Frontier Podcast Episode 2: Ameen Soleimani
This is the transcript for the first episode of The Frontier Podcast with Ameen Soleimani, hosted by Tom Mitchelhill and SpaceComputer CoFounder Daniel Bar.
Welcome back to the Frontier podcast, the show where we interview the pioneers pushing technology and humankind into the future and going deep on the original cypherpunk values of cryptography, digital sovereignty, and the limits of human ingenuity. I'm your host, Tom Mitchell-Hill, and today I'll be joined by my co-host, Daniel Barr, the co-founder of Space Computer. Thanks for joining me, Daniel.
Cheers. Good day. Happy to get the Frontier pod again.
And today we are speaking with Ameen Soleimani. Ameen brings with him an incredibly impressive and somewhat controversial resume in the crypto industry. Ameen is the CTO of 0xBow, which builds compliance tools for privacy protocols that work to exclude, provably dissociate, nefarious actors like terrorists, thieves, and other criminals from using crypto's privacy tech and rails.
He is the founder of the sex work platform Spankchain and the co-founder of Iran Unchained, a blockchain-based DAO that combines the principles of crypto's coordination with social policy with the goal of overthrowing the Islamic Republic and empowering women in Iran. He's also the co-founder of Reflexor Finance, which offers the first ever controlled floating peg stablecoin, RAI. Ameen, welcome to the show.
We're incredibly grateful to have you on. Thanks for all of that introduction. Just a very chill, you know, non-controversial resume.
Something actually I noticed we missed from the intro there. Also the creator of MolochDAO, which underpinned quite a lot of the DAO adoption in 2019-20. Frontier of DAOs.
When I was into DAOs, there was like three of them, and now like 10,000s, you know. I did want to get stuck in on privacy a little bit more, just because privacy has, at least in like the more markets side, has kind of picked up now that Zcash has come back out of nowhere. I think everyone's now kind of questioning what that means.
I think there's a lot of new school crypto entrants that don't know what Zcash is, and I'm like, well, this has been around for a while. It's the Gen Z. It's the Gen Z cash, right? It's the Zoomer cash. They're infused by it.
They don't know what it is. I mean, what are your thoughts on Zcash and the fact that it's like really returned to the limelight really quickly? I'm happy for them. It took them a decade.
For people who don't know, Zcash was the original zero-knowledge proof deployment, first one in production in history. It was basically a minimalist fork of Bitcoin, same 21 million cap, slightly adjusted mining schedule. I think.
I'm not exactly sure on those details. But the point is, is that they have a shielded pool where you can do peer-to-peer transactions and no one can see which transactions correspond to what amounts or what balances or addresses. So I think that people slept on privacy for a long time.
I think that the government actions against Tornado Cash, where they sanctioned the protocol after North Korea deposited hundreds of millions of dollars that they stole from Axie Infinity into the protocol and then arrested Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev in the Netherlands and the US, also put a chilling effect on privacy. Some privacy projects shot down over the last couple of years. And so I'm glad to see that under the current administration that privacy devs feel good about promoting their projects.
And the price action is also reflecting that people feel more comfortable talking about and using these products. They don't feel like they're going to be attacked by the government for doing so, at least right now, maybe in the US, maybe today. Now I also think that there are risks to maybe some idealism around these products.
I was also idealistic about Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash had something, I don't know, a billion dollars in TVL at some point, a lot of money in ETH. And none of us thought it was going to be a problem, and then North Korea put hundreds of millions of dollars through it.
And so I'm not – I hope that doesn't happen to Zcash, but it might. And if it does, then they will also have to ask themselves hard questions like, is it a good idea to build things that help users dissociate from the potentially known criminal deposits? Or do we want all the money to be fungible and all of the users to potentially be suspect? Now there are reasons why they don't want this kind of thing to be normalized, because then they might have to build something or they might fall under regulations that isn't accepted. But I still think that one of the weird ways that modern financial privacy is not exactly like encryption – that is a tough pill to swallow for most cypherpunks – is that I don't actually need anyone else to use encryption to get the benefits of it.
But if I'm the only one using an anonymous money protocol, then it's pretty obvious who I am. And so my privacy comes from the other people using it. And so if I'm in a – like, I – the quality of my anonymity set also matters in addition to the quantity.
I don't necessarily want to be in the anonymity set that includes, for example, the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, or the North Korean terrorists, because then as a user I am getting and giving privacy to them. And that may be something that, like, privacy users want to not think about. But those of us who have had to deal with North Korea have had to think about it, and I think it's worth thinking about proactively.
And that's what we've built our new company for, 0xBow, building privacy pools. It lets you do this – it's like one simple trick to keep terrorists out of your anonymity set. And we monitor their funds and we reject their deposits if we see their funds come from known illicit sources, and we can also retroactively reject funds.
And I think that's a good idea. I think that that allows you to not necessarily need to dox yourself to a financial institution or something in order to prove that your funds are legit, because you can in public prove that you're not – your funds are not associated with potentially illicit funds. So yeah.
I'm a big fan of privacy. I think privacy is super important. I think that the, like, Second Amendment angle is actually a great way to sell privacy to the government in America, because we can say that for the same reason that we are allowed to arm ourselves as citizens to protect ourselves – these rules came from, like, actual threats of foreign invasion, and not only that, but, like, the government also infringing on your rights in ways that are irreconcilable.
And the status quo is more or less that we're comfortable with all of our financial data being honeypots in Coinbase or in banks or financial institutions, and they pretty constantly get exposed to foreign actors, hackers, and so forth. And so it becomes a national security concern to actually protect the American people's data from the foreign actors who might want to abuse it. And there's also instances where, like, the data collection policies themselves end up being threats to users.
Like, Coinbase leaked a bunch of data, and I know someone whose parents was scammed, like socially engineered. They got called up, and the person had their Coinbase transaction history, so they thought it was a legit representative, and then they sent a bunch of money out of their account that they now can't get back. And that sucks, and that's, like, a direct result of having these data... KYC is basically a massive data... The joke was that it's called a kill your customer.
When the ledger hacks, and, like, people got, like, mugged in Europe because their, like, home address was on the ledger databases that they sold them. Back in 2019, you launched SpankChain to help provide, like, a safer financial system for sex workers that faced a somewhat reluctant, like, economic landscape back then. But, you know, you kind of really courted controversy in 2020 when you uploaded a sex tape of yourself with an adult actress.
Can you walk me through the thought process behind this and run me through, like, the response from the crypto industry and just, like, professionally that this brought about? Yeah, it was... We've had a lot of fun working on SpankChain and built a couple different products. At the time, we were building SpankPay, which is a payment platform, you know, to help clip sites and cam sites sell their tokens for crypto, kind of like a BitPay. And I was also dating a porn star for some time in 2018, 19, and decided to... When I was doing that, we made a couple tapes that she released on her OnlyFans, and they did pretty well, and I thought it would be funny to get into it myself and both somewhat normalize it as well as help promote SpankChain's products.
The reception was pretty positive in the sense that I think my audience is still just like my crypto fans who thought it was really funny that I was doing this, and that was mainly the people that I was, you know, promoting it to. So I thought, you know, it worked out. But yeah, that was that phase.
We're also building a product called SpankBatch, which was trying to be a platform for connecting porn stars together to, you know, shoot content. It didn't ultimately work out, but that was the promo. How do you look at kind of like SpankChain and SpankPay now with the rise of things like OnlyFans in terms of like, I feel like it's become a lot more normalized in terms of like financial protection of sex work online, at least.
What is that relationship between crypto and then like sex work payments look like now compared to how it did in 2019, 2020? Yeah, I think when we started out, crypto was more of a pariah and sex work was also more of a pariah in the sense that they were both excluded largely from the financial world. And so it made sense to try and use crypto to bring that to sex workers who got PayPal accounts shut down and funds seized and bank accounts shut down to promote self-custody and owning your own funds. So what's changed since then is a lot of the crypto companies have also been able to have bank accounts and become more widespread.
And sex work itself is a little bit more accepted. More online sex work, like things like OnlyFans, you know, selling content digitally. And so a lot of the generic platforms, like even crypto platforms, can now serve sex workers successfully in a way that doesn't really give SpankChain any sort of edge.
So I think it's a positive thing for the industry that crypto is able to help. And SpankChain is sort of transformed into a hedge fund that buys and sells crypto. It invests in projects, but it also has a lobbying arm.
And so we're actually active in D.C. helping promote some of the legislation that benefits sex workers by protecting their rights to having bank accounts or if they get shut down, that mandate the banks having to provide a reason for shutting down those accounts. OK, I have to say about the like both just seeing that founder journey and the early days, something that I think the good actors in crypto and I obviously consider you one of them, even if the project didn't materialize to the original vision or become like the next Facebook whatever, the stellar team that that was assembled, right, like so many of the early people that that you're collaborating with in those days went on to become awesome contributors and builders that are today working on on epic projects. And this is something that you see coming out of good teams, like whether the project succeeded or not.
There's a lot of new knowledge, new talent that ends up becoming, you know, world class, top talent that builds stuff today. So, yeah, whether it's I remember James Young, I think, was involved there. And Will Price, was he already involved in SpankChain or was it after? He was involved in early days of a couple of different projects.
So he was involved in Rai as well. Yeah, I mean, SpankChain had a lot of great team members and supporters, you know, we overengineered our first cam site. The first thing we actually did before SpankPay was build Spank.Live, which was a cam site that used an Ethereum layer two payment channel to do all of the payments, overengineered to a massive degree.
But the lead engineer on that team then became the lead engineer in Optimism. And so he's been doing fraud proofs on mainnet for like six years. That was like way before any L2s really exist, just for context.
Yeah, my my primary contribution to Ethereum scaling was to rule out state channels as a viable short term scaling solution so that the researchers could go back and focus on roll ups and L2s and other things. Process by elimination is a big one, too. We were just willing to put something in prod and there was a bunch of naked girls who were willing to dance on camera and help us test it.
That's not normal for crypto. What you were talking about before, just this idea that like crypto and sex work and, you know, a lot of other kind of like early tech back then was had a bit more of like pariah status. But particularly over the last three years, we've seen crypto in particular become very like institutional.
It's grown to be a lot more like traditional finance through ETFs, adherence to regulation, also just actual regulatory progress. So I kind of want to ask you a two part question, because a big part of this podcast is looking at like cypherpunk original values of crypto that did actually give it that pariah status that kind of pushed the boundaries a bit. So I want to ask, how do you define the term cypherpunk? And do you still see like a viable path forward for crypto to kind of revitalize some of the cypherpunk values? Or is it is it just lost? Are we is there no room for that moving forward? It's a great question.
How do I define cypherpunk? I'll start with that. So cypher means code. And punk is to me, it means being a sort of moral entrepreneur where I'm willing to bet on the acceptance of some norm in the future.
And I'm willing to stake my reputation today that this norm will actually be helpful or useful or widely adopted in the future in a way that if I don't like it doesn't, then I like a fool. And, you know, I have I'm basically willing to endure some of society's ostracization of me being a weirdo in order to promote some subculture. And like the cypherpunks are promoting the culture of code and not only code, but encryption.
And so I mean, code in the sense of like cypher, like a cypher that helps you solve a word puzzle that is the basis of all modern cryptography. So the cypherpunks believe that people should have encryption and they were seen as societal outcasts for defending that belief. And then they turned out to be right because now you have a mandate.
The government forces you to encrypt all government websites. HTTPS is everywhere. You have that little lock on your browser that shows you that the website you go to, your traffic is encrypted.
And so I think that like the I think I think we focus too much when we think about cypherpunks on the fighting the man part of being a cypherpunk. And I had a funny conversation with Virgil Griffith, who went to North Korea and then spent five years in prison because of conspiracy to violate international sanctions. And he pled guilty and did not have time and he just he's just getting out now.
And when I met with him, he's had this to say, I was like, blew my mind. I'm like, the dude's been in prison for five years. And he had this to say, he said, you know, fighting the man is not winning.
Building a better man is winning. And building a better man means building the society that protects our cypherpunk values, where people have access to encryption. And that is actually how the cypherpunk wars were won, was that the government ultimately folded and embraced the cypherpunk values to permit encryption and mandate it and all, you know, government web traffic and make it, you know, not a criminal offense to do so.
And so I think the same thing should happen today is that we should try to do better than anarchism. I think anarchism is not only nonsensical, but also like kind of demoralized. Whereas like, you can't even imagine that a society like could be good.
And so you just reject the idea of society entirely. And I think some cypherpunks have, you know, people who think that we have fallen out of grace with the cypherpunks original vision, see us not necessarily fighting the man, but becoming the man and they're afraid. And I think there's like a synthesis path here where it's like part of growing up and you realize that you should protect the values that you believe in.
And to the extent that Ethereum can do that or is doing that, I think it's a journey. We're all on like different parts of it. You know, I think there's still a strong like anarchist contingent that's like going to go down fighting the man.
And they think anything that isn't that is, you know, not worth doing. I think there's definitely a contingent that those guys would describe as sellouts, which are happy to work for the man and, you know, integrate with what you might call surveillance states or stuff like that. And I think there's still a balance where like you could imagine a ZK world that is used for evil if, you know, all of the blockchain IDs are like required to, you know, report to the central authority for everything.
But you can also imagine a ZK ID world where the ZK part is used to protect individuals and their rights. And, you know, voting is properly anonymous and verifiable and financial transactions are also protected. And these things are good.
And so, like, I don't know, I want to see the optimistic side of being a cypherpunk, too. I think maybe maybe a part of what you're saying about understanding that it's building a better man rather than being like anti-establishment pure resembles in a way that there's this saying that if you weren't a hippie communist in your when you were 16 or 20, then you didn't do your thing as well. If you weren't a capitalist in your 40s, you didn't do it well.
So it kind of I would think the equivalent is, yeah, many of us have a little bit of this Freudian anti-establishment cypherpunk interpretation. But then you're right that if all what it amounts to is being destroyed, the man, it's kind of like what today we see with the socialists or like defund the government or like let's destroy the Western civilization, like let the US fall down, et cetera, rather than like understanding that the cypherpunks in some more deep sense, it's more about free speech and empowerment of individual freedom. But it comes with it comes with like accountability.
It doesn't come with anarchy. Right. Like free speech is a great example of this, because like I would say something like free speech is something that is aligned with cypherpunk values.
You know, the right to not be subject to illegal search procedure, the Fourth Amendment, also something aligned with cypherpunk values. It is by leaning on and supporting these laws that we like that we can build societies that protect cypherpunk values. We don't need to tear everything down.
And America is to some extent an embodiment of some of these cypherpunk values, you know, in many other ways. It's not. We have we have some of them going for us.
And so we shouldn't just throw them all out when we, you know, try to fight the man. Now, it does come back a lot to this idea of synthesizing the two. You can't.
You see a lot of frustration, particularly among younger people with like, oh, we'll just throw it all out. It's like there's a lot of stuff that was worked very hard on to get us to this level. And it's not all perfect, but there's plenty worth conserving, if you will.
I am curious as to how you because like as a CTO of 0xBow, you know, you're coming up with a solution to like help bar bad actors from using privacy tech. But how do you conceptualize the like, yeah, that that dichotomy that you had before of like the if you have nothing to hide, why do you need privacy like junk argument on one side of like, well, we think we can reasonably assume the privacy is is like everyone requires and would like a certain level of privacy. No one wants to be surveilled.
But then on the other hand, it's like building tools that like just kind of not arbitrarily, but just really over index for pure anonymity are clearly just going to be a logical endpoint for bad actors to wash money through. And so like how do you balance those two in your you mentioned that it was a really difficult question. So I'm probably opening up a very big can of worms.
There's there's like the pragmatic answer and the philosophical answer. Right. There's the pragmatic answer is like, well, we're a U.S. based company, so we follow U.S. based laws, you know, are the people that we don't include or anyone downstream of the OFAC list of illicit addresses, anyone that could be reasonably like we saw a deposit from Novatex, for example, the largest Iranian exchange.
And we rejected it. I don't know if those are my compatriots or my enemies, but we can't tell them apart. And so we have to reject it when we find money from like Coinbase or other reputable exchanges.
We accept it comes from like named accounts or just on chain activity that looks human. You know, someone is buying stuff, selling stuff. We'll accept it.
And if it comes from potentially other privacy tools that aren't up to our standards or no KYC cross-chain exchanges that are less reputable, then we might look harder at it or just reject it. So I think maybe like what I pick between the lines and tell me if I understand. Obviously, there's like pragmatics sometimes make things not optimal.
But if KYC and the approach of the TradFi world to to inclusion is assuming that everyone is guilty until proven wrong. So so like maybe the approach that you're thinking with 0xBow is more like assuming everyone is all right, unless like you can. Yeah, I should have been more clear.
We don't do KYC. We only do KYT, which is Know Your Transaction. We are able to do this because, one, we're not a money services business.
We don't take custody of the user's money. We can't freeze the money or move it around in any way. But also, you know, KYC is not good enough.
If you like professional criminals have identity mules that they'll bring in. And I don't really care what ID you show me if I see that the money came from an illicit source, you know. And so we're mostly around just tracing the funds and seeing where they came from.
And so we would love to, you know, the assumption is that, yeah, everybody is legit, but there's a waiting period. And so when you deposit, you pay a vetting fee. We that the funds that are coming and we do have to vet each deposit independently because like you could deposit could be legit and then later you get money from a hack and then you deposit and, you know, we have to look at the money, see this new money.
Where did this come from? So that's why there's a bit of a delay. We usually get everything within 24 hours and only in some cases is it longer. So most of it's automated and some of it gets flagged.
And then those are the ones we do manual review on. So, yeah, you don't want to OFAC around and find out kind of thing. No, we are our company basically exists to try and tackle this problem, which is to try and keep the bad guys out of privacy tools and this privacy pools.
So that was the pragmatic answer. What was the what was your philosophical answer? Sure.
Yeah, the philosophical answer is like, you know, civilization is a garden and gardens need gardeners and walls and, you know, you are free to not use our privacy pool. We are making a judgment. The judgment is trying to reflect the aggregate interests of, you know, the users.
Even if, you know, I was trying to build an anonymity set, myself personally and the government didn't mandate that I had to exclude the, for example, Iranian mullahs, I choose to exclude the Iranian mullahs, then it's obvious that I'm the one excluding the Iranian mullahs when I withdraw. So I have to essentially horse trade with other people. I'm like, hello, you would like to exclude Hamas.
I would like to exclude the Iranian mullahs. Let's do a trade. And so then we build the set of people that most people want to willingly dissociate from that also leaves them the largest possible anonymity set.
And maybe those people disagree with this and they make their own thing, but then they either choose to include the other people because they don't care about getting and giving privacy for them. They'd happily infiltrate their, you know, financial anonymity set, or maybe they don't want them in. Either way, anybody can use the technology, right? It's all open source.
And, you know, the other answer here is like, if you really hate privacy pools, you can still use tornado cash, which MolochDAO gave all the grants to and me and my friends built and, you know, trying to get keep the friends out of jail for it and all of that. And Oxbow also did, if you feel like using tornado cash, but you have so are so inclined to not extend the anonymity set of the North Korean hackers and other DeFi hackers, we have conveniently prepared a list for you of all of them and you can, you know, dissociate from their transactions. And I think that's called tornado.oxbow.io. And we have our conveniently, yeah, that's the system.
Our digital sleuths went and traced all the tornado deposits and made a list so that you can. So yeah, I think philosophically, that's just my point. It's like the people hate on privacy pools because they say the existence of someone who is picking, you know, who is in or out means that it is a bad system, you know, intrinsically.
And I think that is not the case. In theorem, you would be free to personally choose who is in or out of your set and you could do it that way. But computational limits, you know, for individuals mean that we're all best off using some service and, you know, any service has some tradeoffs.
And so you're just going to end up with whatever most people don't want to associate with is going to be the, you know, thing that has the largest anonymity set. And maybe it takes some time for other, you know, protocols to attract illicit funds that then make people think harder about this problem. But we've had to since tornado cash.
Yeah. Like assuming ultimate freedom is just kind of like a naive thing. It's like name one human structure where no one's picking or choosing what's coming in that works well over time.
It's like there has to be some like absorbing barrier at some point to just say, OK, sorry. I tried to do a really difficult thing, especially for people in our industry. I tried to empathize with the regulator.
I tried to imagine I was like, OK, if it was my job, like say I'm like the future CFO of Iran or something and like the terrorists are, you know, using tornado cash to pop off my homies and pay assassination bounties. Like, would I allow this? Would I allow Iranians to, you know, use this protocol in the name of protecting their privacy and their freedom while I see that money coming out of there as being in it? And it's like probably not. It's probably not a great idea.
Would I do it if they were willing to say, hey, look, I'm not the terrorist who you have identified? Maybe, you know, in that case, I might be a little bit more friendly. I'm like, oh, OK, thank you. At least you're helping me do my job, which is hunt down, you know, the bad guys.
And so something like privacy pools, that's what it does, isolates the illicit and, you know, legit funds. And so it helps the regulators essentially do their job. And that's how we're framing it.
And I hope that, you know, Zcash never has to do that. But I anticipate that they might. While we're there, talk to me about Iran Unchained.
It's no small thing to have your mission statement be overthrowing the Islamic Republic. What inspired you to take this on and how does the Iran Unchained kind of project coordinate for this? Sure. So 2022, September, Massa Amini was murdered by the morality police in Iran for not wearing a proper hijab.
This sparked the Woman Life Freedom movement, had a lot of influencers and women cutting their hair in support of this. And generally, it was a movement opposed to the Islamic Republic of the mullahs ruling Iran. The youth, they're very anti-Islamic.
It's the least Muslim it's ever been in like a thousand years. And yet the government is extremely repressive. And this flared up after Massa Amini.
And that's really what sparked me to lean more into my Iranian culture, heritage, history, and try to figure out ways to use whatever skills, experience to help. Iran Unchained, we started, it's a DAO on Ethereum using a Moloch V3 framework. But it's basically a fundraising to support Iranians, activists for various things.
So for VPNs, Internet connectivity, there's certain exemptions under OFAC that you are allowed to send money even though Iran is sanctioned and they are supporting Internet freedom, humanitarian aid, so like food, medicine. We sent a bunch of food to areas like next to where people were on strike, not necessarily sending it to the people on strike, but, you know, trying to be clever and also pro-democracy. So we supported newspapers.
And the reason we had to support these things, we decided to do this is because like Web2 platforms like GoFundMe were getting taken down, even though they were advertising that they were operating under the specific OFAC exemptions. And it's because, you know, some bank compliance officer doesn't want to deal with it. And so they're like, this is not worth it for us to host, you know, that this could go wrong.
And so me and my friends, we just read the rules. It doesn't say you can't raise money in crypto. You set up a nonprofit, you can send up to half a million dollars a year.
And so we started doing that, sent about half a million dollars over the last, I don't know, two and a half years or so to support that, sent OFAC a letter every quarter about where the money goes and been able to support a couple of different projects as well through that. There's a satellite TV station and, you know, things like that. So that was the core of Iran Unchained, through Iran Unchained.
I also met a bunch of other Iranian activists and we did some other fun things. So one of the fun things we did was that me and one of my activist friends, we went to Kiyv for ETH Kiyv last year. We went, Vitalik was there.
It was cool. Everybody in Kiyv loves Vitalik because, you know, he was all like Slava Ukraine on day one, day two of the war. They were stopping and taking pictures with him and stuff.
It was pretty cute. And we went there and we met one of the Ukrainian dev teams called Raramo. They built this thing called Freedom Tool and it was a way for them to troll the Russian government and to hold a parallel election.
They got like some tens of thousands of people to vote in it. Some opposition leader endorsed it and it uses like ZK proofs on top of passports. And so you can generate an anonymous proof on top of your passport that your passport is legit and then you can vote anonymously using that registration token that you get.
And so they were able to like troll the Russian elections. We saw it and we were like, this is amazing. Also, the Islamic Republic is having their election in like 10 days.
So why don't we just fork the whole thing? And it turned out that the Iranian passports worked out of the box. It's some combination of like hashes and signatures that need to be correct. And so we were able to like build a voting system that works with Iranian passports and then, you know, troll the Islamic Republic elections.
We just stayed in Kiyv for a week to build this. And, you know, only maybe a couple of hundred Iranians actually used it because everybody was terrified of uploading their passports. And, you know, what is what is this? Your knowledge? What are you doing with my data? I'm like, it never leaves your phone.
Why are you collecting? You know, you're like trying to explain stuff to people. But it did help us get in with a bunch more of the Iranian Internet nerds and other of the activists. And now I'm able to potentially promote these tools to a larger audience.
I've been going to the rallies of the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who's the son of the former Shah, who was the leader up until 1979 when he was kicked out. And I think he's the most popular person in Iran, actually just straight up the most popular person in Iran, but also the most popular to lead the revolution to sort of referendum where Iranians can self-determine their system of government. After the Islamic Republic.
And I think that, you know, I hope that for a future referendum, it's using some proper ZKID system and voting system and not some paper ballot. You know, in my lifetime, I would love to live in a society that actually implements some of this this cool technology that we've been building. I think maybe just one one comment on Iran in general, I think anyone that works in tech, you'd meet many people that are educated in Tehran or wherever and emigrated and working on epic, epic projects.
So the talent is insane. And it's just like I wish that there would be, you know, this market would be connected by a free market and a free society. And, yeah, there would be basically no limitation of oppressive regimes.
And I think it's a lot of all the efforts that you're doing and smaller, big efforts is it's really it's sad. You know, I feel like Iranians have a lot to offer the world. And unfortunately, like I joke about this, but it's like Iranians wish for an Iran where the primary export is not jihad.
It's like all we want to export other things, you know. But we're stuck with the jihad. So we unfortunately have to get the jihadis out.
It's, you know, in theory, and we love this like network state movement. And I've read the like network state book. Have you read the network state book, Tom? I actually have not.
I attended the network state conference. I've actually come around a lot more to network state kind of ideals now. It's taken me a while, but I've loomed back through.
I started off being skeptical and I've kind of course corrected. I went deeper because I would argue that the source material for the network state is actually a Jewish state by Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. It's a great playbook.
And I encourage and encouraging Iranians to read it and learn from it. The guy, this was written in like 1897. And you imagine this dude, it's like pre-Holocaust everything.
He's just like, bros, we have been wandering for 2000 years. We should stop wandering. You know, we will pick a homeland.
It will be between Argentina and Palestine. It's literally in the book. Argentina is fertile ground.
Like, maybe we should go there. And then everyone's like, no, no, we need to go to Israel, set up our ancestral homeland. And so they do that.
And the playbook is to set up two organizations. And one is called, it's a nonprofit. And that's called the Zionist Organization.
The other one's a for profit. And that's called the Jewish Colonial Trust. And so the nonprofit does the like census, figures out who are the Jews, where are the Jews, how many of them are there.
Do they want to go back? Will they go back? Will they be in wave one, two, three, you know. And does all of the like code of conduct and like voting and electing and committees and constitutional drafting and that kind of thing. And then the for profit, the Jewish Colonial Trust is like a bank.
Right. And so they IPO this bank. Jews want to build a country.
First thing they do, they sell shares in a bank. And it works and they raise money and they start financing land purchases and basically implementing the will of the Zionist Organization. And there was sort of like a tacit understanding that the directors of the Jewish Colonial Trust would be selected from the committee leaders of the Zionist Organization.
And so this way there were some checks and balances. And the for profit was explicitly not supposed to do things that were just like randomly for profit and not aligned with the interests of the Jewish people. And that's why the checks and balances were important.
I think that Iranians have a lot to learn from Jews in terms of coordination and in setting up these structures. And blockchains can help be the like digital substrate for helping, you know, build some of these structures. So I'm looking forward to.
The way you describe it does sound a lot like a crypto project where you have some kind of foundation. Then you have the token entity that does all of the fundraising and it's very like tech bro Balaji vibe. So I'm not surprised that you made this interpretation that way.
Yeah. And the goal of the network state was buy land. Right.
And it's like, hmm, who has successfully executed this playbook? Let me read what they had to write about it, you know, not like the tech bro way. But I think that the network state stuff is cool. It's a bit of a LARP.
Right. But the tools are actually incredible. And legit useful like anonymous voting tools, DAOs, like treasuries on chain that are like unruggable by individuals like this is great, great stuff, you know, and being willing to experiment and be on the frontier, dare I say, of these things is, you know, great for pushing them forward.
And I think that they will find their way into the communities that need them the most. And so that's what we're trying to do. OK.
Yeah. Me and Balaji in the kibbutz just hanging out. That's right.
I went for one day in the network school of Forest City just out of Singapore there. I was also very skeptical or I don't know, like it's too like tech bro nonsense LARP as they say. And I have to say that when when I was there, yes, it definitely there is a LARPy component, which is quite, quite substantial.
But I think that sometimes, you know, in the spirit of fake it till you make it, then there is genuine like hope and intention. And even if just a fraction of good people come in and do stuff, so it's still very inspiring to see. And I'm actually hoping to spend some time there next year.
Yeah, I'm a fan of it, if I wasn't clear. Like, I'm happy that it opened the door for me to learn even more about successful implementations of it. And, you know, I want to apply it.
Right. Like we have a different kind of goal here. Like for Iranians, we're like, oh, we know the land we want.
There just happens to be other people running it. So we have a slightly different, you know, set of strains on our problem. This is the this is the first time I've heard of like Zionism, that's like a tech project.
So this is this is a great frame. Right. The second page of the book, he's like basically technological capitalism is like has created all of the wealth.
I'm sorry, bros, but like getting more people to like push oxen carts is like not the future. Machines are the way that all wealth is going to be created. The disproportionate amount of wealth will be created in 20th century.
And we should learn to, you know, integrate that directly into our culture. And I was like, Dan, this dude is like tech tech bro, capitalist day one. It's like labor stuff in there, too, though.
Like this is before a lot of the socialist experiments were sort of proven wrong. And so he's like, we will have four day labor weeks and, you know, all the way the way trying to appealing to everybody. Certain things.
I'll do communal farm work. That's right. There's a lot of there's a lot of that in it, too.
Yeah, I do want to ask. So I think Daniel shared with me that you've that you've been misunderstood before as an anti-Semite in crypto. Could you run me through this? Yeah.
Yeah, sure. If I could see myself today, like having seen how everything played out, I would have taken this a lot less seriously at the time. Because what basically happened is that I got into a spat with Glenwell, who's kind of like your, you know, self-hating Jew commie.
And I at the time I was making fun of I was like, you're really proud of how Jewish you are. You know, he has a little three parentheses. And then he was like, I mean, this is hate speech, blah, blah, blah.
And I was not in a great state of mind. I was visiting Japan. I'd seen a friend I hadn't seen in 10 years.
So I am very intoxicated and stimulated, stumbling home at three in the morning. And I looked down at my phone and I see people accusing me of hate speech. And I'm like, this is going to be hilarious.
So all the people who think I hate Jews, you're right. I do. You know, send tweet.
And then I was like, also, I hate Muslims and Christians. Right. Nobody ever brought that part up.
I don't know why. But this was this was a very sensitive time. This was 2019.
This was before, like, BLM and a lot of that stuff. So people were very sensitive to imagined slights. And so I ended up getting canceled by a bunch of people for saying I hate Jews as a joke.
Who probably today hate Jews, not as a joke, because those are the same people that were doing the canceling five years ago. And now they're all like free Palestine and anti-Zionists and all that. So, yeah, it was it was a bit unnerving.
I mean, I was supposed to open for Joe at DEF CON in Japan that my speaking slot got canceled. You know, a bunch of people were mad at me. And I agree.
Like, it wasn't the right thing to do. Right. It's not like I support this type of trolling.
It normalizes even fake hate speech was a good idea. And like it made my friends have to stand up for me and like they didn't I didn't need them to. You know, everybody who knew me at ConsenSys, Joe Lubin is my boss, you know, Joe Lubin.
Right. And he had to, like, hold it all because, like, Amin is making a joke. Guys, please relax.
I remember. I remember. Yeah.
And like that was, you know, the unfortunate part of that. And, yeah, I mean, if I knew now, I would just be like, man, that's a bunch of stuff. This is silly reactions because I kind of wanted to see what would happen.
Right. I was trying to see how many people would take the opportunity to jump on me for something that I thought it was obviously a joke. But there was a lot of people who saw the opportunity to willingly misinterpret, you know, what I was saying and capitalize on it.
So I think, you know, I learned something that day. But, you know, yeah, it was I was misunderstood. But I think today I would be more likely to get canceled for saying I'm a Zionist.
Right. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I think when you're more than 10K follower account, basically anything that you say, there's haters and there's a fan, you know, I don't know.
I'm I realized on October 8th that I, you know, had probably also bought into the anti-Israel propaganda too much. You know, I always questioned before that I was like, you know, grew up pretty liberal and the same way that I got over a lot of the Trump propaganda that I, you know, 2016, I thought he was a racist, misogynistic, sexist piece of shit. Twenty twenty four.
I voted for him. Right. So I think had a similar thing where like after October 7th or something, when I saw it, I was like, this this this is pretty typical.
Right. This is what I would expect. It's a Palestinian Hamas and friends carrying out some terror attack on people who are trying to live their lives.
The gate went down for a couple hours. This is what you expect. Right.
October 8th is what radicalized me. Seeing people cheer all over the world in Sydney, they're saying that's the Jews in England. They're on the streets cheering and all the Arab countries are giving out chocolates on the streets.
That's when you come around to realizing how lonely it must be to be Jewish. Especially when things like that happen. And you might be trying to live your life in such a way that maybe you're like, oh, I'm not pro Israel.
I don't care. You know, and the people who you think that you're like, you know, friends with, they're like, oh, yeah, you're one of the good ones. But then that happens.
And then you're like, oh, shit. They mean me, too. These guys actually are, you know, against Jews generally and are using anti-Zionism as like a way to hide it.
It's not like Germany, they lost World War Two or something. People were like, Germany as a country doesn't exist anymore. Circling back, looping back in, if you will, to use some LinkedIn core language.
Crypto, like I think from the outside perspective, people think of it as the typical like hyper libertarian. They see Bitcoin as and that's kind of like their primary interaction with crypto. It's like the libertarian destroy all banks.
Fuck everyone. Don't tread on me kind of shtick. But often within the Ethereum community in particular, I feel like there's a much stronger vein of like left wing politics.
I mean, how do you kind of like approach the like left wing? Like what are your thoughts on like the left wing socialist push in the Ethereum community or other areas of crypto? So crypto left wing, yeah, Bitcoin has largely been like guns and steak. Right. So it's not as much of a left wing aligned movement as Ethereum has been.
Ethereum definitely leaned on egalitarian values, trying to help the little guy, you know, things like that. Bank the unbanked. And I think I and to be clear, that's also part of what made it attractive for me.
And I think I've also been egalitarian and.
I think I still am egalitarian in a lot of ways. I think that I see some dangers of applying this equality lens in places that it doesn't belong. I've seen that in terms of policy on the left, and then there's a sort of crypto part of it.
And we were just talking about how crypto has gotten pretty politicized. Vitalik, I think, sets the culture in Ethereum largely and at the EF more directly. And I think what happened, for example, after Trump got elected is that Vitalik was standing up for his friends that he saw were demoralized by the right winning and who were sad about this and decided to speak out and say, like, make communism great again.
And that's kind of what I was trolled by when I decided to beef with him and stand up and make I read it as a joke, wasn't it? So I don't think it was actually a joke. It's the type of thing that Vitalik does because he doesn't want to actually take a stance on something. And so he was, like, referring to his post-degen communism that he made on April Fool's in which the only thing that's, like, really a joke is the title.
But if you read the content, it, like, reflects probably a bunch of ideas that Vitalik actually agrees with. And yeah, I think that as crypto becomes more powerful and our politics ends up mattering more. And so, like, for example, Hayden was being attacked by the SEC, right, during Biden's term.
And he still was against Trump and didn't support Trump. And then afterwards was still, like, hesitant to say thank you for all of the lawsuits getting absolved. And it shows that, like, how, you know, crypto's political leaning left, especially Ethereum's leaning left, can hurt us.
And then, you know, we're not even necessarily, like, grateful to the people who helped us or the political party that helped us in ways that we should be. And I thought that it was counterproductive, especially while Roman still had his trial to be, you know, mocking the US government and Trump instead of trying to work with them potentially to, you know, free Roman and set up better rules for privacy devs and things like that. So I was really impressed with the Bitcoiners for getting Ross free.
And I think that that's something that Ethereum people didn't think that Trump would even keep up his word to do. And I think that they were surprised that he did. And I think that, you know, I remember thinking of that as, like, a litmus test.
I'm like, well, if he does do that, then we have to acknowledge that, you know, he did keep his word on at least one thing. So yeah, I think that the hard part about situations like this is that Ethereum people like to claim that we're neutral. And, you know, opposing Trump is somehow neutral or, you know, supporting other countries is somehow neutral.
And I think it's better to just not pretend that we're neutral and do things, you know, and align with the parties that aren't trying to attack us. Vitalik did mention that thing where Ethereum is credibly neutral, but I am not, which I think, like, you see that he's quite careful about. He would be very vocal about being a pro-Ukraine, but he would actually keep out of most of the things, at least directly, whether it's conflict avoidance or just being strategically aligned with different constituents.
Hard to tell, but I think the network or the technology as credibly neutral does play an important role on judgment. I think that is an admirable concept. I think that it stops being neutral once, you know, okay, let me give you an example.
Vitalik, when Vitalik said make communism great again, even outwardly appearing as a joke, you know, people who are building on Ethereum got calls from, like, customers, you know, countries, representatives of countries that were like, are you telling me that we are now supporting this communist thing? We do not want to be supporting this communist thing, right? And so, like, as much as we might want to say that, like, who's holding all of the ETH, right? That matters in determining whether I want them to be richer or not. You know, Vitalik leads the EF. The EF pays all of the core devs.
The core devs implement the roadmap. So how, you know, neutral is Ethereum really if Vitalik is not? It felt like people were using neutrality as something to hide behind when they didn't want to take that side. And so, you know, they'd be like, we support this side.
And then when a different thing would come up, they'd be like, but we're neutral on this other thing. And so it's like, you know, I get that. Ethereum has to serve a large and diverse, you know, populace with conflicting goals.
And so it has to be, you know, willing to put on a lot of different faces to serve the whole market. So, you know. Yeah, I guess it's good that we have some commies, you know, so that, like, the commies also stay here and keep building open source code.
Sure. And like, what's the, what's your rate on like the, cause we're just talking about it, but the kind of like Church of Vitalik kind of phenomenon, like, you know, some people, again, we can get stuck into almost like a semantics discussion of like, well, it depends on the frame or the layer that we're using. But it's like, a lot of people do see the kind of like founder led status of Ethereum as being like a benefit compared to like the completely a non like Bitcoin, like, okay, well, there's no immediate direction from any one person in particular.
You know, do you think that Ethereum should be like less Church of Vitalik? Or do you think it should be, not necessarily that you have to choose like it as a binary option of like, well, it has to be Vitalik, but it has to be more like thought decentralized. But what do you think that Ethereum should look more like? I don't know. It's above my pay grid.
You know, I'm, I got annoyed by the Church of Vitalik because, you know, it got in my way of trolling communists. And so I decided to bash it for a while. I'm generally, you know, I'm incredibly grateful for all the contributions that Vitalik has made.
I spent like a decade dick riding this man. You know, I think that he was very wise to invest in like zero knowledge technologies. You know, he has had an incredibly difficult job stewarding this community, trying to, you know, like, I don't think he's ever had like a real job outside of Bitcoin magazine.
You know, he just like became a billionaire after a couple of years of working on Ethereum as the more or less de facto leader. And I hope that we all can step up in ways that lead him to not be as needed. But unfortunately, so far, that doesn't look like it's been the case.
The sort of network effects of his contributions led him to become even more integral in some ways. And even when he's backed off, you know, it's really hard for us to replace him. I think Evan Van Ness had an interesting like medium post about like the influencer space in Ethereum.
And it's very highly concentrated around Vitalik and his followers. He's just like the loudest person versus like other blockchain ecosystems might not have, it might have multiple different, you know, KOLs or influencers that are pretty visible. I don't know why that is, you know, Vitalik is just so cool.
And, you know, we all benefit from him being so cool, but it also means that we are very much exposed to his whims and he gets a lot of things right. He doesn't always get things right. To the extent that the church is helpful, it's good for people to be inspired and motivated.
To the extent that it's not is that we shouldn't have blind faith. He also gets things wrong and he also would benefit from people challenging him. And I think that we should, you know, challenge him more in ways that are constructive and try to grow up out of needing the church of Vitalik so that, you know, we level up and then we decide, you know, what Ethereum is and what it does, so.
One of the things that I find in the DAO ecosystem, I remember people used to say leaderless and things like this. I actually find that DAOs that don't have leaders end up just the tragedy of the common loot on the treasury and DAOs that have leader full, everyone steps up to be a leader that cares about, you know, cleaning, making sure that things are tidy. These succeed.
And I think in the concept of Ethereum, historically Vitalik and the close entourage around him, it was a lot more dynamic. You used to see that he works on interesting projects and people come in and sometimes move on and sometimes stay. I think over time it became that the close trusted entourage became complacent because probably they became too wealthy over time and are no longer as motivated to do this novel groundbreaking experimental thing and are kind of like capitalizing on hogging the power of having Vitalik's ear.
And I think also like, frankly, probably got a little bit tired from changing and always curating the people around him. And to that extent that personally, it looks to me like some people are really well-meaning, but there are quite a few elements that are a bit just like too jaded and happy with having this position of power, so to speak, rather than seeing what is the real benefit for the greater good. Obviously easier to criticize rather than being in the arena, but that's at least how it seems like from the outside to me.
Well, that's a pretty reasonable tag. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's hard for him to learn how to navigate all of these social dynamics.
He has to play these games and see how they end up and then adjust accordingly. He's done pretty well keeping everybody together for a pretty long time. Happy to see new people get included.
I hope that, I guess I expect him to go the same way politically or that we kind of have maybe where we start out more left-leaning when we're 20, we have a heart. If we're not a Democrat when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a Republican by you're 40, you have no brain or something.
But yeah, it's like, he's just like so powerful within our space, memetically, philosophically, spiritually, technologically that a lot of times instead of being leaderful and like stepping up, we just complain to him, try to get him to do the thing that we want. Mixed results. Usually it's better to step up yourself and figure it out and then complain.
It doesn't work, but yeah. I think it might be pretty good for like in terms of time. Is there anything you're burning that you wanted to get off your chest? No, just thank you so much for having me.
Check out privacypools.com. Pause it. Dude. Hell yeah.
Fantastic, man. This is awesome. It was great.
Cheers. Have a great day, guys. Hell yeah.
Awesome. Catch you guys. All right.
Cheers. Thanks a lot.
Enjoy listening to the podcast? Each episode we bring on visionary buiders, leaders, and thinkers to discuss what they're building and topics on the bleeding edge of technology development.
Join the community on Telegram.
Subscribe to The Frontier Podcast on Spotify or YouTube.