Monero Village - InfoSec vs Hacker The War for the Soul of a Technology
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Presentation of a groupInformation securityCASE <Informatik>CryptographySlide ruleGoodness of fitMetropolitan area networkHacker (term)
01:02
Information securityCodeInformation technology consultingHacker (term)Social classCryptographyTerm (mathematics)PhysicalismMultiplication signDivision (mathematics)Real numberExpert systemRow (database)Fundamental theorem of algebra1 (number)Formal languageINTEGRALTraffic reportingEnterprise architectureVideo gameBridging (networking)InformationFreewareComputer configurationAreaSurface of revolutionIterationSelf-organizationFeedbackInformation privacyGradientTelecommunicationSoftware frameworkPlastikkarteContent (media)Software testingTheoryGroup actionMetropolitan area networkProcess (computing)Perfect groupDependent and independent variablesIdeal (ethics)Type theoryMeeting/Interview
08:08
CryptographyInformation privacyPhysical systemTelecommunicationInternet service providerSemiconductor memoryData storage deviceSpeech synthesisPhysical lawDatabase transaction1 (number)CASE <Informatik>Message passingCodeInteractive televisionIdentity managementDefault (computer science)SoftwareExpected valueElectronic signatureInternet forumSelf-organizationEnvelope (mathematics)Mechanism designCodecEmailGroup actionInformationPower (physics)Content (media)QuicksortSpacetimeDigitizingMeeting/Interview
12:00
EncryptionRegulator geneSound effectPhysical systemCryptographyDesign by contractDatabase transaction1 (number)ArmInformationPhysical lawMereologyInformation privacyMeeting/Interview
12:40
Electric generatorMusical ensembleInformation privacyMultiplication signEncryptionCASE <Informatik>SoftwareServer (computing)Meeting/Interview
14:14
Speech synthesisPower (physics)WordBoundary value problemMeeting/Interview
14:54
MathematicsHacker (term)Group actionSpreadsheetSuite (music)CryptographyParameter (computer programming)Term (mathematics)Direction (geometry)Moment (mathematics)BootingEvent horizonLattice (order)PlastikkarteExistenceMessage passingInformation securityState observerMeeting/Interview
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Physical systemFreewarePower (physics)CryptographyCore dumpHacker (term)Social classCybersexMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
got Alan Stevo from Kraken, which is a cryptocurrency exchange. He's going to be, the title is, as I read off of the booklet, in case any of you guys are illiterate and rely on me, it's InfoSec versus Hacker, the war for the soul of a technology. Technology has a soul. You know why I know? Because you all have a soul. And you all are the future of
00:22
technology. So I'm going to invite Alan Stevo to go and come on up here. You have any slides? Were you trying to get them working? No, you don't have any slides. He's a cool kind of presenter. He just looks you guys straight in the eye. It's all about the soul, remember. So Alan, talk with us about the soul. Give us the soul. Give him a hand. Come
00:41
on, let's not be silent. There we go. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. I feel like there's a little more to say after that wonderful introduction. Thank you for, for joining us here today. Thank you for joining me. How many people in this room have
01:03
attended high school? Please raise your hand if you have attended high school. If you have not, I understand. Thank you. Thank you. You know, maybe in high school there were, there were those guys in class who they maybe knew how to get easy A's. And maybe they got A's pretty easily. And maybe there was something, when you talked to them
01:24
after class, they were like a little dull intellectually. Like maybe, maybe they didn't have too interesting hobbies or maybe they partied all the time. Maybe they were really dedicated to a sport. And they knew how to get those easy A's, but it just wasn't, you were like, ah, that guy gets to do it a little, but he's not, he's not all the way
01:43
there. But then maybe there was that one guy, maybe in like physics class or something like that. And he knew how to get easy A's, but then he was like an expert in black holes. And maybe he was even more expert than the teacher where, you know, he was so proficient he might correct the teacher once in a while. Or maybe he would have
02:01
like a, he'd be that guy who could build those bridges out of balsa wood that would hold 452 pounds or something like that. And there was something really neat about that because there was that passion, there was that passion there. Or maybe, maybe there was that girl in Spanish class who, she seemed to get easy A's, but she wasn't
02:21
boring either. And she, she'd translate Spanish poetry in her free time or something like that. And it was really neat to be around that passion and, you know, kind of getting A's on the report card isn't enough. And there's a question there of, what are you doing with those gifts? And how do you access that passion? Maybe there's that guy in history class who brought up Stalin from the USSR, Tito from Yugoslavia, or some
02:45
concept from the French Revolution and asked about its impact today. And the guy really loved the subject matter. And the only thing the football coach teaching the class could say, perhaps, in response to a question about Tito would be, you mean, Tito, like, from
03:02
the Jackson 5? And you know the history teacher had the syllabus, and you know the history teacher made the tests, and he had an advanced degree, but you're pretty sure the guy in the back row knew more than him, and probably has more passion for material than that teacher. And maybe the guy in the back row was even getting A&D's in
03:21
class at the time. You want these three involved in crypto. The girl who translates Cervantes in her free time, the guy who builds the bridge that can hold 552 pounds, the guy in the back row who knows better than the teacher. Grades are secondary to them.
03:42
Their passion for the subject matter is primary. These are the freakers with the insistence on jumping out of bed obsessed with solving the latest problem that they thought up. These are the Austrian economists with their monetary theory and philosophy on
04:01
human action. Thank you. Thank you. They're a whole lot more fun to talk to than the guys who get straight A's and have no passion. Instead of the freakers, hackers, and Austrians, crypto is getting InfoSec, consultants, and bankers. They know how to get
04:24
straight A's. They know how to navigate the boardrooms. They know how to make money. But where is their passion? Not in crypto, not in the tech, not in the potential to free the world from the oppressive slave money that everyone gets so excited about. The bear
04:43
markets are good for crypto. They bring the geeks back. They chase off the paycheck seekers. They bring the freakers back. They chase off the ones who came to the industry with stock options and payouts on their mind. And don't get me wrong, money is great.
05:01
Resources are great. Profit is great. Profit is actually a way to demonstrate your usefulness to the world. Perhaps the best way. And a very useful check-in with reality. Profit helps you to avoid years of intellectual masturbation and to push your ideas out into the world with lots of testing and feedback and plentiful iterations. But when that's all you have to offer, an ability to make profit, and a lack
05:23
of passion, you end up with an iPhone made by boring Tim whatever his name is at Apple instead of the groundbreaking push toward perfection led by Steve Jobs. You don't want that in crypto. Which is why I'm happy to cheer for less garbage in crypto by
05:40
saying, long live the bear markets. Ideally, you get both. Ideally, you get profit and passion. That is the beautiest thing and that is the ideal. But there are many of passionless people who see crypto as a paycheck, who will destroy the fundamental concepts behind crypto if they're allowed to. If they're allowed to by you, by me, by the
06:02
people who know better. Those are the people I'm speaking about today. This is the battle for the soul of the technology. Defcon organizers this year issued a reminder highlighting how they might define the division between hacker and the newspeak sounding term infosec. Defcon is a hacker con, not an infosec conference. Hackers are more
06:24
focused on the joy of discovery, irreverence, novel if impractical approaches. Infosec is more focused on enterprise frameworks and protecting the interests of shareholders. There's a great value in both types of content, but our con is a hacker con by design. Where is the crypto guy who makes his burning man as dusty as possible, instead of
06:59
a coder poet who will never lie and say code is poetry, but will instead say poetry is
07:05
poetry and code is code. Both are beautiful when done well and I am one of the few who can distill the beauty of each and combine them. Where's the one who will say that and who will combine, I don't know, Python and Rilke or some other wonderful language
07:22
and Coleridge into an integrated life and philosophy. I want to point to examples of coder poets. These are geeks who get the tech of their respective area of expertise and who get the passion, the beautiful passion. There are many, but for my purposes today, cypherpunks and the Austrian school economists are who I want to most
07:42
carefully look at. I'm going to read you something written in 1993 that illustrates some cypherpunk goals. Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
08:01
Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this. How could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but
08:25
the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society. We seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and
08:41
other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech and it will not go away merely because we might want it to. Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary to that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases, personal identity is not salient.
09:05
When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are
09:21
saying to me. My provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot have here selectively reveal myself. I must always reveal myself. Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous
09:41
transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous transaction system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired. This is the essence of privacy. Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say
10:05
something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy. And to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire
10:26
for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature. We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their
10:41
beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us. And we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is rumors' younger, stronger cousin. Information is fleeter afoot, has more eyes, knows more, and
11:03
understands less than rumor. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of
11:21
the past did not allow for strong privacy. But a lot of electronic technologies do. We, the cypherpunks, are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money. Cypherpunks write code, we know that someone
11:41
has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed, and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down. Cypherpunks deplore
12:05
regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption in fact removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it, the anonymous
12:24
transaction systems that it makes possible. For privacy to be widespread, it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems. For the common good, privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellow in society. We,
12:43
we may engage you so we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals. The cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the network safer for privacy. Let us proceed together a pace onward. Eric Hughes, 9 March 1993, that is called a cypherpunk manifesto. Who's heard
13:06
that before? Three people, four, okay, okay. Fair enough. I'm, I'm so happy I read it and I hope you, you may find inspiration in it on another day as well. Now the cypherpunks
13:22
have won. The cypherpunks have won. The US Senate talks about taking down signal. Certainly a centralized server can be taken down. Software can't be forgotten though. Bitcoin can be banned and that ban may have no impact unless the technology is centralized. Encryption is here to stay, electronic money is here to stay, privacy is
13:43
here to stay. At least I think that's the case. For centuries, borders have been pushed east and west as tribes have fought battles. The victor always declaring a permanent victory, saying at times a war to end all wars. Only to have a border squabble over in the next generation, squabble over in the next generation as their
14:05
children seek to right seething wrongs of the past. Those grandpas in Washington similarly want to battle. They are 20 year old grandpas and they are 80 year old grandpas. They don't get it. They don't get that they can't win the battle. But maybe we
14:27
don't get that we could lose the battle. Especially if we are not vigilant in protecting those boundaries that have been hard earned in battle. On this topic in January 19, 1852, Wendell Phillips in a speech said the following rousing words,
14:41
eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The cypherpunks have won. But where have the cypherpunks gone? They've won their battle, but I
15:03
cannot find them. I can't find them in crypto and crypto so desperately needs them. Increasingly, crypto is becoming a strange and unfamiliar place to them. They're hackers and tinkerers and creators and all crypto companies and all crypto companies want, once they're
15:21
established, is infosec. Plenty in crypto want to convey the message that it doesn't need the hackers, tinkerers, and creators anymore. And of course, once there's a little money to be made by running the show, someone with no skill in the subject matter wants to convince the most highly skilled to step aside so the less skilled can run companies. The
15:42
less skilled have no other way in the door than to convince the creators that creativity is no longer needed. This has happened in many industries. It is spreadsheets and powerpoints and 14 person meetings that drone on for three hours. That is what crypto really needs, they insist. Perhaps it does. Perhaps crypto needs janitors to tend to the
16:05
amazing creations that have been built. And so that the creators may move on to new problems to tackle, not having to worry about doing the janitorial work themselves. But we should never be confused by an impressive title on a janitor's business card. Or a fancy
16:20
suit that a janitor put on to try to get you to forget that he is nothing but a janitor. The janitor has no place to determine the direction of an industry so vital to humanity. With Bitcoin, the door to the cypherpunk dream was cracked open. With Bitcoin, this is territory that must be defended. There's a second group that's winning. Those
16:46
are the Austrians. The Austrian school economists descended from Menger, Bombawerk, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard. In terms of cryptocurrency, especially Rothbard, from my observation, have laid the foundation for crypto. Two months ago, I had the opportunity to
17:05
deliver a talk at a San Francisco conference on why Satoshi Nakamoto was an Austrian. I'd be happy to share that text with anyone who'd like to have a look. The creation of Bitcoin is the perfect event that takes place in the midst of the 2007-2008 financial
17:21
crisis, when a cypherpunk suddenly comes to understand Austrian school economics in a historic moment where his melding of technology and philosophy could forever change the world. We're witnessing that happening now, just the beginning of that change. The cypherpunk and Austrian school love child is Bitcoin, and Monero is perhaps their
17:42
paranoid younger child or something like that. For decades, Austrian school economists have been denouncing flawed and failed monetary policies that come to affect every member of society in ways so supremely sinister. The argument has been so well laid out by the Austrians that the deaths of millions at the hands of government is rooted in monetary
18:04
policy. The boot on the neck, oppressing billions more, is rooted in monetary policy. It would not be possible without the monetary policy currently in existence. And everyone around us in society believes in that monetary policy with such obedience, like an elephant
18:22
at the circus. I'm reminded of the story of an elephant at the circus. When young, maybe others in the room have heard it, you chain the elephant to the hulking metal peg in the ground. Elephant struggles for days, the baby elephant, unable to free itself from the peg, and learning at a young age that the peg can't be moved. Growing
18:46
eventually into a mighty hulk of a creature, much larger than anyone here, much more powerful, chained to a tiny peg in the ground, convinced that the peg has no ability to be moved. It isn't the peg that restrains the elephant. It's the elephant's own
19:01
mistaken belief in the power of that peg. Our monetary system is such a fatally flawed enabler of oppression in society because we so fervently believe that it is how things must be. But is it your oppressor's fault that you are so easily oppressible? In 2008,
19:28
when Satoshi Nakamoto came to realize that things were not as they must be, he opened a door that can no longer be closed. The Austrians have achieved their dream of competing currencies rather than government monopoly currency. There are now, merely a decade later,
19:43
several thousand competing currencies that circulate on a given day. Each of those currencies are an experiment in how the free market would better structure monetary policy than our government monopoly on monetary policy. No one is going to bring an end to this realization that a hulking elephant will be restrained by a silly idea that he
20:01
refuses to believe in. And the Austrians, able to proudly declare victory on this long difficult problem that has plagued humanity, are barely anywhere to be seen around crypto these days. Where have the Austrians gone? They've won their battle for free market currency and now I can hardly find them in crypto, yet crypto desperately needs them.
20:22
Without them, it's a technology quickly hurtling away from its brilliant philosophical foundation. It is my advice that you not turn to a corporate janitor for insight on philosophy or ethics. The janitor doesn't know and you do both you and the janitor
20:41
disservice when you pretend that the janitor gets crypto and its underlying philosophy. You do the world a disservice when you invite that janitor to direct an industry based on whims of the janitor. When the industry is instead badly in need of its core philosophy, the cypherpunk, the hacker, the kid in history class, that girl
21:07
translating Cervantes on the weekends, the freaker, the Austrian, the geek, deserve our attention.