>     respect
>     *Sent:* Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 7:30 AM
>     *From:* "Amir Taaki" <amir@??? <mailto:amir@dyne.org>>
>     *To:* unsystem@??? <mailto:unsystem@lists.dyne.org>
>     *Subject:* [unSYSTEM] DarkFi: The Coming Storm
>     Greetings comrades,

>     Our team is happy today to share with this list the first news of our
>     project that has been under development for the last 4 years.

>     # Introduction

>     It's 2013. The director of the FBI gives a speech titled "The Going
>     Dark Problem". Solemnly he warns of an emerging crisis within law
>     enforcement. Since the Snowden disclosures, increasing public awareness
>     of surveillance has encouraged the wide ranging use of encryption
>     technologies - what he calls the tech tool of choice for criminals.

>      > Unfortunately, the law hasn’t kept pace with technology, and this
>     disconnect has created a significant public safety problem. We call it
>     "Going Dark" > - James Comey, FBI director

>     The speech highlighted a risk emerging online: mass popularization
>     of encryption threatens to create a permanent online zone that is
>     impenetrable to law enforcement. We maintain these dark zones remove
>     the barriers for a truly democratic society to realize itself. Recent
>     developments in DAOs and DeFi represent an exciting step towards this
>     future.

>     Additional breakthroughs in cryptography such as zero-knowledge proofs
>     are awakening a new era of challenge and upheaval. This document gives
>     an overview of these advances and introduces our project: DarkFi.

>     DarkFi is not a corporate startup. It's a democratic economic
>     experiment, an operating system for society.

>     # Societycide & the Megamachine

>     The situation has escalated since Comey first documented the "Going Dark
>     Problem" in 2013. The logic of state expansion together with infinite
>     money printing and industrialism have submerged society into a constant
>     state of war. Power and the state apparatus control, oppress and surveil
>     society while big tech wraps us in a digital prison.

>     This state of war has been called a "societycide". Society is
>     increasingly deprived of its moral and political nature. People have
>     been transformed into the fascist's herd-like masses.

>     Internet technology is centered around extracting profit from users
>     for low value work (clicking ads). This leads to huge data harvesting
>     operations and the construction of a surveillance mega-machine. This
>     encourages docility and consumption rather than active individuated
>     usership. It is an architecture of oppression structured on user
>     control.

>     Newer and better artificial intelligences are constantly being honed
>     to wage war on the resistance and force the remaining people into giant
>     megacities. With the arrival of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC)
>     and universal basic income (UBI), centralized power is rapidly seeking
>     to close off all competing economic arenas. The corporate state seeks
>     to monopolize economic life. China's social credit scoring has been an
>     instructive experiment that Western states seek to emulate.

>     What remains in this impoverished world is a new sinister form of
>     fascism and a dead society that has lost its moral and political fabric.
>     Such a dead society is unable to self-organize or act with initiative.
>     The mega-machine constantly searches for innovative methods to extract
>     oil from the ground, fish from the oceans and lifeblood from society,
>     even as these resources are depleted to crisis levels.

>     For 20 years we worked on free software. It was a movement with
>     incredible vitality and creativity, exploring ideas long before
>     proprietary industry would dare touch them. But being a full time free
>     software developer was a tough situation. We created tremendous value
>     but were mostly without resources. We did not have a way to capture back
>     some of the value we were creating. Being unable to capture value meant
>     our expansion was limited and continually resource constrained. So these
>     brilliant concepts that were pioneered could never be realized and
>     society lost the full benefits of a free technology that could have
>     been.

>     The free software movement possessed world class developers with a
>     community of strong believers. But the movement simply lacked resources
>     due to there being no economic model.

>     # Tokenization

>     Through the power of tokenization, we now have an alternative.
>     Programmable money enables a rich set of techniques to
>     develop economic networks.

>     Token engineering and DAOs are shattering the basic structure of the
>     old world. The old world is corporate, hierarchical, and rigid. This
>     new world is rich, intense and creative.

>     In the classical corporate model, you have a consumer-producer
>     dichotomy. This distinction does not exist in crypto. The focus is on
>     community and squad wealth. Rather than a company exploiting users for
>     profit and protecting their property, the owners and producers are the
>     community themselves.

>     The value of a project is directly proportional to its community. Tokens
>     capture the value generated by a community and circle that value back to
>     the community itself. The ability of projects to foster participation,
>     enthusiasm and engagement is therefore crucial. Communities foster
>     autonomy through discourse, negotiation and narrative. This in turn
>     leads to democratic transformations of the individual, fashioning them
>     for the values of self-governance and self-development.

>     Nowhere is this social evolution more apparent than in DAOs. DAOs are a
>     new governance primitive that enable latent democratic forces to
>     assemble and organize themselves before power and capital forces can
>     narrow them ideologically. This enables the exploration of unrealized
>     liberation zones. The users are stakeholders that can participate
>     directly in governance decisions. They can decide on development
>     targets, features, salaries, capital allocation and investments.

>     The ideal of politics is to multiply public spaces. Crypto is therefore
>     deeply political. Politics concerns taking decisions regarding the
>     collective interests of society such as well-being, security and
>     freedom. In this sense politics and direct democracy are synonymous.

>     The old model of technology is anti-political because it removes
>     ownership from people and places it into the hands of monopoly. The old
>     model encourages passivity and indifference by design, reducing people
>     to consumers. This is essentially the orientation of modern technology.
>     Its arc extends back 5000 years to the origin of civilization itself.

>     The Wikipedia entry for civilization reads:

>      > Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the
>     rest
>     of nature, including over other human beings.

>     History has swung back and forth in the struggle between democratic
>     society and the state civilization system. At times this has broken
>     out into open conflict, while in other times has led to an uneasy
>     peace. Conflict between civilizational forms has accelerated in the
>     modern era. Society is under siege by automated weaponry, surveillance
>     apparatus and psychological operations which seek to undermine the moral
>     and political freedom of people.

>     # Autonomous Political Formations

>     Totalitarianism cannot be defeated through compliance. Compliance
>     only emboldens regimes of power. Totalitarian terror is let loose when
>     opposition has died down and the rulers are no longer afraid. Compliance
>     feeds totalitarians and never leads to normality. Resistance is
>     essential to counter the rise of totalitarian rule.

>     Parallel societies offer pockets of freedom that nurture ideologies of
>     resistance and form the basis of a new society. They can be societies
>     oriented around technology, economy, education or culture.

>     With DAOs and DeFi we can bring to life the democratic nation where
>     multiple cultures, ethnicities and political formations coexist with a
>     confederalist structure.

>     DAOs + DeFi = Autonomous Political Formations

>     With APFs multiple parallel nations can exist online free from external
>     coercion. These nations are owned by their community. Decisions flow
>     from the bottom.

>     # Multi-Chain

>     There is a story of money that goes like this: it's the dawn of
>     history. People are trading their surplus goods. You have an apple. She
>     has an orange. Trade necessitates a medium of exchange. Money emerges.

>     We've all heard this story. Except that it's a myth. This never occurred
>     in history.

>     In Ancient Mesopotamia there were sophisticated banking networks long
>     before money existed. These networks offered all the modern operations
>     associated with a bank, such as loan operations, deposits, forex, and
>     debt settlement. Babylon, the cradle of human civilization, was home
>     to the flourishing banking center of the region and an active futures
>     market. Money emerged out of this system of credit networks. Deposit
>     slips and futures contracts were traded in the form of clay tokens that
>     could be broken. It was only much later with the emergence of the
>     Persian empire that the gold and silver bimetallic money was
>     standardized.

>     The lesson history teaches us is this: economic networks are primary.
>     It is the transfer of value within networks that gives money its
>     meaning, not money itself. Money inherits different properties from the
>     financial networks they exist within.

>     In 2010, the concept of universal sound money was central to Bitcoin's
>     emergence. As crypto has grown, we have seen the emergence of other
>     asset classes. First, we saw the rise of blockchains with their own
>     unique features such as Monero. Ethereum was the first to generalize
>     this architecture, which was followed by the growth of ERC20 and the
>     initial ICO boom. But the nature of crypto has changed fundamentally.
>     DeFi has ushered in a new, ecosystem-based thinking that sees not just a
>     single coin in isolation but examines networks in a holistic way.

>     Previously we use to think about crypto-coins and their blockchain. This
>     is Bitcoin, this is Monero, this is Ethereum. The way people reasoned
>     about crypto was as self-sovereign atomic entities. But DeFi is enabling
>     a new kind of reasoning. We think in terms of ecosystems and endpoints,
>     networks and liquidity flows.

>     With DeFi we are seeing the sophistication of crypto and the emergence
>     of a parallel financial system. Blockchain-specific coins are being
>     de-emphasized in favour of instruments and networks. Financial
>     engineering allows these networks to interact, to lower volatility and
>     transfer assets seamlessly. This is the emergence of a proto-banking
>     layer for crypto. With it, crypto has gained a radical advantage.
>     Banking is more powerful and more fundamental than money.

>     Currently 1% of all Bitcoin exists inside Ethereum and this number is
>     rapidly growing. We expect this trend to further continue.

>     # Zero-knowledge

>     Crypto anarchy is the tactic of using cryptography to create a space of
>     freedom which cannot be penetrated by power and capital monopolies with
>     coercive force.

>     This space of freedom is the nascent seed of a democratic society. These
>     social structures are resistant to state control and totalitarian power
>     from the start. They are programmed with the code of resistance. They
>     are spaces which counter social atomization and promote voluntary
>     communal bonds by those who cherish freedom.

>     They are dark spaces used by an alliance of democratic forces.

>     Zero-knowledge (ZK) is a powerful technology, one that if used
>     effectively opens vast frontiers of freedom.

>     ZK allows us to create anonymous smart contracts. Anyone can write
>     an anonymous program which is called a proof. Even though the data on
>     the blockchain is encrypted, the proof makes a statement about what is
>     happening with that data. It cannot be cheated and is completely secure.

>     It opens up an entirely new design space of anonymous applications that
>     previously we could not create. The technology is mature, waiting to be
>     taken up and applied.

>     Now you might be thinking there is a performance penalty for ZK, but
>     actually ZK is fast. It is faster to verify a ZK proof than it is to
>     compute the actual non-ZK function itself. And no matter how big is the
>     data, the proof is always a constant size.

>     For example, we can compress an entire blockchain into a ZK proof.
>     Rather than downloading 300 Gb of data on initial sync with the network,
>     you can instead download a 22 Kb proof that the current state has been
>     correctly computed from genesis. There are already projects offering
>     this. This property of ZK is called succinctness.

>     Here is a simple program:

>     def foo(s, x, y):
>     if s:
>     return x * y
>     else:
>     return x + y

>     Lets say Alice calculates z = foo(True, 4, 110). To prove z is
>     calculated correctly, Alice gives Bob the values of z, s, x, y and then
>     Bob runs the function to see he gets the same result as Alice. That's
>     not anonymous, as Bob can see the values that are input to the function.
>     Instead Alice can use a ZK proof to show she computed the function
>     correctly without revealing the input values.

>     Using this technique, we can create completely dark financial markets:
>     a global decentralized economic network operating fully anonymously.

>     ZK is a powerful design space opening up for developers. It is also a
>     new computational architecture different to the Von Neumann model that
>     we are all familiar with. Certain types of operations are more
>     favourable compared to others which takes some getting used to. There is
>     a lot of scope and exploration here for advancing the tooling around ZK
>     such as compilers which are still very primitive.

>     This is the first step toward a new economic model for technology that
>     is not based off the exploitation of users.

>     # DarkFi

>     DarkFi is a base layer for anonymous applications and smart contracts
>     that is multi-chain interoperable.

>     Find the code here:

>     https://github.com/darkrenaissance/darkfi
>     <https://github.com/darkrenaissance/darkfi>

>     DarkFi is an environment with a language for writing zero-knowledge
>     smart contracts. The research is still nascent but we already have our
>     testnet operational.

>     ZK unlocks an entirely unexplored design space of anonymous
>     applications. Previously if you wanted to create an anonymous
>     application you had to think how to combine several existing
>     cryptographic schemes. Maybe it would be slow or impossible. But with
>     ZK, we have a generic cryptographic schema that any programmer can use
>     to create anonymous applications.

>     We can create anonymous services. Users can interact with DAOs and
>     markets where they use credentials. You attach a proof which says that a
>     statement is correct. Nothing else about your identity is leaked.
>     Services are operated in this manner.

>     Here is an example of a smart contract minting a credential:

>     https://github.com/darkrenaissance/darkfi/blob/halo2-burn/proof/mint.zk
>     <https://github.com/darkrenaissance/darkfi/blob/halo2-burn/proof/mint.zk>

>     We have a chat server on Matrix at: element.dark.fi
>     <http://element.dark.fi>

>     We already have a testnet bridged with Bitcoin and Solana networks. We
>     plan to add support for Ethereum and Monero soon. You can run the
>     application and send payments.

>     Our initial focus will be simple anonymous swaps and a DAO for
>     governance. We plan to focus on building out organizational tooling and
>     rapidly expand our ecosystem. Join us on this world-building adventure.

>     We are seeking political developers and offer competitive salaries. This
>     is an opportunity to help build an ecosystem and there will be many more
>     projects being launched and funded on DarkFi.

>     Every Monday 16:00 CET in #dev on our server, we have an open developer
>     meeting over text.

>     We are more than tool creators. We build applications and help support
>     teams building them. We welcome everyone on our exodus to the promised
>     land of opportunity.

>     # Let there be dark

>      > Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask is an
>      > idea. And ideas are bulletproof.
>      > - V

>     Everybody feels that there will big a huge macro political or economic
>     event in the next 5 years. Everybody is deeply discontented with the
>     power and capital monopolies ruling over us.

>     What is the next system to come along? Here is the answer:

>     We should not be thinking about systems. Human beings are not objects in
>     a mathematical apparatus. That is the thinking that got us in this
>     position.

>     What thinking do we need?

>     What is happening around you? What are people doing? What are the
>     problems they face? What is truth, beauty and goodness? How can we
>     empower that face of humanity and nature that we wish to grow?

>     Luckily we have been gifted agorist counter-economics, not just as a
>     philosophy but as a powerful agent of change. Wield that power, make
>     things happen.

>     The regulators are coming for us. They see us as children with boots
>     too big for our feet. We need to be put back in our place. They do this
>     from outside and within. Those crazy anarchists amongst us get shushed,
>     given freakish looks, shunned and told off for stirring the pot. Who
>     are these people and where did they come from? Certainly in their clean
>     corporate cages they would never have risked betting on Bitcoin in
>     2010. Yet here they are attaching themselves to success, making sure
>     things are done right.

>     The narrative right now is about trivial first world concerns: GameFi,
>     ArtFi, SocialMediaFi - the entertainment and celebrity biz.

>     But one need only look at what power and capital monopolies seek to
>     prevent to understand what is key to liberating the democratic nation.

>     They are going to regulate crypto which allows any person to send
>     crypto to any person anywhere on the planet. Or to establish private
>     organizations that are self-governed. This destroys all proprietary
>     models of the power and capital monopolies.

>     Crypto will split into two. RegFi will be unusable and bolted down. It
>     will be toothless. The other side will be the underground DarkFi. It
>     will have bite.

>     DarkFi is not a project or a company. We are a community and a movement.

>     Counter-economics gives us tools to architect systems that empower
>     free communities.

>     Crypto-anarchy is the tactic of using cryptography for
>     counter-economics.

>     Privacy technologies are emerging stronger than ever and are completely
>     unstoppable.

>     Combine all this together and we get: DarkFi.

>     The darkness is here and will sweep over our digital world. It cannot
>     be stopped, since the benefits it brings are too great. All the latent
>     potentialities of humanity that are being pushed down will be allowed to
>     rise up to the top. This is a great power that must be used
>     respectfully.

>     Remember every technological revolution in history had naysayers who
>     wanted to put the genie back in Pandora's box. But they were dragged
>     kicking and screaming into the future against their will.

>     There are no judgments or edicts being made here. Just statements
>     of reality.

>     Take it or leave it, this is what will happen. Welcome to the agorist
>     future.

>     Let there be dark.
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