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: 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.

Next-Generation DSLs and IRs

We discuss the future of higher-level langauges and circuit representations with developers from a number of toolstacks.

Cryptography on the Blockchain

I have a LocalCrypto.sol library (i.e. all in solidity) that supports El Gamal Encryption, One out of Two ZKP (i.e. either yes or no is encrypted), Pederson Commitments, Inequality proof (i.e. two commitments DO NOT commit to the same data), Equality proofs (i.e. two commitments DO commit to the same data), Discrete log equality proofs, and publicly verifiable secret sharing. I’m currently organising the code for public release (let others experiment with cryptography on the blockchain) – i’d like to present the library, its capability, some projects I have used it in and how people can start using it today.

Minimum Viable Privacy: Introducing Hopper

Hopper is an Open-Source Mixer for Mobile-friendly private transfers on Ethereum. It allows the private transfer of value from one Ethereum account to another, via an iOS client. Users can deposit notes of 1 ETH into a mixer smart contract and withdraw them later to a different account by only providing a Zero-Knowledge proof (zkSNARK) that they previously deposited a note into the mixer, without revealing from which account that note was sent. Relayers are used to post transactions to the blockchain so that the recipient of a private transfer can withdraw a private note from the mixer without needing any prior ether. This project is based on previous work on trustless Ethereum mixers by @barryWhiteHat and @HarryR. This talk will discuss the development of Hopper, how others can contribute, and the next steps to make it a true utility for the community.

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.

Why We Need Threshold FHE for Blockchains

There is a fundamental limit to building privacy-preserving applications in ZK. For example, we do not know how to replicate applications such as Uniswap and Aave in zero knowledge where complete privacy for users is achieved. This talk introduces how threshold FHE can help fill the gap ZK tech leave us desiring--privacy for shared-state applications.