Okay. Yeah. So in terms of my background, I'm originally from The United States. I, I went to actually the University of North Platte Chapel Hill, where I was too poor to study, Marxism because they don't let poor people study Marxist in The United States. But I did take the bus up to Duke, so I did Hegel under Frederick Jameson and Marx under Michael Hart. And I'm not a socialist, just to be clear. I'm I'm an anarchist, always happen. And unless someone really does a good job convincing me otherwise, always will be. But I do think a a a understanding of Marx in particular is vital to understanding, our kind of present day, historical conditions. I, did my PhD in artificial intelligence with Andy Clark in Edinburgh postdoc and, essentially what who knows what he was doing with with Bernard Stiegler in France, and, and then led, standardization of cryptography at MIT. And finally was working with the European Commission on privacy technologies as a French government employee of all things, INRIAN, which is the French, kind of computer science research institute. And then finally, we took some of that research and spun that up into, NIM Technologies. So that's kinda my background as a whole. I've done activism from indie media to environmental stuff or all of the stuff for for years. And I used to be pretty involved in social movements, have not been super involved because being a, CEO is actually a lot of work. So I have not had too much time, for social movements in the last, I would say, few years.

Yeah. I mean, privacy is is is very important for anyone involved in politics regardless of if they're on the left or right. If you wanna try to convince someone, that you're not creating a, dystopian hellscape, you have to provide some, guarantees that they will have privacy and autonomy and freedom. And if you're trying to work, if you're trying to actually do something using blockchain technologies ranging from DAOs or Defi, just sending Bitcoin from person to person, given that a large amount of activity either is illegal or will be illegal in most jurisdictions in the world, people should be aware that what they're doing is just transparent, and people should have the right to choose the level of transparency, that they believes, is the right amount that they feel comfortable with and that complies whatever rules they want to comply with, that they feel that they should comply with. And so privacy essentially is a a bedrock for, almost every cryptographic system. The problem is that privacy is not well understood. So privacy does not mean cryptography. Cryptography is about security. It's about providing technical properties. Like, you can't read my message of if you're not the intended recipient. That's confidentiality and authentication. Privacy is actually quite different. It's about unlinkability. It's about, I don't even know that you sent the message. I don't know who you sent the message. I might not know when the message was even sent or if it was even sent. So these are very much harder to achieve set of privates, properties and security. They typically build on top of security. And, and if you think about it, it's very real world. Right? So if I'm, you know, if I'm worried about government surveillance, let's say I'm an activist in Egypt, you know, I criticize the government. I don't wanna get killed. Actually, I think, Nadia from Pussy Riot emailed me that she was using Tor for this purpose in Russia earlier, today. And then what happens is you have to use some sort of privacy enhanced system to essentially guarantee that your IP address or other information does not leak, so your geographical location is not leaked. Because if you leak your geographical location, you could be perhaps found if you're hiding. If you're communicating to other activists and, let's say you're in affinity group, you're in a protest, you know, and you're using, let's say, even burner phones, but let's say you're probably using your real phone. I've noticed that's become unfortunately more and more popular, and a few idiots have suggested that's a good idea. But the problem with that approach is that that phone metadata is all going through a phone company, which can record you where you were, which often link you to things you might not want to be linked to, and, can link you to all your friends. So if they, don't like you, they may also not like your friends, and your friends could get in trouble. And, you know, this leads to to really terrible situations. We have a lot of evidence in countries like Syria where they would use the hacking of what appear to be peer to peer technologies like Skype in order to track down, imprison and kill, Syrian, dissidents. So, you know, I think if you are an activist, you're doing anything remotely practical in your life, you should be concerned about metadata, and you should be supporting and trying, although I have to admit most technology is pretty unusable. Supporting technologies like Tor, or NIM in the future, that provide some level of privacy as opposed to just using, say, signal or just using whatever crazy new block chain thing is

Yeah. So a lot of people are very concerned about advertising, based surveillance, and I'm also concerned. I don't think, and the business model of the Internet is effectively surveilled, particularly web two point o. So anyone who supports, somehow, the web's current business models is against web three. This would be a mistake insofar as that web two kind of guarantees that the only business model surveillance, while the web three, you can imagine at least there's other kinds of business models. And the problem though is that, what I've seen because I read Zuboff's book and stuff, and, you know, she's smart, but she's definitely no mark. She's very much a a a privileged liberal Harvard. She's a liberal. Yeah. Very much a liberal. And, and I think the problem of the liberal analysis of this of this entire situation is that first thing, it gets a little bit confused. So surveillance, historically, surveillance as a capitalist business model is actually a little new or at least has reached this kind of hyperdrive moment with web two. Historically, mass surveillance, including NSA digital surveillance, was done, by nation states against other nation states or against dissidents. So, you know, if you I wanna hack you know, if I'm the Syrian government, I would like to hack Skype to kill some dissidents. You know? I I I, as Assad, cannot necessarily just email Microsoft and be like, hey. Give me all that wonderful login, logout information you have with all the IP addresses and all the contact list. Instead, I typically have to backdoor that software, or I have to monitor the software using essentially state controlled, telephone, telco companies of which there are are all all state controlled in Syria. And so I I do wanna often, I think the problem that Zuboff has and a lot of criticism capitalism has in it inherently is that it gets a bit confused that the problem that someone is selling my data and not giving me money for, it's not really clear how much your data is worth. I may agree it's a problem, but that's a very I would say it was a very first world western problem. The problem of surveillance typically, is actually more it's like, you know, like, a problem a lot of DeFi projects has is that people don't get returns, so they get rug pull, and they lose money. The problem a lot of privacy projects has that if the privacy software doesn't work, people could get tracked and killed. That tracking killing is typically not done by Silicon Valley directly. It's done by, mostly governments, sometimes criminals or gangs, some of, like, non nation state actors, but mostly governments, to be honest, in terms of actually putting people in physical danger and imprisoning them. In terms of, like, Silicon Valley, now it's not true Silicon Valley is antagonistic. Various companies have, at various points, refused to cooperate. So, for example, the Twitter, historically refused to cooperate with US subpoenas on, for example, WikiLeaks volunteers, so on and so forth. But then you're seeing, you know, Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt write a book about AI and that Google is cooperating very heavily. So I think at this point, what you're seeing is a slow merger, which is kind of natural given the kind of monopoly capital status that Silicon Valley has, with US Government interest and, Silicon Valley, and that you're gonna see increased militarization of personal data captured originally for advertising. Originally, when advertising, you know, I don't like it, but it's not gonna you know, I don't think it's gonna make me, you know, vote for Trump or brainwash me by Russians. I think it's all quite silly. I think it has some subtle behavioral effects, but I'm not every day in my life worried that I am mind controlled by, by Facebook ads or something like that. That being said, I am very concerned, that, for example, email data, contact data, and all of this. But anything which is essentially in Gmail is probably United States government. Now, you know, I'm also not a so, you know, there there are various governments in the world. They all are, have problems. I don't necessarily think that, for example I don't know. Name a nice, what's it Finland. Yeah. Finland. But also, let's say, you know, let's not pretend that, like, you know, I've been to Cuba. It's not nearly as bad as people have said, but I'm not gonna pretend the Cuban government's gonna be nice to dissidents. Even Finland's not gonna be nice to dissidents. So there are many, you know, a general every government wants to control its population to maintain the power of the ruling class, and they will do this through surveillance to control in order to direct physical violence towards dissidents. And so that's kinda like our main concern, at least at NIM. That's my main concern. That's why I started the project. And I think Silicon Valley will give The US, soft power edge in that. Other you know, in China, that same edge will be given by, the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley companies. Countries which do not have these kinds of surveillance technology companies will be essentially colonized in the form of cyber colonialism. Our cofounder, George Denise, has had a nice, blog on that by countries that do sell surveillance technologies or have access to surveillance data. So for example, Saudi Arabia has to choose. You know, they wanna kill their own dissidents. Who are they gonna work with? They're gonna work with Russia or China with The US to find that work in The US and getting data request from Google. And, you know, it's in a over the long stretch of time, most governments will do this. I don't think The US will maintain, Internet superiority forever. It's clearly an empire in decline. And so we we are gonna see a world where many, many different governments are all essentially trying to repress their own dissidents because, obviously, we we have global problems which are cross borders, climate change, economic crisis, so on and so forth. And, yeah, it's gonna get worse and worse, and that's why you need privacy technology, not just to prevent advertising, not just as ad block, but also, you know, to really prevent even nation state level adversaries from knowing who you're talking to when and where all the time. Do you wanna talk a bit? I've I've read into that,

Yeah. No. I was involved in, movements, to, essentially, at that time, we thought prevent, although that's at this point probably not possible, to at least raise awareness at very least around the issues of climate change and climate catastrophe. This is about more than ten years ago. I was, we built, climate camps where people used civil disobedience to shut down, coal burning power plants in The UK to bring attention to the fact that UK was actually constructing more coal burning power plants. I had a personal, undercover cop, called Mark Kennedy aimed at me. I was one of the organizers of protests against what was called the cop summit recently happened in Glasgow and Scotland. But at that point, I think 2009, maybe '10, was in Denmark and Copenhagen. The undercover cops, targeted me for arrest. They, beat me up, and they arrested me. And then I was put on various blacklists. I was, I mean, I did get out. They didn't actually have any reason to arrest me. I was a delegate, for example, at Copenhagen. But at the same point, as soon as the undercover police, began focusing on me, I cannot, for example, go to, manifestations, without, for example, you know, basically bringing attention to everyone else I was near. So I was more or less forced to stop, insofar as I didn't want to endanger, any other protesters or any people in social movements. Yeah. You know? And it's and that happened in The UK with the, help of the United States government, and with the, eventually spread to France, and definitely with the help of the Danish government. And, yeah. So, you know, something as innocent as climate change protesting was viewed as the equivalent of, you know, domestic terrorism, I would say, about ten years ago. And so all this crocodile tears over CO two, we knew I mean, everyone, including climate change scientists, were saying the exact same thing, ten years ago. And rather than listen to us, they, tried to put us in jail and, blacklist us from even having, you know, jobs and stuff. So we're very you know, I I think, to some extent, though, the nice thing about undercover police is that you can see them. They can be identified. Our undercover cop, his girlfriend found his fake passport, and he was revealed as an undercover cop, which is very nice for us because we figured out who was surveilling us. But the new kinds of surveillance we see on the Internet are primarily impersonal. So it does lead a little bit of paranoia. Probably should lead leads to less, people should just realize that for the most part, most data collected about them will not be instantly or necessarily used against them. But it does lead to the fact that there is now a situation of generalized surveillance. And should government start acting on that data, they do sometimes, it can be very dangerous.

Yeah. I would agree. I would say that, the the most the the Black Panthers or that? Yeah. The strangest thing you realize, is that, you know, the police have a giant imagination. So the left the global left is for the most part disorganized and harmless. Yet the amount of police resources spent on, attacking them and about jail sentences. There's that guy that wanted, like, I don't know, carry guns to some demo, and he gets, like, you know, a long time in jail. Some guy like Kyle Rittenhouse kills two or three people and just gets out. I mean, go figure. It's there's usually much more pressure on the left for reasons which I think due to the fact are due to the fact that historically, you know, the weak the left is not particularly doing well right now, I would say, in terms of actually being a threat to any kind of nation state. I mean, maybe Bernie Sanders or something like that will get elected. That's about the most major threat that, global capitalism has from the left right now. That being said, historically, if you look at the the larger scope history going back from the eighteen hundreds into the, you know, early nineteen twenties to, you know, anarchist assassinations of presidents and archdukes to communist revolutions in Russia and, you know, of course, Asia, you know, and Africa, South America as well is very close for the most part that, you know, anti capitalist, particularly, communist and Marxist Leninist movements, were a very large threat to the nation, the stability of the capitalist world order nation state. So, of course, when they see anything that even vaguely looks like that start rearising, the police have a playbook from the sixties and seventies, and they immediately, focus on very heavily. Now that being said, I I would actually think that, you know, realistically, the far right I mean, the January 6, quote, unquote, insurrection in in The United States was, yeah, absurdist event at best. But that being said, you know, it does seem like there are various far right elements in many countries, which are, gathering in power, which want to form, for, you know, which I think is not particularly libertarian in any sense to form some kind of racial or whatever supremacist organization. It's white White we had to white surprise The US. You know, things are more complicated here, like, in Ukraine and Russia, right, or Turkey and, like, the Kurds. But regardless, there's always some sort of either fascist or just sort of weird, kind of authoritarian social movements forming. And, it is the the the state, doesn't, does often ally with those movements with the places, but they should also be a little bit probably more worried about them them than they currently are. Historically, fascism, you know, is the alliance between authoritarian driven social movements and, large capital, which leads the fascism historically. And I could definitely see that happening in a lot of countries right soon.

Yeah. And the tech solution and stuff, which is mostly even more is absolutely garbage. I mean, he's a former state department tool, I believe. I mean, he's a nice he's from Belarus. He's been living in Stanford for ages. I it's good. He's finally going a bit left wing. I mean, that's nice as opposed to just being a kind of Internet tol troll. But the problem with techno solutions, you you throw it's a very non, Marxist viewpoint because I think what Marx would say is that, of course, you have social relationships. That's what drives things. So social relationships are, you know, essentially, give concrete or or concretize to some extent and give rise to technological forms. This technological forms are what, can, both you know, do actually have a real world effect on, class struggle if you're Marx or if you're modest Marxist social movements or whatever you wanna say. So I think, you know, if you say say, oh, well, it's just technological solutionism. Like, historically, you know, I mean, writing could be considered technological solution. But did writing have a large impact on the formation of, for example, the printing press, on the formation of nation states? Oh, yes. It did. Very much so. And this is, you know, very much documented. Same with radio and fashion. There's always a feedback loop between society and technology. And, of course, at the base of social relations, but you cannot cleanly separate social relationships from technical relationships. They are at this point and always happens. One of the unique things about humanity is what Bernard Stiegler would note. It's the primary. It's the it's the, it's it's really the heart of what makes us human, that we can extend our capabilities, via technology. And decentralization is interesting insofar as that historically, it does come from the left. Right? So Prudhoe was a massive, you know, some extent markets even come from, a lot of his kind of critiques of of of capitalism in the state and private property. Property is theft. That's what he said. Yeah. I know. I mean I mean, there there's a there's a long history of decentralization. The anarchist movement is older to a large extent than, Marxist movements and has long had and used the words decentralization. Of course, so did Hayek, but Hayek also had some things to say, which I think people on the left should listen to. She's not People, unfortunately, dismiss things without reading them, and that leads to law problems. So you don't want to dismiss Hayek without reading him because he has points about how, government control can lead to authoritize this. I mean, how markets can, for example, prevent that. So, you know, you may not agree with everything that's worth reading. And so what I would say, on the broad on a broad scope is that, in terms of technology and decentralization, if the goal of any, class struggle is to establish, individual freedom and autonomy and collective forms of freedom and autonomy, you will need a form you do not want a form of complete centralization of either technical or social power or techno social power, let's say. And you would want to have some form of decency. That should be a sort of design characteristic in the society of, you know, let's say, free association, that you're aiming for. And the problem is that if you do not have a technical means, easily you have the concept. Like, hey. I would like to have, for example, on Lenin, I want a revolution in Russia. Wouldn't that be great? We'll give everyone freedom. We'll have electricity and Soviets and bread. And then you say, oh, yeah. We're gonna decentralize governance, to the Soviets, which are at this point are kind of workers assemblies. And there's no way for the Soviets to communicate effectively, to record their decisions, to actually control the economy. That's the kind of fetishization that we see of cyber sin in the left. If you don't have these tools, there is a kernel truth there that's highly unlikely your political ideological ideological program will work. So, of course, in order for there to be a, a revolutionary movement which succeeds, they will need to have tools which are decentralized and which let them accomplish very concrete task in terms of essentially, you know, helping society flourish. And and and and the lack of those tools will naturally lead to centralization of power, which does, as we have seen historically, go horribly wrong in the Russian revolution, you know, is to some extent a failure of politics, but I think it's, it's a little bit I don't know how you say, anthropomorphizing its problems to just blame everything on Stalin. You can also equally blame the fact that there was not the kind of, you know, technical tools necessary to help the Soviets resist the centralization of party control in the Russian revolution. And we're seeing the same stories play out today in revolutionary situations. For example, Kurdistan or Java, you know, it's a it's half libertarian, half socialist, a very mixed kind of place. Lots of capitalist society is more or less, I would say, dominant there, But they have interesting concepts about creating ecological decentralized society, but what they lack is technology insofar as Assad did not really give them access to technology. And they don't definitely not getting anything from The United States because of sanctions. So you have a need for technology and decentralization by social movements. Yeah. I sort of see it that, like, if if you do want

Yeah. You could see that even with the failure of, say, occupy, where you have to put everyone in a big circle and do the mic check thing, and then it was like, okay. You know what I mean? I I was in both occupy New York and occupy Oakland. It was a, I mean, if you have a lot of spare time for meetings, you could do it. But also at a certain point, that's not a very effective form of decision making. So things like, DOWs and things like better tooling, do actually help. And I hope and, actually, if anything, what's surprising is that we haven't had more development of these this kind of tooling. And that's why I think, you know, I I think it's important to distinguish between defensive and offensive technologies. Sorry. Offensive rather than they personally I dislike them. So deep NIM is a defensive technology. So that the what NIM does NIM says you have an adversary. That adversary is as powerful as a nation state. So for example, Tor, very few, let's say, you know, you know, your neighbor cannot probably monitor where you're going using Tor. But an adversary which can mod the input output nodes, so we saw that recent, I think it's called KEC seventeen, whatever, attack on Tor where there was a lot of entry and exit nodes were ran by malicious some malicious party. I would bet a nation's I'm not sure if it's The US or Russia, China. Could be either. Who knows, man? But regardless, you know, nation state level adversaries have a lot of power. They can essentially watch the entire Internet with a godlike vision. So with a mixed network like NIM does is we take packets and we mix them up. We delay them and we encrypt them such that it all looks like entropy or gibberish, let's say, to such an adversary. And that's a defensive figure that defends your social movement and yourself, from having problems. Now, in the and we don't want just and then we create you don't want just, you know, human rights activists or Marxist revolutionaries or anarchists or cyberpunks using this technology. You want as many people as possible using it because otherwise you stand out just by sheer virtue of using them. That being said, there's a whole other scope of technologies, but I think are relatively underdeveloped despite being massively funded. I'm thinking of dials like Eragon or all this crazy I don't know. I'm pretty against the proof of humanity stuff, but I think it just leads to eyeball based surveillance, in the end. Same with universal basic income, to be honest. But regardless, you know, there's all this technology around this collective decision making, communication systems, voting. All this stuff should probably be built. I'm actually surprised given the hype that I haven't seen more actual usable software built. My hope is that, you know, the VC money and the cryptocurrency, capital formation funds a lot of this stuff, and then eventually, it gets to the hands of social movements probably in countries that, we don't really see coming. And that would be great, I think, in the long run. And you need to use both offensive and defensive technologies. You need defensive technologies because otherwise, the small group of people who are kind of becoming active get wiped out before the social movement gets too, too strong. But you also need these kinds of more creative technologies to actually rebuild society. And that's unfortunately not what Nim is working on now. Maybe in the future, I'll be happy to return to that. I did work on some of that stuff, years ago, but it it ends up being very hard. I I would also just make the final point that, you know, defensive technologies, it's important that people take them seriously. You know, I, you know, I saw, for example, the Bernie Sanders campaign, everything is ran over Slack. Even these DAOs, people are incredibly low security and, you know, just look at what's happening in The US. Gary Gensler is definitely gonna aim at all those people and take out all they don't care if you think you're DAO. They're gonna go after the devs and the people with the money. And so I am always shocked both within capitalism and and people who are critical critical capitalism. At this point, even capitalists should be critical capitalism, that there's not more concern over defending their privacy and other defensive means. Now at a certain point, if a revolutionary social movement takes off, to hear a square in Egypt being the classical example, doesn't really matter if they turn the air on off because the entire country is in revolt. The entire world could be in revolt. At that point, defensive technologies matter less, but you have to remember that, you know, part of why Egypt and Tunisia were successful to the that they were in overthrowing their local governments. And I'm a kinda equal opportunity government, supportive of overthrows of corrupt governments. One of the reasons they were successful is because they were not personally targeted so quickly. When in countries where the kinda you know, social movements take time to grow, you know, class struggle has to involve not maybe everyone, but at least a decent subset of people in the class. And, you know, that's not the case if the, you know, the early folks get, hunted down and put in jail, which is definitely what happened, and the classic counterexample being Syria.

So Tor is what's called an onion routing system. So the way onion routing system works is so you use the VPN. Every time you see Internet traffic across the world, you say, hey. I wanna go to this IP address. Maybe that's Facebook's IP address. You get that IP address from a domain name server, typically. Although sometimes it's hard coded like the Bitcoin seed, and you send it, this this month this this this, traffic to the IP address, and it has your IP address because how TCPIP works is you send messages. You get acknowledgements that they've been received, and that that's a very nice technology. UDP in reverse is one way. You just send messages and hope they get received, and that that also works for certain kinds of things. Voice, for example, or, it can be it's okay if you lose a few packets. That being said, the obvious privacy flaws that I wanna communicate with you, I need your address, you need my address. And everyone in the and my packets are being handled by, like, random people, and those packets that can be either observed or actively interfered with by all the random servers in between you and me or me and Facebook or, you know, who knows, on the Internet. And I think that's, important to to to understand about why a VPN works and doesn't work. So people think, oh, I can get away with this by just using a VPN. Like, Mullvad's a pretty good VPN. But the fact of the matter is that so you're seeing your package to Mullvad and Mullvad sends them to Facebook, whoever. But the fact of the matter is Mullvad knows exactly who you are when you're sending it, and they know exactly where you're going. You just hit your IP address. That's it. But the timing and the volume change. Now Tor is just like a three hop VPN where each hop, you add a layer of encryption, and you peel that layer off the next hop. So, eventually, you you you build a you put three layers on your little packet. You send it out after it goes through three hops. Each layer is peeled off, then goes to where it's supposed to go. That's how Tor works. It's called onion routing because these levels of cryptography are, like, peels and onion, layers. Yeah. But then the problem with that is that you're still not disguising the timing and the volume information. So it's still like let's say, the famous example is, you know, you know, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna send a message to someone. I I want only them to receive it. Maybe it's not clear. Let's say let's say I'm buying something. I don't want someone to know I'm buying. I buy something. The enemy is watching the merchant. I'm like, oh, well, who is gonna buy that, you know, sketchy copy of Karl Marx? That copy of Karl Marx gets shipped. I can see when that, let's say, Monero transaction went through. I can see that packets were being communicated. The time because only so many people maybe bought probably only one person, to be honest, bought Karl Marx at that particular time. Then what happens is they can identify the fact that it's you because you're the only person that sent Monero that particular time. So you see this timing information's it being really important. And so what a mix net does is it like Tor, there's three hops. But rather than just grab the packet, unwrap it, send it to the next node, what it does is it waits for a few other packets, and then it mixes those packets up like a deck of cards. And if there's not enough packets, it adds some fake packets. And then it sends all those packets out in a different order. And by sending them in a different order or kind of, like, shuffling a deck of cards or if you're more mathematical or random a permutation, it breaks the link between the messages. And, of course, at each hop, the messages are reencrypted. Rerandomized effectively would be the correct term. And so you can't link the messages, and you can't even distinguish fake messages from real messages. So you don't know even, for example, what's a real message. You know? If I'm online, I might not be talking to you. I might be talking to anyone, but my computer can still be sending out some fake messages. More difficult with mobile phones. But and that's kinda what gives NIM its advantage, I think, in terms of privacy. Now, of course, there's certain things that NIM would work well for. It would work very well for cryptocurrency transactions, probably work pretty well for things like signal, for instant messaging, would not work as well. We do recommend it. I use Tor every day and would not work as well, for things like web browsing as a tour because tours actually be faster. I I was gonna ask. It's, like, you're you're gaining the

Yeah. You're losing some latency. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's a trade off that we can tune. We don't it's not minutes. It's usually, you know, up to a minute, if not seconds of latency. And nice thing about cryptocurrency people is that, you know, typically, cryptocurrency folks, are okay with waiting a little bit of time for, you know, I I I would happy to wait a little bit longer for my transaction to settle Bitcoin than I I don't personally use, whatever, Stellar. But then maybe it's faster and Stellar, but I trust Bitcoin more. And I trust Bitcoin more than my bank. I don't wanna wait for that end of day settlement. I wanna get my transaction. And that's the same thing, you know, with NIM. It's like, if you're willing to pay that little extra cost and latency, I won't willing to wait for my signal message an extra thirty seconds. You can get a lot more privacy. And that's what we're hoping to see happen over the next year or so. So, like, at at the moment,

Yeah. So on the blockchain, I have an article, or interview on this actually coming on Bitcoin magazine tomorrow. You know, the UTXO model where you get a new kind of you send money to yourself and you get a kind of new public key, every hop. It's quite ingenious, but it's not actually capable of resisting adversary that has any form of machine learning in terms of de anonymizing you over time. So, it's not anonymous. It's pseudonymous. Technically, that's so anonymous is no name.

Yeah. Yeah. Pseudonymous is fake name, and, you know, Nim is just name because we try to support all these different kind of use cases, both pseudonym and anonymity and everything in between. And, selective disclosures, I might give you my real name. I might only give you my age, for example. But but, it should be remember the Bitcoin is pseudonymous at best. It's harder to censor because it uses peer to peer traffic, but peer to peer traffic is not necessarily private. I can just watch the peers sending traffic, and I can actually figure out by watching the peers who's sending what traffic. And that's not a theoretical attack analysis. In 2015 said they were doing those kinds of attacks. And, also, a lot of people in Bitcoin are very confused, so they think layer two or blockchains in general, people are somewhat confused because they think there'll be some magical solution to privacy. So for example, one solution that let's say Bitcoin people talk about lightning, but as you saw, chain analysis can now DNI. Lightning is obvious. Just because something is off chain doesn't mean it's private. Right? It may be it may be harder to surveil by you know, I can surveil Bitcoin. I can just download the chain and download block science and run some algorithms. But, you know, it does just your ISP can easily copy our transactions, identify lightning transactions, pull those out, hand that to a government or a private company. And, they can use machine learning. They've just recorded those those on their own, quote, unquote, blockchain, which is just a surveillance log. So Lightning is not anonymous, and then zero knowledge proofs are also not anonymous by default. So a lot of people have a lot of hope for things like zero knowledge proofs and researchers. I do too. They are good, but they're all they're useful in a limited way, which is they let you record things on a blockchain without being transparent. But still, you know, if I'm using Zcash, I'm seeing some money, I'm buying that copy of Karl Marx from that sketchy bookstore in Berlin or whatever, and, you know, the a government or someone's looking at me, my ISP is looking at me, and they wanna know if I'm the guy seeing that Zcash transaction, looking at the merchant. They could just look at the timing of information. They don't need to read what's on chain. They don't need to know what's on chain. So you may be perfectly and we and I think, you know, halo two and stuff are about as good as you're gonna get. You could use a zero knowledge proofs on chain, but privacy, you know, privacy is holistic. It involves all levels of system. So if your peer to peer broadcast isn't secured, the peer to peer broadcast as it does by default and and Zcash reveals your IP address, if your peer to peer broadcast reveals the time, which it does even a tour of your IP address of your sorry. Your IP transaction, your Zcash broadcast, you can still be the anonymized. So you need things like NIM, but NIM's not the whole picture. What you need is also kind of privacy enhanced apps in general, the kind of holistic approach to privacy.

Well, crypto, essentially, cryptocurrency provides the funding, provides the talent, and, crypto provides the first use case. So, ideally, you know, obviously, the nice thing about Bitcoin is that people are used to paying transaction fees. That's not the case with, let's say, signal, or, I guess, a mobile coin now, or it's not the case with, say, I don't know, you know, a voting app or, let's say, Slack. And, you know, you know, something like Slack, I remember in Assange Cypherpunk's books, he said, in order to organize a revolution, you need a multi you know, just a giant chat channel might be enough to start it off. But they aren't used to paying. So when you're starting an economically incentivized system like NEM, you need some source of money to get the initial code off the ground, which for us was venture capital. You need, for example, you need coders. You have to pay them real salaries. Otherwise, you get flaky nonprofit volunteers. So we, again, use venture capital to pay people. And then you need people to run the nodes. You know, Tor, it's amazing. It's very altruistic, that people run those nodes, but, you know, we don't wanna compete we don't want people to stop running Tor and run them. So we also want a very global spread of nodes. So, you know, if you you ask some guy we have one of our node runners in Ghana. You want that guy to run a node. You want a guy in China to run a node. You you better pay they they need some money. They can't afford otherwise. You wanna be able to pay them. And so this is where cryptocurrency comes in useful because it both lets people use the system. It way enables them to pay for using a mixed net. And, you know, they can also pay for other people. It's in someone's best interest. Let's say a rich person wants to be private. It's in their best interest from a sheerly technical perspective. Let's many nonrich people network as possible to subsidize those people, and our system allows that. And it's also important that, you know, you kinda keep the system running and and without out of surveillance, without advertising, and we can do that via cryptocurrency. So cryptocurrency is very much a game changer for development of what we call privacy enhancing technologies or anti surveillance tool. Yeah. So if if I get it right, you have

a a a game changer. Is that is that correct? Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a game changer as far as, you know, Tor has 6,000 nodes. We get up to 10,000. Now we're back to 5,000 with a valueless testnet token. So we're able to you know, you can only be anonymous, using these kind of other people to help you. And so you need those other people to be there. You need lots of other users as well. You can only be anonymous in the crowd, for example, as the fundamental insight. But you need to somehow assemble the the infrastructure, and that's what we use cryptocurrency for. So I run a Tor node. I I like Tor. I wanna support it as much as possible. That being said, if my Tor node goes down, I don't really notice. Right. That's unfortunate. I'm just too lazy. If I had, like, a thousand dollars online and my tornado went down, I would I would restart that, that Linux process pretty quick. I would make sure they have a high quality of service. So, that's the same thing in general. You know, you're not gonna win a a revolution by offering, worse volunteer. This is a problem called anarchist movements. You're not gonna win a revolution by offering a worse version of society Everything is more unreliable and volunteer driven. You're gonna win a revolution by offering superior and sometimes different kinds of, services or different kinds of life than you would, a more fulfilling and better ran existence than you have, for for example, under capitalism. So, you know, we're hoping that we can get high quality of service in a decentralized way. Now we haven't launched the main net yet. See if it works out. It's still a grand experiment, and, I'm not against Altra. I think Altra was very important, but it does have its limits, particularly when you get over, you know, you get over 20 years old, you're into your thirties and forties, you have kids to feed. It's important. It's also very, honestly, decentralization, I think a lot of people left, they're they're they're privileged white liberals. They don't understand that the majority of the world has economic needs, and a lot of them exist in that fantasy world where they think, oh, there'll be some, like, socialist revolution, which will enable socialist government, which will somehow, I don't know, give the people of India welfare. And I've been to Krala. They're doing good, but the rest of India isn't. And it's highly unlikely for most of the world. It's just actually unlikely proposition, and it also ignores the fact that many social governments do descend into tyranny. I think it's it's it's it's just incorrect to say they don't. And so like, historically incorrect. So I think what you have to say, you know, is that I think cryptocurrency empowers many people in the global South, many people who previously excluded from finance, excluded from making money. You can be a perfectly good programmer, you know, and there's all this, you know, guilt in The US right now. But whatever. They're still gonna be racist, not give you a visa to get to The US. You're definitely if you get a visa, you'll be enslaved by Google. Maybe they'll put you in a little on a boat. I know they were discussing earlier to avoid the process. But more likely, you know, get h one b visa. You can't leave your job. You're basically stuck. You can't, you know, you you can't be an entrepreneur. And you can't an entrepreneur, sometimes they're just trying to solve actual social problems. That means you can't solve social problems and you can't make money. You can't feed your family. And I think it's important to, use blockchain technology to encourage initiative and freedom and spread wealth in countries in the global South. I think that's why people in the global South, to be frank, many of them take blockchain technology pretty seriously. And I don't know what the left in the global South has been saying. Primarily, I have some friends. I think they're all a little skeptical. But the left in most of those countries is, to be honest, not super relevant anymore. People have real problems. They need real solutions. So that's why you're seeing country you know, places like Rojava express interest, for example, on Amir Takis Darkfire project. Or you're seeing, support even though, you know, I think some of it is not all wonderful, but you're seeing support. You know? I spent years protesting the IMF, but now all of a sudden, you know, they you know, El Salvador can ignore the IMF and do Bitcoin bonds. That's great. That's a real practical solution. And so I think, you know, people who are revolutionized do need to be practical and do need to have actual solutions and not just kind of I don't know. I always always speak about, you know, I have a I I'm a friend, but I I know someone who's, you know, he's a professor from Connecticut, and he kinda LARPs as a third world revolutionary, but push them to shove. He's a professor from Connecticut. And he's like, oh, yeah. We have to support all these, you know, essentially bankrupt socialist governments. And I do support some of those governments because I think they are better than, for example, US imperialism for many of these countries. That being said, let's not pretend they're doing great. That's not pretend they're answering the actual needs of all their people. And, you know, let's not attack cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is actually fulfilling some very real needs.

the the price. So so it's true the price goes up. The nodes make a lot more money, which is good because the nodes want to be rewarded. But the the the price facing users, is stabilized by an auction mechanism. So, essentially, that auction mechanism is, gets you kind of, how do you say, a Nash equilibrium fair price for access to the network given the available resources and the and the and how much money they need to run those resources every route, and that resets dynamically. So we measure the traffic. We say, okay. There's this much traffic coming in. If the price of the token skyrockets, it's fine, then the relative fee would go down. Right? Because you you know, essentially, you know, we're trying to build our system to be as resistant to speculation as possible. So an auction basically works. You know, I I basically say, this is how much I'm willing to pay. This is how much profit the nodes need. You basically it is a market based mechanism, and markets are actually genuinely useful for some things. I think would argue that as well. And even towards the end of his life, Linen argued this. And then what happens is that that price resets every round, so it remains effectively stable. So the amount of so that the the if the you know, so it's not a dump system where, like, the price is always one NIM because one NIM may be worth, I don't know, who knows, you know, €3,000, €3.30. We don't know. But if the price went up to €3,000 and the the act you know, the price access would then go down if the if the amount of demand doesn't change to point zero zero zero three or whatever. And that's important to keep, our system running. Do users need to pay for using,

Yeah. Users can pay, but users' apps can pay. People can pay for other users. There we have we basically didn't develop, concrete business model before. Some people say whoever I mean, we can't just let people use that for the network exists under capitalism, so we we're not gonna run as a volunteer network. That's not our goal. But, effectively, we leave the business model open, and we're hoping, you know, for example, someone like Moxie who just got 50,000,000 from WhatsApp or, god knows, 200,000,000 from mobile coin could probably throw 1,000,000 in fees down for his users. The fees are probably pretty small. Likewise, we at NIM, if we wanna let human rights activist use it, we could just basically say, well, look. We're gonna let a surmount traffic in just for free because we want to see this traffic in, and we can do that with our with with with what what we own. And then, you know, some Bitcoin guy doesn't trust anyone. He can pay the fee directly himself in his Bitcoin wallet or his Zcash wallet or Monero wallet or what what have you. And, you know, so we're very open. We've created essentially a open fee mechanism. We just measure that someone at some point paid, and we don't care if it's the actual user.

Yeah. I think Jaya I mean, that there everyone's very different. Jaya is, obviously a PhD researcher, finished her PhD recently, wrote, I think, the introduction to the printed copy of Nakamoto's white page. Her work on a political economy of Bitcoin is some of the only realistic good work I've seen out there in the space. She's very intelligent. I think she is, unlike myself, a socialist, and is would be a great other guest to have. She's very thoughtful, and been handling our communications very well. Chelsea is definitely an anarchist without any doubt. And, you know, Chelsea, has been interested, and she has a very good understanding. She's very technical unlike a lot of other, people. So for example, our well, little discussion we have with Snowden, he doesn't I don't know. Maybe we haven't paid him enough. He doesn't seem so technical, but Chelsea is, like, actually able to read crypto papers, actually able to, you know, work on Rust code, looking at secure hardware stuff for us, and is is generally very intelligent, and, you know, has a, kind of anarchist critique of capital. And then, you know, her, she suffered a lot, but she's, done incredibly well. And particularly, I I think, honestly, you know, is supportive because she's worried. She's very strategic. I actually think she's worried that, you know, she doesn't want all of the Internet freedom projects being dependent on, you know, for example, US government funding. So she was actually probably maybe the first person all the way back in 2017 to be encouraging of our attempts to get some sort of, which does seem, venture capital backing for, what was that a time early version of now as NIM. So we're very happy. And I think it's, again, you know, it's pragmatic. We're making compromises, but then we don't exist in an ideal world. I have to pay programmers. I can't pay programmers based on charity grants. There's just not enough of them. Maybe even an NFT I could have, but it didn't occur to me at the time. But, you know, we did think that it was a reasonable trade off to do venture capital to build infrastructure.

Yeah. Yeah. Although she's technically a contractor and can work for other teams, so apparently other teams have been too afraid, to hire her, so I don't know it. But, you know, you know, realistically, you know, we're a privacy project. We have a lot of lawyers. I've been through multiple large scale surveillance court cases. I've never been defeated, and we will probably so I am, looking forward to defending us, both technically and legally in the future.

Yeah. So, you know, I mean, for this, particularly what's coming what was that fellow, Paris Marx? I forget his real name. But regardless, like, it would be nice to read Marx on these things. So, I mean, I think people need to remember that Marx himself, and he's very clear on this. You can read, in his critique of the Goethe program. You know, he was against what he considered LaSallean style, socialism. So the the so the free workers party just sort of if you remember back in the you wanna go back in Marxist history, you know, Marx was kind of near death actually at this point. The Germans were finally forming a socialist party. Germany was supposed to be the center of revolution. Obviously, it didn't work out very well, but that was the thick you get the time because they were the most advanced industrial country Just to say, like, The United States is maybe the most advanced, country, maybe Korea or China. I mean, it depends how you look at it, but I I still would say The US in terms of of Internet technologies. They were the most advanced in terms of industrial technologies at the time, and there's a feeling that they were going to lead the path towards world revolution. And then, you know, they kinda had their I wanna say it wasn't even Bernie Sanders moment, but they they they they they LaSalle, they produced the, the girtha program. And they basically said, hey. You know, we're gonna redistribute. Don't worry. We're gonna ask the state that we are a party. We're gonna get elected into state positions. We're gonna ask the state to redistribute wealth so it's fairly distributed so that workers get their fair share. And, Marx was like, this is a completely idiotic program for a party, and I think he would say the same, out of most socialist programs today. And he he makes a number of very good points. I think it's important. That's why I'm not a socialist. I'm an anarchist, but I do read Marx as Marx has a lot to say. I think, and Marx's points hit on this regulation argument. So Marx says, you know, the the the state arises, from the actual real existing historical conditions, from the social relationships, and from the class structure of society. So, therefore, it's weird to be like, hi. We're a socialist party. We would like to ask the state to basically without changing who controls and even how it works, the means of production, we'd like to change simply the distribution. And if you look at that, that's a historical socialist program from Bernstein onwards is to sort of say, hey. We, the socialist, we're gonna get empower. Bernie Sanders. He seems like a honest, upstanding man or Jeremy Corbyn. But regardless, there's some problems with this, and Hayek was not wrong, I think, to point these out. That I we're gonna get into power, and we're gonna regulate our way out of this problem. The way we regulate our way out of this problem is that we will, you know, distribute labor fairly. Everyone gets their fair share. But the Marxist, well, that's crazy because the how is it that capitalism is not actually a fair share? The board would argue that. And if you did follow this program, you removed everything the state needs. What's left is not an undiminished wage. It's a clearly diminished wage, which then you would exchange via, I don't know, labor vouchers. It's not a directly measure labor, and then you might as well just be exchanging money, that you're not really superseding capitalism. You have to actually change the means of production and the control. It's a very important point of the means of production in order to overcome, industrial capitalism or capitalism in general. And and and that's the to to argue that you can't the technology is somehow morally wrong or somehow shaped by capital in such a way is a profoundly anti Marxist argument. Marx did not Marx wasn't like, hey. These child driven labor factories in England are great. They were obviously terrible, but he saw within them a way of surpassing the current terrible state without, gauging in kind of romanticism. That's what he called his or utopia. That's what he called his program. I mean, he yeah. Scientific socialism. And this is important to remember that the technology itself is always gonna be shaped by your existing conditions. So, of course, we live in a capital society. We're gonna produce a capitalist Internet. How would we do anything else? But within that very capital, there is a germ on the other side of another form of social organization. That's the general bet made by the Pewter Peer comments, hard and neigry kind of folks. And that's not okay. They were obviously idealistic and utopian. They weren't very scientific about it. Most of those people, when I talked to them, to be honest, didn't have any idea how the technology worked. But but there's a kernel philosophically of a correct approach there. But what they lacked is a practical program. And what you're seeing with the rise of Web three is the rise of a practical program, saying that we can actually help recreate nostalgia. Some of this is very venture driven, very for profit, but you're also seeing forms of democratic control, things with DAOs. For example, the free Assange DAOs starting up, the free Ross DAO, the free Constitution. You're seeing forms of democratic control. You're seeing new kinds of technologies radically differ from previous technologies to enable things which were the social which were the demands of social movements in the previous ten years. Things like transparency with Occupy and Indignados and Aerospace were demands. Now you're seeing technology which can fulfill demands. Isn't that great? But instead, people don't understand. They don't understand technology. It is hard to understand. They don't understand the social force leading technology, and then they don't see that technology itself is the product of class struggle, but so is any future society. So any future society will have to use the existing technology, modify it, shape it, and then continue, kind of social process struggle. Now I think what is a correct critique is there is very little in the terms of social movements or ideological development, within blockchain space. There's very little usage of technology by the masses of people who are, struggling today and working. And there's very little, I would say, the blockchain space is politically all over the space, which actually is I find quite refreshing compared to leftist circles, but others may instinctively dislike. But that doesn't mean that they're not organically developing something which could be useful in the future. And it could also but I'm not an accelerationist. Right? So technological development, again, it's rooted in society. So it could excel the acceleration of web three could just be in yet another form, could lead to even a worse form of capital, whereas, you know, I think I forget who said this, the World Bank or someone, we own nothing. That would be kind of that would seem terrible if you own nothing, but you lived in a world where actually things weren't collectively owned, but they were owned by, for example, another class, the some sort of algorithmic overlord. That would be terrible. But at the same point, within the acceleration of technology and the co joining of that technology or social movements, there exist what is a space of struggle. It's a space where you have to create new technologies, you engage with social movements practically. And this is what Marx himself was doing. You know, he wasn't hanging out writing I mean, he did write op eds, but he wasn't hanging out as a university professor. He'd failed to get tenure. He failed to get a job. You know, he was actively writing manifestos, critiquing other parties, trying to bring things together. I happen to believe that, you know, the general the large space of things Kropak and Puno write in their critiques of Marx that he didn't understand how his system would lead to authoritarianism. But there was other people doing the same thing. And they were in other words, they were getting their hands dirty. And what I feel like a lot of the critics, you know, of blockchain technologies aren't doing, which I'm very glad you're doing, is they're actually getting their hands dirty. They're trying to understand the technology, look at its potentials. And none of this is predetermined, but it it's still nonetheless there. And that's a a very fundamental kind of, I would even say, Marxist

Yeah. And I'll just, you know, I'll just I can even quote Marx here while you were talking. I just I just Googled it. You know, what we have to deal with is here is a communist society, not as it developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society. So it's important to remember that there is this kind of process of emergence, and this is probably what we're seeing today, but you can't just assume the state will will do it for you. In fact, that that assumes that's the whole critique of Marx of socialism is that, you know, quote, unquote, you know, his critique. I just have it here in front of me. It's really great. Sorry. I love ilove marxist.org. It's a wonderful website. It's, it's here. Sorry. Okay. Cool. This is it. Where where Mark says, the socialist organization of total labor arises from state aid that the state somehow was gonna give to people's cooperative societies in which the state, not the workers, calls into being. So this is his what people are asking. People asking the state to essentially regulate technology. And he he said this is ridiculous. It's worthy of LaSalle's. This is the German imagination that the state loans with state loans, one can build a new society just as well as one can create a new railway. So that's a very important point. That he what he's arguing is that you cannot expect the state, to regulate things in the favor of destroying its own class structure, in favor of getting rid of itself. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

It's it's completely classic. And in fact, not only and it will continue to do so, it is more or less unable to do anything else. If it did, it would be corrected. And furthermore, it's not just in the interest interest, but that over time, the state, you know, for example, as the state gets more and more threatened, there's no of course, the state will use violence against social movements against people. Why would it not? Its goal is not to make things fair. Its goal is to maintain, you know, class domination, to maintain exploitation. And and that's for that's why I I'm very skeptical of socialist states. I'm very skeptical of people. I mean, I think they they're well meaning. I'm not gonna argue they're not well meaning. I just don't think it's gonna work. And so I'm actually more in favor of what blockchain technologies are doing, which is what Marx says we should do, which is to seize control, which may mean not a classic workers jumping on top of a of a factory, or what would that mean? Grabbing the the you know, Jeremy Corbyn and his, you know, a bunch of grad students who have no idea what to do with a Google server or even how to run Linux commands. But it means basically spreading consciousness among the workers, which comes through their struggle, not through, you know, intellectuals, and then changing that means of production and transforming both who controls and how it works. And that's what, you know, that's that contingency that we see within blockchain technology. Now it may fail, and we may have to wait another ten years if the environment so allows for us to do this with another round of, techno social evolution. But I do think it's possible, and I do think people should be more interested in the actual means of production, not just distribution and consumption.

Yeah. And that's exactly what you're seeing. We're seeing with the pioneering work on. You know, you're seeing changes to money. You're seeing DOWs changing who owns certain things. I admit it's mostly pretty silly stuff like NFTs, but you can see a vision. We could see how this stuff could be very practical if you had to form a new kind of society. So, yeah, I mean, I'm I I am very hopeful, and I I only wish that, the left on the Internet would essentially just grow up, engage with real social movements, which they, for the vast majority, don't do or they, you know, stop just standing, second rate and socialist dictators, stop trying to believe that somehow party politics is gonna work because I don't think it is. And, actually, you know, just engage with technology. The main you know, if you look at revolution movements historically, they've won if they engage in technology. The the Russian revolution, for all its faults, had a lot of engineers involved. But you look at what's happened today with the so called, socialist left, you know, because people were disappointed due to fascism and the failure of the German working class, The the western Marxisms in general left technical topics. They retreated from them. They somehow thought they were inherently dominating an instrumental, which is a even a misreading of Adorno. That's a whole another podcast. A misreading of Horkheimer and Adorno's dialectics and enlightenment, although Not a an a an unsurprising one because they somehow thought technology is inherently dominating, inherently capitalist, and inherently sort of dangerous. So everyone ends up doing, I don't know, studying jazz music and doing bad art. And okay. You know? Cool. I want people to be happy, but that's not necessarily revolutionary. That's not necessarily, what Marx would be doing. It's definitely not surprising that that's an unsuccessful tactic. And so I think, you know, let's tie it's you know, we're we're facing a large scale economic and climate crisis right now, all mixed together with the collapse of the social fabric. So it's time unless you want right wing racist populists to win. It's time for people from the left and from libertarians, including libertarian I've included libertarian capitalists in this broad tent to get together and work out real solutions to real problems, so those problems will involve technology. And they will involve getting out of the academy, getting into the streets, and getting and writing code. And that's what I think the left should be doing. I am not seeing almost any of that, which is really I'm doing my best. You're doing your best. I know others are doing their best. And I I am generally it seems like due to the economic situations, generally, young younger people are less technophobic, than older people. And I think that the I have a lot of hope, in the coming generations. Generations. But that being said, you know, look at the George Floyd protest or whatever, man. You know? Because people aren't aware of surveillance, those protests will not be successful, in general because they will be repressed heavily because everything is just being surveilled. But are people trying to do the right thing, even if it's very inarticulate? Yes. They are. And I think it's mostly young people. And I just think we need, but that being said, you need to have everyone contributing, both intellectually and in terms of physical labor, to social movements to, you know, basically fundamentally transform and overthrow capitalism.

Yeah. So to keep up with us, you know, I'm at, Harry Halpin. That's my name on Twitter. The project is at Nim project, n y m p project. I don't know. And, we're nimtec.net, nym, tech.net. Although, if you can't remember that, we are now also nim.com. Nym.com. And, yeah, we have everything's on GitHub. Still experimental, but you can run it and use it. You could use it on any app that takes a SOCKS five proxy. And, I think if you're interested in Nym, you know, don't jump in because it's a get rich quick scheme. Jump in because you're interested in privacy. And, we are vastly accepting of all, many, many, if not all ideological stripes. So we would be we have support from many different types of, society. And I'm not a puritan. I think that's what we're gonna have to do to build a revolution. Nice.

Okay. Take care.