 So, here you are, Siobh. Hi everyone, I'm Theo Goodman and today I'm going to tell you about NIM. Does anyone in here drink water? Good, good, because humans drink water. That's a good first sign. So NIM is a mixed net, but first we're going to go through a discussion that some guys had the other day. You know, because internet traffic is observable by GPA. So GPA is global passive adversary. You know, like NSA or big China, all that stuff. But I use grin, which is a really cool privacy shit coin, and tour and signal. On-chain metadata can be harvested and exploited. I use signal. Traffic analysis of signal can reveal who is talking to who, when, and where through the metadata, if you observe the signal servers. I thought if I use a privacy shit coin, I'm good to go. Fuck. Yeah, so this is a typical thing. I used Monero, I'm good. I used Pippecash, I'm fine. I used Ethereum, I'm safe. But there's still the metadata out there. So there's, again, the basic problems. Internet traffic is observable. And that goes for if you use Zcash, if you use Ethereum, Monero, grin, all that stuff, you can all observe it, and you can do chain analysis, all the things going in and out of the servers. And tour, it just really obscures your IP address, geolocation, not the metadata. So we need privacy on a different level. Again, and also there's no incentives. So tour, the usage of tour has gone up a lot in the last years. But there's still only about 7,000 or 8,000 nodes. And the geolocation of those nodes, the diversity of them, is not growing. It's not expanding. It's all on a volunteer basis. A lot of them are in Germany. But that's not really growing as the network usage grows. So the incentives are messed up. And what could some of the global adversaries, passive adversaries, use all this data for? What do they want to know? Why are they trying to anticipate what I'm going to drink? If I'm going to drink Granatapfel Mate or the normal one, or what are they using all this for? Well, maybe for a social credit system. Maybe to stop whistleblowers. Maybe to just commercialize mass surveillance in general. So I just want to back up a little bit and tell you a little bit about NIM and where the team comes from, where some of this technology comes from. So after the Snowden revelations, some people created panoramics and they approached the European Union for funding to build a mixed net because they said Europe can't depend just on tour. They need to build something stronger and not just depend on tour. And so they, in panoramics, invented something called Lupix. They built Lupix. And Lupix is being used in a lot of mixed nets that right now. I'll get into that too. And over here, the obscure Lubdin startup that made Facebook's Libra possible. So there's also an ironic link to NIM and Facebook, which seems weird. But George, in the picture, his startup was bought. He was working on NIM, which is anonymous mixed net technology. And then he was essentially poached by Facebook. And now he works on Libra. However, one other guy, Dave, that was also went over to Facebook, left Facebook, to work on NIM. So it's kind of an ironic, it could be made into a TV show one day, but if you do so, maybe give us some credit. So mixed net. What is a mixed net? Has anyone ever heard of a mixed net? Maybe anonymous email remailers? Good. For example, I mean, they've been around for a while. For example, Adam Beck, who's really into Bitcoin. He used to have an email remailer that used a mixed net. It was really slow, high latency. And it was abused. And when Adam Beck did that, he was like, damn, maybe I need to create something like proof of work so that it's not Sybil attacked all the time. So that was one of the motivations to do that. So now we're, but the thing was, they're very slow and they have high latency. But now with the technology we have today, we have an opportunity to bring this old technology back and maybe use it for something really, really useful. So just like Tor, maybe you're familiar with that, it does have multiple hops. What something that's unlike Tor is that it has decoy traffic, so-called cover traffic. And the other thing that's very, very important, unlike Tor, is that it has the timing is obscure. So it's asymmetrical timing of the cover traffic. So it's not like earlier, I would thought if that was a techno club up there, someone was banging. But so if the cover traffic is like a techno club, well then, I mean a global adversary can see through that eventually. But if it's like a scratching DJ that's changing the BPMs all the time, dynamically depending on the packets coming in and the amount of them, then it's really hard to figure out like, do I want to watch this packet? What's this? It all kind of blends in and it's very plausible and deniable about what packet is what. So that's kind of a way to explain it you can imagine. And it's scalable, like Tor, in the sense that it's a general mix net. It's made for, so here we're at the Ethereum meetup. Well, a mix net is essentially a message can be sent through and it could be a sign transaction. It could be a simple Ethereum transaction. It could be dApps that want to use it. But we also don't want to say, this is like only for Ethereum. No, it could be Bitcoin transactions could go through it. Messaging system, like WhatsApp could use it, for example. Because you need a lot in order to have a good and amenity set, you need a lot of traffic. You don't need to specialize. You need to have more of a general scope, like Tor. Tor also does that. So this is how it works. A basic outline of how it works. The packets come in. The mix nodes are in the middle with the N and the dummy packets or the decoy traffic also is in there. Timing, also the timing thing happens on there and the packets go out and you can compare that. So this is, if I don't fall down here. So Tor looks more like this and a VPN looks more like this. So you can compare the different things that are added. Mostly the decoy traffic and the timing of that. So maybe you've heard of Katzenpost, which is a pretty cool project. It uses Loupix, what I was talking about earlier that they worked on. So that uses Loupix and while that's cool, it's highly specialized. So that's one problem. Like right now I think it's used for mostly email. It's highly specialized and it's kind of unclear who gets to run a node. It's not permission, like not anyone can just join the mix node network as far as I understand the current update. And then there was this other thing that came out, Mason, but Mason is essentially a fork of Katzenpost which also uses Loupix and it says it's just for Ethereum. So there's a lot of problems there. The problem is that it's highly specialized, like I said. So then the anonymity set is just as big as all the dApps maybe if that's what it's made for, all the Ethereum users are not as big as it could be, for example. The other thing is that both Katzenpost and Mason, they don't change the speed of the cover traffic. So there's a problem there. So maybe it's just even questionable as if it's better than using Tor or not. So you're going to go through my points again. Centralized and permissioned PKI. So it's not anyone can join either one of those networks as a mix node. It's unclear who controls that right now for both of those. Whereas with NIM it's going to be a permissionless network for the mix nodes. So here we go to kind of like see Katzenpost and Mason is Katzenpost, NIM team gave you Loupix and addressing issues with scalability and privacy. There you go. I could have just done that instead of wall of text, but here we go. So NIM, blockchain, PKI, private key. Credentials, anonymous credentials. And the validators, they kind of watch over the network and check that the mix nodes are not acting maliciously and trying to DDOS everything. And if they do, they get kicked out of the network. It's a very simplified way to explain it, but that's how it works. And the tokens reward the mix nodes as a kind of proof of mix. So yeah, and this is how I was talking about how the DJ is scratching, he's changing the speed of the records and going back and forth and you can't really tell. So it's dynamically controlled how the decoy traffic and how the network adjusts. So it's scalable. Because if you just set it as one parameter, then it's easy. It's the same thing like, okay, I got 120 beats per minute and I just set the decoy traffic as 120. Okay, that's more confusing, but it's not that hard to see through it. Again, permissionless mix mining. So instead of proof of work, proof of mix for the mix nodes. Let's see, what else? Validators transformed them tokens into credentials. So the thing is that the whole thing with the validators, you'd almost need a whole other talk to go about that. And there's also a video from Harry from Chaos Communication Camp that was in the summer. But basically, like I said, the validators are just watching the mix nodes and making sure that they're not malicious and they're actually doing what they say they're going to do. So timeline, we're actually on time. Amazing, huh? So check this out. So we have December 2019 test net debugging at CCC. Check that happened. Test net launched with some volunteers from the workshop in Leipzig then. January 2020, launch alpha test next with volunteer check. It's live. You can join it now. February 2020 launch apps on alpha test net should be no problem. There is someone that already has a messaging app that is using the test net right now. So that's pretty cool. Very big goal. By the end of 2020 launch main net and end mass surveillance. What do you think? Possible? Okay, wait. So I think this is where we're right now. We're hopeful Wojak with a really cool NIM T-shirt. Right now they're very rare, the NIM T-shirts, but they were available at CCC. But now we're just kind of hopeful Wojak. I think this is the state of the project right now. And if you want to communicate with any of us, check out, you can check out telegram. To you.me, nimchan, nimtech.net. And if you want to get into the technical, nimtech.slashdocs. Also, I think the other one had the github. Here's where you can download the node right away and just connect. It's pretty self-explanatory. And that's what I've got. Thank you very much. So any questions? Is the PKI just a smart contract or how's it solved? Because I remember last time I talked with Harry, there wasn't really a full solution to it. Good question. I don't think it's not just one smart contract, but I also cannot explain it off the cuff because they have all these. So each epoch of the mixing has some kind of encryption thing that they do and then the validators check it. I can't tell you much more than that. It's not just one smart contract though. It's more complicated. It's probably why he couldn't say either. Thanks. More questions? Any other questions? Please feel free to contact me whenever we're just hanging out here if anyone's around. Question in the back. Does nim have the concept of hidden services? That's a good question. So right now, so there was a question, can't you run the validator in the MixNet itself? And theoretically you could, but right now we're not there yet because there's some kind of, there could be, I think there could even be collusion problems. So you want the PK, for example, hidden service, let's say that the validator with the public addresses was hidden. I mean there's kind of like a discussion about that. Maybe in the future after the real simple things work, but right now no. Do we have a last question? All right, so thank you very much. Thank you.