Improving SimpleX w/ Evgeny from SimpleX and Daniel Keller from Flux

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Se (00:04):
Well, welcome onto the show, Dan and Evgeny.
I know Evgeny, I've had you on now a coupleyears ago, it's been a while, so we've got a
lot of things to catch up on.
But I wanted to kick it off just by giving youa chance to reintroduce yourselves to the
guests.
Evgeny and then Dan first time on the show.
So I'm excited to learn a little bit more, alittle bit more about you.
So maybe Evgenie, you jump in, quick intro andthen we'll hear a little bit more from Dan.

(00:27):
Hello, I'm Evgeny, the founder ofSimplex Chat.
And Seth indeed recorded a fantastic interviewtwo years ago that helped us a lot.
And we'll talk about what changed and whatnot.

Seth For Privacy (00:42):
Awesome.
Then how about you, Dan?
Welcome onto the show.

D (00:45):
Hey, thanks for having me on.
I do appreciate it, man.
First time being here, many time fans, sopretty cool to actually be sitting down here
and chatting with you.
So I'm pretty happy about that.
I am the co founder of Flux.
Flux is the world's largest decentralizedcompute network.
The easiest way for everybody to think aboutit is anything you can do on AWS or Azure, you

(01:08):
can do it on Flux, but you can do itcompletely decentralized.
So you think of Flux as being Bitcoin, asbitcoin is to finance, we are to data hosting
and AI and so on and so forth.
So everything we do is open source.
And our.
One of our core tenets obviously is ourprivacy.

(01:28):
So it's, it's very poetic.
You're at the opt out.
We believe everybody should be able to opt outin every way.
Right.
Like privacy is massive tenet of human, humanrights.
So I am a cypher punk at heart.
I have a massive seven foot, the Cypherpunkmanifesto hanging in my office because it

(01:52):
means a lot to me.
And Flux is really about building technologyand around technologies that understand that
private centric approach.
And that's how we found Simplex man.
Like it was a super fit.

Seth For (02:06):
Yeah, it seems like a fantastic crossover because I think a lot of
what I talked about with Evgeny on the lastepisode where we kind of intro Simplex to our
listeners was this idea of data sovereigntyand how important you actually having control
of your data is to privacy.
That it's a, it's a key piece there.
And so something like Flux that allows you tohost and store data in a decentralized and
privacy preserving way seems like a, a perfectfit there.

(02:32):
So I'm, I'm definitely excited to learn moreabout that.
And it seems like it's been a good collabbetween Simplex and Flux.
But before we dive too much into that collab,I do want to just give you Evgenie a chance to
update us.
I mean it's.
It's been two years.
Y'all are working like crazy, shipping likecrazy at Simplex.
There's been so much change in the app overthose years as I've been using it.

(02:54):
And so I'd love to hear from you kind of whatare the biggest changes or improvements that
you kind of want to highlight over the lasttwo years?
I know there's probably too much to get intoin one podcast, but what are the big
highlights for you to get people up to speedif maybe they haven't used Simplex since the
last episode?
Right. So the whole Simplex networkwas built on the idea that people can

(03:17):
communicate without having any kind ofidentity.
And it's all built on the idea of anonymousconnections.
And that obviously creates lots of questionshow we deliver some basic things.
And we did in Zito last two years ago when wespoke, we literally had some basic messages
with replies and files were working horriblyand everything was working quite badly and

(03:39):
only enthusiasts were surviving it.
And we probably had more than 20 times lessusers using the network than we have now, if
not more than that.
And over these two years we added lots ofbasic chat functionalities that people expect
in a communication app without any compromiseto privacy.
And we added a very decent support for sendsin files.

(04:02):
So files became from completely unusable twoyears ago to very usable right now.
And with regards to privacy and security ofthe network, the two biggest changes that we
did was as in quantum resistant encryption,it's currently only available in direct

(04:23):
messages groups or small groups will be addedthis year.
And we edited in a way that's more secure thanthe way signals did at what imessage
advertises as like level three when every timethe message direction changes, the key rotate.
And that's really cool.

(04:43):
We have a blog post that explains how end toend encryption works and how it protects from
various sources of attack.
And we really tried designing end to endencryption in the messaging network to tick
all the boxes and provide mitigations againstall possible attacks on the end to end
encryption.
We may probably share this link somewhere nextto the podcast.

(05:06):
And another big thing and probably number onesource of criticism was simple access network
is extremely decentralized and people choosewhich servers they use to receive messages.
And it means that if I connect directly toyour server Seth then it means that your
server will see my IP address and that's kindof suboptimal.
And it was original design of the Simplexnetwork to let people choose the servers they

(05:29):
use.
To some extent it's similar to many othercommunication network design and users
obviously didn't like it because I can choosemy server, which means that I can know your IP
address.
So we added a second layer in message routingwhich was a major technological change to the
network.
We managed to roll out with zero disruption tothe users.
And we are currently at a point that like bydefault it's enabled for all users in all

(05:52):
cases.
Every time the message is sent it traversestwo servers and that protects senders of the
messages from recipients servers can beingable to observe their IP address.
And obviously the biggest like thing thathappened end of last year we found Flux and

(06:14):
ourselves, we found each other and we now haveFlux as a second pre configured operator in
the app.
So when people install the app they can chooseto use either of our servers or both of our
servers, which is even more cool because whenpeople want to protect their IP addresses,
like let's say if message traverses twoservers but both servers are controlled by the

(06:37):
same entity, then obviously those entity cansomehow compromise the security of this
connection.
And if there's two entities and they don'texchange data, we don't have access to Flux's
servers.
Flux doesn't have access to our servers.
So which means that it becomes much morecomplex and much less likely to compromise the
security of connection.

(06:58):
And now people can choose to use servers oftwo different operators inside a single op.
Like, like nowhere else really.
Maybe, maybe like in nostr, but in Nostr itexists for different reasons.

Seth For P (07:11):
Yeah, very different reasons.
And not, not privacy preserving at all bydefault, unfortunately.
Yeah, I think there's, there's two things Iwant to drill down in there before we jump
into the Flux thing.
I think the, the quantum resistant encryptionwas a really big step forward.
Especially as it seems like over the last sixmonths there's been big a big jump in the

(07:31):
quantum computing space.
Nothing still that can practically attackencryption.
Nothing still that can practically breaknormal encryption mechanisms.
But we're seeing more and more progress thatmakes it seem like quantum computers are
actually going to be a reality.
And I know a lot of experts within the quantumcomputing space are starting to say like hey
this is real, it's not just theoretical andit's getting closer and why that matters with

(07:54):
messaging, I think just to touch on kind ofthe deeper subject is if you send messages and
there's some entity in between that'sintercepting those messages and just storing
them, even if they can't decrypt them, even ifthey can't view anything about them, they
could store them forever.
And then if quantum computers do become areality, if that encryption method is not
quantum resistant, then they could triviallybreak those messages and have access to all of

(08:17):
that in the future.
And that's where having quantum resistantencryption long before quantum computers are
actually viable is a huge improvement toensure that the, the security of your messages
long term exists, even in the case of anadversary intercepting all those messages and
storing them for decryption at some latertime.
So I think that is a huge step forward.
I'll definitely add the link in the show notesbecause y'all went really in depth into what

(08:38):
the approach being taken there is.
And so I think it's a, it's a great read forour listeners.
But the second one, obviously, and I'll throwthis one over to Dan.
I know that y'all have announced thispartnership where there's a preset list of
servers both from Simplex, as there alwayswas, and now from Flux.
And that's a huge step forward because nowyou.

(08:58):
You can make sure that all of your connectionsare not going just to Simplex.
There's one less trust piece in there, andit's a great way to distribute that trust
across more operators.
So what does that mean kind of for the enduser when it comes to reliability or privacy?
And then what made you want to jump in on thiseffort, Dan?
Maybe start with what you wanted to jump in onhere, why you saw this fit between Flux and

(09:22):
Simplex being powerful, then maybe Evgeny candive into a little bit of what this actually
looks like for end users.
No, I had been chasing Giddy for a littlewhile and talking back and forth with him
because simply, any project that works onprivacy as its core tenant is its core focus.
And especially the things that went down withTelegram, I feel like I need to be supporting

(09:45):
and a part of.
And we should all feel like that becauseprivacy is a human right.
So I feel like we were at the right point inbuilding our platform out.
You know, the, the biggest thing when, whenGideon and I sat down and talked about it was
we had to explain that we're not a cryptoproject.
And that's a big thing for people.

(10:05):
We're a blockchain project that happens to.
You have a crypto as well.
We don't put a lot of focus on, on the, thecrypto side of the world.
We put it on the blockchain side of the world.
So we work, we look for solid partnerships anduse cases which will extend and advance
humanity.
And they're the ones we want to get behindimmediately.
Now the nice thing about it is we have amassive arsenal of compute resources behind

(10:29):
our back.
We are the largest decentralized computenetwork in the world, hands down, not even
close to anyone else.
We have 13,000 decentralized systemsadministrators, node operators all around the
world which run enterprise grade.
So if you, what you're running in a datacenter is what they're running.
And it could run in a data center, it couldrun in their house, it could run in a barn, it
could run anywhere, right?

(10:52):
That's the glory of decentralization is, ishey, I have a Raspberry PI that runs on Flux,
which is pretty awesome.
So we wanted to make it highly available,highly scalable, highly on demand, cheaper,
better, faster, stronger.
And that's exactly what we did with Flux.
So whether it's AI or whether it's you know,Simplex or another, another product, you can

(11:14):
simply deploy it on Flux.
We, you know, Amazon building aws, you know,they didn't build AWS as a business model.
They built a delivery model framework.
So they built a framework to delivereverything and they had it to have compute
resources to support those deliverables.

(11:36):
And when they did, they said, hey, we couldsell this.
Now it's 60% of their revenue, right?
So it's extortion what these guys arecharging.
They squash or quash anyone that goes againstthem.
The nice thing about Flux is once it'sdeployed on Flux, it's forever there.
It is built on the blockchain.
We're an eight year old product that's been upand running for eight years.

(11:59):
We've had no downtime.
So how many can AWS claim that the blockchainhas helped really solidify us as a consistent
game player against some of these big players.
And we need as a community to take to heart wehave to start doing our marching orders so
that we're going against these big box massiveretailers that will extrapolate your data and

(12:24):
they will utilize it and you are nothing morethan a data mine to them.
That's all.
And you know, with products like Flux andSimplex and other ones that are out there, you
know, we're, I think we're starting to finallyput some focus back, back on, you know, for
the people, by the people that's what it comesdown to.

Se (12:43):
Yeah, let's, let's dive in a little bit more actually into how Flux works,
because I think one of the things that'simportant when you're using another server.
So like we, we've been using simplex servershosted by the Simplex team, so we know that's
a trusted entity.
But obviously there are advantages to havingsimplex servers run by other entities.
So when a simplex server is actually runningon the Flux network, what does that actually

(13:06):
look like?
Because you said it's decentralized and thatthere's like 13,000 node operators out there,
does that mean that anyone can join the Fluxnetwork?
And the compute load that I put out there,like running a simplex server could be running
on anyone's server.
What kind of visibility do they have intowhat's running there?
Like, I think there's a lot to kind of unpackhere.

(13:28):
Yeah, I wanted to comment on that.
I think it's probably fair to say we are notthat advanced.
We discussed it and one thing that's currentlylacking in simplex network design is
redundancy.
Right.
And highly decentralized future of both Fluxand Simplex network require server redundancy

(13:49):
and we didn't develop it yet.
We have plans to massively improve how groupswork and the redundancy is also in the
roadmap.
But right now we're using the centralizedinfrastructure that Flux itself controls as a
proof of concept and we really looking forwardwhen we can use decentralized Flux network

(14:09):
when the capacity is more elastic and we can.
So I hope it makes sense.
Right.
So right now we have a small list of preconfigured servers that cope with traffic
quite well if people use them.
And that kind of provides privacy protectionsfor the end users who can use both ours and

(14:30):
Flex servers.
And we certainly did discuss that.
We do want to use decentralized infrastructurethat Flux has and it would dramatically lower
the costs and improves reliability as well andscalability.

Seth (14:44):
Okay, so to clarify right now the simplex servers run by Flux are run on
centralized architecture with the long termgoal being that they run on the decentralized
Flux network.
Yeah, sometimes you got to crawl beforeyou run.
And one of the things we learned very early inour relationship as we started doing our
discovery is that a lot of, you know, thething about disruptive technology is this, you

(15:07):
got to rebuild everything.
It isn't just lift and shift.
Right.
So if it worked in web two, it's not alwaysgoing to work in web three.
And as a matter of Fact, something similar sosimplistic as two factor authentication, who's
controlled by a third party entity that thatdoesn't work right.
So you have to build these products out.
So we've already kind of built out our MVP andwith arcane coming on Flux, which is our,

(15:27):
basically our full operating system, which istrue end to end encryption, it, this will just
roll naturally right into that.
So our goal is to make this as private and asdecentralized as humanly possible.
I think that that's, that's, that's theultimate goal, and I think guinea would agree
with that, is to, to get it in as manypeople's hands as humanly possible and let

(15:52):
them control the network as well.
Because it's not all about, you know,centralized entities that are, that are going
to build these products out.
We want the community involved with that sothat, that means deploying a server on Flux is
going to be huge.
And you know, we're going to continue to keepbuilding the.
And as guinea said, redundancy obviously is abig thing that we have to get in play.

(16:14):
So we're taking the experience that we learnedfrom and I can't speak for Giddy, I can speak
for MUS from, from, from the Telegram debacle.
And we're looking at that and we're workingfrom back to forward.
We're looking at where is our exposure, how dowe, how do we keep privacy and anonymity even,
you know, as our four, as our forethought.

(16:37):
So I think it's good with time, I think you'regoing to see this thing be completely and
totally decentralized, obviously with someredundancy.
Back over to Web2, I mean, because I'm not amaximalist, I don't think everything is Web
three and only Web three.
I think there are some beneficial pieces toWeb two for particular applications.
This isn't one that I think falls into thatcategory.

(16:59):
I think the sooner we get it to adecentralized platform where it's not
controlled by platforms that can basicallycensor you and remove your application if they
don't like you, I think that needs to comesooner than later and I think Giddy would
agree with that.
And that definitely is on both of our roadmaps100%.
Then we talking about Telegram, weobserved an attempt of several Telegram

(17:24):
communities to migrate and they all failed atthe current stage.
Not all.
Some of them, many of them failed becauseObviously there are 10,000, 100,000 people
Telegram communities and architecture for thegroups we have right now simply doesn't
support the groups of this size.

(17:44):
And that's our number one priority.
That's what the whole team is working on rightnow to make groups of this size work on
Simplex Network.
It took us, I should say, completely bysurprise some time ago that people actually
want to have public groups.
But if you think about it, privacy iscritically important for freedom of speech,

(18:05):
right?
We cannot really have freedom of speechwithout privacy and anonymity.
Because whatever people learned, right,whatever they say online, it can come back to
them.
It can come with some criticism, it can comewith them losing their job.

(18:27):
They may not say anything illegal, but they'veseen plenty.
A very large number of people losing theirjobs, losing their finances simply for
expressing their opinions online.
And it's completely unacceptable.
That's ultimate attack on freedom of speech.
We've seen, for example, just a couple daysago, some European politicians saying that,
oh, we need to have mandatory IDs forparticipating in social media.

(18:48):
This is ridiculous, right?
We cannot really afford anything like that tohappen.
It would be the end of freedom of speech.
We posted a tweet with a quote.
Oscar Wilde said, if you want the man to saythe truth, give them a mosque.
And then you will learn what people actuallythink.
So that's critically important.
And the problem with freedom of speech andcensorship is that what we learned over time,

(19:11):
that neither centralized models nor federatedmodels like Matrix or Mastodon, they actually
can protect freedom of speech.
Because some people may think that, okay, ifyou have federated model like Mastodon, then
you are more protected and you can move toanother server.
But that's not how it works actually in manyaspects, the censorship on federated platforms

(19:33):
becomes stronger than on centralized platformbecause for something to be universally
accessible now all operators to have to agreethat it's a good thing, right?
Which is horrible, right?
It's like for something to be accessible onTwitter, only Elon Musk has to agree it's a
good thing, right?
If for something to be accessible on Telegram,then Telegram owners have to agree on that.

(19:54):
But on Mastodon, if I as a server operatordecide that I don't like the policies of the
server, I can de federate it, right?
And I can like stop exchanging content withit.
It massively disrupts the network.
So the model for decentralization that wehave, which we are going to be building in
Simple X network is completely opposite.
It's extreme decentralization when forsomething to be existing as a communication

(20:14):
space, at least one operator has to agree withthat.
And for something to be CENSORED all operatorswould need to want to censor it, which is
completely opposite, which is closer to themodel of community.
Now it's on Twitter, so it's effectively acommunity vote.

(20:35):
Okay, this is a good thing.
We want to have it.
Yes, some operators may not like it, whichmeans they won't have this traffic.
But as long as some operators believe it'sacceptable wherever they are and it's legal
and, and good, then it will exist.
So we really believe and primary motivationfor building Simplex Network was freedom of

(20:55):
speech.
And I see privacy and freedom of speech as twosides of the same coin when one is not
possible without another.

Dan (21:02):
Yeah, very interlocking.
You know, privacy and freedom of speech, theygo hand in hand, I think.
And that, and that's probably, you know, ifyou're going to be in the space that you're
going to be building technology, disruptivetechnology like this, you have to have those
as your core tenants.
You know, you're, it's, it's fundamental andyou have to really think about it.
And that means sometimes you really got to gooff into the weeds because there's no, there's

(21:27):
no playbook that's written for this, you know,and as a matter of fact, you know, when
technology, you know, when the Internet firststarted, people started to focus on some
privacy and bringing things in that went bythe wayside once they figured out that we were
a data goldmind.
Right.
So now we're working against everything that'salready been for the past 15, 20 years been
built to push centralization.

(21:50):
Right.
People don't want to take care of their ownassets until they have to.
And I think that's where we're at now.
And I think that's what, you know,cryptocurrencies has brought into the parade.
People don't want to think about their privacytill it's taken away.
Right.
Till you see a situation like, you know, whathappened with Telegram and so on and so forth,
forth.
So I think, you know, as technology continuesto iterate, we're going to go back to the old

(22:16):
thought process where you think, how do wemake it decentralized, how do we make it
private, how do we make it scalable and how dowe, how do we get this into the hands of the
people?
And I think that's really what, you know,supplex and, and Flux relationship is starting
to do.
It's starting to get that into the hands ofthe people.
100 Dan, I think you're explaining itbetter than me, and I kind Of.

(22:38):
I'm certainly socially awkward to some extent,and I really can't explain to what extent.
I appreciate.
Yeah, but you're all.
You're also a **** genius, so I will takethat.
I could be a little bit better with words, butI wish I could code like you, brother.

Evgeny (22:54):
Coding is hard indeed.
It's. It's a lot of work.
And you're absolutely right that we have torebuild a lot of technology, ground up.
And I think very few of our users understandthe level of complexity and immensity of the
task.
When we started it, like, three years ago, Ilooked to the future being super scared
because what we built by now seemed immenseand impossible.

(23:16):
Right.
I'm looking to the future even more scared nowbecause the future seems even better.

Dan (23:21):
That was terrifying.
Isn't it?
But here's the thing.
Guinea, though, and the thing that I thinkreally goes well for all of us is the fact
that we know that we're in an uphill battle.
You know, we're going against trillions andtrillions and trillions and trillions of
dollars of technology that's been built overthe past, you know, 20 plus years.
So. And here we are, bootstrap a couple guysthat are working on, you know, building

(23:44):
something to dethrone them.
That's what excites me.
Every freaking morning I get up and I thinkabout that.
Because you can do it.
Government code.
That.
That is where we're at, man.
Like, and that really gets me excited.
That's what drives me, for sure.

Seth (23:59):
Yeah. And it's amazing to see that things like the.
The telegram incident.
The telegram one is such a funny red pill,because nothing changed.
There was no. There was no difference the dayPavel Durov was arrested versus the day
before.
Technically, Telegram was always open.
Group chats were always censorable.
User ip.
All of that was already always revealed toTelegram, but it was just that moment where

(24:20):
people realized, hey, there's actuallydownsides.
There's actually downsides.

Da (24:27):
They're like, wait a minute.
Yeah, yeah.
What we were being told is, well, it's.
You know, I always say there's two forms ofadoption.
There's by attrition, which is a naturalprogress of technology, and by.
By incident.
So something that's happened that made us allof a sudden consciously aware.
Twitter files, for example, was a big one,right?

(24:49):
So people knew what the government was doing,but sometimes, out of sight, out of mind, when
they actually saw the magnitude of what theywere doing, it was jaw dropping, you know, and
people were like, I can't Even believe that.
And it really was for the election, the recentelection, I think it was the number one
driving piece is people want freedom ofspeech, they want privacy, they don't want to

(25:13):
be told what to do by the government.
You know, and I think that, you know, we areevangelists of that.
We need to get out there and get thetechnology.
And here's the other thing too, which reallyis, is somewhat hard, is building these
technologies so they look and they feel likewhat Web2 was in a new Web3 world because, you
know, they've spent billions of dollars onuser interfaces, real nice and sexy and

(25:38):
packaged.
They, you know, it's, it's the drug dealereffect.
You know, your bank gets you in there, theygive you a nice application so you could do
web banking.
You never have to worry about your money, it'salways there.
But guess what, it's not your money.
It's not your money, you know, and it's thesame way with your data.
And by the way, your data is just as valuable.
There's a there, you know, you should be ableto be incentivized even for the data you're

(26:01):
providing.
You should be able to opt out by default.
Like you should not be in a program.
AI is the next big thing, you know, as itcontinues to be a data magnet.
So I think the one advantage that we have isthat we know that they're going to continue to
keep pivoting the dis.
They want to disrupt the disruptors because wecame to disrupt them and now they want to

(26:25):
disrupt us.
You see this back and forth and I think, butwe're, we are much more nimble and much more
flexible and you know, go back to thatcypherpunk manifesto.
I think those guys would be real happy to seewhere we're at right now.
You know, I think that we've picked up thebattle and ran with it and you know, I'd love

(26:48):
to see every application that we're usingprivate and decentralized.

Seth For Priv (26:52):
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's one of the things that's sorefreshing about actually building things in
the space is that when people wake up, whenthey have these incidents that show people
that the things they've been using, even ifthey haven't changed, have been broken all
along.
And that the benefits that they've beenreaping by selling their data have
consequences.
And so it's beautiful that we're actually ableto build this stuff, improve it.

(27:15):
And that's why I'm so excited about thingslike Simplex improving about Things like Flux
providing services to Simplex because it meansthat when those people wake up, they have
tools that they can actually turn to that areactually useful, that are intuitive, that are
easy to use, and that makes that transitionactually happen instead of what happens when
there's not good tools, which is peoplerealize the problem, they try the solution and
they go, it's too difficult, it's not worthit.

(27:39):
I'm just going to suffer the consequences ofusing Telegram or something like that.
And so that's why I'm so excited that thingslike Simplex exist and are improving so that
it's getting easier and easier every day forpeople who wake up to actually switch to a
tool that protects their privacy and caresabout their freedom of speech.
I was going to say Seth, to yourcomment.
Right.
So Flux doesn't provide a service to us,really.

(28:00):
Flux provides the service to our users.
Right.
So, and that's, I think it's very importantdistinction here.
And because we do not see what we do as acompany, as a service at all.
Architecture of the network is such thatwhoever runs the server is much closer to
website hosting provider.

(28:21):
It's just when you choose where you host yourwebsite, you choose your hosting provider
wholesale.
You have to decide.
And it's very costly to migrate.
And if your hosting provider decides to killyour website, they can do it.
They know you, they know that the websiteexists.
And it's very much dependent on the hostingprovider.
What servers in Simplex network provide is nota service.

(28:44):
It's a piece of little pieces ofinfrastructure, such as message delivery pipe
or a chunk of file stored on the servers.
So it's almost like buying your infrastructureor getting your infrastructure.
Currently it's all free piecemeal.
Right?
And the advantage of that, that is that youcan get operator redundancy is that you are

(29:05):
less dependent on any particular operator.
And while it's not the case there, we seeoperators as completely disposable and
replaceable and redundant.
It's effectively a server, a hosting providerwith zero lock in which you purchase as like,
as electricity from the network.

(29:25):
Like in the same way you can getinfrastructure capacity from Simplex network
and have the same control and ownership aspeople have over their own website.
Because if you use Telegram or Facebook or anyother service, I think what's very important,
you don't own your content anymore, right?
So you grant irrevocable license and thesecond somebody shares your content, you can't

(29:46):
even revoke it anymore.
It's no longer yours, right?
That's the terms of service.
And if they decide to censor you, you can becensored in a nanosecond simply because
government cries too loudly.
As Mark Zuckerberg recently said, imaginesomebody cries at you and you suddenly destroy
the livelihood of millions of people andwhatever.

(30:11):
So that's just not acceptable.
We want a model when operators understand ifthey don't respect their users, they will
simply be out of business.
Right.
Nobody will buy infrastructure that suddenlydisappears simply because somebody cries too
much.
And that's very important.
So fundamentally we provide infrastructurefacilities, but we don't provide a service to

(30:31):
people who use the network.
They construct the service themselves.
They fully control the servers.
And that's what's so exciting about thisnetwork model.
It's much closer.
I think my closest analogy to what we'rebuilding is the future of the web the way Tim
Berners Lee was seeing it with micropaymentswith updates that users can make in the

(30:54):
network with full control of the networkwithout serial operators having as much
influence on the network as they have in anyother network.
Yeah, and I, I, I would just want toexpand.
And now I remembered what I was going to sayand it was so good.
I'm glad I did.
What products did Google does Google sell?
And I'm not talking Android or anything likethat, that's a separate, separate arm.

(31:15):
But what is the product that Google sells?
You?
If you don't know what the product is, you arethe product.
Right.
You know, people are just hand handing overtheir data freely and they gave us a, a pretty
search engine and some free email and all of asudden we're giving them all the data.
And you know what, what changed my focus on,on privacy was I worked for the world's large,

(31:37):
well, one of the world's largest healthcareorganizations in the C suite.
And you know, I started to watch our patientdata get migrated to Google and Google was
starting to utilize that patient data.
I felt that was the dirtiest thing ever.
And I had to get out of that.
Like, I could not deal with any of that.
Why?
Because the patients didn't know their datawas being used.

(31:57):
And we're not talking like a few things.
We're talking about your entire health catalogfrom the time you were born till now is being
extrapolated and utilized by Google and otherplatforms.
That just blows my mind.
So we have to make a stand somewhere and wehave to start putting the focus back on that
privacy piece and data anonymity.

(32:18):
You know, I, I think what we're going to seein the Future is we are starting to get it
educated every generation.
We move further on, there's a more focused onprivacy, which is totally bizarre because we
look at these kids, they've got Facebook,Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, okay?
They put everything out there.
I ate this for lunch, right?

(32:38):
So everybody, check it out.
They're finally starting to figure out they'rewatching the debacle with TikTok.
They're watching all these different things,and they're saying, you know, I think that
we're kind of almost like cattle to theseguys, and we need to start really thinking
about that.
My son, who's, you know, I'd love for him tobe a privacy advocate, he.
He just goes 100 degrees the other way.

(32:59):
You know what I mean?
He's got his stuff out there and everythingelse.
He finally reached out to me one day and hesays, hey, how do I clean up my stuff?
So not everything's on the Internet and I gotto get, get away from this stuff.
So I think we're starting to see these youngergenerations because it's a problem for them.
It is.
It is a major challenge for them.
They're starting to see it and these pivotallittle things that are popping up, like the

(33:22):
battle for TikTok.
There should be no battle.
There should be no battle.
The government should have no sway in theapplications we use.
Whether I disdain and with a capital D,TikTok, right?
As a platform, I will 100%, a hundred percentstand behind their ability to have that
application running.

(33:43):
And for the first time, when you start takingthings away like that and people start really
looking at it again.
Adoption by incident, right?
We're starting to see this newfound desire ordemand.
The number one thing I get asked questions onis not about because flux is in AI, we're in
Web3, we're in Cloud compute.
We've got the world's biggest decentralizednetwork.
The number one question I get is this my datasafe?

(34:06):
Is my data private?
Right.
These are.
These are.
These are.
Because these are fundamentals, right?
People are starting to get to thosefundamentals.
So I think the easiest way to really kind ofbeat some of these big players, build a better
mousetrap.
That's exactly what we're doing.
Yeah, absolutely.
Agreed.
I think as these tools improve, it just getseasier and easier for people to move to them

(34:29):
when they wake up and they realize that needfor privacy because it is happening.
I think it's easy to see the privacy issues inthe world and kind of get caught up in how
Many bad things are happening, but I feel likeespecially over the last four or five years,
we've seen just massive growth in thecommunity of people who actually want to take
their privacy seriously.
So that's been really encouraging.
And I want to kind of pivot us back a littlebit to this server architecture, this setup,

(34:51):
and just talk about kind of what are the plansfor how you'll get more operators on the
network?
Is there any kind of monetization plan?
I know you have a document that you've put outthat has some details there, Evgeny, but kind
of where do you see the next steps for theoperators on the network and how that
function's going?

(35:13):
Somebody has to pay the bills, right?
It all goes to a very simple thing.
So we are fortunate to have fantasticinvestors that support our journey and we are
fortunate to have flux.
But ultimately, currently the network spendsmore money than it produces, even though it
reduces the value.
So for anything to be sustainable, it has tomake profit, right?

(35:34):
So people have a lot of like ideas,particularly in the privacy community, that
nonprofit is a good thing.
But reality is nonprofits also have to makeprofit to survive, right?
The only advantage that it gives them is thefact that they don't, don't they pay any tax
on profit, but they get at the expense ofadditional regulation.

(35:56):
And in any case, if they spend more money thanthey receive from their sponsors, they would
be out of business as well.
So the model that we see is based on the ideathat we need to somehow have users pay money
to the operators of the servers for theservices they consume.
And traditionally it doesn't mean thateverybody has to pay.

(36:17):
It doesn't mean there has to be no free tier.
There may be some basic free tier, there maybe some ability to use the network at some
acceptable quality level without payinganything.
But ultimately the end users of the networkeither pay for the usage of the network one
way or another or their data is going to besold.

(36:39):
Right?
And there is no other alternative and nobodywants their data sold.
The problem with payments is that people don'tlike the idea that when they pay something
that they somehow have their identityattached.
Because we live in a world and it's almostimpossible to pay money without kyc, right?
So there are some privacy preservingcryptocurrencies, but they struggle with

(37:02):
adoption and many people don't use them.
And in majority of blockchains are traceable,et cetera, et cetera.
So how do we break the line here and how weavoid being yet one more cryptocurrency
because we don't want to be a cryptocurrency.
We want to be focused on communication.
So we have a concept design that allows toeffectively purchase and give to the operators

(37:29):
of the network a digital equivalent of thegift card.
A gift card is something that's not money,that can be used as an arbitrary form of
payment, that can only be used to buyinfrastructure primitives like these little
pipes to transfer messages or chunks of filesbeing uploaded for some period of time.
And what's important that when I pay moneyit's impossible to connect to me consuming

(37:56):
these infrastructure primitives.
So we obviously it requires both a lot oftechnical development and legal research.
But ultimately gift cards are legal.
Consuming digital services without KYC isstill legal and we have to fight for it
remaining legal and providing that that we canoperate with this environment.

(38:20):
And it looks like the United States at leastmoves to the territory when digital assets are
supported and privacy and supported andtechnology development is supported.
So this seems completely viable future when itcan pay for the service.
But the only thing that is known is how muchmoney I spent.
And even this knowledge is decentralizedacross multiple operators.

(38:42):
Because if, if operators sell me those giftcertificates then even if they know my
identity as somebody who pays a, they don'tknow how much those gift certificates are
purchased in total and they don't know how Ispent it.
It's all based on advanced cryptography,similar to how zero knowledge proofs work.

(39:03):
And the fact that you consume the service canbe completely decoupled, can be completely
decoupled from the fact of purchase of thiscertificate.
When I was explaining this vision to our likeadvisor, he said oh, this is like Visa.
This is what Visa does with banks.
And we kind of since that point we startedcalling it Visa of telecom.

(39:23):
So effectively it's a partnership betweenmultiple infrastructure operators that can all
participate under certain rules and can issuethose certificates and also accept those
certificates in exchange for infrastructureservices.
All records it on single internal blockchainbut without it becoming a cryptocurrency.

(39:48):
So that's our vision.
And then if think about how it can evolvefurther.
Obviously having this accounts in primitivethat allows you to buy those let's say
infrastructure vouchers or gift certificatesand then use them that can also be used for
all sorts of other digital goods.
You can buy subscriptions to content channels,you can buy digital goods, you can buy any

(40:12):
other digital services that don't require kyc.
Because today for example, Amazon knows what Iread, what I watch.
If I use Amazon to Buy digital goods, right?
And if you look, there is really very littleopportunity to buy digital goods and services
without some intermediary knowing your fullhistory.
And this knowledge is used to abuse you,right?

(40:34):
It's used for discriminatory pricing, it'sused for manipulative advertising, it's used
for all the bad things, allowing to build avery detailed profile about you.
So what we see is a vision of the network thatallows to both provide a communication fabric
for any communication, but also can be used topurchase any digital goods and services in a

(40:57):
way that preserve your anonymity.
So creators, content creators, producers ofthose goods and services get paid without
knowing who you are.
They know how much they sold, they don't knowhow many people bought it.
I think it's really, really important to allowsuch kind of the same level of privacy in a
digital space.
We had an old retail bookstore, right?

(41:19):
Like if I buy the book off the bookshelf,nobody knows what I'm reading.
I kind of like this situation, right, whennobody can consolidate the knowledge about
what I am reading throughout my life.
Right?
Today we live in a world and every website youwatch can be recorded, every movie you watch,
every book you read.
I think we can build a future which willrestore the same level of privacy that we had

(41:42):
before the Internet, but with the Internet.
And that's ultimately the vision for multipleoperators in the network and for commercial
model in this network.
So think like Visa of telecom.
That's how we call this vision for the future.

Set (41:58):
And thankfully cryptography is there already.
I mean, this is a concept that people havebeen solving for a while.
I know, like I just did an episode with Vladfrom Cocky who are a privacy preserving search
engine and they had basically the same problemwhere they wanted users to be able to pay and
then be authenticated for searches, but notreveal which searches are happening with which

(42:18):
account and with which payment method.
So they're doing something very similar inthat you essentially pay and you get these
credits that are cryptographically unlinkedfrom the payment that you made.
And whenever you go and you redeem them, theoperator has no idea who you are.
They just know that these credits arelegitimate, they know that they are actually
issued by them and they let you pay for thatservice without doing anything else.

(42:40):
It's very similar to the concept of ecash,which I know has existed for a good 30, 40
years at this point, but definitely somethingthat's solvable, which I'm thankful for and I
think is a really fascinating next step forthe infrastructure side I think you need to.

D (42:54):
Call it Byzantine gift cards.

Evgeny (42:58):
Yeah, possibly, yeah.
But I think, I think what's important when youtry to develop something is to think less
about underlying technology and more aboutuser experience.
I think the successful and widely adoptedtechnology innovations that we use today have
been all heavily focused on how usersexperience technology and less focused on
what's the underlying technology.

(43:20):
And with Blockchain it was clearly technologydriven more than it was user experience
driven.
And I think we need to now somehow connect thelevel of privacy that we know possible with
the user experience that people want.
And that's obviously a challenge.
And this has been the challenge number one.
Right.
So how do you replicate the user experiencethat usually requires centralization, without

(43:41):
centralization?
How do you replicate things that require someprivacy compromises without privacy
compromises?
Right.
These are all solvable problem if you thinkhard enough.
But they are hard problems.

Seth For (43:55):
Yeah, absolutely not.
Not trivial to solve.
But that's a big topic that I've been focusingon more and more, is that the user experience
is so much more vital than how the underlyingtech works.
Like the underlying tech needs to be good.
And a lot of the privacy preserving technologyactually makes better user experience possible
because there's so much less that an operatorcan do with data, that sort of thing.

(44:15):
But that is a huge piece and one thing thatgoes so far into when people have that wake up
moment by incident like you've been saying,Dan, if the user experience is there, if it's
not this massive hurdle, they're going toconvert over and use these privacy preserving
tools much more readily.
Yeah, I think we win and we win, win itall when we can have it as a, as a secondary

(44:37):
thought, like my wife goes to the atm, sheputs her card in, she puts her pin in, she
takes her cash, her card receipt and sheleaves.
She doesn't give a, about any, sorry I said sword.
So she doesn't care about any of the thingsthat happen behind, you know, the doors there,
the massive infrastructure that runs out.
She just wants to use it.
So when we get to the point where we've builtthe user interface to feel just like what

(44:59):
everybody else has had, that creaturecomforts.
And because here's, here's the thing, you canmake the most amazing technologically advanced
product out there and if they come to use itand they can't figure it out or it's
cumbersome, they will not come back.
They will not come back.
So you, the experience that they need to getfrom the initial outset is one that they I've.

(45:24):
I know what this is.
I've used this.
It feels the same.
And I think that's, especially with whatSimplex is doing and, and what Flux is doing,
is we've put a ton, I mean, a ton of focus onthe user interface.
It flows like, you know, it flows likeTelegram, it feels like signal, it feels like

(45:47):
these pieces.
And eventually no one will ever think aboutthe privacy piece in the back of it.
We've already thought about that for you.
Right.
And then you can figure out how to monetizethat on your side.
So, I mean, I, I think we're definitely atthe, at the point where I think our biggest
success piece is we've built some amazingtechnologies, whether it's in cryptography or

(46:07):
blockchain or whatever it is, but now we haveto apply them and make them useful, otherwise
we're not going to get where we want, youknow, long term.

Seth For Pr (46:18):
Definitely. Agreed.
Well, the last main topic that I have fory'all, and this one goes, goes back to Evgeny,
is another hot topic lately in the Simplexworld, and one that you mentioned you want to
talk about, is this idea of privacy preservingcontent, moderation.
And I'm really curious what you actually meanby this, because.
Go ahead.

Evgeny (46:37):
Right.
I think the world is split in many camps whenit comes to freedom of speech.
So many people call, for example, Elon Musk,freedom of speech apologist, but he's not.
He understands that there are boundaries ofacceptable behaviors and there are boundaries

(46:58):
that everybody universally agrees that are notacceptable.
Right.
And we have seen, for example, in several lastyear, ongoing attempts in the European Union
to introduce the legislation that wouldmandate scanning of end to end encrypted
communications.

(47:20):
And it all have been happening under theguise, oh, we need to combat the distribution
of child sexual abuse materials.
I 100% agree that this is not something wewant to have within freedom of speech, but it
doesn't mean that we want to compromiseprivacy or security of communication.

(47:41):
I actually made a talk at one of the Germangovernmental agencies about that because the
problem is created predominantly by big tech,right?
So, for example, take Facebook.
Allegedly, according to the criminal casesagainst Meta in multiple states, they knew
about the problem for years and they refusedto do anything about those problems for years.

(48:03):
And they got to the situation when it'scompletely epidemic, right?
When it's out of control.
And then Facebook and Google and many otherbig tech companies sponsored nonprofit
organizations that went out and started tolobby European governments for introducing
mandatory scanning to prevent the same problemthat they failed to prevent in the first

(48:24):
place, which is ridiculous, right?
So a lot of what is unacceptable, even withinthe free speech, happens in public space.
And it's not about privacy, it's aboutpolitical will, it's about technological will.
It's about the willingness to reduce therevenue ultimately, right?
Because every traffic creates revenue.
Illegal distribution of child sexual abusematerials creates revenue for the big tech

(48:49):
companies.
So they for some reason are reluctant.
And generally, if you talk about freedom ofspeech, Seth, imagine we're having podcasts
now and this is our private space.
Imagine anybody joins to listen in, but thenthey suddenly just say, oh, we have freedom of
speech, we can talk.
Or you're giving a lecture, and then hundredpeople barge in and start shouting that they
disagree with you.

(49:13):
This is not about freedom of speech.
The problem with absolute freedom of speech inall spaces is that it kills the freedom of
speech because it suddenly becomes thatwhoever has the strongest voice is right.
And we've seen the same with huge censorshipmachine in the United States and some elements

(49:34):
of that in Europe.
Then whoever has the strongest voice isdefining what is allowed under free speech
protection and what is not allowed under freespeech protection.
So obviously going about our initiative, wedid observe some distribution of child sexual
abuse materials on our network.
And whenever users report it, we remove thosegroups and files very promptly.

(50:00):
We have a technology that does it.
And people say, how is it even possible?
Because in people's minds, if you have end toend encrypted communication, then nobody can
look into it.
And the trade off is either you can't censorit and you shouldn't, or if you can and you
would, then you kind of.
But that's not exactly right, right?
So imagine like for example, on our platform,people can create public groups, right?

(50:22):
Anybody can join those groups.
The expectation of privacy for public groupsis very different, right?
So you cannot have expectation of privacy ofthe content.
It is, it is public, right?
But what you can still have is expectation ofprivacy of your participation in this group,
which is critically important for freedom ofspeech.

(50:43):
So what we published the blog post recentlytitled Privacy Preserving Content.
Moderation is exactly about that.
How can we moderate content that's alreadypublic without any scanning client or server
side, without any compromise or privacy andhow we can prevent the distribution?
And it ultimately is very simple, right?

(51:06):
If we as a user, if our technology, if ourautomated bot as a user can join a group, then
obviously it knows, okay, which servers areused by this group, which files are uploaded,
where they are uploaded, and obviously thegroup, this technology that is Bought have an
access to those servers, can then remove them.
Right?
So we don't know and they can't know and itwould be privacy violation and it's even

(51:28):
illegal.
Right.
Because European Convention of Human Rights,for example, protects privacy as a basic
right.
So the whole idea is that we have to scaneverything to prevent abuse is ridiculous and
illegal.
But if we see something that is abuse,whatever we define as abuse, and we believe
that we do not want to participate indistribution of those materials, I think our

(51:50):
right as operators of the service is to refuseright.
And we see it happening in Feziverse and wesee it happening in centralized platform.
Right?
All operators define the boundary what'sacceptable and what's not acceptable behavior
in this network.

(52:11):
And as I said before though, what's reallyimportant about our destination is that if we
get to the point when every single group,every single conversation depends on multiple
operators, then for something to be censored,all operators have to decide, okay, this is a
bad thing, we want to remove it.
And only then it will be censored.
And if some operators decide, okay, I disagreewith this opinion, so therefore I want to

(52:32):
censor it, it would have completely zeroeffect, right?
Because some other operators, I may disagree.
I think Winston Churchill who said that I maydisagree with your opinion, but I will fight
for your right to express it.
And that's pretty much where I stand onfreedom of speech.
There are lots of opinions I disagree with,but they have to be heard, they have to be

(52:55):
said, they have to be discussed, they have tobe debated.
And that's the only way to protect freedom ofspeech and the only way it can be possible.
If on the one hand, each communicationoperator can decide what communication they
want and don't want to provide, but on anotherhand, none of the user depends just on one
operator.
Because we historically built communicationnetwork when our operator is our everything.

(53:17):
If this operator, the platforms we lost, welost communication, we lost friends, we lost
connection, we lost our business.
And that's the situation we need to change.
We need to balance those scales and make it sothat each user of the network depends on
multiple operators, and not just on one, anddepends in such a way that only collective
action can result in censorship.

(53:41):
And in this case, yes, we can then preventdistribution of child sexual abuse materials.
But whatever mistakes any operator can make inany other limitations would have zero effect
because they will be compensated by other.
I hope it makes sense what I'm trying toexplain, but please ask questions.

Seth For P (53:59):
Yeah, let me kind of summarize.

Evgeny (54:03):
Yeah, go on.

Se (54:06):
I was just going to say, let me just kind of summarize what I heard to make
sure that we're on the same page.
And I think it makes total sense to me.
So basically, I mean, if you're in a publicgroup chat, obviously like you mentioned, the
content is public, and thus if all of thatcontent lives on servers controlled by a
single entity, that content can be moderated.
And that just technologically makes sense, andI think logically makes sense that that is

(54:28):
possible and in a way is right, because datasovereignty doesn't go only one way.
It doesn't mean that just the end user shouldhave data sovereignty and have control over
their data, but also the person actuallyproviding the service, the infrastructure
operator, should also have the right to beable to decide what data is served that they
have visibility into, obviously.

(54:49):
And so they would have visibility into publicgroup chats.
They could moderate that as they see fit.
But like you mentioned, there's protectionagainst an abuse of that power because if
you're using multiple server or serversoperated by multiple entities, or you're
hosting your own relay server, you haveprotection against censorship, especially
censorship that is illegitimate because theycan't remove data from your servers or they

(55:11):
can't remove data from servers that are notwithin their control.
So I think that totally makes sense.
And then obviously, just to clarify, privatechats, there's no ability to moderate because
there's no technical visibility into what'shappening in that private chat.
So there's nothing that could be done there.
But in public group chats, obviously there,there can be visibility because that content
is public by choice of the people actuallyparticipating.

(55:35):
And so if all of that data lives on one set ofservers that are hosted by one entity, then
it's trivial to moderate.
Or if all of the operators of the servers thatthat group chat exists on agree on that
moderation policy, they can still do it there,which I think just makes sense.
And I think there's this hard line wherepeople feel like we have to have total freedom

(55:55):
of speech.
But just like you said, that actually destroysfreedom of speech if you allow things that
simply should not exist on a place that youhave control.
But that's again, the kind of balance that'sbeing struck here is ultimately the user has
control over what servers are used, the groupoperators have control over what servers are
used.
And so there, there can be balance while stillallowing moderation of clearly illegal and

(56:20):
unethical data from people servers when youhave control over them.
Yeah, all I was going to, all I was goingto add to that is the fact that just because
it's private and decentralized, it doesn'tmean it's jealous.
I mean, we have to remember that, you know,there is, I am a freedom of speech maximalist,
but, but I agree with Guinea.
I, I mean, obviously there's content thatshould be nowhere.

(56:42):
Right.
I think that's, that's a, that's a human rightas well, to not be exposed or, you know, have
things like that done, especially to our youngchildren, you know, which is terrible.
But, but they're nefarious people out there.
And, but you cannot build technology for theless than 1%.
You have to build technology for the masses.

(57:03):
And 99.9% of the folks that are using theseplatforms, they're using them for every day
and just want privacy.
You know, in the States, we have, you know,big arguments about guns.
You know, you know, like they say, well, youknow, people kill each other with guns, so we
need to outlaw guns.
Well, then you have to outlaw spoons becausethey make people fat.

(57:24):
Yeah.
You know, you could go through the list ofthings, those items by themselves and the
majority of the people that utilize them doesnot constitute banning something or, or
censoring something for the, for the less than1%.
So in my, my view, I, I think, you know, thegovernments are definitely going to have a

(57:47):
challenge on their hand.
They're going to have to become more proactiverather than reactive.
At the point right now, they're unbelievablyreactive.
They go and they serve subpoenas across theboard.
They need to start thinking outside the box,fundamentally.
So, you know, but, but my, my goal is to buildit for the masses because I'm protecting the
masses and then deal with the folks that arenefarious along the way.

(58:12):
So, yes, I do agree with what guinea wassaying.
I think that that's a perfect, perfectexplanation.

Evge (58:18):
Yeah. And that's critical.
I think whoever advocates for unabridgedfreedoms have to understand that freedom of
individuals should end precisely where thefreedom of another individual starts.
And the second you say, okay, my freedom ofunlimited, I can do whatever the hell I want,
okay, then it means you can kill people,right?

(58:38):
You can steal, you can, whatever.
It's like, what is the boundary of thisbehavior?
The boundary is very simple.
So freedom should stop when another person'sfreedom starts and it's a conflict,
inevitably, it requires some management, itrequires some discussion of the boundaries, it
requires some consent.
Right.
So in the same way as users have to giveconsent about what happens to their data There

(59:01):
should be at least limited ability for serveroperators to have consent and rules and
limitations about what may happen on operatorservers.
And the approach that I found has absolutelyzero compromises.
And we hope that it will be analyzed and usedby whatever politicians that really want to

(59:25):
solve the problem of child sexual abuseonline.
Because the way they see today is effectivelycompromise everybody's privacy.
It's like UK government, sorry for politicaltutorial.
They literally discussing okay, let's requireidea when we sell knives on Amazon because
knives can.
It's not a joke.
It just said spoon.
We have exactly that with knives, which isridiculous, right?

(59:46):
How about we do something that actually worksright?
Rather than something that compromiseseverybody's privacy and converts our world
into a really nightmare.
And it wouldn't even work because the problemis that criminals will always file away.
So you have to.
Dan is absolutely right.
You're right.
We have to develop technology for majority ofthe users finds in the right balance and

(01:00:06):
protecting this majority of the users from anynefarious activities.
And we already hear for example, you may sayokay, online enthusiasts and techno geeks and
cyberfunks would use Simplex Network at thisstage.
But we hear a lot from family users who say,okay, we like the fact that nobody can

(01:00:29):
approach our children on this network.
It's much safer than WhatsApp.
It's much safer than Telegram.
We can have communication with our kids, wecan share family photos and nobody can reach
out to them and say hello.
And that's not something that any otherplatform can provide.
But at the same time, it doesn't mean that wehave to say that public spaces do not require

(01:00:51):
protection from nefarious activities.
So that's all hard balances.
And it's really important that there is a wayto achieve safety in digital spaces without
any compromises to privacy and security, whichis what we hear in various warrant proposals
in European Union.
I really hope that this will stop that thiswhole idea that we can solve the problem by

(01:01:13):
client side scanning.
No, we can't.
We won't.
We will only make it worse.

Seth For (01:01:17):
Yeah, no, I definitely agree.
I love that concept of build for thelegitimate users and then find intuitive
solutions for the minority that are causingissues.
And I think that definitely makes sense.
I know it is a hot topic and one that sparks alot of debate.
I'll be sure to put the blog post in the shownotes as well so people can read more about
the the background of where you're coming fromand how technically this will, this will work.

(01:01:41):
But it's Definitely one that I'm, I'm thankfulyou're willing to talk about and talk through
and actually just have open and honestdiscussion about.
It can be a little heated both ways sometimes.
So I think this is really helpful.
But I know we're a little over the hour mark.
Y'all are very, very busy, busy guys, so Idon't want to keep you too long, but I just
want to wrap up by giving you each a chance totalk about kind of what are you most excited

(01:02:02):
about with Simplex moving forward?
Next things on your roadmap or concepts thatyou're excited to push out and then the same
for you.
Dan, I'll let you wrap up with telling us alittle bit more about what you have planned
with Flux.
But Evgeny, why don't you kick us off?
Well, our biggest and excitingdevelopment right now is large groups that
will work.
We've seen some influx, sorry for the pun ofthe users on Telegram who were trying to see

(01:02:25):
if they can host their communities on Simplexand it's really exciting to see.
And we have some groups that several thousandsof users and we know how badly they work
because currently groups are fullydecentralized and every time you send a
message to a group, your client effectivelyhas to send it to every group member, which

(01:02:47):
works up to hundreds of members.
And it starts working really, really badlywhen there are thousands of members.
And we're developing the approach when therewill be some high power participants
specifically for public groups that willprovide privacy and actually would improve
privacy comparing with the current groupdesign by rebroadcasting messages to all

(01:03:11):
members in the group.
So it's a lot of technologies development,it's really, really deep and large problem.
So we hope that in several months we will haveall current groups migrated to this new
technology and they will be able to scale totens and thousands, hundreds of thousands of
members.

(01:03:31):
So that's literally our number one priorityfor this year.

Seth (01:03:35):
Yeah, I love that because I've always been fascinated by how much
interest there is in using a privacypreserving platform for public group chats
because I think there's a lot of, I don'tknow, it's just an interesting idea to me and
I see a lot of people who love it.
But like you mentioned, even if the content ispublic, the details about your participation
metadata being private is still a huge wineven for public group chats.

(01:03:56):
So I think that is something that not onlypeople just want.
So if it exists within the messenger, you'llhave drastically more users who are willing to
Also use it for just individual privatemessaging and other things.
But it's also a use case that fits very wellonce y'all can iron out the architecture
issues.
Because, you know, like you said, the currentarchitecture is not ideal for huge groups.
But I'm excited to see how y'all, y'all dosolve that problem in the future.

(01:04:19):
Um, but then how about you.
But you, Dan, what's, what's coming up nextfor Flux?
What do you want people to be aware of?
So we have a big meeting coming February1st.
We are continuing to develop our, our Flux AIproduct which is completely open source and
decentralized and private by the way, so youget to keep your own data, you don't have to
opt out on chat GPT and still get, you know,data siphon from you.

(01:04:42):
We don't collect anything, not squat.
We use training models that are open source aswell.
Our algorithm will be published, so we'rehighly transparent, so we're going to work on
that.
But that goes hand in hand with what we'redoing with Simplex, which is we're working to
make it so that every flux node operator,13,000 nodes across the world, can deploy the

(01:05:04):
application and it has massive redundancy.
So helping guinea with redundancy on, onSimplex is huge for us and we finally have the
capability to do, do that with the release ofArcane.
So I think the big thing for us is our, ourroadmap is really around fine tuning and
honing the products because the products wereall created, they're here, they're here today.

(01:05:25):
Whether you're launching front ends, backends, game servers, all in a decentralized
manner, all ran globally, it all runs today.
It's, it's getting that user interface tweakso that we can really go, to go to go to
massive market with it.
So we're already getting a ton of interestfrom, from Web2.
When I say our legacy technology, as I like tocall them, they want to understand moving

(01:05:50):
forward how they're already in kind of save my*** mode.
They understand that there is going to be anexodus, a mass exodus from their technology
platforms because people are becoming moreaware of, of their privacy and how they're
being utilized as assets.
So I think Flux is going to continue to keepdoing that, supporting projects like Simplex

(01:06:13):
that is hands down doing something nobody'sdone before.
Super proud to help them and continue to keepbuilding with them.
But we're going to really focus in on thosethings.
Privacy, decentralization and security.

Seth For Privacy (01:06:28):
I love it.
I love it.
It's definitely very aligned here.
So thankful for you guys.
Grateful for the work that you're doing onmaking privacy tools actually usable and
useful and decentralized.
I think it's a, it's a fantastic effort and Iknow Simplex is one of my favorite tools out
there, so I'm always glad to be able to talk alittle bit more about that too.
So thank you so much for jumping on again.

(01:06:49):
Great to meet you, Dan.
Thank you so much for your contributionstoday.
Definitely have to have you back on in thefuture and definitely have you back on as well
of getting in the future as y'all keepbuilding Simplex like crazy.
So thankful for you guys.
Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Dan (01:07:01):
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Seth for having us.

Seth (01:07:13):
Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Opt Out.
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Improving SimpleX w/ Evgeny from SimpleX and Daniel Keller from Flux