Artificial Interruption

by Alexander Urbelis (alex@urbel.is)

Minding the Decentralized Gap

When I look at a mess of tangled wires, something deep within me recoils.  The more critical the piece of hardware or infrastructure to which those tangled wires relate, the more acutely I feel that dread.  I experienced this sense of disquietude rather regularly during my recent trip to Bangkok for the Ethereum Developers Conference (Devcon) whenever I ventured outside.  Seemingly every street post hosted swelling ganglia of black wires, some coiled, some loose, others criss-crossing in random directions.  But despite the massive disorder, everything seemed to work just fine.  That chaotic cabling enabled a sprawling and ever-changing city, brimming with vitality and history, to host over 12,000 members of the Ethereum ecosystem: builders and hackers whose divergent interests and goals intersected just as much as the tangled wires over which their packets traveled.  And despite never having been to Bangkok before, all the while, I had a sense of nostalgia - Devcon reminded me of the first HOPE conference in 1994.

That nostalgia was coupled with optimism for the future, and a nagging feeling that there was a divide that must be bridged, a significant gap between the hacker and cybersecurity subcultures, on the one hand, and that of the Ethereum and wider blockchain ecosystems, on the other.  And to be fair, I think that a great deal of the work to bridge this gap falls onto the hacker side of the subculture.  There is a feeling that crypto bros, scammers, and those all too taken with lavish lifestyles are running rampant within cryptocurrency spheres and that the blockchain industry itself is tainted.  Hacker conferences have been loath to accept blockchain-related submissions and the What Hackers Yearn (WHY2025) conference in the Netherlands deliberately dissuades participants from proposing blockchain talks.  That is wrong, outdated, and must be corrected.

Certainly, the Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) of the days of 2016 and thereabouts, and the greed and scams that went with that frenzy, have subsided.  And while the odd crypto bro may be inevitable in a market that has assets whose prices are steadily rising, that mentality is an outlier and will continue to grow rarer still with infrastructure being built that will lower network gas fees, thus flat-lining the profits of these people who are, even in the Ethereum community, viewed as degenerate gamblers, or "degens."  Degens aside, there are deep and intertwined roots of both subcultures, but somehow they've grown far apart.

Both cultures rose out of the tech at issue during the crypto wars of the 1990s, when crypto still referred to cryptography as opposed to cryptocurrency.  Recall the skirmishes of Phil Zimmerman, creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), with the federal government.  At the time, cryptographic systems that used keys that were longer than 40 bits were considered munitions for purposes of U.S. export regulations, and because PGP encrypted data with keys no shorter than 128 bits, Zimmerman was the target of a long-ranging criminal investigation.

Recall the battle over the Clipper Chip in 1994, a Chiclet-sized bit of hardware that would have both enabled encrypted communications over telephone lines and via electronic communications, but which would have been backdoored by way of a key escrow for the U.S. government.  Dubbed the first "holy war of the information highway" by The New York Times, I remember so vividly being a 15-year-old hacker listening to discussions on Off The Hook about the civil liberties implications of this key escrow system, conversations that changed the trajectory of my life.

The hacker culture fought hard and won these battles.  Asymmetric public-key cryptography is now ubiquitous and secure.  It's used in SSL certificates to secure communications between a client and a server from the prying eyes of ISPs and governments; it undergirds highly popular messaging applications like Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram; and as key pairs used to verify transactions, establish one's identity, and secure accounts, it is the very same technology on which Ethereum is built.

In the three decades since these battles were fought, tech empires have risen but barely fallen.  Surveillance capitalism has been major tech companies' financial model of choice since at least the days of when the first Gmail account was given away.  That trade of an email address and cloud-based storage in exchange for access to our private communications set the stage for the last 20 years of tech offerings where the user was the commodity with little to no power over what happened to personal data.  Google, Alphabet, Facebook, Meta, Twitter, X, et alia, have all become gigantic advertising engines propelled by the massive profits made by surveilling our online activities, associations, and communications.

The click-through terms of service and terms of use required to engage on these platforms are both Faustian in nature and yet also bog standard.  As hackers and builders, we know there are better ways, we've yearned for privacy-preserving tech and infrastructure that does not monetize us as commodities, i.e., archives our data to be bought and sold, or - as is the common wording in privacy policies - "shared with third-party affiliates."

This is where we overlap with the Ethereum subculture, and what is being built right now is Internet infrastructure with people, privacy, and security - not data collection and profit - as its core values.  In short, the cypherpunk ideals of the 1990s hacker culture are alive and well and thriving within the Ethereum ecosystem.

This is a community that:

Strives for open, global, and permissionless participation.  Access for all has long been a tenet of hacker culture.  These roots can even be traced back to the days of phone phreaking as a means by which communication and collaboration were achieved.

Works towards decentralization of resources to minimize reliance on and power of single entities.  Fighting against the centralization of power, be it of a government or corporation, has been part of our hacker culture's past and our plans for the future.

Creates censorship-resistant technologies.  Here too we have historical alignment: as hackers, we have sought to develop tools and tech that prevents centralized actors from monitoring and repressing our online activities.  One need only think about the creative manners by which hackers have evaded the Great Firewall of China, to building systems such as Tor, to the creation of SecureDrop for the protection of both investigative journalists and sources.

Protects and promotes auditability by permitting anyone to examine and validate the operations of an application and its logic.  This is tantamount to the open-source movement within hacker culture, by which security is not achieved through obscurity but by full transparency.

Focuses on building tools that are public goods, such as the Ethereum Name Service.  Harkening back to the days of shareware and the emphasis on open-source projects within hacker culture, there is philosophical alignment here too.

Promotes cooperation rather than competition.  Much the same way that hackers cannot help but share information about vulnerabilities and techniques, this is a mindset that is common to both the hacker and Ethereum culture.

These ideals, by the way, were found in a concentric circle in the inside of a piece of Devcon swag that I brought back from Bangkok, and which I subsequently found out were referenced within a recent blog post of Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum's luminaries and founders.

Aside from these ideological commonalities, wondering around the massive, seemingly never-ending halls of the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center that housed Devcon, I found there were social, visual, and cultural similarities to hacker culture as well.  The ever-present cadre of black t-shirts, the wildly and proudly diverse attendees, the impromptu teaching sessions about some arcane technical topic, the ingestion of massive amounts of caffeine, the emphasis on building and collaborating, and the general vibe and spirit of the place had hacker conference written all over it.  If you snapped a photo of a random hallway and asked me to guess from what conference it was taken, I would have had to say HOPE or DEFCON.

More to the point, the builders and architects of this new world call themselves hackers, modeled after the true etymology of the term denoting a programmer who wrote innovative code.  Within Devcon, there was a hacktivism center, a place to chill out called the Hackers Cove and - truly bridging this gap between cultures and personalities - a mailbox by which attendees could send mail directly to Virgil Griffith, an intellectual powerhouse whom we're proud to call one of our own, but who also squarely belongs to the Ethereum community.

Indeed, my entre into this world of decentralization and Ethereum was through Virgil.  As I learned about the tech that underlies blockchain - the sequencers, the validators, the op codes, etc. - more nostalgia crept in. I was reminded of how I felt when I was first learning DOS and how to issue commands that a computer would understand.  In many ways, it is still very much early days for the world of Web3 and the Ethereum ecosystem, and it feels like the heady era of the Internet in the 1990s, before commercialization and centralization corrupted it, when cross-border networking itself held the promise of equality and transparency for all.

Now the next generation of the Internet is being built.  We all know the platitude that hindsight is 20/20.  We have that hindsight now.  We know what went wrong.  With the very same tech for which our subculture fought so valiantly, we (not the platforms) can take back control of our identities and dictate who, when, and how our data is shared.

If you believe that it is about time that our terms of use (not that of the platforms) should control; if you believe that we (not platforms) should own our data; if you believe in privacy and the sovereignty of the individual; if you believe that we own ourselves and that the technology that we build should reflect our values and our belief system, then I exhort you to reconsider the world of Ethereum, Web3, and blockchain.  A new Internet is being built and the architects of that world not only share our hacker values and roots, but desperately need and value our collaboration.

Like the wires in Bangkok, this ecosystem is expansive, complicated - and candidly a bit of a mess - but it's a hell of a lot of fun, and what's being built right now will alter the course of history.