> On Oct 22, 2021, at 4:03 PM, Amir Taaki <amir@???> wrote:
>
> Any resources? I only know Anchor from Terra.
>
> We have bridges from Bitcoin and Solana, and will add Eth and Monero soon. We have our own blockchain.
>
>> On 10/22/21 20:53, Uwe Cerron wrote:
>> Would you consider refactoring to anchor? Love that you considered solana for this.
>> */Uwe Cerron/*
>> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 8:30 AM Amir Taaki <amir@??? <mailto:amir@dyne.org>> wrote:
>> 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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