[Music]
hi everyone
hello
welcome
so the last talk of the day for this
theater
uh how everyone enjoying hope everyone
having a good time
great
that's great i like the enthusiasm
so
welcome to this talk uh we're going to
talk about payments
so you pay for that payment surveillance
sorry payment systems surveillance and
dissent
so please welcome alex martius
[Applause]
hi everyone and thank you for sticking
it out through to almost the end of hope
and i am hoping to make you feel even
more hopeless by the end of this
so yay um i'm alex matthews i'm the
national chair of restore the fourth we
do um civil liberties work in the area
of privacy and surveillance
and
i've grown more and more interested in
the topic of
payment systems and government power
and
how that can be used to affect people's
ability to transact and dissociate and
therefore their ability to dissent from
whatever their government is pleased to
think is the right opinions and the
right practices
the immediate spur
for
the for this kind of thinking for me
came in 2019 and related to a fairground
ride
so
my family and i were traveling in china
and
um
and i had three kids who were very
interested in riding on the fairground
rides and they could not
they could not because they could not
use cash
and unlike at u.s fairgrounds there was
not a system of tokens where you could
pay using a credit card or cash and then
be given to code tokens and then use
them on the right
instead the only payment mechanism that
was viable for my kids to get on these
rides that they really wanted to get on
was to use wepe
we pay being a chinese system that
grew out of the social messaging app
wechat
and you cannot get a wechat account
without having a chinese national id
with a matter that we thoroughly
researched before going to china because
we knew it would be kind of convenient
to be able to use wepe but there was
literally no well there was literally no
legal way that we could get a wechat
account so our kids were fresh out of
luck
and
why is this convenient and and good for
the chinese government well frankly
there aren't that many tourists coming
to
china who have no access to anybody with
a chinese national id so the problem
from their perspective is relatively
small
and
the benefits to the chinese government
of having a payment system that is
anchored to
social messaging in an integrated
collection of apps
is enormous from their perspective for
all of the reasons from their
perspective
that
the
u.s government or other governments use
when they're considering what kind of
financial surveillance to conduct
the suppression of terrorism the
suppression of money laundering the
suppression of fraud the suppression of
theft
these are all the same sort of familiar
arguments
and
so unfortunately
my family were not terrorists
um and
the and a lot of the history of payment
system surveillance traces back to
efforts to suppress
terrorism funding
so here for for for many of you in the
room you already know some of this but
we're going to just briefly canter
through
some notable elements in the history of
payments and surveillance
so
the patriot act in 2001
establishes the new offense of material
support for terrorism
it requires organizations that are
transmitting money to foreign countries
to certify that
those they're sending money to are free
of links to terrorism
um
and
the
it strengthens know your customer
requirements and anti-money laundering
requirements or with the all with the
intent of trying to
prevent the financing of terrorist
attacks
at the time i was running a non-profit
that
sent substantial amounts of money abroad
we wired money to schools in east africa
for the sponsorship of girls
for their secondary education
so if we had been following the letter
of what the patriot act required
then what we would have needed to do in
each of the schools that we wired money
to
was to sit down with every employee of
the school every teacher
every other staff member and to
interview them to ascertain that the
money that we were sending was not going
to go
to fund terrorist related activities
and frankly we were never going to do
that because i love sister salami she's
an awesome person and definitely not a
terrorist
and the and
just for completeness neither of the
girls next to her are terrorists either
um
but you know we were not going to be
targeted in the same way
for doing that because the patriot acts
um for financial surveillance
requirements were not really targeted at
girls scholarship programs
so
a well-known case during the 2000s was
the holy land foundation case
the holy land foundation at the time of
9 11 was the largest muslim charity in
the u.s
and it funded um
[Music]
education and support programs in the
palestinian territories
at the time the gaza strip was ruled as
it is today by hamas
and
the u.s government rapidly after
9 11 initiated a prosecution for
material support for terrorism
on the holy land foundation
there was a trial attended with a
mistrial with one of the jurors
declaring publicly that links between
the alleged links between the holy lamb
foundation and hamas had all the
strength of a wet noodle
but there was another trial
and the fbi got a conviction that they
celebrate on their website to this day
um which included senior holy land
foundation figures being sentenced to 65
years in prison so yay fbi
moving forward
a few years we have
yes
moving beyond the sphere of islamic
terrorism to other activities
by the us government
and after the publication of over 200
000 us diplomatic cables
wikileaks was blockaded for donations by
paypal mastercard and visa roughly
simultaneously
the c a senior executive of paypal on an
earnings call explained that this was
because the state department had told
them to do that
the state department weighed in very
very rapidly and said that they had
never asked them to do any such thing
and they maintained that position to
this day
mastercard lifted their blockade in
2012. i'm not sure when or whether um
paypal or visa lifted their blockade but
here we see the dynamics starting which
we're going to see in other non-profit
groups during this talk
of
um wikileaks turning to cryptocurrency
donations to sustain their operations
and
that is something that they still do
today in major parts to fund the defense
of julian assange
during the 2010s we also saw the
development of
crowdfunding sites
most famously gofundme
but also it's right-wing alternative
gifts and go
and
um
there was and
and
the these these sites are
relatively easily subject to
disruption by nation states because they
use the regular banking system
um
and give send go ran into troll with the
canadian government because it was a
major vehicle for donations to the
canadian trucker protests against covid
restrictions last year
um and
the canadian courts weighed in to block
the movement of the money and there were
also prosecutions of individual donors
um
you can see
for those who have a little familiarity
with the fourth amendment
that
a lot of these
third party fundraising sites
raise the
issue of the third party doctrine
this is the doctrine whereby
the u.s government can approach
entities with whom you share your data
and can subpoena them or
or get a warrant for access to their
data
and you yourself do not necessarily
get informed and are not necessarily
part of the process it's all like you're
considered to have exposed your data to
the third party vendor's use and then
and then it's a matter between the third
party vendor and the government the
third party doctrine is a little bit
weaker now than it was ten years ago but
it's still a very live
element facilitating the us government's
collection of data
we also have
during the latter part of the 2010s the
development of using blockchain to
develop peer-to-peer transactions
outside the regular banking system
they're not necessarily anonymous by
design
but this whole
ecosystem with the with the fancy name
of d5 for decentralized finance evolving
to
try to provide people with alternatives
that have
lower transaction fees that are faster
that enable people to move money around
internationally with more convenience
and that then generates regulatory
issues that the u.s government is really
only beginning to grapple with
um
we also have evolution of the swift
system the swift system has been around
since 1973
and
originally it was set up by a consortium
of six western banks um
really just as a standardized messaging
system for the settlement of
international transactions
so
um
so they have standardized codes for
banks it makes it a lot easier to
transmit money a lot less burdensome
and swift has become a dominant player
offering a variety of services and as it
became dominant
it became more useful for governments to
use to accomplish their foreign policy
goals
so in 2012 you see
the
uh eu
um enforcing sanctions on iran
by
um
by cutting off iranian access to swift
and this year you see the u.s enforcing
sanctions on russia by cutting off
access to swift
there's
clearly a little bit of institutional
anxiety on the part of those
administering the swift system
because there are pains to point out on
their website that they consider
themselves to be
a neutral system and to be a utility
but they are also
subject to these kinds of manipulation
for foreign policy goals of nation
states
so we can see
that
in the context of digitization in the
context of vastly increased
flows of international funds the
government's greed for financial data is
only growing
and the
and as part of that the neutrality of
payment systems is under threat
governments want to
control
the flow of payments and they want to
understand the nature of payments
and
in my view largely mistakenly we are
retreating from
the idea that these payment systems
could be used neutrally for
anything that is not sort of massively
criminal um
to
um to a situation where payment systems
are more manipulable
as a response
we can we can see the us government
becoming more aggressive in the area of
cryptocurrency
tracking and regulation
um
over the last few years i think it's
fair to say that the u.s government has
become the most sophisticated actor in
the world
in terms of tracking transactions
unraveling
mixers
um tracing
um cryptocurrency transactions obviously
more easily with bitcoin than with
more privacy oriented coins
um
and there's also been a lot more
thinking about how to integrate
crypto currencies into the worldwide
financial system rather than having them
exist apart from them and there's
clearly a great deal of regulatory
discomfort with that separate existence
to explain a little bit about mixers
because not everyone here is going to be
terribly familiar with what they do but
if you take bitcoin as the default
because it was the first cryptocurrency
then user a sends a bitcoin to user b
that tracks transaction is recorded it's
on the public blockchain it's visible
um
if you use a mixer service then that mix
mixes your cryptocurrency payment
payment with cryptocurrency from other
users
and sends that mix to one or more
addresses that are designated by user a
that mixing process breaks the on-chain
link
between wallet addresses and that
improves user privacy and autonomy
the mixer then gives back
to user a or onward to user b
an equivalent value of the resulting mix
of coins
so user a or user b they don't have to
know the source
of their new assortment of coins
just that it has the equivalent value of
what was put in
subtracting
presumably some fee for the use of the
mixing service
so the us government has begun
prosecution of peer-to-peer
cryptocurrency traders for
not fulfilling kyc requirements
not filing these suspicious activity
reports that you're supposed to file
for transactions over 10 over value of
over ten thousand dollars
the first prosecution for that was in
2019
and they have also
um
started to contract
with
third-party vendors who specialize
in cryptocurrency training uh tracing
of which a big trade player is chain
analysis
um
and the kinds of things that chain
analysis do or this so
when you have coins from two or more
addresses that are spent in a single
transaction
then it their software reveals that
whoever created that multi-input
transaction
must have control of both spender
addresses so that now allows chain
analysis
to identify
a single identity governing those
transactions and to identify that to
their client
in other cases they can follow what's
called appeal change so
bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies get
moved out of one address a fraction is
paid to a recipient then the remainder
is returned to a spender at a different
address a change address
and chain analysis is software
enables them to
distinguish the chain out change
addresses and that allows investigators
to follow a sum of money as it hops from
one address to the next
so
fbi is developing significant expertise
in this so it's the irs and so is ice um
and they seem to have been starting to
have substantial contracts with chain
analysis and a developing relationship
with coinbase
to track trip cryptocurrency
transactions which i presume
are related to them
attempting to suppress cryptocurrency
payments to coyotes
smuggling people over the border
so the biden administration attempted to
introduce a rule last year that would
not require reporting of all
transactions over a value of ten
thousand dollars but over a value of six
hundred dollars which would be a lot
more intrusive and we were
working
on
congressional advocacy to oppose that
move
in the end the senate finance committee
nixed it
and
what followed was an executive order
with some really interesting phraseology
for how they're thinking about
um
about
cryptocurrency and payment surveillance
more broadly so i'm just going to be a
little bit of that
they say the executive order says
digital assets may pose significant
illicit finance risks including money
laundering cyber crime and ransomware
narcotics and human trafficking and
terrorism and proliferation financing
assumedly nuclear proliferation
digital assets may also be used as a
tool
to circumvent united states and foreign
financial sanctions regimes
and other tools and authorities and
we'll talk about sanctions in a moment
growth in decentralized financial
ecosystems this is the d5 stuff
peer-to-peer payment activity and
obscured blockchain ledgers without
controls to mitigate illicit finance
could also present additional market and
national security risks in the future
and they're right opinions differ on how
much of a problem that is but they are
right
they're now contemplating the urgent
adoption of a central bank digital
currency which is another way of
co-opting the cryptocurrency space
and bringing it into the mainstream
a lot of this comes i think from talking
with staffers
from the kind of impulse that i saw
commonly with people when i was at
public policy school
for public policy people
they
detest the idea of biased and prejudiced
decision making and
the conception at least when i was at
policy school was that the way that you
avoided bias in decision making was to
collect more data
and that therefore implicitly more
collection of data by the government by
improving decision making is by default
a good
and it's very hard for public policy
people to wrap their minds often around
situations where the collection of less
data may be a good that's just not how
public public policy courses and
philosophy is structured
so we have data now flowing from
cryptocurrency exchanges to fincen and
from finzen fincen outward to ice and
fbi and irs
and
this i i want to emphasize this has
gotten a lot deeper and a lot more
sophisticated in between say 2017 and
now
to the extent that even with the exp
impressive progress that there has been
on privacy coins like monero and zcash
in the context of this heightened
scrutiny relying only on the technology
of those privacy coins
feels unwise
especially for
implementations that the us government
may perceive as being against its
interests whether those implementations
are legal or illegal in a given country
so
this raises an interesting question
for
um
of whether cryptocurrency
can in fact
blunt the impact
of sanctions
regimes and with that
how much can it blunt the
in the efforts of the u.s to advance its
national interests we're getting into
some very large questions here
and you can see the anxiety
about that in the executive order so how
far is that really true as we stand
well
what i see realistically right now
is
that
implementations
outside the us that are citizen focused
are blunting the impact of sanctions on
individuals that's not exactly where the
anxiety lies
but
that it but that is nevertheless the
case
so
there are some useful examples of this
um
in venezuela for people who have been
looking to flee venezuela in the context
of the currency controls that the
venezuelan government imposed
cryptocurrency has been a useful store
of value enabling them to flee the
country and still take something with
them
in
afghanistan with the acute crisis that
is going on there
there are educational charities that are
reported to be turning to cryptocurrency
so that they can continue to provide
some measure of girls education
without using
anything that is visible to the taliban
but also
without having to raise funds in ways
that go through the mainstream banking
system which is operating under
sanctions
and also
as things get more desperate there to
provide famine relief as well as
education
i have seen reports
that um
iranian students are using
cryptocurrency to
be able to pay college tuition for
remote learning courses
which would otherwise come under
sanctions
a the feminist coalition in nigeria
got blocked from raising funds by the
government
because it advocated too energetically
against police brutality in nigeria
and they have been using cryptocurrency
to continue their work against police
brutality and against impunity from rape
and another interesting example i found
was
the belarus solidarity foundation which
is an association of dissidents against
the belarusian dictator lukashenko
again blocked from raising funds by
their government
they've used cryptocurrency and
continued to use cryptocurrency to fund
that dissent and also now to fund
volunteers and medical supplies and
equipments
and in the form of arms to resist the
russian
invasion of ukraine
so
let's think about the larger anxiety in
this executive order
why is it that we have not seen
as a consequence of the russian invasion
of ukraine
a substantial turn by the russian
government
to using either cryptocurrency more
broadly or privacy coins in particular
to evade sanction regimes
there are a few reasons why that might
be so
so
one is
probably that
this whole ukrainian invasion was
envisioned as being a short-term over by
christmas kind of thing
it was indeed i think envisioned as an
easy security
operation and that the conquest of
ukraine would be brief
and
that logically means that they would not
necessarily have been thinking
about
long-term financial retooling of the
tools that they were using
there's obviously issues of expertise i
would be surprised if
a substantial portion of russian
leadership were familiar
with the use of privacy coins
but there are also issues of scale
wars are massively expensive and the
daily transaction volume on monero which
is the largest of the privacy coins by
some way
is a tiny fraction of the expenses of a
war
so
we would be able to see
a russian caused expansion in the use of
privacy coins that just is not there
and that issue of
volume
suggests that the anxiety
in the executive order
that nation states would use privacy
coins and cryptocurrency to blunt the
impact of sanctions
that really is not happening yet
and is not going to happen until
adoption of privacy coins is a lot
broader than it is today
um
so
there you go there is good and bad
so
now come see the part of the talk where
i get to be a little bit of a
nostradamus
and to give a plausible scenario for
near-term
the near-term future for payment system
surveillance and there are some things
that are reasonably foreseeable
some of which are already in part
happening
so
in the context of privacy coins
um
d some degree of d platforming from
exchanging exchanges has already
happened
and in some countries there will be
attempts to
criminalize the use of privacy coin
related software
um
we can expect to see more countries
experimenting like india has done and
like china has done and like sweden has
done
with discouraging the use of cash
cash is too flexible and too anonymous
for the default assumptions of
governments these days
an enormous
amount of the world's
payments transactions are still
conducted in cash even in the us it's
still around 50 percent
and we can expect to see that continue
to decrease
in an environment of government
discouragement of cash
one thing that
gives
privacy and surveillance activists hives
is the
prospect of increased mergers between
credit rating agencies and data brokers
and open source intelligence
a vastly increased volume of data going
into
credit rating decisions whether that
data is of high quality or low quality
and
forming what you might call credit
broker entities
that
pose a significant threat to people's
privacy in the payments context
on another axis
we can
see that facebook already spent
a couple of years trying to create its
own cryptocurrency lumen
um
and was clearly prompted in that by the
success of the wechat we pay
at um access in china
and we can
we can expect to see continued efforts
along those lines and
in and in the west it may be that that
eventually those efforts will be
successful
so if those consolidations occur
then we can reasonably foresee
that governments will have an enormously
strong incentive to coordinate with
credit brokers and wechat analogues
to do all the things that they already
do with other types of surveillance data
heat mapping of where the risky entities
are flagging those entities harassing
those entities prosecuting those
entities and some of those prosecutions
will be completely legitimate
some of the concerns relating to payment
surveillance are completely legitimate
but there's also going to be
a lot of fallout for individuals
privacy
um that comes along with that
um
and
it is hard to see what institutional or
legal barriers
there may be within the u.s context
that would prevent the u.s government
from going down that particular path
so
then we can then i can switch because it
is my talk and i get to do this kind of
thing from being nostradamus to being
moses
and making not the commandments but some
suggestions of things that we can do
that
may
help a little bit i'm not sure really
what will help very much these are
powerful forces that are involved here
but
one element of this can be that
the the smaller banks and the credit
unions in the us are not geared up with
the swift system
and so
for folks who are privacy conscious
there can be small banks and credit
unions that may be preferable to large
ones we use one called digital federal
credit union
um
the privacy coin adoption and volume
problem
solving that would solve
a large number of other problems it
would solve problems of volatility it
would solve problems of how you get ca
resources out of the privacy coin
context and into context where normal
people transact
in ways that may be less transparent
to
the to governments than the regular
banking system is
there's been a great deal of research
that there isn't really time to get into
in the cryptocurrency space
over
um
identity solutions and and what is
sometimes called sovereign identity but
um
having instead of a unified
digital identity um
separate identity claims in separate
contexts that by balkanizing your
digital identity enhance your privacy
vis-a-vis the government
there have been long-running experiments
with autonomous currencies there's one
near me in massachusetts which is burke
shares which has been
um popular for a long time in a
particular county in massachusetts and
that's a local physical currency
um
for for
um
anarchist groups
um there have been
interesting experiments on a smaller
scale with you know black market work
and barter economies and free cycling
and mutual aid that exists existed and
have always existed
outside of the regular banking system
and one thing that might be useful and
interesting for you for you folks as a
takeaway from this
is to practice setting up an unhosted
privacy coin wallet while it's legal to
do so
and to try transacting with it and see
see
where it takes you and what kind of
implications that generates in your mind
for
this kind of problem and how it may be
solved
so
those are the preliminary thoughts that
i have for you on the topic of payment
surveillance i think it's a really
fascinating
area and that it's going to
become something that as activists we
have to think about more and devote more
time and thought to
but i'm going to open it up at this
point for q a and thank you for being
patient and for listening
[Applause]
so if you want to come to the mic over
in that direction
then i'd welcome any thoughts that you
have
this is this is you're first you're up
thank you for an awesome super
informative talk um i had a question
about the slide you put up about uh
the contracts with uh
with with ice and with the government
right so coinbase and coinalysis and a
few other folks
yes is that dollars or is that thousands
of dollars because those numbers look
smaller than i would have expected
um and my understanding is that those
are thousands of dollars so i sure i
should have made that clear okay so
these are billions
okay yeah yeah that makes sense i'm
sorry
i can feel my math teacher cringing at
me for not labeling axes properly but
there you go thank you very much
yes please how you doing i met you
yesterday at your booth um so what
you're saying is uh if the governments
start uh banning the privacy coins of
course they're gonna force the exchanges
to remove the coins from their
from their systems right the so what
what happens what do you think is going
to happen is it's just going to go to
like decentralize exchanges at that
point or
i mean they could continue going on it's
just going to get harder for probably
regular people to understand how to
trade yeah i mean it's it's not a
process i think where governments are
expecting that there is going to be
zero percent usage of privacy coins in
the future but i think it's something
that they want to discourage and
denormalize and drive out of
anything that is at all analogous to
something that is usable
um
and so
it's an awkward discussion and i've been
in some of these discussions and
you have folks who
understand the potential of privacy
coins who are saying you know look you
don't understand it's not about trying
to regulate this particular kind of coin
or this particular kind of software
because it is designed to make you
irrelevant
um
and
on and on the other side you have a lot
of interest from governments in the
potential that cryptocurrency poses as
long as it can be adequately taxed and
monitored
um
the
um
and
i think both elements of of of these
folks are right in the in a way but you
can have very innovative software that
is very privacy friendly that still
nobody with will use
if
governments decide to just make it
illegal within their
spaces of government then that will
discourage people if it is perceived as
being something that is
that only criminals will use then it
will discourage people from using it
um and so
there
there are a lot of things that
governments i think will be willing to
do to maintain their grip
over how people transact and to make
that continually more transparent to
them this is a very important thing to
governments to do thank you
i think most of us here believe in the
individual's right to privacy but the
sad truth of a lot of
anonymous currencies you know i don't
want to name any is that they are used
disproportionately by bad actors
so i wonder you know in your various
positions how how do you counter this
argument
well
so
i think that
speaking a little bit to the dynamic i
was just describing
um
the
more that
um
that governments try to repress and
discipline a particular technology the
more it
will be likely to be used
only by people who have let's say a
really strong financial incentive
to keep their
affairs out of government eyes
um
i've given some
very favorable examples of people who
might have good reason to use privacy
coins
um
but
it is nonetheless true
that
there
are
um
child sexual abuse materials that are
circulated using these payments
there is money laundering that happens
there is tax evasion that happens using
these tools
but at present
i would have to say
that at least as regards tax evasion and
money laundering an enormous volume of
that occurs through the regular banking
system
and it occurs because you have corrupt
individuals who are working within banks
who enable it to happen on behalf of
wealthy clients
and
so
i i understand
the need
for there to be some notion of knowing
your customer
i understand the impulse behind it
but i also see
a much more ardent desire by governments
to squash these particular technologies
than to clean house in the established
banking system they're easy targets now
yes
you know it's nascent and i think they
feel like they've done all they can in
the fiat side of things
i'm sure they do feel that or at least
they feel they have done all that that
they are willing to do thank you
thanks for the talk um i'll keep myself
to one question um the
so
we do have nowadays a lot of um people a
lot of consumers who have moved away
from cash um and
the um even though
cash has a lot of benefits for personal
freedom they
they
adopt the corporate run system payment
systems that are um
and sometimes credit cards sometimes um
yeah right so a lot of people use them
um and um data brokers and so on have a
lot of visibility to what happens in
them
so i'd um
you'd expect that to result in costs to
consumers although consumers are usually
not aware of the costs
it seems to me that we are seeing those
costs um but it's being attributed to
anything but um the recent adoption of
these corporate surveillance payment
systems um so
i mean everybody's suffering with
inflation nobody connects that to the
rise of corporate run
corporate surveillance payment systems
um i wonder if you see any link there
so
i do not feel qualified to speak on the
link between inflation and these
phenomena i am not a trained economist
but
i
was i would say
that
it is true that it is hard to see the
damage from um
from poor privacy practices and poor
information security practices
and that it can be shocking for people
to come from other countries to the us
and see just the regular process of
credit card transactions and go like
this is crazy you're not entering a pin
you're not there
nobody's checking your signature
nobody is checking that the person who
has the card is actually that person
this is an apparatus that is designed
absolutely for the convenience of the
merchants and very little
to do with protecting the consumer
against credit card fraud
so people have
great reasons to be skeptical of the
current ways that we handle things
um
you lied out very nicely that
cryptocurrencies don't play a role in
sanctioned bustings for let's say russia
or for china or for iran as a state
actor
why is it then and the cryptocurrencies
have used as you showed with great
success for people subverting
other states
why is it then that the u.s has such a
hard on let's say
to actually regulate cryptocurrencies
when they're actually being used very
successful
for
let's say
liberal uses instead of suppressive
users
i think i think that there is a
a real tension of world views
that i can encounter in these spaces
and
when you're talking to like staffers on
the finance committee in congress or or
or folks like this
then
it is about
there be there being data that is out
there that they are can gather that they
are not gathering it is about there
being problems that they could
potentially solve if they if they allow
the government to gather this
information that they are feeling like
they cannot solve adequately without
that um and so is a worry about their
scope of authority
um
that i think is is so such a powerful
and fundamental thing for folks who have
this kind of training that they might
not even articulate and i don't even if
i would have come to articulate it if i
hadn't wended my way over into the
privacy and surveillance space
so
um
i don't think that there is much that
will stop
governmental employees from feeling that
there is a problem here in the
development of the cryptocurrency space
it's often the case
honestly the government departments are
victims of ransomware attacks that are
executed
with the aid of cryptocurrency
technology
and that often is because government
departments are poorly protected and
have visible information security
practices um
and
and so they they are ripe
for the plucking
um but that doesn't mean they like the
sensation of being plucked
i think to your question is i'm sorry to
interrupt but in the u.s i think the
government have a lot of pressure from
the banks
which
is controlled by federal reserve to
crack down on this stuff because
in the long run cryptocurrencies are a
threat to the us dollar that's why i
think
personally i think there's pressure not
too much
yeah on your moses slide you mentioned
sovereign identity
are there any concrete examples of that
uh well there is um you can look up um
the one that i looked into most closely
are some folks called the sovereign
foundation
s-o-v-r-i-n
and
they they've been doing a lot of
thinking about the
how you deal with what are characterized
as the problem of blockchain and
identity persistence
because
in a sense
we we all benefit from a certain
plasticity in our identities
being able to shift our self-conceptions
over time
being able to shift
ways that we name ourselves and describe
ourselves to the world
and
not having a fully accurate digital
record of the decisions that we have
made
the one of the
risks in the blockchain space is because
of the indelible nature of transactions
on the blockchain if there are solutions
adopted
unwisely
that are blockchain solutions that
um
that
fix a particular digital identity at a
particular point in time for a person
then that person will be accountable to
that identity for as long as that
blockchain
is
accessible
i've seen some absolutely cracked
suggestions
of applying blockchain solutions in the
criminal justice space
in the us and i'm like for christ's sake
don't touch the one with the other they
should stay very very far away from one
another
um
so
my hope is that
if there are
methods evolved for as i put it
balkanizing your digital identity and
having it break up into particular
claims in particular contexts
then it will decrease
the risk to people's
self-characterization
of the existence of blockchain
technology
and i'm sorry if that got a little
abstruse and hypothetical but that's
been on my mind
okay
looks like we're done
[Applause]
hello hi guys so just to let you know uh
closing ceremonies will happen on 416
but also there will be broadcasts here
as far as i know correct
no
okay
yeah
okay so yeah 206 i think 206 or 416
those are the places to go to watch the
closing ceremonies
thank you
you