How to be cypherpunk

A keynote by Juan Benet at the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress (ECC#2) in Buenos Aires on the history and future of the cypherpunk movement, from the first-wave pioneers who built PGP and fought the crypto wars to today's open problems of mass surveillance, autonomous robots, and building civilization-scale infrastructure for a positive future.

This transcript is an accessible copy of the original video transcript (opens in a new tab) published by Web3Privacy Now. It has been lightly edited for readability.

Introduction (0:05)

Host: [applause] Thank you so much. And I love your dress today. It's amazing. Kilts are amazing by the way. I got to get married recently for one of the days and Scotland is amazing.

Juan Benet: Awesome. That's good. Thank you. I got this. All right. I'm here today to talk to you about how to be a cypherpunk. Let me check. Great. I'm going to try and keep this very fast moving. So, pay attention to the slides. I'm going to try to be very crisp and hopefully I can get us some time back. I don't need 20 minutes to tell you this. Let's go through it.

My name is Juan Benet. I've worked on IPFS, libp2p, Ethereum, Filecoin, Protocol Labs, Garen, a whole bunch of projects throughout the last 15, 20 years. And I am a cypherpunk. Cypherpunks are everyday normal people. We can all be cypherpunks. As Gandalf says, it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. So you ordinary folk, what amazing everyday deeds are you doing to keep the darkness at bay? Just keep that in mind. Small actions can trigger massive changes in the future. It could be a research project. It could be a new protocol idea. It could be a new mathematical result. It could be taking an action to disseminate critical information at a critical juncture in the crypto wars.

There are many actions that you can take to be a cypherpunk. These are pictures of the first wave of cypherpunks. They are everyday normal people. Here are some pictures of later wave cypherpunks. And one of them was in the early and later cypherpunks. You can see Zooko with longer hair and Zooko with less hair.

Cypherpunks write code (2:20)

Cypherpunks write code. This is one of the major tenets of this movement. A lot has been said about this, but remember that at the end of the day, we have to produce actual infrastructure, actual code that goes into hardware, actual code that powers the systems that we use every day. And it cannot be code for only a small elite group of extremely technical hackers. It must be code that everyone in the world can use. It must be things that are broadly disseminated. It must be things that compete in the highest levels of product user experience. It must be code that is as good and easy to use as any kind of centralized or less secure alternative. You have to compete not just on what is more private, but also on what is more convenient, what is more fun to use. What do people enjoy more? Because at the end of the day, people will choose based on those features and not on security.

A lot has been said about write code. So, I'm here to tell you about the other things that cypherpunks also do. Cypherpunks write email and forum posts. At the end of the day, cypherpunks are much more famous for the cypherpunk mailing list. And this was way more impactful than most of the code that all of the cypherpunks ever wrote. It's actually a code one of one of the latest cypherpunks, the one of the latecomers to the list, Satoshi Nakamoto, that actually was perhaps the most successful of the projects that were talked about in the list. So remember that just refining ideas, trying things out, building prototypes, and getting the things out there can have can ripple through history and make a significant change. And today, lots of us are doing this through discourse forums, through GitHub, through EIPs, through all kinds of Twitter posts. We're refining the range of ideas that can improve the code that we use.

Cypherpunks fight for freedoms and rights. Think about the key freedoms that you want to have. Think about the freedoms that all of the people in the world should have a right to have. And then think about what systems do we need to implement on the internet. What systems do we need to build in the stack to implement and support those freedoms for all of humanity to make these liberties accessible to all? That's what cypherpunks are about.

Cypherpunks build utopias and protopias. We have positive visions for the future. We aspire to build wonderful worlds where we can live free and flourish together. We're pluralist in nature. We also prevent dystopias. We're keenly aware of bad possible futures. We are motivated to prevent the emergence of terrible outcomes. 1984 was very influential to the cypherpunk movement. Many individual cypherpunks wanted to avoid the Ministry of Truth. Wanted to avoid the mass surveillance that Orwell talked about and they took this very simple moral lesson from the book: Don't let it happen. It depends on you. And I'm telling you today, don't let it happen. It depends on you specifically.

Secure communications and funding (5:26)

Cypherpunks enable secure and private communications, from coming up with breakthrough results in cryptography to enable public key crypto, breakthrough algorithms that make it practical, even more useful, and harder to break. Or not an innovation, just an important action in the moment. You can notice that sometimes you need to take some important action to correct the course of history. Mark Miller, one of the most prolific cypherpunks from the early days, pictured here, the second from the left, along with many other luminaries of that era, again, everyday normal people, knew that RSA and public key were being withheld and weren't being published. And so he took it upon himself to go and find the papers. He made photocopies of the papers individually, going to many different copier places to avoid leaving a trace. And then individually mailed those papers to a whole bunch of people to make sure that just in case these papers remain classified, the knowledge would get out on how to build this kind of cryptography. That action was pivotal in that moment.

Cypherpunks build secure and decentralized communications networks. People like Moxie and Meredith build systems like Signal that now power secure communications for millions of people globally. Everyday people depend on the work of people like this. People like Matthew and Amandine built Matrix and Element and made a useful tool that's a Slack competitor that you can actually use. It's end-to-end encrypted. And by the way, they have teams. It's not just the two of them. They have entire ranges of teams that work with them every day to help. But it usually starts with one or two people, a small kernel of success that then scales to something significant. Jay builds Bluesky. She gave us a way to have a social internet, a decentralized public forum for all kinds of conversation.

Cypherpunks resist and prevent censorship. A set of us when Turkey banned Wikipedia just put the Wikipedia archives on IPFS and made them distributed and peer-to-peer and enabled everyone there to be able to browse Wikipedia. That was for a long time the way that most people in Turkey viewed Wikipedia. Others took the same tech and enabled a referendum to happen that was outlawed by the state and enabled a censorship-resistant way of convening the vote. Others took the same tech to establish a public verifiable record of terrible events in history so that we do not forget them. So that we can have a verifiable trace that we can take to court in the future. And these have actually been used in International Criminal Court cases.

Cypherpunks make money to develop and fund cryptography and privacy tech. This one is probably the most surprising to all of you here. What? We're talking about privacy and security, not money. Ah, but the cypherpunks, unlike many other developers in the history of open source, understand capital and understand the ways of the world and understand that you need to be able to fund large groups of people to develop software. They understand that it is extremely expensive to build high-quality software that millions of people can use. And so some of us build systems that can be cash-flow positive to be able to fund and develop lots of software. Think of Ethereum, a cash-flow positive system that has funded tons of ZK and FHE research and lots of other privacy tech. Think of Zcash, a cash-flow positive system that developed and funded ZK work. Think of Protocol Labs and Filecoin who have a cash-flow positive system developing and funding ZK and FHE, and more recent entrants, things like Starknet and Zama, who are doing a lot of the development themselves and are also creating the capital structure to be able to fund a ton of this research into the future. All of these groups not only develop their own stuff, they fund thousands of other people working on this tech. So as a cypherpunk, if you can make a cash-flow positive system, do it so that you can fund other work. And tons of projects do this today.

Legal battles and building together (10:17)

Cypherpunks may have to face legal battles. Hopefully we can avoid it. Hopefully we can do everything by the book everywhere. But sometimes when powerful groups want to infringe on your freedoms, they will manipulate every system around and will attack you sometimes with legal battles. We had the crypto wars that had to be fought, and they had to be fought in court. Thankfully, we won them. There were three of them, many cases to prevent the flow of information, to prevent publication of important research, to force certain kind of devices like the Clipper chip. Each of these fights required lots of people, lots of lawyers, lots of policymakers, lots of people talking about why these issues matter and why it would be terrible to repeat that kind of problem.

And today we have another version. Chat control in Europe is trying to take over people's private communications. And this is a fight that needs to be had and a fight that people need to take on individually. You individually can take actions to prevent the spread of this kind of terrible mass surveillance type of system. Here are some of the people that had some of the hardest such fights. People like Aaron Swartz, Virgil Griffith, Roman Storm, Phil Zimmermann, Ladar Levison, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and many more people who are not pictured here. Huge applause for them. [applause]

Cypherpunks build together. Sometimes we do things on our own, but at the end of the day, we contribute our ideas and our code in open source to lots of other people, and we refine what we do by talking about it with each other, refining our ideas, refining our software, getting feedback. We do that through forums like the Cypherpunks mailing list or these kinds of forums in the Liberty community or the Ethereum research community. We do it by collaborating across many projects and teams, and we do it through communication venues like this. The Chaos Communication Congress helped convene a lot of these groups in the past, and now we have the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress convening our group to talk about these ideas. And we also have been creating the Cypherpunk Retreat, a venue for a set of the builders in these systems and projects to come together and solve core problems that affect everybody. Shared problems that maybe we can tackle together, because oftentimes what we want to avoid is a super fragmented environment where nothing talks to each other and it's the massive centralized players competing with tiny little networks. If we build on open standards like open identity standards or open messaging standards, then we can build very large scale privacy-preserving systems. Things that are secure, but also interoperate.

Three open problems (15:27)

Cypherpunks solve open problems. So I'm going to leave you with three critical open problems for the next 10 to 15 years, and hopefully one of you or a few of you in this room will get inspired by these open problems and will work on them.

The first one is an old problem: mass surveillance. Now today with the systems that we have, the phones, the computers, the cameras, the infrastructure that we've built, it enables a total mass control surveillance system that is way beyond anything that Orwell ever dreamed of. This is a potential dystopian environment when attached to social credit systems that can decide what you do or can't get to do. Social credit systems that might enable you to be able to access transportation or use money or be able to fly to a different country. When those systems depend on these mass surveillance control systems, you can establish an extremely powerful feedback system that can control billions of people in the world. This is one of the things that I fear the most in the future — that we will accidentally let these systems exist. There's tremendous optimization pressures for these to emerge, from very powerful people who think that they'll be doing the world a favor by removing all kinds of freedoms, by removing all kinds of potentials for risk and bad actors. And all of these systems always get implemented in the guise of the good guys policing the environment, the good guys looking at your messages and deciding whether you should be allowed to say that or not because it might be dangerous for the community to hear about that. And this is how these systems slowly get ratcheted up to control populations at scale. We need to prevent the rise of digital totalitarian states. They might emerge in the future. We don't quite have them yet. And this is a fight that we have to take on.

The next one: the robots are coming. Like there really are the sci-fi landscape. We're very quickly entering the real sci-fi landscape. There will be millions of these robots by 2030 and billions by 2040. You might think that these numbers are crazy, but I've done the estimation. And it's not just me. The companies themselves are talking about these numbers. So this will happen. There's an enormous amount of economic optimization pressure for this to occur. And so we have to get ahead of this potential problem and figure out how are we going to navigate a world with these kinds of systems which by the way could be hacked, could be controlled by various groups, and could be coercing us or attacking us in all kinds of ways. So we have a little bit of lead time, 5 to 10 years, of being able to put in place infrastructure that helps humanity have a much more cooperative positive sum environment with robots and various groups that might control fleets of these.

And the one that I'm personally most moved by, and I find most interesting, and the one that could lead to a tremendously positive vision of the future is: how do we build a society of humans, AIs and uploads? We are reaching the moment of sci-fi that sci-fi has talked about for the last hundred years. We are getting systems like brain-computer interfaces and whole brain emulation; this will arrive in 15, 20, 30 years. We are building AGI. AGI will lead to ASI. And when that happens, we will be sharing the world with our children. And we will have a new set of agents, a new set of people, a new population to share the world and the universe with. And what we have to figure out — the challenge to our generation is — what are the civilization and societal infrastructure components? What are the rules? What are the laws? What are the ethics that we need to put in place to make this transition a very positive one? One that enables all of us to flourish in a very positive vision of the future. This is a very hard problem as you can imagine. All sci-fi talks about just how damn hard this is. But this is our challenge. This is one of our fights and I hope that some of you in this room are going to be inspired to take it on. And I'm just going to plug Pantheon. It is a phenomenal recent sci-fi that goes straight at the heart of all of these questions and it is quite good at looking at the near-to-midterm science and tech that is going to be built and asking the really hard ethical questions about how the world will contend with these ideas.

So cypherpunks, everyday people, everyday normal people that do deeds to keep the darkness at bay. Please take on these three open problems or others that you know about, others that you've heard today or that you'll hear later. Please, we are counting on your work for the next 10, 20, 30 years to build a very positive, flourishing future. Thank you very much. And if you want the slides, here's a QR code. I'll post them on Twitter as well. Thank you. And a huge thank you to the Web3Privacy Now community because they have been restoring the heart of our community. I have been so sad in the crypto space to see such obsession with "token number go up", and a bunch of us came into the system to establish rights and freedoms, and the heart of this community is a cypherpunk one! And I am so thankful that you are here helping return these ideas and helping us get there. We couldn't do it without you. Thank you. [applause]