can have a function, and everybody can have this function, and the function can say data like secret keys, and it can sign messages, but you can't see what that secret data that the function holds,
or NPC, like, or, you know, FHE, et cetera, a lot more interesting math crypto that's coming on the horizon.
We can leverage these tools, and we can build infrastructure that's privacy preserving the enables people to build organizations, and enables a new sphere of activity for people to change things.
So, you know, that's people mobilizing.
So, one of our thesis is the lunar punk cycle thesis, which is that, you know, there are two kinds of systems, there are fragile systems and anti-fragile systems, and a fragile system.
When you shake it, it breaks down, and example of fragile system is, you know, corporate companies, you know, that are dependent on, you know, money from VCs, and, you know, the financial system.
And, you know, whenever that system experiences a crisis or a shock, you know, then, you know, liquidity exists from that, and people exit from that.
Whereas an anti-fragile system, the more that it gets shaken, the stronger it gets, and so, a good example of that is, you know, when you create privacy tools for people, and you're like, you know, you need these privacy tools to preserve your rights,
to preserve your speech, you know, your ability to organize as communities.
And, as soon as, you know, your community experiences a crackdown or oppression against it, suddenly, you see, it validates why this thing needs to exist.
And it's suddenly, and it becomes like, oh, these tools are actually crucial to our survival, to our existence.
And so, we're kind of in an arms race where the better, the anonymity tools that we create, the more the surveillance system crackdown.
So, that's the thing. So, yeah, so I'll talk a bit. So, oh, okay.
So, here's some of the tools that we made in dogfight. We have the world's first and only anonymous style.
And this was, you know, the reason we created this was in the Assange case.
Basically, the US, well, their strategy was to bankrupt him, and they basically, they basically nearly did that.
And then Assange came and came to us, and they were like, look, we need to do something.
And so, we created this, the Assange style, which raised 55 million, and that's basically what bankrupt Assange's freedom.
But it was a dowel, a dowel's like an organization where the members vote on chain, they manage it, they can manage a treasury, etc. Collectively, is completely anonymous.
The one we made in dogfight, completely anonymous. But the one for Assange style, it wasn't anonymous.
And so, they're all the, basically killed or the action, because, and who wants to act for a political prisoner, you're just some random dude, you know, you do something for Assange.
They come after you and put you in jail. Nobody's going to know who you are, anything.
And they can make an example of you. So, it just stopped people in the dowel mobilizing to help Assange.
And in the end, what the dowel did was send the money to the while Holland Foundation.
So, we made that dowel, because we're like, oh, this is one of the tools we need.
So, since I only have like five minutes, I'll just show as well we released the first version of our app, you can download it on our GitHub releases page, you know, like I can show you see.
This, this gets so posting has begun. So, but that's fully anonymous peer to peer chat. And you go, okay, well if it's peer to peer, how do you stop spam?
There is a technique we could use called rate limit nullifiers, where every epoch, you produce a ZK proof that you have a certain, that you have a key pair that's staking a certain amount.
You produce some data. And then if you double-post in an epoch, like if you're a spammer trying to flood the network, then you could then because you've posted two shares of the same secret data that allows people to calculate the private key and then they can slash you.
So, there's a lot of these kind of techniques that we can use to build a PTP anonymous software. We have our own ZKVM, our own ZK compiler, ZK debugger, that's what you see in the top right, you know, wallet, etc.
These two tools are actually tools to view the network, PTP network topology, so we built our own PTP network. It has tool, it can have name, it has plugable transport, so it's multi-transport.
The apps we didn't want to use get-hub because get-hub is actually a source of liability, so we have our own anonymous task manager, so we don't use the get-hub issues. It's fully anonymous PTP, you know, we have swaps, we have anonymous payments.
But this is a general toolkit, there's not we're just building applications, anybody can come and make apps and do ZK proofs, etc. So, yeah, so apologies not, I didn't go through deep in the tech or the app side or, you know, I just did the intro, but I'll stop there.
Question, someone raise their hand, right here, who's here.
How do we find more information about the apps and trying to get into the app?
Yeah, you can go on the website, doc.fi, go on the docs, go in the telegram, and join this chat, download this up, join this chat.
And you see, they've meet every Monday, so yeah, thank you.