Rather than bend to knee to Donald Trump, the goal of the cypherpunk movement is to abolish the state in order to maximize human freedom via privacy-enhancing decentralized technologie. After reviewing the history of this deviant group of programmers in the 1980s, what philosophical and technical lessons do the cypherpunks hold for Ethereum today? Censorship-resistant digital cash was only one the start, and the missing parts of their legacy: mixnets and anonymous credentials for identity.

Main Stage

CEO and co-founder of Nym Technologies, a startup building a decentralized mixnet to end mass surveillance. Formerly a research Scientist at MIT and Inria de Paris, where I led the standardization of the Web Cryptography API across all browsers. Postdoctoral studies under Bernard Stiegler in the philosophy of technology. Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh and also teaches cryptocurrency at the American University of Beirut.

Harry Halpin

Iness Ben Guirat is a privacy researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She did her PhD at COSIC, KU Leuven, under the supervision of Prof. Claudia Diaz on Privacy with a specific focus on mixnets 

Iness has a keen interest in exploring the intersection of technology, privacy and their broader impact on society.

Iness Ben Guirat

Max is Senior Developer Relations at Nym Technologies, building developer tooling, SDKs, and example projects for developers who wish to build the new internet free from mass surveillance. Prior to joining Nym he was a Smart Contract developer and artist with an academic background in Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of Technology.