[00:00:05]: Anna Rose:


Welcome to Zero Knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero-knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.


This week, Nico and I chat with our guest Arnaud Schenk and dive into the topic of how communities develop in the digital space, starting with a discussion about the history of computer culture, the rejection of institutions by the mid-90s internet culture, how the seeds for this were set by the 60s counterculture. We then switch over to discussing the key points he raised in a recent blog post entitled Trust Infrastructure. We discussed the downsides and dangers of a trustless system, the need for new institutions, structures, or norms to make it possible to build long-lasting online communities, and how programmable cryptography may play a role in these solutions. But Arnaud also makes it clear that the post is not prescriptive, but rather the idea of Trust Infrastructure is a starting point for a bigger conversation. It was a lot of fun to chat about this and I do think this is very much an open topic, so very curious to hear what you think about it.


Now, before I kick off, I just want to point you towards the ZK Jobs Board. There you can find job opportunities to work with top teams in ZK. I also want to encourage teams looking for top talent to post your jobs on the ZK Jobs Board as well. We've been hearing more and more from teams that used it that they found excellent talent through this Jobs Board. So be sure to check it out. I've added the link in the show notes. Also a quick reminder, we are back with ZK Summit 12 happening in Lisbon on October 8th. Be sure to get your application in if you want to be eligible for an early bird ticket. ZK Summit is a one-day ZK-focused event where you can learn about cutting edge research, new ZK paradigms and products, and the math and cryptographic techniques that underpin our favorite ZK systems. All info and the application form to attend can be found at zksummit.com. I hope to see you there.


Now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors.


[00:02:15]: Tanya:
Aleo is a new Layer 1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. Driven by a mission for a truly secure internet, Aleo has interwoven zero-knowledge proofs into every facet of their stack, resulting in a vertically integrated Layer 1 blockchain that's unparalleled in its approach. Aleo is ZK by design. Dive into their programming language, Leo, and see what permissionless development looks like, offering boundless opportunities for developers and innovators to build ZK apps. This is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at aleo.org. 


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And now here's our episode.


[00:03:42]: Anna Rose:


So today Nico and I are here with Arnaud, a co-founder of Aztec. Welcome to the show, Arnaud.


[00:03:47]: Arnaud Schenk:


Thank you so much for having me.


[00:03:49]: Anna Rose:


And we have Nico. Hey, Nico.


[00:03:51]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Hi, Anna. Hi, Arnaud.


[00:03:52]: Anna Rose:


So this episode came about because, Nico, you had the idea. I think you had gone to an event that Arnaud put together, and you suggested him for the show. So yeah, I just was hoping you could share a few words about what you had in mind.


[00:04:05]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Yeah, I mean, it came from multiple places for me because I've been also hanging around, I think similar people to you have been Arnaud in London these days. And so this narrative of Trust Infrastructure that Arnaud has been pushing has been quite prevalent. And then last week, you hosted this Hash It Out event where a lot of builders came together to talk a lot about programmable cryptography. And so I thought all these realms intersected nicely. There's a big intersection between Hash It Out and ZK Hack in terms of the people who show up. So I thought this would be a really good fit.


[00:04:38]: Anna Rose:


Cool. So let's kick off, Arnaud, I know we're going to be spending some time in this episode talking about this Trust Infrastructure, but I think we should start with getting to know you a little bit. Tell us a bit about your past joining Aztec and also what got you first excited about ZK topics.


[00:04:56]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah. Cool. So it's funny, I reflected a couple of days ago. I've just turned 30, and I used to introduce myself as a high school dropout, but I don't think I've done that very recently, because --


[00:05:08]: Anna Rose:


It's too long ago now.


[00:05:09]: Arnaud Schenk:


It's too long ago exactly. But I've been in startups and in tech basically since I left school. Always in quite early stage companies. And in about 2015, I moved to London to work at this organization called Entrepreneur First. Entrepreneur First is also the kind of VC or incubator where Aztec, or what became Aztec, started. Zac and Tom, who I think you've had both on the ZK podcast, right? Zac Williamson and Tom?


[00:05:41]: Anna Rose:


For sure. Yep. Zac multiple times, actually.


[00:05:45]: Arnaud Schenk:


Zac multiple times. He's a good person to have on a show.


[00:05:48]: Anna Rose:


For sure.


[00:05:50]: Arnaud Schenk:


So Zac and Tom knew each other through family friends, and they had started working on this thing that at the time was called CreditMint. They worked on it part-time. They joined Entrepreneur First to start working on it full-time. That's when I joined them. And then Joe, who I think also has been on the ZK Podcast, joined us a few months later. And the interest in ZK, I think, was -- yeah, it kind of came out of necessity. So we were building this platform -- our initial idea was to try and issue this financial asset called a syndicated loan on Ethereum. For a bunch of reasons, we thought that was a good asset to try and put on-chain. I still think it is, but, yeah, we'll see where it goes. And along the way we built this whole platform, and we talked to these private debt funds, which are responsible for issuing these assets. And they basically told us, look, we like the idea, we like the platform, but there's absolutely no way we're putting these assets and all our transactions on-chain completely publicly. We started -- well, mostly Zac. Zac was animated by, at the time, what seemed like an irrational belief that he could pick up cryptography from scratch and roll his own cryptography from scratch--


[00:07:05]: Anna Rose:


Which he did.


[00:07:06]: Arnaud Schenk:


Which he did.


[00:07:06]: Anna Rose:


However, those early iterations, as I understand, were slightly rough.


[00:07:12]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah, that's one way to put it. I remember the very first iteration, which was out of a fever dream of Zac for a couple weeks of intense introduction to cryptography for him, and he went to speak -- we got an introduction to Jens Groth of Groth16 fame, and it turned out that it was completely wrong.


[00:07:38]: Anna Rose:


Yes, yes, yes. Arnaud, this is funny. I want to do a quick throwback, because there is an episode, I think the first episode I ever had with Zac was 2019 or something like that. And I remember him telling that story of Jens Groth and Jens giving him all the advice and kind of pointing him in a new direction. And just another side note is we just had Jens Groth on the show like two weeks ago too. He's working at another ZK company now. Anyway, continue.


[00:08:03]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah, indeed.


[00:08:03]: Anna Rose:


Anyway, continue.


[00:08:06]: Arnaud Schenk:


His new company, by the way, is, I think, going the same direction as broadly, like programmable crypto and Trust Infrastructure stuff. So I'm excited to see what he does. So, yeah, anyways, that was when I met Zac and Tom. That was late 2017. I had been paying attention to crypto, but not actively in it for a few years. There was something really appealing to crypto, maybe as a frontier, as this sense of, hey, maybe this is an environment where we could get out of maybe these inadequate equilibrium -- equilibria that we seem to have found ourselves in. And I think realistically, crypto was appealing because it was this continuation of the promise of the internet. I've started making the distinction between the internet and cyberspace. I think cyberspace is closer to the idea that animated the early creators of what became theiinternet. Cyberspace as a place, as a frontier, as an environment, you know, the very famous declaration of independence of cyberspace from John Perry Barlow, which, hilariously -- he basically argues in that declaration of, we're no longer going to be subject to the will and the power of states. And I always find it absolutely hilarious that he wrote that at Davos, but you can only win some things.


But, yeah, I felt like crypto is a continuation of that promise, maybe, and I found that quite appealing. And then, yeah, by accident, got into cryptography and at first really quite basic cryptography, and then ZK. And, yeah, that was maybe the start of Aztec. I actually left Aztec at the tail end of 2020. I think I was maybe a little bit disillusioned during the kind of summer of yield farming with crypto. It felt to me like there was this core group of people who were earnestly trying to create this new space and taking this idea of crypto as a frontier really, really seriously. And then there was this wider -- because crypto like imposes limitations on you, and it's actually -- I think you can only be productive in the space if you take seriously that what you're doing is probably not going to look like a startup. Right? It's probably going to be slightly closer to -- well, just to -- you know, in the 1600s moving to the US. And it has to be a little bit ideologically motivated, and it has to be something a little bit deeper than just building something that gets a bunch of users very, very quickly. Yeah, I don't know, I felt maybe a little bit disillusioned with where the space was in 2020 -2021.


[00:11:04]: Nico Mohnblatt:


What happened to the promise, right?


[00:11:06]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah, exactly.


[00:11:08]: Anna Rose:


It's funny, though, that DeFi Summer turned you -- because to me, that was only the start of the insanity that followed. And it's interesting when you think back to that era. I mean, it created so much energy, it brought in a ton of new people, for better or worse, very quickly. But DeFi Summer actually seems like a blip compared to what happened the next year or the year after. And it's funny, because I think we're still -- we still have the sort of the spirit of the casino that was started then with us. Now I wonder, like I think it's also responsible for a lot of the disillusionment today and frustration today, but it's just interesting that even in 2020, you were feeling it. See, I was kind of excited by it. I don't know if I spotted it as negative. I was sort of also bored at home during COVID and I was like, this is fun. I'm gonna try Sushi Swap and lose money there.


[00:12:07]: Arnaud Schenk:


I do think it's -- in retrospect, I think I was maybe a little bit too -- what's the word that I'm looking for? I guess I saw some people that, to me, felt like exactly the kinds of people that I wanted to follow. People who seemed to be really living and breathing crypto and really earnest in the space and really ideologically committed to the space. I think if it had just been, oh, we're all having fun here, this is just a lot of fun, I wouldn't have had that strong of a reaction. But there was this sense of, this is the future, and the circularity of it was kind of papered over, and at some point, people got quite hostile to just being like, I guess this is the discussion of the week as we're recording still, because I do think there are really valuable things that have come out of DeFi.


And by the way, one of the mistakes that I think a lot of people in the space more broadly make is to be almost, like holier than thou on DeFi or on people that have been attracted to crypto. I think you can both respect what has been built and kind of like happy that there was this energy that got created, but also aspire to something maybe a little bit bigger, a little bit more interesting, and for us to finally have an answer of, yeah, but where does the yield come from? I think that's a worthy aspiration.


[00:13:41]: Anna Rose:


That's true. Let's go back to the story, though. So you were a bit disillusioned at that moment, and did you step away or did you just -- yeah, did you focus on something else?


[00:13:51]: Arnaud Schenk:


I stepped away and took quite a bit of time off first. I did a bunch of -- ran a bunch of reading groups, which was funny during the pandemic, but was really valuable. Did some math tutoring, because I left school when I did, I'd always felt like there were some basic math that I just wanted to get more familiar with. And then I actually joined this EdTech company called Higher Ground Education as -- they basically did everything in education. They built schools, trained teachers, all the full stack except ship software. So I joined them, helped them become a company that ships software. And then for the majority of my time off, I also ran this thing called Polaris, which is a small fellowship based in the UK, all in person.


Essentially, the idea is expression of talent is just this fundamentally social thing, and it really matters whether you find your way to San Francisco or whether you don't. And Polaris is maybe this -- the aspiration behind Polaris is, let's gather some very, very talented and maybe a little bit weird people that haven't found their way to San Francisco, and let's give them a new group of peers that helps them just do more, just be more ambitious, try to be a little bit more agentic, to use that word. And yeah, so that's been running for two and a bit years now and has been a lot of fun. But earlier this year I got really back into thinking very seriously about crypto. And by happenstance, Zac messaged me and asked me to come help out on some of the lead ups to decentralization to launch at Aztec. So I'm now back in the space and happy to be back.


[00:15:42]: Anna Rose:


That's cool. So it sounds like -- so you sort of took this time off and moved more into the education or almost like personal development. Like Polaris sounds like this attempt to foster innovation in a new way. I think educational institutes are trying to do that as well, in their way. Like Higher Ground was education, I guess, sort of platform.


[00:16:01]: Arnaud Schenk:


Higher Ground was education.


[00:16:04]: Anna Rose:


I want to just very quickly make the connection between these educational environments and communities because -- yeah, the next thing I wanted to talk about was communities, and I'm just realizing, though, as you describe these environments, and I think about, obviously, like the ZK community or the ZK Summit. Like, the ZK Summit is an event. It's an event that's educational, but it's also a community, or it forged a community that's now maybe the ZK community. And also, I think a lot of us made our first communities at school. Like it would have been in elementary school, but then also in university, you would have found your community. Yeah, I'm just sort of connecting those two things all of a sudden that they seem to be very tightly tied.


[00:16:47]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Education and community.


[00:16:48]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[00:16:50]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Yeah. I think you get through education, common language, common vocabulary, and sometimes common interest, and then that is sort of a seed for people to gel together.


[00:17:01]: Arnaud Schenk:


The way I'd link them both is maybe -- the first is, in my mind, thinking, is this fundamentally social thing. Right? You just think better when you're around others, and maybe that would tie back --


[00:17:15]: Nico Mohnblatt:


I might disagree.


[00:17:16]: Arnaud Schenk:


Well, yeah, depends thinking about . But, you know, this Hash It Out week, Nico, you were at last week, as we're recording, I suppose, in my experience, when -- you know the expression of, oh, we're all touching different parts of the elephant, that kind of meme, we're all touching different parts of the elephant, and no one really knows that we're all touching the same elephant.


[00:17:38]: Anna Rose:


I don't know this one. I should look it up. Sounds fu… it sounds weird. I'll check it out. Yeah.


[00:17:46]: Arnaud Schenk:


So people say, sometimes when there's a new field or a new set of ideas out, if you're in that field, you notice that there's other people maybe a little bit away from you, taking a slightly different view at what to you seems quite related. Right? And quite often, we don't really connect initially. We don't really see that people are -- this is the analogy of everyone touching different parts of the elephant, and not knowing that, hey, I'm touching an ear, you're touching a leg, and we're describing the leg or the ear, but we're not describing the elephant. And that, to me, is the way in which thinking is this fundamental social thing. Like we're all exploring this ideal space, we're kind of grasping, we're kind of grasping around in the dark, maybe a little bit trying to figure out what's in front of us, and the space is too large to explore purely on your own. Right? There's a sense that you need to find the walls, you need to find the kind of limits to this idea space, or you certainly -- like you benefit a lot if other people are exploring this idea space along with you. Because they will find that there's a wall over there that you don't have to go explore, and you can focus on other parts.


For me, maybe Hash It Out week and to tie it back to also Polaris or what have you, given maybe this idea that thinking is this fundamentally social behavior, it seems really important when you spot a set of ideas that seem animating to a small group to try and bring that group to explore it together explicitly. To kind of get over this activation energy, maybe that you sometimes have to solve for before things really make progress. For programmable cryptography, for what it's worth, I think we're all in the same room, but we're not yet touching the elephant, to come back to the analogy. I think we're all in the same room and we're kind of smelling something, and we're all kind of -- we think that we're all smelling the same thing, but we haven't yet touched the elephant. That's my sense of the stage that we're at.


[00:20:01]: Anna Rose:


That's interesting. As you're saying this, I'm also having sort of like a throwback to ZK Summit 4, where just speaking of Zac, Zac presented Plonk, I think, for the first time. And this was the first time I brought ZK Summit to the US. So before that, it had been always in Europe, and it was kind of like it was the local Berlin community and then some ZK people flying in. But when I went to San Francisco, it was like everyone from Stanford and Berkeley and the people that had written the papers that we had talked about maybe on the stages of ZK Summit, but hadn't met necessarily, or seen in the same space.


Yeah, it's that idea that you're -- like everyone had been writing. I mean, obviously, a lot of these people also knew each other. This was not the first time they met, but I felt that it was at least the first time I got to see everyone in the same room, and some of the works that were presented there obviously went on to be very influential on work that came from those people subsequently.


[00:21:02]: Nico Mohnblatt:


I was going to ask, did this feel like two communities merging or the same community? And like part of it was cut off from it and got to join back in?


[00:21:13]: Anna Rose:


It was like, there's two sides to the community, and it was like, we've been focused on one side, and then we were adding the other side. But I think because it was further away from me, I was very -- like these were -- I was a fan of a lot of these people. It was kind of like, wow, I get to have you in my event now. And so, yeah, it's really cool.


[00:21:33]: Arnaud Schenk:


Even Plonk, by the way, started off -- so Zac had been -- we had noticed this limitation with the very first crypto system, which gave its name to the company, but this Aztec cryptosystem, which is just Sigma protocols, quite basic. We had noticed the limitations, and Zac had been thinking about some of the problems with, at the time, Groth16 was kind of the state of the art. Still, one of the problems was just like a per circuit trusted setup, which made a bunch of applications absolutely impractical. And Zac had been toying around with these ideas that transformed into Plonk, but the secret sauce came from an interaction between him and Ariel at a conference. I think they were aware of each other before but hadn't worked at all. And Zac essentially mustered up the courage to go talk to Ariel, and nerd sniped him, and that became Plonk. So I do really think this idea that a lot of these tasks that we have in front of us, a lot of these technologies, just require a little bit of coordination, not as in central planning, but at the very least, let's all get in the room and notice that we're all thinking about the same things. That's usually very productive.


[00:22:57]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. I think maybe what we've just described too, is the sort of value of the community side of it in education and development and invention. I think, Nico, you were about to -- you were slightly disagreeing there, where I guess, yes, you can think on your own, and you can invent on your own as well. I think one could say that there's lots of inventors whose inventions died in the dark because no one ever saw them too.


[00:23:22]: Nico Mohnblatt:


100%. I think it was more getting out like problem solving sometimes is easier alone, where you can sit and lay out the problem for yourself, and either you solve it or you find a roadblock, and then you can start talking about it in a more social way. But I guess people think in different ways. The nice thing about social thinking is the interdisciplinary aspect, and not fully interdisciplinary, because we're still all within a small realm of disciplines, but we still have, I guess, little specialties, little areas of interest that others won't have.


[00:23:55]: Arnaud Schenk:


Here's maybe some more exposition, and it's actually maybe a better answer to your initial question of how education and community and my current work connects. I think I've had a long-standing interest in this idea of, you sometimes see these small groups pop up, these schools of thought, or just these small groups, like, I don't know, the inklings, so you know, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and a few other authors, or the impressionists in Paris who they're five to ten people, and yet they fundamentally change the direction of a field. And I don't know, there's something really -- I can't help but being fascinated with the question of like, well, where do their ideas come from? Right? How did they have to find each other for the idea to emerge? Did they find each other because they had similar ideas? How does this all work?


And a really good -- or certainly I'm going to call it part of my canon, my personal canon, is this book called Collaborative Circles by this academic from, I don't know exactly when he wrote, I think, early 2000s. And Collaborative Circles is five case studies of these small groups. And he tries to do a little bit of a taxonomy of these groups and also a set of stages that these groups seem to go through. And there are the Inklings, which I mentioned, the Impressionists, the Poet's Circle in the US, the Ultras in the US, which are the equivalent of the Suffragettes in the UK, and Freud and his Circle. And the key ideas that I got out of that is, first off, you need these groups. These groups are fundamentally about, at first, building trust and the social interactions that happen within these groups of people egging each other on and competing, but also collaborating and exploring the space together like that is just a fundamental enabler for new ideas to emerge.


And then also these groups go through phases, and those phases are -- you can't come back to those phases once you've gone through it. So you can't always have the same group stay in the maximally generative where being very creative space, because at some point you just want to get to action. If these groups work well, if you're embedded in the right group, the ideas that emerge, the kind of behaviors that emerge within these groups, they just impel you to action, right? You just kind of need to go out and do things.


[00:26:34]: Anna Rose:


And implement them.


[00:26:35]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly. So this idea of, hey, maybe there are some features of social spaces which can be better or worse for the emergence of interesting ideas. And also, hey, maybe we should think of groups not as these fixed things, as these things that stand the test of time, but maybe a little bit transient. That has impacted how I think about things very deeply.


[00:26:58]: Anna Rose:


Wow, I want to read this book. Sounds great.


[00:27:00]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Do these groups exclusively emerge from in-person interactions?


[00:27:05]: Arnaud Schenk:


That's the other thing. Yeah, well, all of the groups that he writes about, they did. Mostly because non-in-person interactions is somewhat new concept, to a large extent. There's maybe the link to -- a good way to explore that question, there's this other book that influenced Martin Gurri, if you remember him, The Revolt of the Public. And the second book is called No Sense of Place. And the thesis is, hey, our media landscape really changes just our social landscape. So starting from -- this was a book written in the 80s, and he goes through radio and television and then the early computers, obviously before the internet, since it's from the 80s.


But he basically, my favorite example to explain the thesis is there used to be a time where adults could behave in a way that was different whether they were kids in the room or not. And kids would be able to see only the adults behaving as the adults behaved when there were kids in the room. And then radio comes along and television comes along, and you suddenly have kids seeing adults behaving like adults behave when they're on their own. And that obviously impacts the dynamic between children and adults and the authority that adults have and all that kind of stuff.


And there's something -- to tie back to your question, I think there's something about current online spaces which makes it really difficult to have this kind of very generative, very fledgling stages of groups where quite often you will just be too exposed to kind of outside observers. You won't be necessarily able or willing to take the risks that you need to take in order to explore a very, very early idea. And the cultures that create are maybe a little bit fragile as well, right? Because there's always a sense of maybe I'm drawn to this other adjacent community in a way that can be good, but might also stop the kind of phases where -- I talk about it as phases of radicalization. You kind of radicalize yourselves into believing that you must act on this idea or this set of ideas. And I think it's much easier to loop out of a radicalization loop than it used to be, just because you have many more influences available to you.


[00:29:33]: Anna Rose:


I think this is a really good kind of segue to the article that we wanted to talk about, this blog post you had written around this concept of Trust Infrastructure. We're going to add the link in the show notes. To me, it's a conversation about communities and their evolution. How when communities went online, they almost needed new rules or new ideals and values to be able to survive in this new environment. Let's jump in on that, and maybe we can start with how were communities formed in the past, which I think you've actually covered already a little bit. How did it change with the internet?


[00:30:08]: Arnaud Schenk:


So my -- and by the way, as a disclaimer, as always, mental models are, there will always be counter examples. This is just like -- I find it useful to think about it in this way, but obviously it's not the end-all and be-all. But I always think about an American teen in say the 60s who wants to become an engineer. And that American teen, if they're really ambitious, and if they're in the right socioeconomic context, etcetera, they will have probably heard of MIT. And MIT is this thing in the distance that is visible and attractive. And even though they don't really understand what it means to become an engineer, they know that moving to MIT is what they need to do to become that person.


And moving there is quite expensive, as in socially. Right? You're kind of removing yourself from your current social context. There's also a filtering that naturally happens. You move to MIT, and a bunch of other people who want to be engineers have also moved to MIT. You kind of are in a somewhat homogenous group when you get there. And then, because all of this somewhat homogenous group has also removed themselves from their previous social context, you have status games and kind of games within this culture which are really local to that physical space. Right? And the idea of hacker culture emerging in MIT seems like -- it seems like it could only have emerged from a space like a university, right?


[00:31:38]: Anna Rose:


And actually, as you mentioned this, I immediately thought more like the artists in the 80s moving to New York or something like that. I feel like you have this in every group, like a location that you need to be in order for you to actually be able to tap into this thing you're trying to do.


[00:31:54]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly.


[00:31:55]: Anna Rose:


And if you're stuck in your small town, you can always kind of dream or do it on your own or get books on the topic, but you don't have that back and forth in that community, so you can't really quite achieve it.


[00:32:07]: Arnaud Schenk:


On the flip side, I grew up on the internet, and I do think that the internet makes it easy to find groups of people that you want to be around. The way I put it, in general, is you have this, in my mind, this quadrant of finding a tribe versus being a tribe, acting as a group, developing this distinct culture. And online, it's really easy to find a tribe. Probably quite difficult to be a tribe, again, because you have so many overlapping other cultures that are accessible, and there's always this chance of someone external looking in, and you feel kind of awkward being cringe. Right? To some extent, you want to protect yourself with irony, and I'm never as committed as maybe it seems to the culture that I'm a part of.


And offline is the reverse, right? Offline, it's actually very difficult to find people who you enjoy spending time with, who have the same vibe as you. But you put ten people in the same room, assuming you do some amount of selection, but you don't even need to do that much. You put ten people in a room every week for dinner for ten weeks and they'll leave having quite strong bonds. It's almost you can't avoid it in the physical world. And there is something -- to me, there's something really intriguing about this quadrant and also the way this quadrant is changing where as the internet kind of diffuses out into the world, I think it's actually becoming slightly harder to be a tribe offline. And as the internet also gets noisier, I think it's maybe getting a little bit harder to find a tribe online than certainly it seemed to me to have been when I was growing up, when I was a teen. So, yeah, that to me is the central problem is kind of we seem to be losing our ability, both online and offline, to form these groups. And maybe we can get it back.


[00:34:08]: Anna Rose:


You mentioned in the piece you wrote, kind of closer to the end, actually, this concept of Eternal September, which I subsequently went and looked up, and I sort of want to define it because I think as, I mean, we and a lot of our listeners are in the ZK community. And I'm just like, we see waves of growth. Yeah. Anyway, maybe you can define it and then we can talk a bit about that.


[00:34:32]: Arnaud Schenk:


I'll probably get the details slightly wrong, but as I remember it, this is before the internet, as in the networks of networks. This is when you still had networks that were quite local to a university or to a city or what have you, or maybe just like a BBS that you had access to. And at some point, those different networks got interconnected. And I guess maybe to back up, actually, so you have these different networks that are quite distinct from each other, and most of them are associated to university. And so every September there's a class of freshmen that comes about, and this class of freshmen doesn't know the norms of this online space, they don't know the culture, they don't know who's high status, who's low status, what you can and can't say. But because it's only every September, you kind of -- you can always just slowly but surely kind of educate them in the norms of the space. Right?


[00:35:30]: Anna Rose:


And you're used to that cadence of, like, every September, you know there's going to be some fresh faces, so you're ready for it.


[00:35:36]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly. Yeah. And it's also just less noisy. Right? You can prepare -- you can prepare for it, you can deal with it. And then there comes this point of interconnection between these networks, and essentially you have every day a new class of freshmen that stumble upon your space and they don't stay long enough for you to be able to build this sense of like, okay, well, if you're going to be in this space, maybe consider behaving in this way. You just only ever have new people. And yeah, I think the internet is still roughly in that phase of always having new people coming in.


[00:36:11]: Anna Rose:


As I was reading that, I just thought about, like in our community, have we had that point? And I don't think so. I think we've had waves of growth. It's not as regular as like every September school starts, but there's been sort of moments of hype and then a chill out phase and. And moments of hype and --


[00:36:30]: Arnaud Schenk:


Do you mean ZK or do you mean a different --


[00:36:32]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, I'm talking about our specific community. I'm only -- I keep referencing this because as I was reading what you were writing, I could only think of the community that we've built. And even just this last week, I was on a Twitter space. It was all about ZK communities. And one of the questions was about growth hacking, and like do you want to growth hack and bring more people? And we haven't done that at all overtly, at least. We've never wanted to just get as many people as we can, in large part because it's not a product. Like yes, there's a technology that we're kind of trying to champion, but the community itself, it's like about development. 


And so there's been very little artificial growth or artificial -- like an attempt to make something bigger. We have waves of interest, and then they sort of chill out. You have time for people to adjust to the way that maybe our community works. And then sometimes there's another influx, and people come in with different attitudes. Sometimes they're more salesy, sometimes they're more trolly. I don't know, they come in with very different attitudes. But we do see also those people kind of either adjust or leave and sort of get into it. But what I picture the Eternal September looking like is an ever growing group where every day there's new kind of attitudes and voices that are very loud joining. And I can just imagine that that becomes -- I mean, then where's community? Because they're not -- like then they're going to be potentially taking over that culture and making it something else.


[00:38:12]: Nico Mohnblatt:


And leaving before it grows into a full-blown culture. Right?


[00:38:16]: Arnaud Schenk:


Potentially.


[00:38:17]: Anna Rose:


Yeah.


[00:38:17]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Or you have new ones coming in and also changing it.


[00:38:20]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly. I guess there's two ideas that when I think of Eternal September and the internet and these communities online. The first one is linking back to Collaborative Circles and this idea that, hey, a lot of these groups are just transient, and if you try to make them stable, you're just going to compromise the dynamic. I think it's important to recognize that as well, that there was a phase where Ethereum could all fit in a small room in Berlin and that's not the way that Ethereum should behave now. Right?


[00:38:58]: Anna Rose:


True.


[00:38:59]: Arnaud Schenk:


That's just not a credible structure.


[00:39:03]: Anna Rose:


There was also a moment -- it's funny you say that, because there was a moment where it's all in one room. There was a moment where it was one subreddit and that was -- or a Stack Overflow. There's one place where everyone could get all the info they needed on Ethereum, and that was obviously a different phase from the one room. And I just -- I hear people in Ethereum who've been around a long time always like, you know, harking back to that time where you knew everyone and you could ask a question and they were so helpful.


[00:39:28]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly. Because it's really nice to have this kind of context, shared context and common norms and have a strong sense that we're -- there's this idea of common knowledge, that I know that you know that I know, that I think is really important for healthy communities. So the first concept is this kind of transient -- accepting the transientness of these spaces, and then you can make a decision. Right? Do you institutionalize? Do you dissolve? What happens if you recognize that dynamic?


The second idea is one that I actually, Toby Shorin from Other internet, which is an online research organization, and just a really incredibly thoughtful guy on community, on crypto as well, wrote maybe three or four months ago this idea, this blog post called Crypto's Three Body Problem, where he talks about crypto being maybe a little bit -- crypto not feeling able or not being able to draw on things that are not just code or markets as coordination mechanisms. And the other ones are, for example, like norms or law or -- yeah, you have a set of other coordination mechanisms. Anyways, he and I were speaking about the ideas that we're talking about, and he brought up this book by Fukuyama called Trust, which is really good, I recommend it.


And Fukuyama in this book -- I don't know if this is a Fukuyama word or concept, but certainly he's the one who introduced it to me, this idea of spontaneous sociability, where you have some cultures, where you have this rich tapestry of groups and forming a group for either your neighborhood or like to take on something that is a temporary thing that this community needs to solve for, like forming these groups is incredibly easy. It just kind of happens. These are high trust societies, right? So you have this ease at forming these spaces. And because there's this rich tapestry, there's always an overlap of these groups. So if you have some kind of governance problem within community, you actually have a few different spaces within which you can resolve different parts of this governance problem. And it just makes for a healthy, healthy culture, a healthy place to be.


And when I think of both the dynamic that you've just outlined, just this idea of people reminiscing to when Ethereum was smaller or when a community was smaller, but also people coming in as the equivalent of the freshmen during Eternal September, and feeling maybe excluded because everyone is a little bit unhappy that they're all coming in at the same time and they're not getting the norms right, etcetera. I just think that both of those dynamics point to us not having enough spontaneous sociability online, right? Because the truth is, the maximally healthy thing to happen is, to some extent, to have some groups declare themselves like, we're good, we're ten people, we're happy to just be this group, and we're gonna -- whether or not we sustain ourselves long-term doesn't really matter, we are going to grow at our own pace. You can't come in, but it's fine because you can go to the next group over or you can start the next group over. And we don't feel comfortable doing that. Because I think the truth is we have all these kind of aggregation effects online where winner takes all for these online spaces. And if you don't luck into being in one of these groups very early on, because there's a set of ideas that are around or what have you, you just don't really have a space, right? You're kind of just in the ocean. You're just kind of floating, bobbing around a little bit.


[00:43:25]: Anna Rose:


I want to just wrap on the Eternal September because I also want to make sure we made it clear what the eternal part was. So the September was every September these students arriving. The eternal happened once. It wasn't only September, and it was every month, it was every day. As we were also talking about this and thinking about your kind of unhappiness with DeFi Summer, I feel like that was an example of an Eternal September. I think 2017 was an example of an Eternal September, where there was all these new people, but then a lot of them just left. So 2018, 2019 was a much smaller group. It wasn't quite as small as the Reddit era, but it was still pretty small. I mean, you see the same people all the time, and it was like a lot of the writings were quite shared and the spaces were shared. But then in 2020, you saw that take off again, and 2021-2022. And in the sort of end of that, as things shrank back, it's again a new phase. I'm not sure how to define it. I don't know what 2023 Ethereum, 2024. I don't know how to map it, even, because it's so broad. It's kind of like there's events all over the place, there is no central group of people that you can kind of spot at conferences. I mean, you can see the OGs from previous years, but they're not all in the same space in the same way. It's really interesting. It's definitely like a much bigger thing now.


[00:45:04]: Arnaud Schenk:


Even EthCC is not too long ago, a couple months ago in Brussels, and the overwhelming sense that people got was there was this smattering of side events that people went to. No one in the main event. It didn't feel cohesive in a way. Right? I think it's a little bit too grandiose, but screw it, I'm gonna use this analogy anyways. My sense of my frustration with the space is sometimes that it doesn't take itself seriously enough as a frontier. My prototypical frontier, in my mind, is America from discovery to today.


[00:45:47]: Anna Rose:


For sure.


[00:45:48]: Arnaud Schenk:


And there's something about 1600s America, I think, during the 17th century, kind of at the tail end, or, sorry, the very start of 1700s. There's maybe of like immigrants to the US. There was a population of maybe something like 400,000 people. This is not native populations, this is just people coming from England, from Germany, and elsewhere, which is quite small still. Right? And obviously now the US is 300 odd million people. Along the way, the institutions that it had to start and grow and establish changed, and some of them kind of had stood the test of time, mostly, and some of them didn't. And again, my frustration sometimes with the internet as a whole, really, but certainly crypto as maybe like an attempt to iterate on the internet, is it still seems a little bit afraid of being a place that starts institutions. That still feels a little bit, ooh, we're compromising on our ethos by trying to start institutions.


And I don't know, that feels a little bit off to me. I feel like maybe we need to accept that --  we need to be a place that people want to move to, and people won't want to move here if there's not a little bit of a sense of, here's what you need to do and here's how you need to behave, and here are the norms and this is the support structures that you have access to. And I can already sense people being like, oh, statist or what have you. I'm far from it. But again, I don't want to bring governments in as much as I want crypto and the space and the ideology and the culture that is crypto to really allow itself to be like, okay, we're serious, we're a space, we're gonna -- we win by helping people move here instead of just diffusing in this shadowy way throughout the world.


[00:48:01]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Is there a fear when code is law and everything is immutable, that any institutions we try to build now, if they're flawed in any way, we're stuck with them?


[00:48:11]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah.


[00:48:11]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Like is that why people aren't building?


[00:48:13]: Arnaud Schenk:


So this is why I like this Crypto's Three Body Problem from Other internet. The way I think about it, is the protocol, Ethereum, this global consensus layer, I don't think that should be -- there's not that much governance that should be added to that. I think it's neutrality, it's kind of unopininatedness makes sense. I wouldn't want Ethereum to be run as a company. I think that would just kind of compromise its ability to become what it maybe ought to become. But having -- again, this is why spontaneous sociability is a very present object in my mind, having a rich tapestry below Ethereum of spaces that are not just trustless, that allow themselves to maybe build themselves so that they're private to the outside world, but within it, everyone knows who's inside. Maybe somewhere there's different trust assumptions, where there might be some -- and you can map it onto -- I don't know that it's productive, but map it onto Layer 2s, Layer 3s, this kind of fractal view of what Ethereum could become.


Anyways, my general sense is not everything needs to be in this public global consensus layer. We can actually afford to have through privacy, through programmable cryptography, spaces that are still tied to the space, still tied to Ethereum Layer 1 in some way, shape or form, that use it for legitimacy, use it to settle things that do need to be settled between spaces, but that are also -- I don't know, there's a sense of richness that I want to see grow out of the space. Again, this is not me saying, let's bring the world into Ethereum. I think actually we should build Ethereum to be a place that people want to be, and people just don't want to be disembodied and trustless and all that kind of stuff. I don't want to live in a trustless world. I want to live in a trustful world. And I don't think that implies compromising on what interested me in crypto in the first place. I think you can both be permissionless and trustful. You can have your cake and eat it too. And to bring maybe the Vitalik's latest blog post, I think he recognizes this as well. I haven't spoken to him about this, but this idea of, hey, maybe we need to move past this ideological baggage that we acquired with the Cypherpunks, and maybe we can have more. I think that is -- I don't know, that seems a really valuable thing to take seriously.


[00:50:56]: Anna Rose:


I'm gonna -- I mean, we'll have the link to this article in the show notes, so I hope people do read it while they're listening to this or before. But I will do a quick summary of this because I think we're now diving into the meat of this work. In it, you talked about kind of communities, small communities, that as they grew, they eventually needed institutions. And we know the kind of classic institutions, and they evolved over time. You talk a bit about - like you just mentioned the states and sort of the frontiers. And as things were discovered and land was populated by the Europeans, there was more institutions that were founded.


And the minute the internet started, it was like, once again, we had the frontier, like a ton of space and communities could form, and there was sort of -- it was founded in a way where the initial culture of the internet kind of was a bit against the institutions of the real world. Or it was like, even though it came out of academia and the military, it came out of those institutions, once there was the Cypherpunks, they kind of developed this anti-institution attitude. And from there, they had to come up with new rules. So maybe we can talk a bit about what were the proposals of them. They didn't want to create institutions in the traditional sense. So what did they offer up instead?


[00:52:21]: Arnaud Schenk:


There are two books that, again, have really deeply shaped my thinking about where the culture of the internet initially came from. And the first one is from Counterculture to Cyberculture, which is fantastic. And the second one is a book about the Merry Pranksters called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Anyways, the broad thesis is you had this counterculture movement in the 60s that had a bunch of causes, but certainly the effects were these communities that maybe had -- well, quite an anti-institutional bent, right? Like they didn't want to submit themselves to the expectations or the rules or the structures that were expected of them prior and out of the counterculture and quite explicitly. So personal computing pops up in a bunch of different places in slightly different ways. But certainly the culture that became personal computing and Apple and Silicon Valley realistically came out of this small group of people called the Homebrew Computer Club.


When you read about the hippies and you read about these groups, you get a sense that they have just maybe a set of core ideological beliefs. One is, maybe we should be leaderless. Maybe there's a sense that emergence is the force that we should pay most attention to, and we're all interconnected. The hippies have these core maybe beliefs. One is being leaderless, the other is, hey, maybe the only thing that you need to do is to manifest things into existence. Maybe you don't quite need to act as actively as you actually do need to in the world. And that was a pretty dysfunctional set of beliefs, it turns out, in the real world, right?


So during the 60s, you have something like more than half a million people at various points live on these communes in California. Most of them turn out to kind of disappear, right? Most of them actually turn out to be pretty dysfunctional places where there's the kind of tyranny of structureless-ness, right? If you've read that, that post that certainly comes about lots of abusers, lots of bad people that get attracted to these structures. And right at the point of disillusionment of these communities, you have personal computing and the early internet that kind of comes about. Again, funded and populated by actually quite an overlapping group of people, especially in California. There are, again, other places where personal computing comes about, but really California is the place where it's taken most seriously. 


And funnily enough, the very first form, or one of the very first forms, is this thing called The WELL, which is The Whole Earth 'lectronic Catalog, as you can imagine, started by Stewart Brand from the Whole Earth Catalog. So again, one of these original hippies, and when you think about these early internet spaces and you think about these ideological beliefs of the hippies, you suddenly realize that what was dysfunctional in the real world of like, oh, we're going to be leaderless, we're going to be emergent, maybe we're just going to design the system, we're not going to act on the specifics, suddenly that becomes evolutionarily productive. Suddenly that is actually the only way you can cope with online spaces, because they're just too big and you have too little context and they're too disembodied.


[00:55:59]: Anna Rose:


And there's no institutions.


[00:56:01]: Arnaud Schenk:


And there's no institutions. Right? So you have these online spaces which suddenly become evolutionarily fit. This culture becomes evolutionarily fit on the internet. And I think we kind of -- we've obviously moved away from that culture over time. Right? We're certainly not all hippies or all Cyberpunks or what have you, but there's part of that ideological baggage which I think just lived through the internet. I think we probably all remember the internet of the 2000s-2010s, which was very much around, like it was counterculture, right? It was, we will, through transparency, kind of get to good outcomes. And, yeah, I think that has kind of turned out not to really be true. We've just kind of turned out to be ineffective in our pursuits, unfortunately.


[00:56:52]: Anna Rose:


Let's define so that connection between the transparent and this trustlessness. Because that -- I mean, to me, the concept of trustlessness was actually something I only encountered, I think, in 2017 when I joined this space. I had always known the concept of downloading and P2P, but I didn't -- you know, I knew you could get cool music and you could share your music, but I didn't -- like this, literally, the word trustless as a positive thing. For me, I only was introduced to that in 2017, but I know that that concept is actually much older. That is Cypherpunk, I think. This idea that you would create the rails of a system, therefore it can be trustless. Like you program in the rules, so you don't have to worry about some third party kind of enforcing the rules.


But I think you're right to point out that 2010s transparency element as well. This idea that all of a sudden you're sharing everything on the internet, and even though in the past we knew that people spied on their neighbors and used information against them, all of a sudden it didn't matter anymore. Like I remember having that thought when I'd see people sharing a lot. I'm like, I've read a lot of history of the Cold War, and you're like, wow, this could one day be used against you. But I guess I also sort of -- I allowed myself to sort of follow the delusion that maybe we're past that. Like, maybe we're in a post-shame society where you can never be -- like no info could ever be held against you. And we're just going to share photos of our families online forever and all of our activities, and it will be fine.


[00:58:29]: Arnaud Schenk:


I think the internet, because of its scale and because of the reach it gives you and the leverage that it gives both institutions and individuals, it kind of broke both high-trust groups that tend to be quite local and quite small, because when they get too big, just the assumptions of trust kind of break. But also it seems to have broken a lot of these trust substitutes. Imperfect though they may be, things like laws and culture and institutions and all these kinds of things, I guess, it just -- to me, the two maybe levers through which it broke, it was, one, just the scale. Right? You suddenly were encountering a lot more people than you used to. And these people, you had just a lot less context than you used to, so you don't -- it's kind of quite difficult to trust them outright. Although early internet, everyone trusted each other and then everyone got screwed. Right?


[00:59:20]: Anna Rose:


And early social media people did it again.


[00:59:22]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly.


[00:59:23]: Anna Rose:


Actually. Every platform, they did it again. They did it on Friendster, then they did it on MySpace, they did it on Facebook.


[00:59:32]: Arnaud Schenk:


Every wave of maybe Eternal September, you have a version of this, maybe. And then the second lever is this leverage point where you suddenly -- a lot of people were suddenly in your world, or a lot of institutions or companies or what have you were in your world in ways that, like who are they? Why do they have leverage in my space? And you can't really --


[00:59:57]: Nico Mohnblatt:


So you mean in the physical space?


[00:59:59]: Arnaud Schenk:


Interest in your life. Right? Digitally mediated physical space. And it's both companies, but also the state suddenly had a lot of reach into, it just was able to see a lot of things happening in the world that it couldn't previously see. And this idea of, okay, well, you have these two levers that both points you, like you're surrounded with a lot of people and a lot of companies or institutions that you don't really trust. But the natural reaction, I think it doesn't seem far-fetched to be like, well, if I can look at them back, I don't have to worry about getting screwed, right? If I can observe everything that's happening, I can just make my own decisions. And unfortunately, that just stops working quite quickly because people do the kind of sociopaths and the ill-intentioned just force you to be transparent, but they themselves are actually comfortable breaking the norms of these groups. And transparencies can only be ever a norm, lest you be in an actual physical panopticon. 


And on top of that, you just get so much scale of information that you're just not able to evaluate everything all at once. And one of the first things that -- well, it felt -- the first kind of dissonance that I experienced in crypto is most people don't read the code. Most people are just not able to read the code. Most people actually get their sense of whether they can trust something from these loose groups of online influencers and the scene, and they get a sense of like, oh yeah, curve is good, but maybe this other protocol is bad and that's really lossy and just doesn't really work that well.


[01:01:43]: Anna Rose:


For sure. What then are -- so we've talked about trustlessness and sort of the problems of extreme transparency, but what's a Trust Infrastructure? Because I know that that was the name of the actual post, is Trust Infrastructure. So this is it sounds like a proposal for an alternative.


[01:02:06]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah. There's a couple of inputs, maybe, to this idea of Trust Infrastructure. Most of them are Vitalik's posts around making Ethereum Cypherpunk again, which may be motivated me again to reconsider why I had been attracted to crypto in the first place. And crypto as a frontier, and as a frontier that takes itself seriously as a frontier, again, trying to reconnect a little bit with that initial motivation. There's also a lot of content and talks by the PSE group at Ethereum and Gubsheep in particular around programmable cryptography and maybe some of the affordances that programmable cryptography gives you.


And the way I frame it to myself is I also became absolutely obsessed with the early days of personal computing and the early days of the internet. And the more I read both books and just like the early magazines like bite in '75 '76, the more obvious it got that people were justifying all this effort just because they found it neat. They found it appealing in a way that was self-evident to them, but maybe looked a little bit self-referential or under-justified to the outside world. And I guess all this mixed together in this sense of maybe we had tried to justify crypto in slightly the wrong way. Maybe we tried to make it fit into a pitch deck that wouldn't be out of place in kind of a Stripe fundraise. And actually maybe we just needed to get back to thinking about crypto as this space, this culture, this frontier. 


And from that, I guess the -- focusing on trustlessness, that's always been maybe the one idea in crypto that I've found most frustrating. Again, because I don't want to live in a trustless world. I just don't think a trustless world is that good of a world to live in. So the Trust Infrastructure title is partly because I think this idea of trust is very important and underpins a lot of our world and will remain as this kind of foundational structure. And second, I really want us to move away just from the word trustless because I think it's nonsensical. So trying to get people to talk about trustfulness in a way that doesn't otherwise compromise on some of the other crypto ideals, that felt like a valuable thing to attempt.


[01:04:46]: Nico Mohnblatt:


So one of the initial, I guess, value props for, even Bitcoin, was a trustless payment system. Like I can pay someone without having to have this trusted third party, which is sort of the banking system. Is this -- I'm guessing you're not pushing against this.


[01:05:04]: Arnaud Schenk:


No, no, no. It's really just this, -- okay, so there's this project which makes use of cryptography and zero-knowledge called Rarimo. And Rarimo's goal is to give coordination tools for, at the start, at the very least, people and regimes like Russia or Iran or these very illiberal places. The way Rarimo works is you have this app that allows you to prove that you're a citizen of this particular country completely anonymously and allows you to vote in alternative elections. That's kind of the basic premise. And obviously you could attempt to do that on Ethereum Layer 1 in the clear, and you'd have a horrible time. Right? You'd have the exact contrary effects than maybe you're hoping for. The way Rarimo does it in practice is obviously the proof of passport is wrapped in this zero knowledge. It ends up being an anonymous. Like you don't have to reveal who you are, you just have to reveal that you passed some conditions, but they also coordinate quite a lot with local activists, because it turns out if you just have this external company that pinky swears that you scanning your passport is not going to put you on some lists in kind of the Kremlin, people are not really going to believe you. Right?


So you need this extra social layer of, okay, this is someone who I trust, who I know is putting their life on the line. They wouldn't do this if it wasn't real. And you need to gradually build up the sense of Rarimo takes what they're doing seriously, and they're withstanding attacks from the Kremlin, and they're just able to deliver on their promise of being secure and private and actually coordinate these groups. What I dislike about the world trustlessness is if you take it maximally seriously, what you would end up building is this tower of economic games or some kind of tower of bullshit around this idea of, oh, you need to coordinate, but you don't want anyone to be visibly involved. When, in fact, through cryptography, you can have people coordinate and conspire and be involved in quite trustful ways that remain private to the outside world, but within this little group, this little conspiracy, everyone trusts each other. They have to, because at some point, someone can always take a screenshot. You can't really only rely on code. You have to have some kind of social element to it. And I'm quite excited about Rarimo. Whether or not they're the ones who win specifically, doesn't matter that much, but this idea of these tools that allow for these discombobulated groups to coordinate in ways that are real. Right? That actually have an impact on people's lives, that feels quite exciting.


[01:08:13]: Anna Rose:


It's interesting, though, when you talk about the Trust Infrastructure, you need this human component, because when I think of programmable cryptography, I still think of that in the category of trustlessness. The whole idea is that you have programmable -- you have cryptography that anyone can verify, which is definitely harkening back to the Cypherpunk's trustless stuff. The idea that you build it, people can verify, but then no one has to run it, and you don't trust anyone. But you know it will be run correctly because the code or the cryptography is correct. Yeah, to me, programmable cryptography and verifiable compute and these kinds of concepts, to me, they still fall under that trustlessness idea. The idea of the removal of the intermediary.


[01:09:00]: Arnaud Schenk:


I do think it's worth, again, pulling out, me trying to kick the hornet's nest a little bit with the words and just being like, fuck, trustlessness --


[01:09:11]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's good, though. I want to explore it. No, I think it's great.


[01:09:16]: Arnaud Schenk:


So there's that component, right? They kind of kick the hornet's nest with language, and then there's the -- in practice, what I'd love to see happen over time is the same things, this may be a little bit too skeuomorphic, but the same things that happen in the real world. Right? Where in your first interaction, because you have cryptography, as in privacy, and you can choose your what you reveal, when to whom very tightly, you can have that initial kind of, I don't know if I'm gonna want to keep interacting with you. I don't know if I trust you but here's a little nub of information that maybe helps the conversation get started.


And over time, in that discourse, you can gradually reveal more and more information about each other and kind of just build trust as whether it's a pair or a small group or a culture, right? I think we're all parts of group chats where we allow ourselves to say things, even if it's unencrypted, even if it's on Telegram, right? And allow ourselves to say things that we wouldn't say on Twitter. And part of my distaste is that has always felt like something that people don't really -- it's always felt like something that we kind of paper over in crypto where, oh, no, all the coordination happens on-chain. Right? But that's not true. Actually, all the coordination happens within these small groups of people that trust each other, that have shared context, that can kind of bargain in ways that are not -- are maybe a little bit ambiguous at first and then gradually get more precise. And I think accepting that that's something that human groups want to do is much better than lying to ourselves about, no, no, no, everything happens on-chain and one address, one vote and all that kind of stuff.


So the cryptography can be -- well, should be trustless, right? You should be able to go look at the chain of both implementations. But for example, if you're proving -- if you do a proof of passport through cryptography, you're kind of attesting that you have this passport through, like a zero-knowledge proof over some kind of signature in your passport. That still relies on some key, some master key being issued at the very top level by the United Nations and by countries, and you still want to be able to go inspect that chain and be like, okay, this was actually issued by the people that say that issued it, etcetera. That kind of trustlessness, I'm very pro right. Aztec only does open source, I think that's a necessary condition for people to take these systems seriously. I just want more richness post these kind of quite neutral, quite cold systems.


[01:12:05]: Anna Rose:


It sounds like -- I mean, there's two pictures that have been somewhat painted. So it's the transparent, fully trustless, which is like Twitter or some on-chain stuff. And it's kind of like the state of today, which I think we're seeing a lot of dystopia in. But then there's the old school institutions and absolute privacy and non-transparency that the hippies originally rebelled against. That sort of led to this other pool. And it sounds like there's, I mean, all things, you're going to have to find some mix in the middle, probably, to have a functional society online. And one of the things we didn't really talk that much about, although you've just sort of mentioned it, are the private spaces where sometimes private spaces can be used for corruption and conspiracy, but sometimes private spaces are needed for the community building to have the small group where you trust the people and you can speak openly and kind of hearkening back to those -- I don't know what the names were, but those groups of people around a topic that came up with brilliant ideas, like the Freud group or the --


[01:13:15]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah, yeah.


[01:13:15]: Anna Rose:


The ones you mentioned earlier. Yeah. They would only function in a private space. And if we're all online, we are going to need something like that.


[01:13:23]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly. Yeah. I do want to put my flag in the ground of, I think conspiracy has acquired this kind of negative affect. Right? This kind of negative sense. I don't see why it is. In my mind, a startup, a good startup, is a conspiracy. Right? You are a small group --


[01:13:44]: Anna Rose:


Strategy.


[01:13:44]: Arnaud Schenk:


Exactly. You're kind of -- you're not justifying yourself to the outside world. Probably to some extent, your goals and certainly your methods are a little bit obscured from the outside, even if it's just because the world doesn't care about you for the time being. And that seems like a precondition to effective action for most things. There are other things where you actually need the broad global consensus that, okay, this is good, this is safe, this is legitimate. You know, as you were saying, that this is not like a return, like, let's go back to these institutions that have lost all their legitimacy. This is, in fact, the, well, maybe we can toe the line, right? Maybe we can walk the knife's edge, maybe we can have a little bit of what's good about trust and norms and culture and law, and quite a lot of what's good with permissionlessness and transparency and legitimacy that comes from being just open as systems. Zac has this phrase of transparency for the protocol, privacy for the user, which I think is pretty close to the ideal. Maybe the slight additional or the slight -- it's not clarification, but the slight addition that I would have add to that phrase is like, privacy in the real world is a spectrum. Right? I'm absolutely fine with you both knowing my full name. I'd probably -- if you asked me to post this, I need to see a proof of passport for whatever reason, I'd be maybe fighting back a little bit.


[01:15:20]: Anna Rose:


You would let us KYC you.


[01:15:22]: Arnaud Schenk:


I'd probably let you KYC me. I feel like we have -- you know, we first interact, I don't know, like 2018 or something like that. I feel like I have enough background context, but I definitely wouldn't post my passport on Twitter, and previously as the spectrum, that is something that you should be able to reason about and have really strong expectations about as an individual or as a group. That, to me, feels really important. Building tools that help you think about that and help you deal with this spectrum in really productive ways. That, to me, is maybe one of the components of what I mean by Trust Infrastructure, but not the only one.


[01:16:04]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, it sounds like -- I mean, it sounds like a great kind of idea to think about. And I think you've described a few pieces that could make up a Trust Infrastructure or Trust Infrastructures, or almost -- it's not quite institutions, like this is kind of just going back to that earlier idea of there were institutions that were formed because societies and groups got bigger. And on the internet, there are maybe unofficial institutions. There are -- I mean, there are institutions just that there's constant rebellion and anger and frustration and no buy-in. I think, in the Trust Infrastructure, I wonder if there isn't. The very start is like, we need to be able to have a private group that fits five people and we feel safe talking. Okay, that's like one piece of infrastructure maybe. Like some chat app that allows you to do it or you're allowed to vote in private or something like that. But I almost wonder if you have to start building back institutions in that -- like that we trust, but now in a digital context. And I don't think just mapping previous institutions to this new world works. I think every time you see people try, I mean, it might slightly work for a while, but I feel like it often doesn't.


[01:17:21]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah. The three things that came to mind. The first one is my mental model of maybe the battle cry of the internet is who the fuck put you in charge? You know, that's kind of the only reaction that, by the way, I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this podcast, but --


[01:17:36]: Anna Rose:


Sure.


[01:17:37]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Too late now.


[01:17:38]: Anna Rose:


No kids listening to this cryptography-focused podcast, I don't think.


[01:17:43]: Arnaud Schenk:


But that to me is maybe the -- yeah, it's what -- you know, it's kind of this fundamental thing with the internet and maybe allowing yourself to only be within context where you're not going to be surprised by someone coming in and, you know, who the fuck put you in charge. That can be useful. The second, slightly disconnected frame is, I think when people talk about some of these tools that we're building or that we aspire to build, and when you get into the context of decentralization and kind of empowering the user, et cetera, it's always struck me that it's valuable to -- there will be people that want to use these tools to create something new, and there will be people that want to use the tools that those people create. The way I put it, the analogy is you have like bar openers, right? People that want to run bars and that want to create those social spaces and deal with all the stuff around opening a bar. And you will have people that want to go to bars. And those two people are not the same usually. Right?


[01:18:47]: Anna Rose:


I used to be a person who liked to go to bars, and now I feel like I'm a person who runs the bar. But it's this conference, yeah.


[01:18:56]: Arnaud Schenk:


I think sometimes, you know, a lot of the talk of crypto UX or these tools not being good enough or what have you, fails to make the difference between, well, are we building for bar openers or building for bar goers? And I'd really like to build for bar openers, first and foremost. And again, give people a little bit more leeway to build as they see fit. And, yeah, the institutions that do get built by these bar openers, hopefully they look very different from the institutions that have been built so far. Right? Those ones are no longer adapted to the world as it is. If only because at least in my life, a lot of the kind of groups or cultural affinities that I've kind of fostered or that I've resonated with, those are no longer primarily geographical. I have friends a little bit all over, we're kind of a disembodied group, we don't really -- we're not like, really a polity, but maybe we should be. That's maybe the ultimate audience that I hope to build for is maybe people who are already living in that kind of slightly removed from geography world.


[01:20:09]: Anna Rose:


I think I followed this. But polity, what is that, actually?


[01:20:15]: Arnaud Schenk:


I may be misusing it a little bit, but polity is like a distinct political group, maybe is the way to put it.


[01:20:27]: Anna Rose:


Okay. Okay, like a pod. Is it that group you described, the one of the people around Freud?


[01:20:32]: Arnaud Schenk:


I'd probably make the distinction between a small group like the ones that we talked about at the beginning, and polity is maybe a little bit larger, a little bit less cohesive, necessarily, but distinct nonetheless. I do think that, for example, the people that were attracted to Ethereum in I don't know, like, '14, '15, '16, there was a distinct sense to them. Right? They had some sense of what they wanted to achieve, they were coordinated in a loose way that maybe gets a little bit closer or otherwise people -- just people like me who I suppose just grew up on the internet. There's a sense that I have preferences that are much closer to mutuals on Twitter in my everyday life than people that I -- you know, that come from the town that I was born in. In that sense, I feel a little bit distinct, I feel more affinity with my mutuals on Twitter than I do with people that, again, come from the town I grew up in.


[01:21:34]: Anna Rose:


Yeah. Do you ever -- this is also to you, Nico, but do you ever wish for that era of freedom? Like the thing that got you excited at the beginning when you were like, oh, my gosh, the rules that I know don't apply here. I get to like completely recreate things. I mean, that's how I felt. 2017 but, yeah, do you look for that? Do you kind of miss it?


[01:22:02]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah, for sure. In a hopefully slightly less naive way than I was back then, in retrospect. But certainly, I think the world is just -- there's this meme from 2011 or so, which I'm guessing most people listening will have seen in some form or another, which is just, like born too late to explore the world and born too early to explore the universe. Right? And that, to me, is that represent 2011, like the moment of crisis of my teenage years, of like ah, maybe we're stuck. The horrific realization that maybe we're stuck. And the internet and cyberspace, and then maybe crypto was an extension of this promise, was, hey, maybe you have this additional frontier, right? Maybe you're not quite as stuck as you feared.


Unfortunately, I don't really think that the internet has lived up to that very much. I think that the internet largely, instead of giving us a new frontier, it's just -- there's an update to that meme from, I don't know, 2015, 2016. Just like, born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe, born just in time to browse dank memes. And I feel like that's kind of the direction we've gone in. Right? It's kind of, oh, we're just kind of distracting ourselves, we're no longer this frontier, we don't believe it anymore. And coming back to, hey, maybe we can rekindle this sense that there's this way to escape these inadequate equilibria, maybe there's this new space, a little bit of digital, a little bit of physical, through cryptography and through these coordination mechanisms and through privacy and through these new systems and hopefully new institutions at some point, hey, maybe we can build something better. That doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, actually. Right? And that's maybe what I see -- well, Trust Infrastructure is maybe like a flavor of this, but programmable cryptography in general, that's what gets me excited. It feels like it's a path towards taking us seriously as a frontier again. 


[01:24:10]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Yeah. For me, I come from a slightly different angle in that I wasn't as much interested in the frontier, but more interested in how can we fix what we already have, all these big information asymmetries in the world, all this issue that our data is being collected. I came from more of a background of like, all right, what are the technical solutions to these problems? So in that sense, trustlessness was often the goal. Right? Can I still do social networks without trusting some central entity? And I think trustlessness was a goal in the sense of, yeah, removing this trusted third party, trusting the people I interact with, of course, still has to be there. And giving me the means to interact with these people is, I think, necessary. And that's where, I don't know, I feel like Trust Infrastructure feels right in a way to, yeah, kick the hornet's nest, but also, build in that direction. Like almost like two directions to the same goal. Remove the unnecessary trust in these parties that we shouldn't be trusting and give me the tools to actually trust the people I want to be trusting.


[01:25:26]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah.


[01:25:26]: Nico Mohnblatt:


And eventually we're going to meet nicely in the middle.


[01:25:29]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah, yeah. I've been playing with this frame that programmable cryptography gives you three things. It gives you privacy. That's the default, right? Not the default, but certainly cryptography for privacy is maybe like the standard framing. It gives you leverage. ZK Email or TLSNotary and all the companies that have popped in, like Pluto was at Hash It Out Week last week, allows you to take things that are technically yours but that are hosted on these platforms, and you can take it and take it somewhere else in a way that doesn't rely on the permission of the platform that happens to host that data or that information. So it gives you privacy, it gives you leverage. And I think, importantly, it also gives you some sense of tangibility, which I think it's easy to dismiss because it's not quite a feature. But tangibility, as in this achievement in this video game, this skill-based achievement in this video game that right now is just hosted on Steam. Hey, you can take it and wrap it in cryptography and suddenly it's a thing, right? It's a thing that you can take into this different context of Ethereum Layer 1 if you want to do that, or you can just take it into a different game. To some extent like you own that little blob of data and having wrapped it with cryptography in ways that seem to me really different than just being able to do an API call and kind of reference it in the traditional web2 way.


So, yeah, privacy, leverage and tangibility to me are the big affordances created by programmable cryptography. And then you can combine those and hopefully get the tools that you need to build these social spaces that are maybe a little bit, well, that are private, but in more subtle ways if needed allow you to coordinate, that create like -- yeah, the votes that Rarimo tries to coordinate, they feel real in part because you have this sense of this is only people from this country and they're unique humans and we don't have to worry about the anti-Sybil having been a bit broken. Like, these are just my compatriots that voted in this thing. So, yeah, creating a little bit this sense of realness, this sense of tangibility that feels very valuable.


[01:27:47]: Anna Rose:


Arnaud, thank you so much for coming on the show and --


[01:27:50]: Arnaud Schenk:


My pleasure.


[01:27:50]: Anna Rose:


Kind of walking us through some of the thinking behind this article. Also, I don't know, for me, just like, thinking back to the times that we joined or the early ZK community, how that's changed. I mean, it's just definitely a lot of food for thought on how communities evolve and change over time online, what tools there are today to foster that, or what is missing potentially, and trying to figure out that balance between transparency and sort of something more trustful. I like that.


[01:28:27]: Arnaud Schenk:


Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And I will say a lot of these things are still kind of grasping in the dark. Right? A lot of these things, I think, need more definition and playing around with these tools and figuring out the edges for them. So if anything, you're like, oh, this is clearly wrong, or you're like, oh, I really like this, but I want to explore it more either way, happy to chat with anyone that's interested in the same topics.


[01:28:53]: Nico Mohnblatt:


Yeah, I mean, thanks, Anna, for taking the suggestion. I was really happy to have these conversations. It was funny for me to be co-hosting an episode that was not a technical episode.


[01:29:03]: Anna Rose:


Yeah, true. All right. So I want to say thank you to the podcast team, Rachel, Henrik, Tanya, and Kim Ho, who's editing this episode, and to our listeners, thanks for listening.