 This is Dr. Robin Renwick. He is a PhD. He has like six PhDs. He is the smartest man on the planet. So if you have any questions about anything, please refer them to him. I'm obviously joking. He does have one PhD. You can ask him about that later. He's going to be talking with us today about perspectives of privacy. So he made the firmware of the badges. So let's give him a snap. Everyone snap. There we go. Robin, what perspectives on privacy do you have for us today? Well, he's going to share them with us right now. Okay. Can everyone hear me? Those who control the code control the rules. How different perspectives of privacy are being written into the code of blockchain systems. That's the title of a research paper that is currently up for peer review with the Journal of Information Technology. It was the culmination of about nine months work and it was conducted at University College Cork in Ireland. Monero essentially was a case study. It was probably the best place to start to get informed, rational and educated opinions on the relationship between privacy and blockchain systems. However, that also means that everybody involved in the interview process was essentially a guinea pig. Putting all that aside, the project attempted to obtain opinions and perspectives from an array of participants in the blockchain space and I wanted to concentrate mainly on Monero as privacy is obviously a very strong thematic concern to the community but those interviews were actively engaged in building a privacy focused system or ecosystem. What I really wanted to try and do was to understand how notions of privacy informed their interaction with the technology and also how it informed their view of how the technology and industry should develop as a whole. And then I compared these opinions with those drawn from outside of the community. Really the goal was to try and understand the differences, the similarities, the points of contention between all the perspectives. The study was analytically framed by boundary theory which includes the concept of boundary objects. Now a boundary object can be anything. It can be a physical object, it can be an abstract philosophical concept, it can be even be a linguistic term. The frame is really nothing more than a lens to help understand the way in which people negotiate varied interactions, differences of opinion, differences of perspectives as they engage in a cooperative design process. In the academic literature a boundary object is described as an abstract for physical artifact existing in the liminal spaces between adjacent communities of people or alternatively as things that exist as junctures where varied social worlds meet in areas of mutual concern. It emerged from the work of two design science researchers about 30 years ago as they studied the design development and construction of a museum of vertebrate zoology in Berkeley, California. In that instance the museum was the boundary object and they felt that framing the object as one which crosses between and through boundaries helps understand the object itself, the process, the project as a whole and the involved entities in better detail. Now since the methodology emerged there have been a wealth of studies that have used the theoretical framing. For example, resilience, medicine, water, room and space, gender, even musical scores have all been studied through the boundary theory lens as boundary objects. Now in the context of blockchain technology I imagine there to be various social worlds acting adjacently to each other as they tried to move the technology forward. So I split the blockchain community into five main social worlds and those are users, developers, cryptographic researchers, corporate architects and then regulators and legislators. I then went about interviewing the social worlds framing the responses under three main boundary theory related constructs. So these were concepts or ideas, resources or tools and then finally methods and practices. So the perspectives were then analyzed, grouped and framed and they were understood to be either robust and convergent so consistent across groups, plastic and complacent so varied or divergent across groups but harmless and then plastic and into nesine which means divergent across groups and harmful. So before I turn to what the outcomes of the findings of the study are or were it's important to note that really the findings are limited to just this study. It was really just exploratory in nature to uncover or to uncover some themes to which more deeper or wider studies could then be conducted. So if we're looking at the concepts constructs there were three main frames that emerged and they emerged quite organically from the interview and codification process. So these were the right to privacy which was robust, this idea of a decentralized revolution which was also robust and then this idea of the role or the mode of government involvement in this decentralized revolution and this was plastic and into nesine. All groups agreed with the right to privacy whether that was financial or informational. All groups also agreed the blockchain was affording a decentralized revolution and it was being created in this era. However there were some concrete divergences with respect to the role of government in this revolution and their level of involvement in the development of the technology. Now the varying perspectives may be attributed partly to the multi-purpose affordances of blockchain technology. So on the one hand we know that blockchain offers market-led efficiencies in the creating, the storing and the securing of data whether that's financial or otherwise and on the other it affords a radically different system of value exchange for which no central authority has control. Now separating the affordances does not actually appear straightforward and neither does it appear to be a priority for many of the individuals participating in the actual development of the technologies. Whatever the outcome the use of the technology will probably not fulfill the expectations of some social world i.e. there will always be disagreement about what the technology should or shouldn't do. If we look at a bit more closely you can see how the right to privacy and decentralized revolution were both robust framings. However if you look at the last one which is the role in the mode of government involvement you can see that there are divergences of opinion. Now I'm going to paraphrase a lot what has been said and there's a lot more detail in the actual paper but I'm just going to take quite broad strokes regarding what was said in the interviews. So for example users do not want government involvement as they might see the decentralized blockchain based systems as a method for freeing themselves from government control. Developers do not necessarily want government involvement as they see themselves developing cipherpunk inspired systems that are replacing law with a political code. Corporate architects do not want government involvement as they feel it will stifle innovation and perhaps harm profits. Regulators obviously do want to be involved but they aren't completely sure how to negotiate their involvement due to the multiple affordances of the systems. If we turn to methods and practices things become extremely nuanced and a lot more delicately poised. So blockchain systems are seen by all as a method through which ordinary transactions may be overseen. After all we're talking about open permissionless data silos or ledgers. We all know the inherent characteristics of these systems they're transparent, they're audible, they're immutable etc etc. However perspectives differs with respect to who needs to be overseen, who is watching and who needs to be kept in check. The source of perceived threats becomes the point of contention rather than any divergence of the technology's affordance. So for example users may feel that governments need to be kept in check, developers may feel that corporations need to be kept in check and regulators may feel that both users and corporations need to be kept in check. This brings us on to the idea of extraordinary transactions and whether or not blockchain systems can be a method or can afford a method for overseeing these types of transactions. Obviously regulators are concerned with some of the privacy affordances of the system and they're keen to be able to access information for quote-unquote dirty or tainted transactions. However other groups feel that affording this sort of access potentially affects the privacy aspects of the network or system as a whole. Now whether or not it's possible to create systems that allow for optional transparency that will appease all social worlds is still an unknown. The regulation doesn't exist so it's difficult to know exactly what is required and from whom. However regulators do seem to assume the methods are necessary to avoid widespread near effortless money laundering and that these methods will be built into the protocol consensus layer once it becomes law on the legislative or the regulatory layer. They assume the blockchain systems will automatically code in compliance once the legislation is set. Now we know that changing the consensus layer code is not an easy task especially if the pressure is coming from outside the community as opposed to from the inside of the community. There's no obvious middle ground presented here and there's no discernible path to reconciliation. If we look at it a bit more closely you can see the robust agreement on blockchain as a method for overseeing ordinary transactions. You could also see the differences of opinion with respect to the second frame which is blockchain as a system for overseeing extraordinary transactions so the divergence surrounds the idea of tainted or dirty transactions. Now it's important to note that most of the social worlds would prefer not to see two-tier privacy affordances develop but they also understand the necessity for privacy technologies to be deployed in order to enact a fungible currency and this is especially pertinent in the case of Monero. They want to protect certain rights or believe in protection from authoritarian regimes, protection from the surveillance state, from surveillance capitalism, believe in civil liberties etc. Corporate architects understand for the most part that they must comply with whatever the regulations demand but they also understand the importance of private transactions in their business dealings along with the obvious need for a fungible currency and on the other hand regulators are wary of privacy affordances and wish to have methods for overseeing tainted transactions full stop. There is no convergence of perspectives. Now we're starting to see regulatory pressure being placed on the economic layer. At some point in my opinion it's only a matter of time before that pressure moves down to the network or the consensus layer or the protocol and consensus layer I should say. So I'm going to summarize. There's two high level findings that emerge from the study. The first is that significant divergences are apparent with respect to the desired level and mode of government involvement in the development of blockchain systems. The social worlds are in agreement that near-term government involvement is undesirable and regulators are operating under the assumption they may join the development at a later stage where necessary restrictions have been identified. The second high level finding relates the idea of a method for overseeing extraordinary transactions. Regulators believe that compliance will be coded in once it's required. However other social worlds are operating under the assumption that the trade-off has already been made regarding privacy affordances to accommodate the essential mechanics of privacy enabling blockchain systems. Okay that is essentially it. The research paper is in for peer review. It's about a 50 page paper so it's quite dense. There's a lot have been said by many of the participants. I'm not sure how long it's going to take. Personally I would like to see an abridged version for the MRL. However I'm not so sure that a soft science study is in their scope or their reason to etch her. However the actual interviews especially ones from the Minera community are an extremely interesting read and they're actually personally I think they're quite beautiful. They are wide-ranging, they're informed, they're educated, they're wise, they're rational. It's sometimes very very emotive and when I was reading them and analyzing them I often imagined that it would be nice to see a small little book or perspectives of privacy book as told by the Minera community which would be interviews surrounding their understanding or their perspectives on the relationship between privacy and blockchain systems and cryptocurrencies. Out of those three things I'm not sure how many of them will come off. I'm hoping number one is just a matter of going through the peer review process. Number two it's not really up to me it's up to MRL and number three yeah could potentially be funded by CCS. Of course that would also be up to the people who are interviewed whether or not they'd be willing to publish their interviews in an anonymous fashion. That's pretty much the presentation so I'll take any questions if you have them. Yes and no. Some regulators seem to understand that there would be conflict of interest between some jurisdictions. Some just talk to the very broad high-level overview. What I did get a sense was that they believed that the legislature was already there it just needed to be amended and reworked to be able to include some of the technologies that are now developing. The problem with changing legislation is that it takes quite a lot of time and obviously there's a process of understanding that needs to be done before that can actually happen. I did get a sense that there was a very wide degree of knowledge difference depending on who you talk to and that kind of confused some matters with regards to the analysis of the interviews. Yep. Do you know that there wasn't? A lot of the views were quote unquote quite soft which was actually quite surprising. I think the people that I talked to it didn't seem like it was very adversarial because they believed that the rules and regulations were already in place. For argument's sake in the PSD in Europe the Payment Services Directive that that's already there and that covers payments between people. Some of the other regulators depending on their jurisdiction talked of other published legislature but it was already in place that covered a lot of the actual interactions that it was dealing with but I didn't get a sense it was highly adversarial. I think there was a strong sense that people were willing to learn and educate themselves and then mold the existing rules around what technology was developing. Yep. So kind of jurisdictional censorship in such way. So you would get a number of parallel chains that are each agreeing by the terms within their jurisdiction. Well in terms of the actual code change I'm not sure I'm not a developer I'm not involved in those decisions so I'm not sure how much code needs to be changed. I'm also not sure the regulations are there so we don't really know. Do I think it will cause a significant amount of problems? Yeah I think so but it also depends where the pressure comes from. The governments may place a lot of pressure on the economic layer and then they might be the ones that are kind of afforded the responsibility of putting the pressure on the protocol and consensus layer which actually worries me a bit more because a lot of the people operating on the economic layer are intertwined in the space a bit deeper so it might be harder to distinguish who's a good actor for lack of better terms. Yes. Yeah this depends on your perspective. It was really difficult to make a classification between one and the other. There was just this idea of how should I say transactions that would need to be investigated for some reason. What these reasons are we kind of know it's money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion. It's pretty much the big three. I didn't want to make a lot of kind of sub frames regarding all these different transactions because all three of those have different problems associated with them so we just use to keep the sub frames quite broad and just keep it at extraordinary and ordinary. The distinction between them depends on who is actually viewing the transaction that's the sense I got. I think it's important to remember that this really was just an exploratory study so it really just wanted to uncover some themes that would then be really put into a wider deeper study and to really to drill down into what actually is going on but that would take time and resources so anybody else? Am I done? Great. Thank you very much.