 Today we're here to talk about self-sovereign sexuality and some personal stories from our journey and what we've learned from them, and how we've come to some of the conclusions that we've come to, and how we think that the Ethereum community and the sex worker community are more aligned than most people think. So I want to start out with just a sort of high-level thing about rationality itself. So rationality is about having mental models that are calibrated with reality. So it's about asking yourself, why do I believe what I believe? And then not believing the things that you don't think are true, even if you want to. So when we started SpangChain, most people thought it was a really bad idea, and even a joke. And this was about a year ago in the heyday of sort of virtue signalling ICO, everybody shaking each other's hand, and I thought it was basically all bullshit. And I thought, where is blockchain adoption going to happen first? Where does this actually matter? Who gives a shit about this? And that's what drove me to realize that the adult entertainment community, this community that's been routinely discriminated against, ostracized from the financial institutions, this is where it starts. Because this is the people who having a safe place to securely store and transact their funds is actually really important. And so I think now, a year later, we had a lot to prove, but I think we've done a pretty good job and it's become somewhat accepted that we're decent devs and that we're trying to do good in the world. And I hope that as the going gets weirder, the community doesn't write us off as crazies and takes a moment to reflect on our logic and draw sensible conclusions. Okay, so I'm going to start with a story about personal experience. About a year ago, I was feeling pretty depressed, ego depleted, pretty low self-esteem. I didn't spend a lot of time on Tinder because it took, you know, I was working a lot and it takes a long time. And when I tried to hang out with girls, I kept like fumbling it up somehow. And I was lonely and it was affecting my productivity and Ethan had been going up a lot. So I had more disposable income than I was used to. So I spent a few nights checking out the escorts in my area before I finally worked up the courage to text one. And it was a lot of like, you know, me sitting there looking at and being like, I'm not the type of guy who does this. And then the rational part of me is like, how do you know, right? Why not? Like, how do you know you wouldn't enjoy it? It's like, all right, well, you have a point. So I talked to an escort set up an appointment and about an hour before I went to go get cash and I realized that I hit my daily limit in the ATM withdrawal. And so I freaked out. I started texting all my friends to see if anybody could come deliver me cash. And nobody could. I went to a bunch of other ATMs and eventually I had to give up and tell the escort that like, hey, sorry, I know I made it to our appointment, but can we only do one hour? And that I would make it up to her. But when she got there and after we'd established a rapport, I introduced her to the world of crypto and helped her get set up on an exchange and sent her her first ethers. And she ended up staying the extra hour. And so, yeah, that was like my first experience. And since then I've sort of come around to this idea that like, you know, one of the slides I really liked in the last presentation was morality is not equal to legality. I think we should all keep that in mind. Without further ado. Cool. All right. Chelsea, take it away. So I guess I'll give a little intro on myself because I'm pretty new to spank chain. I was a sex worker for a number of years before I found crypto. I really wish I had known about crypto when I was a sex worker. It would have been super, super useful. But the three or so years that I've been a Bitcoin educator, I have approached crypto as a technology with the knowledge of the things I went through and the ways that with some weird gray areas, I got exploited with implications. So I've been coming to this tech for a while with the idea that it could really help people not go through shit I went through. And I was like a lurking fan of spank chain and really seeing how they were playing in this space of expanding the over 10 window of what it's acceptable to talk about. They were showing that crypto people, sex workers, and other people kind of on the fringe of things have a huge amount in common. So yeah, basically, I mean, I was like lurking in their discord for a year as a Bitcoin maximalist liking their crypto economics. So that said something, I was like, holy shit, this is brilliant on a technical level. So yeah, we're just going to go through, this kind of summarizes the slides to follow. So we're just going to go through some of the shared concerns of crypto people and sex workers. So trust but verify, which I found out is a Ronald Reagan original, very clever of the man. So we see in crypto, you know, full nodes, we depend upon people running full nodes. We depend upon the idea that this decentralized technology can be spun up from scratch by anyone and that you can verify all your own transactions. Similarly, sex workers, especially face-to-face sex workers, have to verify who they're meeting. And in fact, that's one of the biggest attack vectors. One of the worst experiences I had was I had blocked someone and he went through the agency I was working with under a completely different name and then I opened the door of a penthouse and was like, oh my god, it's that guy. So technologies that allow us to create layers of protection for ourselves, pseudonymous layers ideally, are really important to both of us. But in both cases, we're putting some trust in these systems that we're opting into. We're putting some trust into the larger cryptocurrency framework. We're putting trust into the sex worker-client relationship and that goes in both directions. Yeah, one of the other fun things about this is the cold start problem for full nodes. Like, who here has tried to sync parity or geth? And like, who here felt pain? Yeah, so a lot of times, you know, escorts will require a verification from another one. So if you've never done it before, you end up having to share like your LinkedIn or like your work email or something, it's a whole thing anyway. Similarly, and I mean, title of the talk here, self-sovereignty is core to both of these communities. Crypto, we don't want anybody to get in the way of how we transact between ourselves. And sex work, we don't want anyone to get in the way of how we use our bodies. In general, these are two of the cutting edge areas in which we're starting to see that we actually can create, we can create off-ramps from legacy systems that have restricted us and told us that whatever the dominant morality of the time is in fact the legality. Privacy, this is an interesting one because within crypto, you know, when I first got into Bitcoin, I thought it was relatively anonymous. I did not understand how easily traceable all the shit I was doing were. So we've seen like a lot of great presentations from like the Zcash community here and stuff, like ZK Snarks being integrated with Ethereum. We've got these tools. I think that in sex work, it becomes more complex because reputation is much more important within sex work and networks of being able to verify that someone's going to deliver on something, that they're going to be who they say they are. Now, it's funny because originally when we were discussing this presentation, Amin was pointing out like sex workers using privacy-enhancing technologies, proton mail, stuff like that, I was really bad at that. And when I got into crypto, I was really bad at being a responsible crypto user too. So this is actually somewhere where I think creating user-facing tools for sex workers that are comprehensible and easy to understand will be a win because like when I started out as a stripper and I would have like a beer and then start accidentally using my real name because I'm just not used to pretending like I'm Chelsea Amin made-up name, damn it. So it is something that's super important for sex work and it's something that literally can endanger your life if you're not good at it. Yeah, sex workers are like straight-up cypher punks. They've got proton mail accounts, multiple identities used to dealing with large quantities of cash. And the ever-familiar wrench problem, the XKCD representation of this is the best I know of. So it's been brought up in crypto that we create these complex systems. Oh, I don't have my ledger on me and I don't have, you know, like you can't force my private keys out of me. Well, you can hit me over the head with a wrench until I give you my, you know, digital assets. And the oldest profession in the book has this as the oldest problem in the book for it. Like that is really, and it's usually implications, like not direct extortion, not direct threats of violence, but the implication of violence is something that's constantly a threat when what you're providing as a service is literally contained upon your person. Like you're providing a service that when you get right down to it, someone who's sociopathic can be like, oh, I could just take this right now. This is a vulnerable moment for you. This is an area where in both directions, crypto and sex work can really enhance our understandings of how to move past this. So to continue on the safety concerns in crypto, we're always, you know, thinking, you know, you lose your private key, then you lose your coins, right? And in sex work and, you know, in general, STD prevention is a huge deal. If you get AIDS, it's game over, right? This is very serious. And so in both, I hope that we're able to develop infrastructure for a safer world. Personally, I don't intend to live in a world where STDs are a thing. I recently found out that you can get $100 at home 15-minute result STD kits mailed to you, and it takes like two weeks to come from Singapore. So I think that we're going to actually did that, and then I streamed myself doing it live, which would have been really awkward if I tested positive for anything. But I was lucky enough. I actually skipped two of the tests. So I did the syphilis, hep B, hep C, HAV, herpes, but the gonorrhea and chlamydia are urethral swabs. So I didn't stream that live. But I might for science, right? Yeah, I mean, we can't let our, you know, prudish nature get in the way of safety, right? So, yeah, we'll do that. The other tests were blood tests. So I pricked all five of my fingers because they were all separate blood tests. This could get much better in the next couple of years. And if it costs like $100 for a single unit that I get shipped, it could cost like $20 if I bought like $10,000. And then you could imagine that somebody, you know, comes to your house that's registered to administer this test. They come at 12.30, set up an appointment on an app, and you know your results, right, $50, something like that. And generally speaking, like, I think it's just interesting to imagine a world where STDs are not a thing. Like, what does the world look like if STDs are not a thing? Think about it. So, challenging the status quo. It's something that I know we all like to imagine ourselves to be actively doing within this field. In crypto, it started with rejecting fiat. And I see in the Ethereum scene, one of the things that pulled me slowly out of Bitcoin is that it seems like the economic use case is the only thing most of my friends in Bitcoin care about. But I see in the Ethereum space, and I've seen at DevCon, like ridiculously ambitious approaches to rejecting nation-state governance, to rejecting traditional centralized management of resources, etc. In sex work, there is an imperative to reject the status quo because the status quo rejects us. Like, we're allowed to exist on the margins, but we're afforded no protections and no sympathy when something happens to us. So, censorship resistance is at the forefront for both of these communities. And particularly, again, the finance and economic use case is where we see, like, a foothold in for literally sex workers can be blocked immediately from all traditional banks in North America, from all legacy, you know, payment processing, etc. So that's an area where even though it's kind of hard for end-users to use some of the tools being built, they are so enthusiastic from within this community because there are no other choices, really. Yeah, and to be clear, like, Spank Chain is, you know, fully compliant with all the laws in which we'll operate. So, like, if somebody was advertising sex work on Spank Chain, like, we would have to remove their account because that's going illegal, right? But, you know, you can imagine that for decentralized payment services, right, then nobody has control. We couldn't, you know, have any impact on it if we wanted to. And further, like, if we do succeed at building decentralized communications infrastructure, that would also be possible. So, there's also a case for decriminalization of sex work. It is illegal in pretty much everywhere. And in some places it is legal, but then it gets regulated, and so then the only people who can do it without getting heckled by the government are the people who get the licenses from the government. And then it's sort of a boys' club type thing anyway. And so, we've found that the criminalization of sex work means that sex workers are, you know, less likely to, for example, call the police if there's an issue because the police are less likely to side with them or might even imprison them or arrest them for doing sex work in the first place. And so, this is really unfortunate consequence of the criminalization. And so, if we're able to succeed at reducing the stigma, then you know, they'll have more of a voice and the ability to like use the services as Chelsea was saying. So, how many people here have heard of FOSTA and SESTA? Okay. So, FOSTA and SESTA, FOSTA stands for Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and SESTA stands for Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. These passed in the House of Representatives and Senate earlier this year. I think in the Senate, it was like 97 to 2. In the House, it was like 400 and like 80, set 3 to, I don't know, like 3 or something. Like, it's like literally the only thing that the Republicans and Democrats agree on that I've like at this scale. It's kind of mind-boggling. And it's partly because like while it says that fighting sex trafficking, what it's actually doing is dismantling internet freedoms. So, sites like Backpage, Reddit, even they had sections for personals and what FOSTA and SESTA does is it says that the websites are accountable for user-generated content. Right. This has been a hallmark of internet freedom for years and by targeting sex workers, they're able to make this difficult enough to oppose. Because nobody, it's really hard to stand up and be like, actually you know, I want to oppose the sex trafficking bill. Right. So, that's hard. Alright, cool. You want me to do this? So, I'll just say crypto is amazing for sex workers and I like to compare like all of the adopter performers on our platform are like bitcoiners in 2013-2014 like they want to tell their mailman about this they're so pumped they want to tell everyone but I mean there's still the Spanxchain platform is pretty easy to use I was really surprised the first time I used it how like kind of the user interface just makes sense you don't have to become a crypto expert but in general with moving crypto around with getting it into fiat to pay your bills etc. So, using UX and UI key management is a nightmare pretty much everything that the presentation before us was talking about like these are things that are going to be problems for end users and while performers have like a complete drive to be on board with this we've got to get customers who can use legacy platforms and they're not going to get their banks shut down necessarily we've got to get them on board and one of the things I've seen a number of times is why I kept my mouth shut about being a sex worker my entire time as a Bitcoin educator is the assumptions that will be made of oh you're a sex worker and that means this about you and so I think that's the main thing that like as a group we can really do is make sure that we're not making assumptions about the capability of sex workers because all of the ones that I've met in my personal experience have been fricking brilliant you know like like Brenna Sparks had the best quote on this that has been revisited a bunch from ETH Berlin, blockchain offers freedom from a world that doesn't want me like that hit me right in the heart and it was like I you know I did not come out of the closet everyone in my personal life face to face knew I was a sex worker but I kept my mouth shut about it because I was so terrified that I would be just kind of discarded based upon this one element of fiscally responsible decision throughout the period of time that I was able to make it so you know like we gotta walk the walk on inclusion inclusion shouldn't just be about quotas it should be about taking each human being who comes into this community for who they are and not making assumptions about them and my last points on this are that I have seen sex workers have some skills and brilliances that we need particularly in terms of incentive design like holy crap the sorts of creative campaigns that like camp girls will come up with I remember seeing the like oh get all of my content for October if you send 0.0666 ETH and it's all like spooky costumes and stuff like that so there's that and I find that the best understanding of consent comes from the sex work and the kink and fetish sorts of communities because once we acknowledge the transactional nature of sexuality we can have much more real and open conversations about it because this is a reality for everyone who gets objectified and it's much weirder to navigate when we pretend it doesn't happen so yeah thank you thank you so much let's do some questions we're gonna maybe two or three questions we're gonna go there then there Chelsea are you gonna dye your hair pink they all did it right after I dyed my hair dark blue so it would fall out I feel so left out because they look super dope hi thanks for your presentation I learned recently that more than 50% of sex workers are victims of human trafficking so I'm curious about your thoughts on the platform and I think it sounds really great for sex workers who want to be sex workers but most of them probably don't and so I'd be curious to hear your response to that yeah this is this is a really important piece to me and it's why I'm out as a sex worker who is a voluntary participant who had choices I feel that the I feel it's a really really difficult problem to attack especially because I experienced first hand that there are sociopaths who specifically want a non-consent experience and trafficking will never be will never be ended as long as that exists however my hope is that by reducing stigma overall and by those of us who are voluntary participants in the industry speaking on behalf of others like basically someone who has been trafficked and then feels that even if they've got a way out they'll always be judged and it's assumed that they're ruined or something like that that gives no path to exit for them so I feel it's a really difficult problem and certainly one we can't solve right now but I feel reducing stigma overall is the best thing I personally can contribute to that and it is a huge priority for me I'd also call into question the accuracy of that metric I don't think it's 50% I'd be curious to know where you got it yeah I it might be geographical do you know if that's like more centered in Canada 50% 5-0 in Canada that's interesting to me so like you know if you look at like the seeking arrangements stats there's like 1.2 million students in the United States that are part of that I doubt they're trafficked I think they're just trying to pay off student loans but like yeah we can talk more after clearly nobody here is a fan of sex trafficking right like that's not what we're trying to accomplish we're we acknowledge that sex trafficking makes this harder because the more that you know if we remove barriers to sex work we might make the lives of sex traffickers easier right if we could accomplish this and make sex trafficking harder with for example more emphasis on the identity part of it needing to like verify yourself as you know consensual and voluntary then we might be able to make headway but I have to think more about how to actually do that yeah I mean thank you very much that's very very great what you guys doing and I was opening thank you for educating us so my question is what's the biggest challenge you have today is like what's the things that if you could resolve or if it could change will make everything much easier for you so I think part of this I mean there's a lot of aspects of like what is the biggest problem right so if we're talking about in the context of like you know embracing this movement then I think it's actually a numbers game like I think the more people who have positive respectful interactions with sex workers as peers and performers as well then the more people will realize that like this is you know not this like crazy dirty terrible thing or it doesn't have to be and so as that grows and you know they're real people right and as that happens I think that everybody's minds will change so the hardest thing about getting from here to there is like we all have to change our minds about it right if we have biases if we have preconceptions and it's pretty hard to change a bunch of people's minds right like Bitcoin's been out for 10 years now and like everybody here probably thought it was a joke or a scam the first time they saw it right and if I can just add also like bringing background to the self-sovereignty thing I think the limitations of nation states trying to regulate in order to protect is actually the biggest barrier I see and that's why I jumped on board super hype is because like I come from Canada and when they criminalize living off the avails of prostitution they were trying to criminalize pimping but they made it so that that extends to a landlord who knows that they're they're renting to a prostitute can go to jail so it took all protective mechanisms out people can't be security guards for prostitutes etc so I do feel the more we can have self sovereign tools and platforms and especially online platforms where you can be your own boss you can be pseudonymous and you can make your own choices I think that's the biggest thing we've got to pursue and the regulations so far haven't actually worked the FOSTA and CESTA put more prostitutes on the street and that's what's been reported by police all over the country and they end up targeting people for facilitating prostitution for like handing out condoms at like clinics to people who are known prostitutes which doesn't make any sense we're going to do one final question let me see if there's anybody in the back that wants to just speak out thank you for the talk I was wondering over let's say over the next year how can we individually or as a community help you guys and help spank chain if we're not either users of the platform well I would say really the I'm biased but the cultural inclusivity part is huge for me because there are just kind of like immediate snap judgments of like oh what's this is this replicating you know patriarchal objectification et cetera so I would say like welcoming in by onboarding all these performers we're onboarding them to the crypto community so they're going to be around they're going to be like dropping memes and stuff so just be inclusive and recognize that like they're super brilliant honestly and like they need to be part of this and help us shape this be respectful don't make dead talker jokes stuff like that like when you talk about it talk about it as if you had any other job