00:00 Hello, I'm Seth For Privacy and welcome to season two, episode five of Opt Out. Opt Out's a show where I sit down with passionate people to learn why privacy matters to them, the tools and techniques they found and leveraged, and where we encourage and inspire others towards personal privacy and data sovereignty. In season two, we're taking a look at some of the privacy preserving tools, FOSS projects, and privacy focused companies in the space to get a better understanding of what they do well, what their limitations are, and what we all can do to help drive their tools forward. Have you been wondering what's coming up in the network anonymity and privacy space, or maybe what alternatives are out there for Tor? This episode, we're going to sit down with Harry Halpin from NIMM to chat about their upcoming NIMM network.

Welcome on to Opt Out, Harry. Oh, great to hear from you, Seth. I enjoy listening to your podcast occasionally, so I'm very honored to be on the show. Oh, it's awesome to hear that, your listener. Very, very nice to hear that. I'm very grateful that you were willing to take the time out to come and chat with me about your work on NIMM. I think there's a lot of great promise in what you're building out and a lot of details that are very different from existing networks today. So I'm excited to get the chance to learn more myself, let listeners hear a little bit more about NIMM, about how it compares to their networks, and just kind of keep pushing people past the Tor is good enough mentality. So we keep focusing on what improvements need to be made to Tor and maybe even what other networks need to be built out like NIMM.

If you don't mind, I wouldn't mind just noting that there's a big problem I've seen in a lot of, I would say, technological approaches to privacy. So typically, when we think about privacy, particularly when we think about strong forms of privacy, such as anonymity, what people fail to realize is that it's not as simple as use signal, use Tor, or even use Monero, use whatever, I2P. And even NIMM itself is just a small part of a larger stack which is needed. And the reason for that is because privacy is essentially a holistic property of a system. So if you think about the internet, in the beginning, the internet, you know, there was this model called the OSI model. And so you can imagine that the internet has different layers, you know, you have the physical layer, you have your device, you have the link layer, you've got the networking layer on top of that, you have the application layer on top of that. And that the problem with privacy and why it's a hard problem, and honestly, I mean, not just surveillance

capitalism, but it is actually hard from an engineering standpoint, precisely because it is a cross-cutting concern through all the layers of any usage of the internet. So for example, you know, you could be using even Monero, or, you know, imagine some super perfect Monero, you know. And if your network is traffic is being carried, without some sort of network level protection, that network level data leaks. But likewise, inversely, you could be using something completely different.

You could be using, let's say, super Nym. You could be using the best network level privacy protections possible. But if the application asks, you know, like that idiotic thing, BitCloud, to ask for a seed phrase in a web app, or ask for you to, or ask for you to, you know, add in, you know, add your user ID or email or an ID number, then it doesn't really matter what you're doing on the network level. And because all these levels interact, and user behavior is very vastly different between different applications, that's why privacy is hard. I think it's important to kind of, for anyone listening to the show, to keep in mind that privacy, you know, any leak on any other level can spread to the whole application, to all the other levels. And so that's why privacy is hard. And Nym is just one part of a larger kind of privacy stack to come. Yeah, I think that's a great call out to start on because it is so important that people do grasp that there's no one tool that's going to solve all of your privacy problems

and make it so you don't have to worry about privacy again. It's a very all-encompassing thing from the physical to the digital. And in the digital, like you mentioned, there's so many different layers and pieces of privacy that need to be considered. So having something that does protect the network portion of privacy, or at least does that job well, removes that need. But then you obviously still have to be worried about everything else. I mean, it's kind of like, hear people using Tor browser to access their bank. It's not really providing them any privacy because the bank still knows their ID and all of their financial data and all of that. So it's very much just a piece of the stack. But network privacy is an important one, but one that I think has proven to be very, very hard over the years, as you touched on there. How even Tor has struggled with many different areas of protecting user privacy and protecting the network and civil attacks and lots of different angles there. So it's a tricky question to answer for sure. So I'm excited to learn a little bit more

more about what Nym is. Yeah, I just want one little comment. I mean, we don't like this positioning of Nym versus Tor, even though that is a sort of obvious analog, precisely because there are things that Tor is good at that is unlikely Nym will be good at. For example, web browsing, something that we can discuss this more later that I think honestly, Tor may have reached some sort of, maybe the best possible design out there. But there are other things such as, for example, Monero or Bitcoin, where Tor is not probably the right choice for your needs if you're trying to defend your network level privacy. And so we can discuss this more later. But that's how the problem is that every application has a different threat model, like a different way it uses data. And so certain things that fit very well one application, may not feel fit very well, another application. So I use Tor every day, when I browse the web. And I even after Nym is launched, I will continue doing so and I we will support Tor. On the other hand, it's kind of useless using

Tor for most cryptocurrency transactions, and maybe even an actually an actively bad idea. And so that's why, you know, we're looking at Nym and also just, you know, other kinds of technology. Yeah, I definitely want to, I want to dive into that more. But I also want to hear a little bit more in the background of kind of where you're coming from, and what kicked off the creation of Nym itself. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about what it was that woke you up to the need for personal privacy. I mean, it's obviously an area that you've been deeply concerned about for a long time. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about the background there.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not a, I mean, I have been trained later in my life, but I'm not trained as a cartographer, I could play one in the standards body, I'm actually have my doctrine in artificial intelligence. And, you know, I first started waking up, and this is kind of, I would say, around the kind of 2005 through 2008, to the need for increased kind of network level privacy. And the problem metadata, when I was working on my PhD, and the later the World Wide Web Consortium, when I was working on browser API's, and browser privacy, which none of which really worked out, that we did get a halfway decent crypto API standardized across browsers, mainly because it became obvious, even in very early artificial intelligence, or as I prefer to call it machine learning work, that a very small amount of metadata could completely de-anonymize transactions.

And I, that really struck me when I was doing my PhD. And while I was also doing my PhD, and before I was involved in technologies like indie media, kind of when I was an undergrad, and I was kind of interested in the cypherpunk mailing list and whatnot, when I was in high school. And, you know, I'd always kind of been interested in cryptography, but cryptography is something that was, it was very hard to get a good background in. I mean, it was just literally in the 90s, it was kind of random crazy people, including Satoshi Nakamoto, mailing each other over this kind of bonkers mailing list where, and, you know, at least at the school I went at, so I went to a public school. There, I took a number theory course, because that was the closest I could get to cryptography.

And there was no cryptographers, at least that I remember when I was doing my PhD at University of Edinburgh. And so, but what I was also doing is I was involved in climate change activism as a graduate student. And in particular, I was involved in organizing, organizing protest. And I do believe that technology does not drive social change. I believe social movements and people drive social change. And I, what happened to me personally, was I had, this is all public, I had a, they decided at some point, this was the British state, working in concert with the Americans, that I was to be eliminated as an activist. And the reason why they thought that is, is because things were getting kind of serious on the climate change front. And there was a large summit, this UN summit on climate change happening.

And I understand that not everyone is concerned as I was.

10:00 In 2009, it was viewed as sort of a, 2008, a sort of fringe topic, you know, something that only crazy people were interested in. But that being said, you know, I had an undercover cop signed to me. I was personally tracked, personally had surveillance technology used against me. And I mean, I know all this because it later came out in court documents because the undercover cop went mad and leaked a bunch of stuff and was revealed. And so I personally, you know, suffered quite a lot.

I was at protest, would be targeted. I would be beaten up so badly I couldn't walk. I had my, people would keep trying to seize my computer. I had to basically not use a mobile phone, which I'm not a huge fan of mobile phones even today. So it's not a great loss. And, you know, I have friends who's, you know, the house I was staying at in Germany was raided. Friends in New York has their house raided. So, you know, none of this led to charges. This is all kind of right before WikiLeaks.

So, you know, and I've always been a fan of hacking. So I remember very distinctly being at the Chaos Computer Congress. And I actually met Julian Assange there. They were launching. Maybe it was WikiLeaks back then. And I remember, you know, Julian Assange was, you know, I said, Julian Assange, you're going to go to jail. Like, I was at that point the sort of paranoid crazy guy. And he said, no, why would we go to jail? We're creating tools for dissidents.

And I said, I said, I don't think, you know, he was sort of saying, we're not dissidents. We're just creating tools for dissidents. And I said, I don't think the FBI will see things that way. I don't think they make those kinds of fine level distinctions. And I know that because, you know, I was having problems being dragged off the airplane by the FBI and, you know, having my fingerprints taken against my will and all sorts of crazy things such that I was essentially driven into hiding.

And I was right. You know, later I visited Assange at the embassy and we kind of made up. And he clearly was, you know, facing a level of repression that was nowhere near what I was facing. And then as someone who was heavily, I would say, you know, it's kind of logical. I was attacked. I won't say I was victimized. I was attacked by both personal and electronic surveillance when I was trying to figure out how to put my life back together again. Because that has a hugely destructive effect on one's ability to even think clearly.

I said, well, what is it that I really want to do in my life? And I said, well, I really don't want anyone to experience what I just experienced. And I was talking to my friends like George Denesis, who, you know, told me about mixed networking. And I said, well, that's something that I would like to pursue. So we kept chatting about it. And at a certain point, you know, that's kind of how we led. That's what led to them is I basically said, well, look, I can no longer be anonymous.

All of my most of my, I would say, kind of organizing and social movement work was all done anonymously. And most of my computer stuff had been done anonymously before that. And in earlier networks like Indymedia. And I said, well, look, I can't be anonymous anymore because I've been doxed by at least three or four governments. I didn't really enjoy talking about it. So I said, well, it's kind of pointless to be anonymous. But I do think we can create the tools to allow the younger generation to preserve their anonymity and so that they can fight back in a more effective way than we could.

And because it was very clear that these kind of large scale social and ecological economic problems. I mean, it kind of crisis 2008, which led to Bitcoin. It was clear that these were going to get worse and worse. I do think they're going to get worse and worse. And so that's what led to the creation of NIMM. That George and me, George got interested in mixed networking. At that point, he was working at Microsoft. I was working at MIT. And I said, well, he was like, well, let's just let's get the money to build this.

And at this point, we didn't really think about forming a company. Bitcoin wasn't even really on the radar. I had seen it fly by my inbox. And I'd asked a friend of mine, Ben Laurie, if it was a good investor or not. He told me no. I said, well, he has a paper called Proof of Work is Proven Not to Work, which I think maybe I believe he probably still believes in. I'm kind of a big fan of proof of work now. So I've obviously changed my mind. But at that point, when Bitcoin happened, I was dealing with larger kind of personal surveillance problems.

I wasn't particularly I was OK. There was so much crazy stuff on that mailing list. I didn't pay too much attention. And then I said, well, let's build this mix net. And we got a large academic research grant from the European Commission to build a mix net. And that was provoked partially by Snowden because one of the aspects of the Snowden revelation, which most people don't maybe remember, is that Angela Merkel is being spied on, that European leaders are being spied on.

The majority of NSA activity was actually aimed at international trade negotiations. And so the European Commission said, we need something better than TOR because someone intelligent inside the commission had looked at TOR and had realized that if you're up against what we call a global passive adversary, that's an adversary like NSA that can watch all the packets coming in, all the packets going out, that has a kind of God's eye view of the network, as George likes to say.

And we realized that TOR is great if you're up against the Iranian government or maybe the Chinese government or government doesn't control the whole Internet. But if your enemy is the United States government, that you need more protection. And so we got an academic research grant and we started doing the research and we got some results, but they weren't really scaling. And then Bitcoin kind of came back on our radar. I think the thing that really got me excited was seeing Adam Back doing big equity raise for Blockstream.

We said, wow, Adam Back just raised, you know, we thought we were amazing. We had raised 5 million euros from the European Commission, which is very large by European Commission standards for an R&D project, effectively. Now we saw that Adam had raised like down to 20 million or something crazy for Blockstream. We said, wow, this, you know, Adam is a great guy. He's an old cypherpunk. You know, he's been around talking about mass surveillance since I think he may have some of the first papers on it since the early 90s and was instrumental in a lot of the early crypto wars.

So he said, well, if Adam Back could raise 20 million for Bitcoin, then maybe we could raise some money for privacy. And that kind of stayed in the back of our heads until we basically, the research funding ran out. And we were approached by Binance Labs, of all things, who had just started and said, we'll give you some starting money to push this out. And that made, you know, we had never really thought about cryptocurrency users needing privacy.

But, you know, we were concerned more about government level surveillance. But then we said, well, you know, actually, what the NSA can do, the whole Internet, Chainalysis or Elliptic, they can do to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network easily. And that really woke us up the possibilities of using mixed network technology with cryptocurrency. That's what led us to essentially incorporate Nym in Switzerland and start building the software. So what are some of the core?

Well, first off, I just want to say that is quite the way to be woken up to needing personal privacy. And obviously, you had a very severe and very drastic interest in reclaiming your own personal privacy. So obviously, I'm sure a ton of motivation there. And you got to see firsthand the ability that nation states have to surveil and oppress and firsthand to see that the oppression that comes with the loss of privacy. So thank you for sharing that.

So it's a crazy story and crazy that governments would go to those lengths for someone who's doing activism like you were. But it's definitely something that is unfortunately not as rare as you would think it would be. Well, that's what I often want to impress upon people is that what people think is privacy as a luxury is actually a matter of life and death for many people. I actually got off quite nicely. You know, I got good lawyers. I basically never got an indictment.

I just had those grand juried and harassed infinitely. And I'm still on a watch list. I still can't fly without severe problems in most airports. It would be wonderful to be able to fly like a normal person one day. But, you know, I have friends who also thought that they were not the target of mass surveillance. They're not the target of individual we call targeted surveillance. I have friends like Basel Safadi in Syria, you know, who at the time was just kind of a nice Mozilla contributor.

Kind of the equivalent of what you might want to call just a Bitcoin open source contributor today. And, you know, these people were targeted like Basel and tortured and killed. So, you know, or Assange is rotting to death in Belmarsh prison. The U.S. government wants him dead. And, you know, I remember Assange did not,

20:00 what he was doing was even remotely illegal. What Basel thought he was doing was helping his people fight back against a utterly crazy dictator. These are people that never thought that they would end up in jail, much less dead. And in all of those cases, there were tremendous amounts of just good old-fashioned repression, but also tremendous amounts of electronic surveillance. So I do want to remind people. Honestly, I just got doxxed and that's why we're not building them anonymously among other reasons. But what we face is very little compared to what we've seen other people in our social network face. And we never saw that coming. Honestly, when I look at the Bitcoin space today or the Monero space or whatever else is going on, I just personally feel, and I do firmly believe, I look back at these people, I'm like, well, you guys are just like you know, WikiLeaks in 2009. You're riding high. You're the center of the historical moment.

You know, you're going to get person a year award on the Forbes billionaire list. But as soon as some government wants to crack down on you, you guys are screwed. And you don't have the technology even to defend yourself. And as we see nation states break down, this is not just an individual matter, but you're going to see, you know, smaller nation states, abused by larger nation states. You're going to see more and more political use of surveillance.

And I, and that's what concerns me. And I, but the problem is you, because you don't know when you're going to be targeted, even if what you think you are doing is completely legal, you really have to kind of try your best with the tools available to hide what data you have. And it's not an impossible task. I mean, if you look at the Snowden revelations, the amazing thing about the Snowden revelations is they didn't break tour. They didn't break off the record messaging that the NSA had no secret weapons that were better than anything that essentially a bunch of academics and open source developers had produced, despite having huge budget lines. So on this level, what they have is data collection capabilities, but they don't have, they're not invincible. And that goes doubly strong for people outside the United States and the global South who are facing much more weak and limited government opponents.

Yeah, it's very, it's very, I think, frightening. And then it should be eye opening to see the, the, the lengths that governments will go to and have gone to, but people definitely do not, do not understand the pressure that's going to come, especially against those people who are contributing and building these tools. I think that's a very important call out that the, the people who are active in building out these tools that allow people to free themselves for repression and allow people to gain privacy and take back control of their data definitely can be in, in some, some, some focus and in some just kind of the, the spotlight from, from governments.

So properly using privacy tools is, is hyper important. And I, I am, I'm really curious what, what the main thing that you're hoping users get from using them is you mentioned cryptocurrency a few times. So if it's, if it's like network level privacy and cryptocurrency, I'm really fascinated about that. But I also love to hear if there's a, maybe another key thing that you hope that users get from using them once it's released. Yes. I mean, in an ideal universe, the internet would just use something like Nym by default, but the internet was designed in a trusted academic environment where there was no concerns of a metadata. I mean, there weren't even originally concerns over cryptography.

Um, and because of that, every time you use the internet, it doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin or going to a web browser or you're using signal, um, your metadata, who you are talking to when is leaked. And that's leaked by the virtue of IP addresses. And it's also leaked, not just by IP addresses, but by the timing and volume, the way you can think about it. Every time you use the internet, you're releasing a stream of packets. Those packets, uh, are shipped across the internet by other people's computers. And those packets can be used to uniquely identify you. So it's not as simple as just matching an IP address to another IP address. You can hide your IP address with a VPN or even a Rator much, much better, much better than VPN. But it's that pattern of, of bytes that forms a kind of unique digital fingerprint of your exact act of communication, uh, that, uh, is typically can be used against you, um, to identify your communication stream, who you're talking to. And often even what you're saying, even if some encryption is used, you can usually make kind of predictions, uh, by looking

at the back and forth of who's sending, uh, packets when and where. And there's essentially, the way I think about Nym is that there's essentially, let's compare it to Tor, essentially two ways to solve this problem. Uh, what, um, what Nym does is Nym mixes the packets up and sends them out using a statistical process called a Poisson process. We can predict with the app, what the average latency should be, but we never know exactly when each individual packet is released from either your, uh, your computer or a different node. And, uh, this, this basically scrambles that digital fingerprint. Now this, this does have, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, impact on latency and it does, we also kind of mixed kind of like shuffling a deck of cards. You can imagine each internet packet is a card in a deck and we, we, we kind of shuffle or mix those cards, those packets. And the way you can think about it is that any kind of application where you can lose a few packets of the application still works fine. So this would be things like, for example, audio

calls or, uh, things where packets are not so huge, you know, things like instant messaging. I'm sending some relatively small packets back and forth, uh, occasionally large attachments, but you know, often, uh, just text messages back and forth and cryptocurrency where you're sending, you know, Bitcoin transactions, which aren't all that big and are pretty regular. Um, all of these kinds of transactions, which essentially what we call message based transactions, uh, and which can be delivered to some extent asynchronously is what Nym can provide privacy, even against global passive adversaries, uh, like the NSA. And I think that's a, that's, that's our main advantage. Now, what we would like to see was we would like to see that Nym would be bundled with applications, ideally like signal or like a Bitcoin wallets, ideally with some privacy on chain or Monero wallets or whatever. And, uh, these kinds of applications, uh, we think Nym could basically provide a very high degree of network level privacy out of the box. It gets harder with web browsing and

a few other kinds of applications. So I don't want to, don't want to dive too deeply into the weeds, but I'm, I'm curious to hear your perspective is, is Nym something when used for network level privacy and cryptocurrencies, is that something that you, you view as being able to handle both peer to peer traffic? So nodes, downloading, uploading, blockchain, syncing, and transaction propagation, or is your focus more on, uh, just the transaction propagation portion of a, of a network?

Definitely handle transaction propagation. Uh, we currently have researchers looking at, uh, you know, essentially the way to think about blockchains is you're downloading large amounts of data. So this is equivalent to a giant file attachment in signal. And so that's a different kind of problem. Um, it's something I do believe Nym can handle, uh, because it can be kind of asynchronous, right? You know, the whole application doesn't break if you don't download the whole blockchain at once. In fact, it takes a day or two. Um, and therefore we think we can handle that. And I think the question is just, if you're running both of those streams of traffic through the same computer, that, that those vastly different types of traffic can still be adequately mixed together to provide a sufficient level of privacy. And that's going to open our D topic. Luckily, we're working with, uh, Carmelo Troncoso and, uh, uh, EPFL, which is a great university and various machine learning experts on this topic. Uh, so I would say, you know, does Nym handle transactional privacy? Yeah.

Right now it handles that for blockchain stuff. You can use it, uh, but we don't have strong guarantees on that privacy in terms of validation and downloading whole, whole large files, uh, right now. And that's one thing we're still working on. Yeah. And I mean, that makes the most sense to me. I think that's a common way to approach even using Tor today with, with cryptocurrency, um, networks is to avoid it for the peer to peer portion because that's so bandwidth heavy, but then to use it for transaction propagation, or you want to hide the source of the transaction, but you're not as worried about the actual sinking process being something that necessarily needs to be obfuscated as much. Um, but yeah, curious to hear the, the fruit that comes out of that, that R and D and see where things end up on, on that front. Yeah. And I think in terms of, of Tor, I mean, we think tours is great for web browsing. Um, and also you have to remember, um, you know, Tor is, you know, so the way to think about as Nym is message based and asynchronous and Tor is

synchronous and circuit based. So a circuit means that you just packets come in first in, first out, the good old FIFO principle. And the way to think about this process,

30:00 properly is that that lets Tor get a generally better latency than NIMH, but then it sacrifices some privacy against kinds of adversaries that can be monitoring that kind of traffic. So you kind of want to use the right tool for each problem. Yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense. And I like that you made the point that it's not like a NIMH versus Tor thing necessarily. They have different design goals and different focuses. Like you said, Tor is more focused on a low latency anonymity network and a mixnet is by nature a bit higher latency, but does provide that much stronger protection against a global passive adversary who can see traffic at the input and output of that network. Let's take a quick break from this episode to chat about the sponsors of Opt Out, Cake Wallet, and LocalMonero. Cake Wallet is a key tool that I use daily as it allows me to easily and quickly use Monero for private by default payments. It's available in both iOS and Android and is a fantastic way to get started buying and using Monero with a simple and

easy to understand user experience. I regularly onboard new users to Cake Wallet and hope that it will help simplify and ease your journey into cryptocurrency. If you're interested in purchasing Monero for the first time or helping to bring others into a parallel economy, I'd recommend you look at using LocalMonero like I do to buy and sell Monero while maintaining your privacy and avoiding invasive exchange surveillance. LocalMonero is entirely peer-to-peer and is an important part of opting out of the surveillance state and into a parallel economy. Thank you to both sponsors for their incredible support and partnership, and I hope you'll take a moment after the episode to learn more in the show notes or at optoutpod.com slash sponsors. What are some other limitations that users should be aware of for NIMS? Maybe versus or compared to Tor or I2P, just so people who are familiar with those can can grasp that. But I'm curious if there are any other limitations besides that latency that's introduced and

then the need for asynchronous communication versus that kind of first in, first out principle. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to remember that it's a, everything in life is a trade-off function. So, you know, we let you tune NIMS. So you can say, I would like to use NIMS. We have a paper on this. It just got published by our first intern, who finished his master's thesis of the University of Notre-Chapelle, is because everything's a trade-off, you can use NIMS with relatively low latency and low amounts of cover traffic. Another thing we do that Tor tends not to do is we add fake traffic to the network, because this helps destroy that kind of digital fingerprint of traffic patterns. And the way you want to think, the way you want to think about it is that you can fine tune NIMS, but you can't change the fundamental design. And there is a design space here. And I think Tor is one extreme of that design space and NIMS is kind of the other extreme.

There are other systems which are good, you know, David Chom's CMIC system, which I think he now calls Elixir, may not scale as well as NIMS because we're a statistical system and he's not a statistical system. But it's a great system provides, also provides privacy against global network adversaries. So do theoretical systems that to our knowledge no one has built, like dining cryptographer networks. Dining cryptographer networks, in theory, provide better privacy than mixed nets. It's just that they have severe scalability issues, quadratic scaling typically.

But there's other networks like I2P, where I'm not honestly sure if the design space even makes sense. So what I2P does, and it's an interesting system. I mean, it definitely has, I would say, good values, you know, anonymous developers and a kind of cool open source community. But the problem with I2P is I2P takes NIMS and mixed nets message-based routing and kind of puts it on top of Tor, but doesn't actually mix messages. They're still kind of first in, first out. And I don't know what that actually accomplishes.

Every time anyone kind of serious has looked at I2P, they tend to break it. And so I know there's a bunch of interest in I2P from Monero, from the Monero community with Covery, and I'm not entirely sure what's going on now. But I would say that in general, I would not recommend I2P for anything. I can't think of a use case where it makes sense. Same with kind of I2P derivatives, like Loki or whatever. I mean, they're interesting points. I'm glad, I guess, someone built them.

But I can't really see where they shine. I think NIMS and mixed nets shine very well at any kind of message-based systems, audio calls, maybe things with buffering, even like video or file downloads. NIMS could at least probably do. Definitely works well for instant messaging. Definitely would work well for email. That's the original use case of mixed nets from the Cypherpunks. George Denise has built Mixed Minion with the Tor developers, which was used by the Cypherpunks, probably including Satoshi Nakamoto, to hide his identity.

And so these sort of things mixed nets are great at. And on the other hand, there are things like web browsing, where I think it's going to be very hard for anyone to beat Tor. And that's the trade-off I want users to kind of think about. And ideally, users won't have to think about it. I really wish that you're seeing Apple do this with their Apple Private Relay. I really wish people, when they built apps, thought about network privacy and just built in by default.

And now Apple builds a kind of slightly retarded version of Tor called Apple Private Relay. So it's a two-hop rather than a three-hop Tor that only works for Apple. So obviously, smaller anonymity set because the more different kinds of people that use the application, the more anonymous you are. But at least they have a kind of part of their system by default. And that's why I also like the Tor web browser, because the Tor web browser has Tor working by default.

And I have just been generally shocked that most, except for like Samourai and Wasabi and a few of them, most Bitcoin wallets have no network level anonymity built in by default. It's also sort of shocking that, you know, Signal ignores this issue or most, quote unquote, secure messenger. Signal is actually secure. I'm not sure about the others. But in general, I think that the way I hope people use them and use eventually toward other things more and more is that they don't think about it.

The users just install an app and it's private by default. And if there are any developers listening, I think I would prefer that you built your apps that way. That being said, we do make it so that power users, of which, you know, I'm one and I imagine you are and a lot of your listeners are, can also just like you could turn Tor on and Torify and SSH connection. You could ideally turn Nym on and, you know, we can use Nym now with things that Nym is not built for, such as Keybase.

You could even run Firefox through Nym. It's not really a great concept, but you can do it. So, you know, so we have, we want to have the ability for users to kind of go to what's called a proxy and be able to cut and paste their local proxy into particular apps that they're concerned about. Yeah, and I want to touch on two things there. I definitely agree on the privacy by default aspect that has to be grasped by developers building these apps. And I think a lot of the reason that that hasn't happened is I think we've kind of been lulled into a false sense of security because of the growth and the usage of end-to-end encrypted apps and platforms.

We trust that end-to-end encryption to protect us, but the metadata piece really kind of gets left by the wayside in many of those applications. And the advantage of networks like Nym and Tor is they can really help with the metadata piece to help protect that extra bit that is actually something that's becoming more and more common to be the thing that's preyed on by surveillance, especially by nation states. Because they've realized that they may not be able to crack or get a backdoor in an end-to-end chat app, but if they can get metadata on when you're sending messages to, whom you're sending messages to when you're receiving them, and all of the different data around it, even if they can't get the details about what you're actually saying, they can gather a ton of information just from that metadata.

So I think there's kind of been that lulling into a false sense of security due to the growth of apps that protect the majority of data, but still leave out the metadata. So I am excited to see that continue to grow into the defaults. And just a quick call-out, that is something that, like Monero, we focused on building in privacy by default into the network. And we've decided not to go with Tor by default because there's some issues with civil resistance when you're doing all peer-to-peer traffic and transaction propagation over Tor, but using Dandelion++ as a way to obfuscate the traffic somewhat between nodes when you're actually sending transactions.

So it's definitely something that, like, I wish was more commonly thought of. And I wish Bitcoin had native protections built into the actual peer-to-peer network. But I am glad that the wallets like Samourai Wallet, who I'm a huge fan of, they do build in Tor support by default. When you run their node, you can only use Tor to access it. A lot of value there. And it really should be something that's continually abstracted away from the user. You know what's best for that app.

You build it in. You make it the default. And then users just use the app, but they're gaining the protection of those network privacy tools. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I agree 100%. I mean, I was working for Tim Berners-Lee at the World Wide Web Consortium when the Snowden leaks happened. And I remember...

40:00 it wasn't all that long ago that there was no encryption on the internet at all, almost, that TLS was used by a tiny minority of websites. There wasn't even agreement on the elliptic curves that TLS was going to use because of all of the possibilities of NIST backdooring the curve that Daniel Bernstein and others were discussing. And so, you know, but over the course of four years, we managed to encrypt with the help of Cloudflare and even Google.

Indian encryption is now everywhere on the internet. And I do think we can do the same for privacy. I think privacy is a little bit less mature than Indian encryption, but I do think we can win the game. And my goal is in the next five to 10 years to eventually have metadata, just as it's very hard to use the internet now without TLS, that we should be able to use the internet and have the metadata protected by default. I think that's actually possible.

I've seen it happen with TLS, and I think it can happen with Nym or similar technologies or combinations of Nym and TOR style technologies. Now, I mean, Monero's cryptocurrency, we are, of course, fans of Dandelion++. Any kind of protection is always better than no protection. We have not managed to connect them successfully with the Monero community. And we do hope that to build a Monero compatible wallet. We are prioritizing Bitcoin and Liquid because I'm kind of, you know, Liquid CT is pretty straightforward, confidential transactions.

But we do hope to see, we would like to get in touch more with the Monero community insofar as I think they share to some extent the same values. We may be a bit edgy for them sometimes. We're a little bit too, we're a company, obviously. We're not a mysterious open source project. But that being said, it's definitely on our hit list because we want people to be able to eventually start and run Nym nodes using Monero, probably with some sort of Bitcoin swap.

Yeah, no, I'd love to see that. And I'm always game to chat or to introduce you into some of the Monero circles and start building up a relationship there. Because, I mean, we always need more and more ways that we can help to protect users' privacy, especially those people who are running nodes or using remote nodes with their wallets. Because both those cases, you need that strong network level privacy. So Nym does seem like a good fit. So I'm curious to see what we can build out there and how we can integrate Nym, at least into the kind of quote-unquote official wallets that are pushed out by the Monero community and hopefully push some other devs in the community to integrate it natively.

Definitely. I mean, when I talk to people who are actually at kind of life and death risk, I understand that Monero has been, I like it some improving rapidly. You know, rig signatures are obviously not always a great, not the best. But now I like the fact that Monero community is pretty flexible about their cryptographic scheme and quite flexible on upgrades, unlike a lot of other cryptocurrencies. And I think for Bitcoin, it makes sense not to upgrade very often because it's really a transparent store of value.

But then, you know, if I'm dealing with someone in an at-risk country, particularly in the Middle East, I actually do recommend Monero. And I would not recommend anything else just because I think Monero actually works well enough, particularly against those kinds of threats that you see now. Yeah. It's a great use case for that because it does kind of, it does value that privacy by default at every layer. That's kind of the push in every layer on-chain network level.

Wallets, privacy by default is really the focus. And it's definitely something that I hope will continue to propagate across many other open source projects as we go along. But I also just want to kind of go back to what you're mentioning about the propagation of TLS across the internet. And I think something that's so important is that when the right tool gets built out and is easily accessible and easily usable, we can see massive change in the internet's approach to privacy and to security because obviously TLS is more focused on security than privacy in many ways.

But when EFF launched Let's Encrypt and the things that Let's Encrypt enabled for companies and individual people to very rapidly get a certificate and use that certificate in their web app, that really drastically sped up the adoption of TLS and HTTPS across the internet. So I'm hopeful that we'll either hit on the right tool, maybe that's Nym, or that we'll find the right way to make it more and more accessible to developers so that it's not like, oh, I have to integrate another network-level privacy tool.

But we can make it very straightforward, very simple. They can throw it in there, get it figured out, and then provide that to users as a sane default. So I think there's a lot of hope there. I'm hopeful that we'll find the right way to do that and maybe have kind of the Let's Encrypt effect on network-level privacy as things go along. And hopefully, maybe Nym will do that. I did want to touch a little bit on some of the issues with Tor. The two kind of main ones that we've seen are that, and these are not really nation-state attacks necessarily.

These can be a little bit smaller, but we've seen that Sybil attacks, where people introduce malicious nodes into the network to gain a larger and larger portion of the network to get visibility into traffic. And then entry and exit node attacks have been something that's just been going on against Tor for as long as I can remember. It's just a constant problem in a network that obviously cannot have reputation by design. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about maybe what Nym is doing about, specifically the issue around Sybil attacks, because that's always a problem in privacy networks like these.

And you mentioned a little bit earlier about how having exit nodes being malicious seems not as much of a problem in Nym, but maybe you can clarify that a little bit more for us too. Yeah. I mean, so you have to remember again that Tor is optimized for web browsing. And so that means essentially an open proxy to the entire internet. Nym has two or three other kinds of design variations. So the way to think about Mixnets is historically they were used for making email private.

I mean, email is a terrible protocol. No one should use it. Even with the PGP, it's basically not particularly private or even secure. But the model that Nym has is effectively more of a client server model where you can use Nym to browse the internet. You can run an open internet proxy through Nym. No one's going to stop you. But how we imagine Nym working is more of a service provider model where you have particular apps that are running nodes within the Nym network and they force their communication through the Mixnet.

And because of that, the Sybil attack problem, to some extent, is a little bit less bad. That's a design choice. But again, you know, the world has moved on a little bit from web browsing running everything to this more app-based world. And so we try to make sure that Nym fit this kind of app-based model. Nym is a privacy layer. It's not necessarily a... We are decentralized, but we're decentralized not because we fetishize decentralization. I'm a big fan of decentralization.

I mean, if you want to read about decentralization, there's a paper I wrote with George Nises and Carmelo Troncosa called Surveying 15 Years of Decentralization and Privacy. But that being said, Nym is decentralized insofar as that we want to be resilient. So we want to have... We don't want our company to be taken out or me to be taken out or a few nodes to be taken out. The whole thing falls apart. And so we aren't aiming for maximal decentralization.

We're aiming for maximal privacy. With a resilient infrastructure. That's just slightly different goals. And because of that, while we let anyone run a Nym node, we do have effectively... The way to think about it, this causes horror in a lot of people, but I understand completely why do all the terrible scams around this place. But we do have essentially a reputation token attached to all the nodes, which Tor doesn't have. And that prevents Sybil attacks.

That prevents Sybil attacks in two ways. First, just as proof of work was invented to prevent email spam, charging a little bit for initial reputation, which we call the pledge, basically prevents people from essentially overrunning the network very quickly with Sybil's. Second, is that we can essentially optimize that network topology, something that neither Tor, nor I2P, nor anyone else, to my knowledge, does, is that we can sort of say, given a set of NIMM mix nodes, we can measure in a decentralized way how many packets they're mixing, if they've dropped packets or not.

We use a sort of particular kind of hard to explain secret shopper method to do this, where we basically send fake traffic through and measure it. And that fake traffic is indistinguishable from normal traffic by virtue of being ran through the mixnet. And by virtue of doing all of this, we could basically optimize our network topology both for latency and for quality of service. And that's something that no one else can do. And we do that because the nodes themselves are not anonymous.

Your Tor node's not anonymous, your VPN's not anonymous, your I2P node's not even anonymous to my knowledge. We basically sort of say, what's the node? What's the reputation? We measure that in NIMM,

50:00 tokens. And then that prevents essentially a random guy from running a gazillion different nodes. And essentially, we use it, we even let people do delegation of their existing Nym tokens. So I have some Nym, I get tired of running a node, because right now you can only get it through running a node. But I would like to support my friends at EFF running a node. So I delegate to them because they're trusted in this kind of market-based, very Hayekian mechanism, absorbs the social information in the market to also help get rid of untrusted symbols. There's some even more advanced techniques we could use for symbol de-sibling that mostly involves some form of kind of social network analysis on top of the delegated staking work.

That's work, if you want to look it up, it's called Sybil Infer and Sybil Quorum that George Nisus was working on. George is part of Nym part-time, and we will plan to pursue that at some point. But currently what works is the pledging prevents total Sybil attacks. The reputation token measures the quality of your node, and you're mixing over time. So it's not just pay to play like a, we're not a proof of state network. You know, we have work, that work is mixing packets. And then that combined with the kind of delegation to absorb the social information, we believe makes our network fairly Sybil resistant. And then you put that on top of more of a client server model, and it really is a dramatically different model than Tor.

Yeah, I think that's a huge difference. And that can be the use case of Tor. Like you don't, you don't have to use an exit node and interact with the regular clear net when you're using Tor. But that is at least I think the most commonly thought of use case of Tor is an open proxy to the internet. But when using like hidden services, you do have that same type of client server model. And you do gain the advantages of not having to worry as much about a dangerous adversary, because as long as the actual service you're accessing is who they say they are, you're at much less risk than when you're using Tor.

An exit node to just proxy out to the broader internet. So that's why we're just like, let's make that model the default. And if you really want to do some open proxy and go for it, we're not going to stop you. But I think having a default model that like that's essentially client server model, even though it's against a bit against peer to peer dogmatism is actually better for privacy. And that's why we're using peer to peer to peer networks. People often, we even had some Ethereum kind of scammers copy us and built a peer peer to peer kind of weird Ethereum version of NIMH that didn't really work and JavaScript of all things. We're in Rust. It was just embarrassing.

And, you know, it's, I understand to some extent where they're coming from, because it would seem intuitively that somehow a peer to peer would be more private. And that is true if you're dealing with very local adversaries that can only see a tiny portion of the network. As soon as you see a significant portion of it, you don't need to see all of it. It's very hard to maintain privacy and peer to peer networks. And there's a good paper by Anya Petrovska, a research scientist in the blog post, in a workshop called Workshop for Privacy in the Electronic Society last year, that goes into this whole trade off, which I think some of your readers might be interested in.

Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely have to collect some of these and get them into the show notes for people who want to take a more technical dive. So you've mentioned this NIMH token that's going to be part of the reputation system and the civil resistance of the NIMH network when the mainnet goes live. Is that something that people who want to use the NIMH network as a client will need to use to be able to pay as some sort of fee to actually use NIMH?

Or is that something that only the servers and the mixed nodes are going to need to have to be able to pledge and to prevent civil attacks in that way? I'd love to hear a little bit more about how the token will actually affect users. And then also just how will you ensure that users will have a private and kind of non-discriminatory, aka like a not KYC bound process for people to get tokens if they need them to use the network? Yeah, so there's a kind of simple minded answer to this question, which is the we are not.

We do not want to build a cryptocurrency. NIMH is a reputation token. Reputation tokens and mixed nets predate the existence of Bitcoin. They were essentially assumed to exist in older systems, which most people here probably forgot about, like the eternity service that were theorized in the 90s, which later led to things such as a decent kind of led to decentralized networking. Now, one of the reasons the designers of Tor built Tor the way they did is because they were actually working on reputation tokens for mixed nets and gave up because they correctly noted the problems very hard.

And, you know, we have luckily built on 20 more years of research, particularly research from Bitcoin to kind of fix that problem. That being said, do we want end users to know or even think about NIMH as a cryptocurrency? No, they should be using Bitcoin or Monero as cryptocurrency. Don't shouldn't use some random token, particularly reputation token. That's a misuse of it. And then the second thing is, should they, but does someone have to pay?

The answer is yes. There is unfortunately nothing free in this world. But as long as someone's paying, the user should not have to pay directly. So the way that we see them probably working is that there will be, we have a very flexible model in this regard, is that users do have to show that they have the kind of right to use the system. And they use that by essentially what's called anonymous credential, which is just users don't think about this kind of like a entry ticket.

Entry ticket. And how they get that entry ticket does not have to involve a token. For example, I think it's good to think to two or three examples because it's a very open model. You can imagine there are certain kinds of applications where people are used to paying fees. For example, Bitcoin. People are used to paying fees. They're also used to kind of relatively high latency. And for those kinds of applications, we can imagine that a little bit of that Bitcoin is taken out.

And that goes to fund whatever wallet you're using. It's your little privacy fee. And then that basically lets them use the network and not even think about it. This little tiny bit of Bitcoin goes to the network and it's kind of converted on the back end to Nym token, the reward, the mixed dose and the services that they're using. That being said, a lot of applications people don't want to pay to use and they shouldn't pay to use. For example, things like Signal.

In that case, it should be free. People should use a Nym token freely. Now, that being said, Signal does not exist from the goodness of Moxie's heart. Signal is paid for by, you know, for example, Brian Acton and donors. And that what Moxie can sort of say is, I would like to use a NIP network and I have, you know, half a million, 50 million, 100 million users. This is how many bytes I need or approximately. And they can just purchase those on behalf of their users and then it's just for free.

This last kind of model is a, you know, you can imagine sort of VPN style models where you pay monthly, where essentially I have some sort of billing cycle set up. And a little bit of that billing cycle of users find that service important enough to pay for monthly to go feed the anonymity network. And so the way we imagine it rolling out, and we're going to be doing this next few months, is we're going to just open up to different developers. We're going to let them experiment with different models.

And we're just going to see what works and what doesn't. And, but we do want to keep the network essentially free or incredibly close to free for users for at least a few years and ideally forever. What's the main, what's the main advantage to the network to having users who are more clients rather than servers paying to use the network? Is it a, is it a spam prevention measure? Because I would think in a, in a network like Nym, you would actually gain from people even introducing spam traffic because.

Oh yeah. Well, I mean the spam traffic is not necessarily the case as far as that Nym auto generates cover traffic. So we can say, you can say, I would like to be private by 200 people. And there's only 200 people using Nym network, but Nym can auto generate enough fake traffic that you're one of those 200 people. And unlike systems, so that's actually a good distinct distinguishing factor between poor and Nym. We can actually give you a pretty accurate estimate of what's the anonymity set, how many people you're anonymous amongst.

Right. So that's kind of nice to know, assuming a global passive adversary. That being said, like I said, that's the important thing that it is important and somewhat rational, even if I, that somebody has to pay, but it's also rational for that paying person to let other people come in without paying. Does that make sense? So for example, let's say I want to be anonymous because I'm sending a giant, you know, liquid confidential transactions, Bitcoin payment through.

And I would like a lot of other traffic to be mixed in. I like signal, you know, the more diversity of traffic is the more anonymous I am. I might want some signal traffic mixed up. I might want some.

1:00:00 a file download traffic. I might even want some web browser traffic mixed in. So some of that fee that I pay as a paying user should subsidize, for privacy reasons, users that can't pay. And these are the kinds of mechanisms that when I say delegate staking, I can sort of say, I want to use network, I'm going to pay this service. Some of that money goes to the service directly. The rest of it goes to the network and then subsidize not only the nodes, but a certain amount of free usage. But not enough free usage, but you subsidize an infinite amount of free usage, then you just open the network up for a giant, not Sybil attack, but users essentially just blasting the network and taking it down, which we don't want to happen. So yeah, it's again, it's all about finding the right balance between high value use cases of which you don't need that many. You only need a few people paying for the whole thing to work for everyone. Lots and lots of low value use cases or use cases where no one pays, which then provide diversity, not just cover traffic, but diversity

of use cases. And then, you know, something that basically lets the node operators feel running these mixed nodes, make enough money so that they don't have to, they can keep that machine up and not only keep that machine up, but get a really good machine that can mix lots of packets. Because the the more packets that are mixed, the faster the packets are mixed, the more anonymous everyone is, and the faster the network is. And that's the nice thing about NIMM is that it's a very special design insofar as that it should scale well. So that the more people that use the network, the faster it gets, because you can maintain the same level of privacy with more people using the network and seeing your packets quicker. And that's the kind of counterintuitive aspect of our design.

Yeah, that's a really fascinating one I hadn't thought about. I guess that's native to it being a mix net because when you're not needing to wait for, for other packets to mix with that are, are a proper fit for your traffic, you can actually send them much more quickly and not have to add as much delay when you have more and more traffic coming in and out. That's definitely an interesting piece of that that I hadn't hadn't thought about. And less cover traffic too. So I think it, you know, I really, we want lots of users jumping on for free and we do think that users that have a lot on the line should be able and be okay with helping subsidize those users.

Yeah, I'm definitely curious to see how that plays out. Because that is a big paradigm shift away from something like Tor. But like you mentioned, it is a little bit more similar to a VPN. So I'm curious how like kind of striking a middle ground between those two approaches in the kind of cost model. Well, will pan out in reality. So I'll definitely be keeping an eye out. Yeah. So you mentioned that you're able to measure the anonymity set of, of the Nym network and of people who are using the Nym network. Is that the main way that you actually measure the privacy that's provided by a network like Nym? Or are there some other metrics that are helpful in kind of figuring out how good the privacy is that is being provided by, by Nym?

Well, how to measure privacy is a, a, a very controversial topic, but in the world of mixed net literature, we have a pretty clear solution, which is Shannon entropy. So the Shannon entropy is better than a pure Nym set insofar. It says, well, the Nym has some background knowledge. They're watching your packet. They're trying to identify that packet after every hop in the network. And they're learning by looking at that packet and looking at other packets. And so you can basically measure that using information theory and get an entropy score. The problem is that entropy scores are harder to intuitively analyze than just an anonymity sets. It's a debate, but it's a debate worth having.

And, and we can definitely provide entropy for people as well. Is that a measure that would be something a user could see, or is that something that would just be abstracted away and, and used more to determine like the cover traffic that's necessary and that kind of thing? Well, currently it's abstracted away. Uh, and it does determine how much cover traffic is needed, but it's something that developers will probably have to set how much, how private do you want your users to be?

And that impacts your latency. Uh, and it's also something that I would like users to see. We just haven't got to that part of the user experience aspect of Nym. Yeah. Yeah. And so good, a good call out that you're kind of having to shift that slider between latency and privacy, because if you want to sit in, in the mix net and keep mixing and mixing and mixing, you can theoretically gain a greater anonymity set and theoretically greater privacy. Again, measuring privacy is really tricky, but you will increase the latency of, of that communication when you're doing that. So that's a good call out that you, again, just like we talked about, everything is a trade-off.

You can choose actually what, uh, the trade-off you want to make is around latency. And I'm sure that'll be really important for developers to, to properly grasp the, the knobs that they can turn there and, and the developers who understand their application and understand what they need, whether they need the latency or whether they, whether they would prefer a higher anonymity set and theoretically higher privacy, um, to be able to adjust that. So it'll be fascinating to see something that's more configurable by the client and by the, um, the actual user of the, of the network to determine what fits their own threat model and their own needs. Well, I agree. Definitely.

So we talked a little bit about self-hosting or about hosting Nym servers. And we talked about the, the token will be necessary for that. Um, is there kind of like a target audience for actually hosting a Nym server? I know like Tor relays, especially middle relays are pretty open-ended. Pretty much anyone can spin one up without too much concern, but exit nodes can be a lot trickier for management. You can have to deal with a lot of, um, communication and, and there can be a lot of trickiness around that. Uh, so I'm curious if there's kind of an, an ideal audience for actually hosting the Nym mix nodes, or if that's something that'll be pretty approachable and open-ended for anyone to pick up. Yeah. We think it will be similar to the kinds of people that, I don't know, run lightning or whatnot, uh, where we can imagine that any relatively competent system men should be able to run, run a node up. Uh, you know, we do expect that people will have to somehow kind of, uh, get some initial, what we call the initial pledge to run the node,

but we are working on making sure that they have an API where they can use pure Bitcoin and don't even have to think about Nym in order to start that process up. So we don't want people to, for example, we don't, we actually don't want people to have to go to, you know, a KYC exchange or something silly like that in order to start a node up. Um, we do expect that it is important. Remember that the node runners themselves, you know, it's transparency, uh, for the powerful privacy of the week, the node runners themselves, we don't necessarily want to know their identity unless we're as a company directly shipping the money, which is what we are doing for the test that, uh, but otherwise, uh, they will have to have their IP address and public keynote. This is similar to lightning or tour.

And so they will to some extent be public. So we do expect that to be more of a assisted man, uh, kind of role or role that, you know, someone who's pretty technically competent wants to run. We kind of hope the same evolutionary dynamic that worked well in Bitcoin's favor, uh, uh, eventually pans out NIMS favor such that more and more technically skilled people get involved and they can run better and better mix those and mix more and more traffic faster and faster.

Uh, and that to get better and better reputation. I think that would be a wonderful thing to see happen to Nym. Now for your average privacy enhanced user on the street, that's probably not a good use of their time. Uh, they may feel uncomfortable, uh, unless they're very technically skilled and getting, uh, you know, an anonymous or privacy enhanced, uh, virtual private server. They may just, you know, want to use the network or want to contribute sort of hidden service like things to the network. Uh, for these kinds of users, um, we do want to point out that the first hop is something that you can run yourself. So you can run your own essentially private entry node into the network. Uh, we call that a gateway. You can also make your gateway public to your friends or the entire planet if you are so inclined. Uh, and so that's this kind of thing that we imagine. And we do hope that users do run themselves on their home machines. We don't really want people to run nodes on their laptops or something. It's more, you don't really want to run a Bitcoin mine on your laptop right now.

You don't really want to run a mix node on your laptop, but you can, we can't stop you. Um, you will get less, uh, reputation than someone that has a bigger, better machine. Uh, we will prioritize, uh, having a good jurisdictional spread, uh, the network. And we have some techniques by our chief scientist, Claudia Diaz for, we're guaranteeing that. Um, because obviously of all the nodes are in one place, it's not a, not great from a privacy perspective for all on Amazon, for example, it's sort of pointless. And that's what we're seeing a lot of the so-called web three technology stack. Um, so we expect that privacy enhanced users will run applications and will probably one run gateways to access the network for themselves or their other privacy enhanced, uh, friends.

Awesome. Thanks for, thanks for breaking that down. I think there's definitely some similarities to Tor there that not everyone runs a, a relay, but many people run the Tor daemon as their entry into the, or everyone runs the Tor daemon as their entry into the Tor network. Um, so I'll definitely have to play with that and I'll have to, uh, get something up on the, the test set and get familiar with, with Nimix nodes specifically, I'm curious

1:10:00 that. I'm curious about running one, especially once mainnet is out. But just a couple more questions for you, and then we'll close off. And it's been a little long one and late night for you. But I did have one more listener question, and it was just essentially around your funding. You mentioned already that you have VC funding and that you're able to raise funds to build out the network. And I know that there's a lot of concern, especially in more of the communities that I run in around what control VCs and investors have on the development and direction of projects like Nym.

So is there any clarification you can bring? Just simply, I won't have to go super into the legal weeds, but just any clarification around what control the people who have invested and helped to support Nym up until this point have over the development or direction of Nym? Yeah. I mean, firstly, a lot of people are very concerned with this issue. I think they're right to be concerned over it. But I think realistically, we've been trying to build a mixnet for, oh, God help us, running on the decade now. And folks on our team like George have been working on this mixnet since before Tor, Mix Minion, and Mix Master. One of the people who remember Mix Master, I've been talking about that. And then, you know, here's the deal. We tried to build this off of academic funding and a pure nonprofit GPL, Richard Stallman approved manner. And what we discovered is that that was very hard to scale, that our enemies are folks like Google or Facebook or Chainalysis, who just have hordes of programmers that can every day, and this isn't talking about governments,

you know, essentially infinite amount of money because they control the money printing machine, that they can use to target our network. And so, you know, it was very, we built a completely, with the European Commission Research Fund, a completely GPL, completely open attempt to build a mixnet and it was not, never really working properly. And what we found, there was tons of, when you were working under an academic or nonprofit environment, there are so many restrictions on what you can do with money. So I would say venture capital, which I was essentially considered a form of evil malware when I first heard of it, I ended up being actually much less restrictive.

And not only much less restrictive, but you actually got much more money with less restrictions. And venture capital, you know, their goal is just to get users. You know, I think a lot of VCs, first it was only really fringe, crazy people, maybe fringe then now, maybe more and more mainstream, like Binance. But now we're seeing, and a lot of our early kind of investors were all just sort of very nice people, not no mainstream VCs. But now what we're seeing is that even mainstream venture capital, like Andreessen Horowitz, are questioning the future of the surveillance economy, even for their Web2 investments. And so I think the way that they look at Nym is they say, well, you know, there's a less than 1% chance that surveillance fails. These guys know what they're doing. If there is a way to build privacy and somehow make money off of it, which is where most, you know, honestly, we got rejected by many more VCs than we got accepted. Most traditional VCs wouldn't touch us with a nine foot pole. We're actually quite surprised that Andreessen and Polychain and a few other bigger

ones threw down on us. But it's kind of rational because they're like, well, there's a less, there's a tiny percent that this chance this might work. That's worth a tiny amount of money, but tiny amount of money to a multi-billion dollar fund, you know, $10 million here, $10 million there is a huge amount of money for privacy enhanced software. And that lets us hire world-class programmers, you know, so we could hire folks from Amazon, we could hire, we hired back people from Google and Facebook, and, and we could even hire people that no one else would touch such as Chelsea Manning. Because we all of a sudden had venture funding. And the question is, what did the venture capitalists control? And it used to be when there was a bear market, that venture capitalists would want to get, you know, controlling seats on the board, they would want controlling equity. So if they don't like me, they kick me out, or if they think, you know, we don't, but honestly, they don't have any of that power in the way that we've currently

crafted our deals. They can't kick out the board. They don't have participating board seats. They don't control majority of the equity. They don't control majority of the Nym tokens. We're just like, look, these guys, I think we're very thankful they've given us money. And we do hope we can build a user base that they feel this was a good investment for them. But they don't have any control over the design decisions. That being said, honestly, I, I, this is a bit of a counterintuitive argument. I would argue for more privacy enhanced projects, particularly open source projects that are struggling for funding, you know, who's going to be more likely to give you a backdoor, a government is more likely to ask for a backdoor. So why would you spend a year, half a year, right, you know, struggling for a hundred K grant, a 200 K grant, and then basically be, you know, whatever at the, you know, under the U S department of state or like us under the European commission, uh, where you could just basically say, look, guys,

we can get much more money with much less restrictions, the venture capital and then venture capital. I've, you know, I'm from a research background and open source community background working on free software, but you know, I had never ran a team of 30 coders before, and it was crucial to have the venture capitalists on board to help us learn how to hire people, how to fire people, you have to do occasionally and how to scale and how to really think about, uh, how to do an effective, uh, build an effective structure, whether that's, you know, I would like the structure to eventually become more of a co-op, uh, more nonprofit over time. Um, that being said, it's much, it's, it's, this is harder than people think. And, and the one thing companies are good as they're good at building software.

And that's our goal right now at this point in them project, as the software is finished building, we can of course transition out of a company structure and more to a traditional Apache foundation or whatever kind of structure or a DAO, even if we're really feeling crazy. Although I'm a little bit suspicious of DAOs. Uh, I'm a bit old fashioned this way, but I do think there's something to be said for picking the right kind of structure and the right kind of funding instrument, uh, for the matured project. And we could not have built them and rebuild our entire code base and rust and hire the best people in the world, including people that no other company would touch had not been for VC funding. And in terms of back doors, honestly, you know, we have the same argument tour has, if you think there's a back door at our software, find it. And if we don't fix it, fork us, it's all open source. It's all on the web. And, you know, before we really launch, we're going to make sure we have reproducible builds. Uh, we're looking right now with Chelsea

Manning at secure hardware, not SGX nonsense. Cause I don't trust SGX more than I can throw Intel, but looking at actually ways that we can kind of guarantee the execution of the code is also not completely corrupted either by us or by you. I mean, our main concern is actually the node runners, uh, the people running the mixed nodes become corrupt. Now there's very little damage they can do, but it's still something we're worried about or the people running gateways or the people, you know, what's one giant threat that Chelsea and Manning pointed out that we weren't super concerned about till she pointed it out. How about what if your phone gets hacked? What if the client is corrupt? That's an interesting threat that I think very few people have taken seriously. And someone like Chelsea who has a lot of experience with, uh, you know, lack of better word, military intelligence, uh, uh, is really working on that problem pretty hard. I think she's going to come up with some pretty amazing, uh, solutions eventually. So we are, uh, you know, I, I understand it's not a choice everyone

agrees with, uh, but what can I say? I mean, you know, history will judge us. We'll see if it works or not. Uh, and I'm happy to see other people try different approaches. Uh, I've written letters of support for competing approaches even, uh, it's just that personally, I only have so much time left on this earth and I would like to see this software built, uh, before I die. And I think that's the case, not just with me, but with people on our team, like George Denises or Claudia Diaz that have been working on mix nets and anonymous communications for, you know, at this point, uh, over 20 years. And, uh, we want to see this out of the world and we want to see if it works or not. So it's not just a theoretical part of privacy enhancing technologies, but something that that is real because, you know, we don't also just to be clear, I don't think NIMS is going to be the end point. There are many other interesting directions, uh, that you could take anonymous communication, uh, all sorts of crazy peer-to-peer designs

and, um, dining cryptographer networks and verifiable shuffles, all the sort of stuff that NIMS isn't doing.

1:20:00 And we think there is probably something there. So we do hope that if we get a lot of funding, and I am definitely wanting to get a lot of funding because I really want to build this, and we want to help fund all of that work come to fruition as well. We want to be able to fund the stuff that no government funding agency or no other venture capitalist will touch. Yeah, and thank you for diving into that. I know the funding issue, I'm sure, is something you have to talk about a lot and a lot of people are concerned with.

Surprisingly, not. But yeah, I want to write a blog post on this because I think it's... I'm almost surprised there's not been more questions. It's sort of shocking, really. But yeah, in terms of how we're going to... We do fundraising. We're also trying to stick to the straight and narrow. We really look up to companies that do that. So we are currently in the process of registering a prospectus with the Swiss government. And we are in the process of excluding U.S. people because the U.S. is a terrible jurisdiction full of extra jurisdictional issues.

So we are doing a lot of relatively controversial moves, some to protect our people, some to make sure that we're not getting taken advantage of by scammers, some to make sure that you guys aren't scammed by us. And people are going to fall. I'm sure friends are going to be mad at me. But when you're running something like them, you have to have a lot of faith in yourself and your team and the mission. And I can think of no better mission than ending mass surveillance.

And we're at least going to give it the best shot we can. Yeah. And I think one of the key points that you hit on and what you're mentioning about how your funding system works is that the output is free and open source software. And that, I think, is a huge, huge, very important thing because not only does it allow people to inspect the code and look for backdoors and make sure that there's not some ulterior motive that's being driven by VCs that's causing problems, but it also allows it to be reproducible and to exist no matter what route y'all decide to take it in the future, even if that route is something that, for some reason, just goes way off course.

As long as the output is free and open source, I think that's really the key. For me, I know a lot of people feel differently, and I think it would be very valuable to have a blog post around the funding and sustainability model of Nym, especially because that's such a pressing and common issue in the open source space and the privacy space specifically. So I think there would be a lot of value in a blog post around that. So I would also see that.

I mean, taking venture capital over privacy is a grand experiment. And we're not the only ones. Adam Back did this with Zero Knowledge Systems to make a mix net in the late 90s. Didn't work out. Company had to pivot. And luckily, we got Adam pushed out Blockstream. But we're not the first, but we do hope to be successful. And if we're aren't, a certain venture capitalist that funded us, whose name I won't mention, but I will mention the fact that they should, I think, be in the cover of Forbes maybe this month.

They said, look, guys, this technology is so cool and so revolutionary that maybe there's not a business model here. And they said, well, that's okay because worst case, this all falls apart. We still have this, there's going to be some valuable open source code. And in the grand scheme of things, you know, we have billions of dollars. So you guys are a small investment. And I think, you know, I would say that that's the attitude that I try to take as well, that we're going to work really hard to make this sustainable.

And we do not know if there's a business model behind privacy. There might just not be. Maybe the only way you get privacy is you have to overthrow global capitalism. I mean, may be the case. That's definitely what I thought 10 years ago. That being said, it's worth trying because you don't know unless you try. And I've been down the road of nonprofit funding. I worked in that space for years. I ran a VPN nonprofit. I worked on open source projects that had no funding at all.

These all had historical, wonderful users, wonderful usage, and all fell apart eventually within a few years, primarily because of lack of funding. Because at some point, it's just hard to compete. And so I would like to see privacy work and be competitive. Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. I think it's a pressing issue. And I'm going to be curiously watching and definitely interested to see where it takes Nym and where it takes others in the space who are starting to go that route as people do realize that there may be a business opportunity, even one that is around VC funding in the space.

So I definitely be curious to see where that goes. But last question I had for you was just how can listeners jump in and help support what you're doing with Nym? Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. We have a website, nimtech.net and you can go to that website and you can read about us. You can download the code. If you're more towards a systems administrator, you can run a mix node. If you want to remain private and you have some technical skills, you can run a gateway.

If you want to build your developer, you want to build an app or you already have an app, you can run a service provider. And this is all very clearly documented. And we're happy to help in Telegram, Keybase, whatever channel you prefer. And we have all of that on our website. And that's the best way to get in touch. And if, you know, if you're really interested in privacy, we are also very interested in privacy. We are typically always hiring. And not only are we hiring, if you don't want to work for us, if you just want to work for privacy and you can convince one of our associates that you could do this, you know, we sponsor undergrads for internships.

We sponsor a master's thesis and we're starting to sponsor PhD dissertations on privacy. And we will continue to do so. And we hope that, you know, I think there's all, there are many ways to do it. We'll probably start sponsoring nonprofits if we ever get tons of money, which we hopefully will cross fingers to such that we can build a sort of, as you say, an ecosystem. But it will, we're happy to work with more or less anyone. We do, we are a company.

So we have found it occasionally hard to work with very loose groups. We're don't know who we're talking to or what we're doing, but we do also respect also various people's right to privacy. And so we do also want people who want to get involved with them. You know, you can apply for a job with a real name. You can volunteer under a NIMH in our channels. Everything's on GitHub. Go for it. I mean, that's, it's, it's, we do hope we get more, more volunteers.

And, and at some point, you know, like I said, we're happy, to phase the, if the company is successful, uh, and we're happy to keep going indefinitely, but we're also happy to phase this into a co-op or more loose structures while over time. And this, and what, what's the real deal maker breaker there? It's how many people get involved. So again, just go to our website and there's more ways to get involved than we can count. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Harry.

It's, it's a tricky topic to get through and there's a lot of detail and, um, a lot of weeds to, to crash through in the, the network privacy space. But, uh, thank you for helping to clarify so many things around how Nym works, how it compares with Torrent ATP, um, how your, your funding works, what users can expect to, to benefit from limitations. There's just a ton of solid content here. So thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to, to jump on and chat about this.

And I'm really excited to see where Nym goes in the future. Cool. Thank you. And keep up the podcast. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Opt Out. If you did, please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast. Or if you're already subscribed, share it with one friend or family member this week. As always, you can check out the link to the guest content and contact info, as well as links to all of the tools we discussed in today's episode.

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