[Music]
um I hope by now most of you are
familiar with what zass is you will have
used it to check in uh for this event
and I can see some of you have collected
some frog hats so you've been playing
frog crypto um so you're kind of
basically familiar with uh with what
zass is um originally I had a slide here
where I was going to talk about um you
know Zupas is a kind of uh zero
knowledge data manager for your personal
crypto graphic secrets and and and that
kind of thing but um I think it's just
easier to talk about some of the things
you can use zup pass for um so we have
here uh eth Berlin the voting for The
hackathon so you prove that you're an
attendee at eth Berlin uh and you can
anonymously vote uh for the winner of
the hackathon and that was used to award
prizes uh you used it to check in at
Devcon uh you used it to play frog
crypto and you won uh some some frog
merch uh maybe you were at devc connect
and you sent anonymous messages to the
telegram Group by proving that you are a
ticket holder and then the bot would
anonymously send your message uh if
you're at zoo connect you might have
participated in a distributed clinical
trial using uh a data Gathering device
that would then store that data and then
anonymously uh prove that you
participated in the trial when you
submit it um maybe you were at Edge as
morala and you participated in the Run
Club using straa and you were able to uh
compete anonymously with other people to
see who could get the uh could cover the
most miles um maybe you voted in the
quadratic funding round for the Zulu
community and again you you will have
used zass to prove that you are a member
of the Zulu ecosystem that You' had
attended previous events um and here at
Devcon you might have also participated
in the speaker Q&A so again you're
proving that you're an attendee of the
event and then participating by creating
questions and getting answers from the
speakers so zpass is is basically all of
these things it enables all of these
things to happen um
and I kind of want to give a bit of a
philosophical reason for why Zupas does
things the way that it does so rather
than going into how it works if you're
interested in how it works we're doing a
CLS on that tomorrow um but if if you
want to know why uh ZK and why uh
decentralized data um this is a sort of
philosophical
background so there's this concept um
called conviviality and conviviality
means living together from the Latin you
know con and VV means together living
and it kind of connotes this idea that
we create our our our lives together we
we collaborate in creating the meanings
uh that our lives are made up from and
this book uh by aan ilich I think
written in the 70s um applies this view
to technology so he he has this idea of
tools for
conviviality where a convivial tool is
is something where the user of that tool
is empowered to find their own use for
it the tool doesn't tell them what to do
it gives them options and they figure
out about what those options mean and
how they want to uh how they want to
make use of
them so we regard Zupas as being in that
sense a tool for conviviality it's a
tool that doesn't tell you who you are
or what it means to be a person it's a
tool that lets you collect data and
decide within your community what that
data
means so there's a bunch of philosophers
uh throughout history who've thought
about this stuff um one of two of my
favorites are alist McIntyre and Michael
walzer um McIntyre thought about this
question uh he wrote a book called who's
Justice which rationality which again
was on this question of meanings like
what does it mean for something who gets
to decide the rules uh of what things
mean and what actions are possible what
what exists what's real um and his view
was that different Traditions do this in
a way that is kind of in sort of
incommensurable meaning that you can't
have one system that incorporates all
Traditions every tradition has its own
notion of what constitutes truth
goodness Beauty and they need to find
their own representations for those
things um similarly in spheres of
Justice Michael walzer uh he makes this
defense of pluralism and equality um and
he's arguing against a view of kind of
egalitarianism where what's fair is that
everybody has the same thing and instead
he's saying like what's fair is that uh
everybody is part of a community that
gets to determine its own sense of
what's valuable and its own sense of
what's good so instead of being put in a
single Global hierarchy you have many
different hierarchies and people get to
have a leading role in their in their
own kind of smaller
community and then finally uh just two
more references uh so one is the Society
of the spectacle by G Bard uh written in
the 60s um and he talked a lot about
this concept of order givers and Order
takers and how Society is divided into
people who tell other people what to do
and then people who have to do what
they're told um so the people at the
bottom take orders and and and
they receive not just orders not just
being told where to go and what to do
but they receive an order they receive a
system they receive a whole idea about
who they are and what their role in
society is that is given to them is not
something that they develop for
themselves um so he was very much in
favor of the idea of people creating and
co-creating U that that sense of meaning
um from from their own
interactions um and another very recent
book came out in the last year called
the the ordinal Society by Maran fard
and Kieran Healey um they kind of apply
that sort of analysis to computers and
they look at the ways in which computer
systems provide order they they they
take the chaos of of life and they
produce numbers and facts and figures
and databases that kind of we are we use
to understand what's going on around us
um in fact um I was going to ask if we
have any french speakers here um because
I in French the word for computer is
ordinator uh which means it it it gives
order it ordains things in in pretty
much the same way that God ordains
things um and so that idea that that
something being in the computer makes it
real that idea that the computer says
what is real or says what should happen
um is kind of built right into the word
at least in French um so so how do we
live in a world where we can co-create
these um these these orders ourselves
um so naturally this is where I
transition into talking about Zupas
again um so we have these three things
um that are kind of new and are kind of
interesting uh called pod GPC and zapi
um there's a QR code for the the
documentation site there um and pod
stands for provable object data uh so
it's a basically a data format a very
flexible data format GPC stands for
general purpose circuits um which is a
flexible system for making ZK proofs and
zapi is a new thing that we've recently
built U that enables you embed Zupas
functionality directly into your own
apps um so pod lets you create your own
data structures you know if we think of
of an order sort of a system of of
understanding as being made up of
structure you know ontology what's real
and logic that tells you what you can do
with those things pod lets you define
the structure so here we're defining a
frog if you've played frog crypto you've
interacted with this structure um and it
it tells you what's real in the world of
frogs it tells you what exists um but
you can create these yourselves so you
can issue your own frogs um you can
extend this you can add a frog that has
some extra attribute that other frogs
don't have um you can uh verify the
signatures on frogs so anybody can issue
them and verify you know have a list of
maybe valid issuers that they would
accept as as real so it's a very it's a
very flexible thing that is in under
your control rather than being issued by
a central
Authority and then GPC lets you create
your own logic and this is where things
start to get interesting because the
question of what does it mean to have a
frog is determined by what you can do
with it and what you can do with it in
at least in zass is determine what by
what kind of proofs you can make so if I
can prove that I have a frog of a
particular type maybe in some space in
some community that allows me to do
something if I can prove that I have
three frogs maybe that proves something
else if I can prove I have a frog and a
ticket maybe that has a different
meaning and these are kind of contrived
examples but you could imagine doing
this with any kind of data typee you
like again with pod you can make your
own data um so you can kind of reinvent
this system however you like and then
zapi lets you embed this directly into
web applications so this is zero knowled
this is cryptographic data and zero
knowledge proofs directly in the browser
in something that looks like a basic
standard ordinary web app again you've
probably already interacted with some of
them while you were here so frog crypto
uh would be one miacat would be another
so if you've submitted uh any q&as
during any of the talks uh you will have
interacted with an app that does this
and it it uses pods it uses GPC proofs
uh and it it also gives you pods back um
for for participating in
that um there's a kind of cool one there
shulan engineering I think is is new so
that's again it's a community project uh
I think that came out today which lets
you take two frogs extract Venom from
them and create a psychedelic substance
so again the meaning of of these things
is in the hands of the developers it's
in the hands of the communities that
that want to kind of figure out what we
can do with this stuff for
themselves um so thank you very much uh
for listening me to me ramble about
philosophy uh as say if you want to
learn more about how this stuff works on
a technical level we have a CLS tomorrow
uh be very happy to see all of you there
um we also have documentation website
which has a link to a telegram group if
you want to come and talk to us in the
telegram group uh please do thank you
very much thank you rob ni