Welcome to Layer Zero.

Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the cryptography community.

Cryptography is, of course, built by code, but is composed by people, and each individual member of the cryptography community has their own story to tell.

Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code,

because cryptography is people all the way down, and it always has been.

Now you might have noticed a little difference in that intro, and that's because I have not a member of the crypto community, not a member of the Ethereum community, but a member of the OG cryptography community.

And I'll do a minute, it doesn't make complete sense to say that cryptography is people all the way down, because actually cryptography is one of the few things that is strictly math through and through and through.

Today on the show, I have on David Chom. If you don't know who that is, you need to do a little homework, because we live in an industry that is built upon David Chom's work.

He's the founder of Digi Cash, one of the early experiments into online cash, but mainly one of the big proponents of privacy at all costs, where not just the data about a message is private, but all of the metadata is private too.

And I'd like to read a quote out to help emphasize the importance of who David Chom is and what he's done for this industry.

This is Chom's warning to the world in 1985, where he talks about the dangers of user data that is building up around computing systems.

He says, computerization is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used.

Already, public and private sector organizations acquire extensive personal information and exchange it amongst themselves.

Individuals have no way of knowing if this information is accurate, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate.

New and more serious dangers derive from computerized pattern recognition techniques.

Even a small group of them tapping into data gathered every day in consumer transactions could secretly conduct mass surveillance, inferring individual's lifestyles, activities, and associations.

The automation of payment and other consumer transactions is expanding these dangers to an unprecedented extent.

Projecting the vision of these two futures, one built with current technology, and one built with decentralized services, David Chom saw that the two approaches appeared to hold quite different answers.

Large-scale automated transaction systems are imminent, and as the initial choice for their architecture gathers economic and social momentum, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

Whichever approach it prevails, it will likely have a profound and enduring impact on our economic freedom, democracy, and our informational rights.

David Chom said this in 1985, before we had surveillance capitalism, before we had Web 2, and before we have the state of Facebook, Instagram, all this collection of metadata, and the resailing to targeted ads, and all these other practices that we now deem evil in this world, but we now also have to live with.

And so David Chom saw this in 1985, which is one of the reasons why he's such a fantastic character, and he's been dedicating his life to building private cryptographic systems that protect users data, and not just the contents of messages, but all of the data that those messages leak.

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