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

Welcome onto the show.

So you think of Flux as being Bitcoin, as bitcoin 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 our privacy. So it's, it's very poetic. You're at the opt out. We believe everybody should be able to opt out in every way. Right. Like privacy is massive tenet of human, human rights. So I am a cypher punk at heart.

I have a massive seven foot, the Cypherpunk manifesto hanging in my office because it means a lot to me. And Flux is really about building technology and around technologies that understand that private centric approach. And that's how we found Simplex man. Like it was a super fit.

So I'm, I'm definitely excited to learn more about that. And it seems like it's been a good collab between 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 like crazy at Simplex. There's been so much change in the app over those years as I've been using it.

And so I'd love to hear from you kind of what are the biggest changes or improvements that you kind of want to highlight over the last two years? I know there's probably too much to get into in one podcast, but what are the big highlights for you to get people up to speed if maybe they haven't used Simplex since the last episode?

And we probably had more than 20 times less users using the network than we have now, if not more than that. And over these two years we added lots of basic chat functionalities that people expect in a communication app without any compromise to privacy. And we added a very decent support for sends in files. So files became from completely unusable two years ago to very usable right now.

And with regards to privacy and security of the network, the two biggest changes that we did was as in quantum resistant encryption, it's currently only available in direct messages groups or small groups will be added this year. And we edited in a way that's more secure than the way signals did at what imessage advertises as like level three when every time the message direction changes, the key rotate. And that's really cool.

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

And another big thing and probably number one source of criticism was simple access network is extremely decentralized and people choose which servers they use to receive messages. And it means that if I connect directly to your server Seth then it means that your server will see my IP address and that's kind of suboptimal. And it was original design of the Simplex network to let people choose the servers they use.

To some extent it's similar to many other communication network design and users obviously didn't like it because I can choose my server, which means that I can know your IP address. So we added a second layer in message routing which was a major technological change to the network. We managed to roll out with zero disruption to the users. And we are currently at a point that like by default it's enabled for all users in all cases.

Every time the message is sent it traverses two servers and that protects senders of the messages from recipients servers can being able to observe their IP address. And obviously the biggest like thing that happened end of last year we found Flux and ourselves, we found each other and we now have Flux as a second pre configured operator in the app.

So when people install the app they can choose to use either of our servers or both of our servers, which is even more cool because when people want to protect their IP addresses, like let's say if message traverses two servers but both servers are controlled by the same entity, then obviously those entity can somehow compromise the security of this connection. And if there's two entities and they don't exchange 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 more complex and much less likely to compromise the security of connection. And now people can choose to use servers of two different operators inside a single op. Like, like nowhere else really. Maybe, maybe like in nostr, but in Nostr it exists for different reasons.

Nothing still that can practically break normal encryption mechanisms. But we're seeing more and more progress that makes it seem like quantum computers are actually going to be a reality.

And I know a lot of experts within the quantum computing space are starting to say like hey this is real, it's not just theoretical and it's getting closer and why that matters with messaging, I think just to touch on kind of the deeper subject is if you send messages and there's some entity in between that's intercepting those messages and just storing them, even if they can't decrypt them, even if they can't view anything about them, they could store them forever.

And then if quantum computers do become a reality, if that encryption method is not quantum resistant, then they could trivially break those messages and have access to all of that in the future.

And that's where having quantum resistant encryption long before quantum computers are actually viable is a huge improvement to ensure that the, the security of your messages long term exists, even in the case of an adversary intercepting all those messages and storing them for decryption at some later time. So I think that is a huge step forward. I'll definitely add the link in the show notes because y'all went really in depth into what the approach being taken there is.

And so I think it's a, it's a great read for our listeners. But the second one, obviously, and I'll throw this one over to Dan. I know that y'all have announced this partnership where there's a preset list of servers both from Simplex, as there always was, and now from Flux. And that's a huge step forward because now you. You can make sure that all of your connections are not going just to Simplex.

There's one less trust piece in there, and it's a great way to distribute that trust across more operators. So what does that mean kind of for the end user when it comes to reliability or privacy? And then what made you want to jump in on this effort, Dan? Maybe start with what you wanted to jump in on here, why you saw this fit between Flux and Simplex being powerful, then maybe Evgeny can dive into a little bit of what this actually looks like for end users.

You know, the, the biggest thing when, when Gideon and I sat down and talked about it was we had to explain that we're not a crypto project. And that's a big thing for people. 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, the crypto side of the world. We put it on the blockchain side of the world. So we work, we look for solid partnerships and use cases which will extend and advance humanity.

And they're the ones we want to get behind immediately. Now the nice thing about it is we have a massive arsenal of compute resources behind our back. We are the largest decentralized compute network in the world, hands down, not even close to anyone else. We have 13,000 decentralized systems administrators, node operators all around the world which run enterprise grade. So if you, what you're running in a data center is what they're running.

And it could run in a data center, it could run in their house, it could run in a barn, it could run anywhere, right? That's the glory of decentralization is, is hey, 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 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 deliver everything and they had it to have compute resources to support those deliverables. And when they did, they said, hey, we could sell this. Now it's 60% of their revenue, right?

So it's extortion what these guys are charging. They squash or quash anyone that goes against them. The nice thing about Flux is once it's deployed on Flux, it's forever there. It is built on the blockchain. We're an eight year old product that's been up and running for eight years. We've had no downtime. So how many can AWS claim that the blockchain has 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 we have to start doing our marching orders so that we're going against these big box massive retailers that will extrapolate your data and they will utilize it and you are nothing more than a data mine to them. That's all.

And you know, with products like Flux and Simplex and other ones that are out there, you know, we're, I think we're starting to finally put some focus back, back on, you know, for the people, by the people that's what it comes down to.

Because you said it's decentralized and that there's like 13,000 node operators out there, does that mean that anyone can join the Flux network? 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 into what's running there? Like, I think there's a lot to kind of unpack here.

But right now we're using the centralized infrastructure that Flux itself controls as a proof of concept and we really looking forward when we can use decentralized Flux network 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 pre configured servers that cope with traffic quite well if people use them. And that kind of provides privacy protections for the end users who can use both ours and Flex servers.

And we certainly did discuss that. We do want to use decentralized infrastructure that Flux has and it would dramatically lower the costs and improves reliability as well and scalability.

And as a matter of Fact, something similar so simplistic as two factor authentication, who's controlled by a third party entity that that doesn't work right. So you have to build these products out. So we've already kind of built out our MVP and with arcane coming on Flux, which is our, basically our full operating system, which is true end to end encryption, it, this will just roll naturally right into that. So our goal is to make this as private and as decentralized as humanly possible.

I think that that's, that's, that's the ultimate goal, and I think guinea would agree with that, is to, to get it in as many people's hands as humanly possible and let 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 so that, that means deploying a server on Flux is going to be huge. And you know, we're going to continue to keep building the.

And as guinea said, redundancy obviously is a big thing that we have to get in play. So we're taking the experience that we learned from 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 working from back to forward. We're looking at where is our exposure, how do we, how do we keep privacy and anonymity even, you know, as our four, as our forethought.

So I think it's good with time, I think you're going to see this thing be completely and totally decentralized, obviously with some redundancy. Back over to Web2, I mean, because I'm not a maximalist, I don't think everything is Web three and only Web three. I think there are some beneficial pieces to Web two for particular applications. This isn't one that I think falls into that category.

I think the sooner we get it to a decentralized platform where it's not controlled by platforms that can basically censor you and remove your application if they don't like you, I think that needs to come sooner than later and I think Giddy would agree with that. And that definitely is on both of our roadmaps 100%.

It took us, I should say, completely by surprise some time ago that people actually want to have public groups. But if you think about it, privacy is critically important for freedom of speech, right? We cannot really have freedom of speech without 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 come with them losing their job. They may not say anything illegal, but they've seen plenty.

A very large number of people losing their jobs, 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 days ago, some European politicians saying that, oh, we need to have mandatory IDs for participating in social media. This is ridiculous, right? We cannot really afford anything like that to happen. 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 say the truth, give them a mosque. And then you will learn what people actually think. So that's critically important. And the problem with freedom of speech and censorship is that what we learned over time, that neither centralized models nor federated models like Matrix or Mastodon, they actually can protect freedom of speech.

Because some people may think that, okay, if you have federated model like Mastodon, then you are more protected and you can move to another server. But that's not how it works actually in many aspects, the censorship on federated platforms becomes stronger than on centralized platform because for something to be universally accessible now all operators to have to agree that it's a good thing, right? Which is horrible, right?

It's like for something to be accessible on Twitter, 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. But on Mastodon, if I as a server operator decide that I don't like the policies of the server, I can de federate it, right? And I can like stop exchanging content with it. It massively disrupts the network.

So the model for decentralization that we have, which we are going to be building in Simple X network is completely opposite. It's extreme decentralization when for something to be existing as a communication space, at least one operator has to agree with that. And for something to be CENSORED all operators would need to want to censor it, which is completely opposite, which is closer to the model of community. Now it's on Twitter, so it's effectively a community vote.

Okay, this is a good thing. We want to have it. Yes, some operators may not like it, which means they won't have this traffic. But as long as some operators believe it's acceptable wherever they are and it's legal and, and good, then it will exist. So we really believe and primary motivation for building Simplex Network was freedom of speech. And I see privacy and freedom of speech as two sides of the same coin when one is not possible without another.

And that means sometimes you really got to go off into the weeds because there's no, there's no playbook that's written for this, you know, and as a matter of fact, you know, when technology, you know, when the Internet first started, people started to focus on some privacy and bringing things in that went by the wayside once they figured out that we were a data goldmind. Right.

So now we're working against everything that's already been for the past 15, 20 years been built to push centralization. Right. People don't want to take care of their own assets 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 privacy till it's taken away. Right. Till you see a situation like, you know, what happened with Telegram and so on and so forth, forth.

So I think, you know, as technology continues to iterate, we're going to go back to the old thought process where you think, how do we make it decentralized, how do we make it private, how do we make it scalable and how do we, 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 of the people.

Every freaking morning I get up and I think about 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.

So people knew what the government was doing, but sometimes, out of sight, out of mind, when they actually saw the magnitude of what they were 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 recent election, I think it was the number one driving piece is people want freedom of speech, they want privacy, they don't want to be told what to do by the government.

You know, and I think that, you know, we are evangelists of that. We need to get out there and get the technology. And here's the other thing too, which really is, is somewhat hard, is building these technologies so they look and they feel like what Web2 was in a new Web3 world because, you know, they've spent billions of dollars on user interfaces, real nice and sexy and packaged. They, you know, it's, it's the drug dealer effect.

You know, your bank gets you in there, they give you a nice application so you could do web banking. You never have to worry about your money, it's always there. But guess what, it's not your money. It's not your money, you know, and it's the same way with your data. And by the way, your data is just as valuable. There's a there, you know, you should be able to be incentivized even for the data you're 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 it continues to be a data magnet. So I think the one advantage that we have is that we know that they're going to continue to keep pivoting the dis. They want to disrupt the disruptors because we came to disrupt them and now they want to disrupt us. You see this back and forth and I think, but we're, we are much more nimble and much more flexible and you know, go back to that cypherpunk manifesto.

I think those guys would be real happy to see where we're at right now. You know, I think that we've picked up the battle and ran with it and you know, I'd love to see every application that we're using private and decentralized.

And that's why I'm so excited about things like Simplex improving about Things like Flux providing services to Simplex because it means that when those people wake up, they have tools that they can actually turn to that are actually useful, that are intuitive, that are easy to use, and that makes that transition actually happen instead of what happens when there's not good tools, which is people realize the problem, they try the solution and they go, it's too difficult, it's not worth it.

I'm just going to suffer the consequences of using Telegram or something like that. And so that's why I'm so excited that things like Simplex exist and are improving so that it's getting easier and easier every day for people who wake up to actually switch to a tool that protects their privacy and cares about their freedom of speech.

You have to decide. And it's very costly to migrate. And if your hosting provider decides to kill your website, they can do it. They know you, they know that the website exists. And it's very much dependent on the hosting provider. What servers in Simplex network provide is not a service. It's a piece of little pieces of infrastructure, such as message delivery pipe or a chunk of file stored on the servers. So it's almost like buying your infrastructure or getting your infrastructure.

Currently it's all free piecemeal. Right? And the advantage of that, that is that you can get operator redundancy is that you are less dependent on any particular operator. And while it's not the case there, we see operators as completely disposable and replaceable and redundant. It's effectively a server, a hosting provider with zero lock in which you purchase as like, as electricity from the network.

Like in the same way you can get infrastructure capacity from Simplex network and have the same control and ownership as people have over their own website. Because if you use Telegram or Facebook or any other service, I think what's very important, you don't own your content anymore, right? So you grant irrevocable license and the second somebody shares your content, you can't 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 be censored in a nanosecond simply because government cries too loudly. As Mark Zuckerberg recently said, imagine somebody cries at you and you suddenly destroy the livelihood of millions of people and whatever. So that's just not acceptable. We want a model when operators understand if they don't respect their users, they will simply be out of business. Right.

Nobody will buy infrastructure that suddenly disappears simply because somebody cries too much. And that's very important. So fundamentally we provide infrastructure facilities, but we don't provide a service to people who use the network. They construct the service themselves. They fully control the servers. And that's what's so exciting about this network model. It's much closer.

I think my closest analogy to what we're building is the future of the web the way Tim Berners Lee was seeing it with micropayments with updates that users can make in the network with full control of the network without serial operators having as much influence on the network as they have in any other network.

You know, people are just hand handing over their data freely and they gave us a, a pretty search engine and some free email and all of a sudden 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, well, one of the world's largest healthcare organizations in the C suite. And you know, I started to watch our patient data 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 data was being used. And we're not talking like a few things. We're talking about your entire health catalog from the time you were born till now is being extrapolated and utilized by Google and other platforms. That just blows my mind.

So we have to make a stand somewhere and we have to start putting the focus back on that privacy piece and data anonymity. You know, I, I think what we're going to see in the Future is we are starting to get it educated every generation. We move further on, there's a more focused on privacy, 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?

So everybody, check it out. They're finally starting to figure out they're watching 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 these guys, and we need to start really thinking about that. My son, who's, you know, I'd love for him to be a privacy advocate, he. He just goes 100 degrees the other way. You know what I mean? He's got his stuff out there and everything else.

He finally reached out to me one day and he says, hey, how do I clean up my stuff? So not everything's on the Internet and I got to get, get away from this stuff. So I think we're starting to see these younger generations because it's a problem for them. It is. It is a major challenge for them. They're starting to see it and these pivotal little things that are popping up, like the battle for TikTok. There should be no battle. There should be no battle.

The government should have no sway in the applications we use. Whether I disdain and with a capital D, TikTok, right? As a platform, I will 100%, a hundred percent stand behind their ability to have that application running. And for the first time, when you start taking things away like that and people start really looking at it again. Adoption by incident, right? We're starting to see this newfound desire or demand.

The number one thing I get asked questions on is not about because flux is in AI, we're in Web3, we're in Cloud compute. We've got the world's biggest decentralized network. The number one question I get is this my data safe? Is my data private? Right. These are. These are. These are. Because these are fundamentals, right? People are starting to get to those fundamentals. So I think the easiest way to really kind of beat some of these big players, build a better mousetrap.

That's exactly what we're doing.

So that's been really encouraging. And I want to kind of pivot us back a little bit to this server architecture, this setup, and just talk about kind of what are the plans for 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 out that has some details there, Evgeny, but kind of where do you see the next steps for the operators on the network and how that function's going?

But reality is nonprofits also have to make profit to survive, right? The only advantage that it gives them is the fact that they don't, don't they pay any tax on profit, but they get at the expense of additional regulation. And in any case, if they spend more money than they receive from their sponsors, they would be out of business as well. So the model that we see is based on the idea that we need to somehow have users pay money to the operators of the servers for the services they consume.

And traditionally it doesn't mean that everybody has to pay. It doesn't mean there has to be no free tier. There may be some basic free tier, there may be some ability to use the network at some acceptable quality level without paying anything. But ultimately the end users of the network either pay for the usage of the network one way or another or their data is going to be sold. Right? And there is no other alternative and nobody wants their data sold.

The problem with payments is that people don't like the idea that when they pay something that they somehow have their identity attached. Because we live in a world and it's almost impossible to pay money without kyc, right? So there are some privacy preserving cryptocurrencies, but they struggle with 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 we avoid 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 to effectively purchase and give to the operators of the network a digital equivalent of the gift 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 buy infrastructure primitives like these little pipes to transfer messages or chunks of files being uploaded for some period of time. And what's important that when I pay money it's impossible to connect to me consuming these infrastructure primitives. So we obviously it requires both a lot of technical development and legal research. But ultimately gift cards are legal.

Consuming digital services without KYC is still legal and we have to fight for it remaining legal and providing that that we can operate with this environment. And it looks like the United States at least moves to the territory when digital assets are supported and privacy and supported and technology development is supported. So this seems completely viable future when it can pay for the service. But the only thing that is known is how much money I spent.

And even this knowledge is decentralized across multiple operators. Because if, if operators sell me those gift certificates then even if they know my identity as somebody who pays a, they don't know how much those gift certificates are purchased in total and they don't know how I spent it. It's all based on advanced cryptography, similar to how zero knowledge proofs work.

And the fact that you consume the service can be completely decoupled, can be completely decoupled from the fact of purchase of this certificate. When I was explaining this vision to our like advisor, he said oh, this is like Visa. This is what Visa does with banks. And we kind of since that point we started calling it Visa of telecom.

So effectively it's a partnership between multiple infrastructure operators that can all participate under certain rules and can issue those certificates and also accept those certificates in exchange for infrastructure services. All records it on single internal blockchain but without it becoming a cryptocurrency. So that's our vision. And then if think about how it can evolve further.

Obviously having this accounts in primitive that allows you to buy those let's say infrastructure vouchers or gift certificates and 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 other digital services that don't require kyc. Because today for example, Amazon knows what I read, what I watch. If I use Amazon to Buy digital goods, right?

And if you look, there is really very little opportunity to buy digital goods and services without some intermediary knowing your full history. And this knowledge is used to abuse you, right? It's used for discriminatory pricing, it's used for manipulative advertising, it's used for all the bad things, allowing to build a very detailed profile about you.

So what we see is a vision of the network that allows to both provide a communication fabric for any communication, but also can be used to purchase any digital goods and services in a way that preserve your anonymity. So creators, content creators, producers of those goods and services get paid without knowing who you are. They know how much they sold, they don't know how many people bought it.

I think it's really, really important to allow such kind of the same level of privacy in a digital space. We had an old retail bookstore, right? Like if I buy the book off the bookshelf, nobody knows what I'm reading. I kind of like this situation, right, when nobody can consolidate the knowledge about what I am reading throughout my life. Right? Today we live in a world and every website you watch can be recorded, every movie you watch, every book you read.

I think we can build a future which will restore the same level of privacy that we had before the Internet, but with the Internet. And that's ultimately the vision for multiple operators 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.

So they're doing something very similar in that you essentially pay and you get these credits that are cryptographically unlinked from the payment that you made. And whenever you go and you redeem them, the operator has no idea who you are. They just know that these credits are legitimate, they know that they are actually issued by them and they let you pay for that service without doing anything else.

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 something that's solvable, which I'm thankful for and I think is a really fascinating next step for the infrastructure side I think you need to.

And I think we need to now somehow connect the level 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 experience that usually requires centralization, without centralization? How do you replicate things that require some privacy compromises without privacy compromises? Right. These are all solvable problem if you think hard enough.

But they are hard problems.

But that is a huge piece and one thing that goes 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 to convert over and use these privacy preserving tools much more readily.

So when we get to the point where we've built the user interface to feel just like what everybody else has had, that creature comforts. And because here's, here's the thing, you can make the most amazing technologically advanced product out there and if they come to use it and 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 get from the initial outset is one that they I've. I know what this is.

I've used this. It feels the same. And I think that's, especially with what Simplex is doing and, and what Flux is doing, is we've put a ton, I mean, a ton of focus on the user interface. It flows like, you know, it flows like Telegram, it feels like signal, it feels like these pieces. And eventually no one will ever think about the privacy piece in the back of it. We've already thought about that for you. Right. And then you can figure out how to monetize that on your side.

So, I mean, I, I think we're definitely at the, at the point where I think our biggest success piece is we've built some amazing technologies, whether it's in cryptography or blockchain or whatever it is, but now we have to apply them and make them useful, otherwise we're not going to get where we want, you know, long term.

Go ahead.

And we have seen, for example, in several last year, ongoing attempts in the European Union to introduce the legislation that would mandate scanning of end to end encrypted communications. And it all have been happening under the guise, oh, we need to combat the distribution of child sexual abuse materials. I 100% agree that this is not something we want to have within freedom of speech, but it doesn't mean that we want to compromise privacy or security of communication.

I actually made a talk at one of the German governmental agencies about that because the problem is created predominantly by big tech, right? So, for example, take Facebook. Allegedly, according to the criminal cases against Meta in multiple states, they knew about the problem for years and they refused to do anything about those problems for years. And they got to the situation when it's completely epidemic, right? When it's out of control.

And then Facebook and Google and many other big tech companies sponsored nonprofit organizations that went out and started to lobby European governments for introducing mandatory scanning to prevent the same problem that they failed to prevent in the first place, which is ridiculous, right? So a lot of what is unacceptable, even within the free speech, happens in public space. And it's not about privacy, it's about political will, it's about technological will.

It's about the willingness to reduce the revenue ultimately, right? Because every traffic creates revenue. Illegal distribution of child sexual abuse materials creates revenue for the big tech companies. So they for some reason are reluctant. And generally, if you talk about freedom of speech, Seth, imagine we're having podcasts now and this is our private space. Imagine anybody joins to listen in, but then they suddenly just say, oh, we have freedom of speech, we can talk.

Or you're giving a lecture, and then hundred people barge in and start shouting that they disagree with you. This is not about freedom of speech. The problem with absolute freedom of speech in all spaces is that it kills the freedom of speech because it suddenly becomes that whoever has the strongest voice is right. And we've seen the same with huge censorship machine in the United States and some elements of that in Europe.

Then whoever has the strongest voice is defining what is allowed under free speech protection and what is not allowed under free speech protection. So obviously going about our initiative, we did observe some distribution of child sexual abuse materials on our network. And whenever users report it, we remove those groups and files very promptly. We have a technology that does it. And people say, how is it even possible?

Because in people's minds, if you have end to end encrypted communication, then nobody can look into it. And the trade off is either you can't censor it 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? Anybody can join those groups. The expectation of privacy for public groups is very different, right?

So you cannot have expectation of privacy of the content. It is, it is public, right? But what you can still have is expectation of privacy of your participation in this group, which is critically important for freedom of speech. So what we published the blog post recently titled Privacy Preserving Content. Moderation is exactly about that.

How can we moderate content that's already public without any scanning client or server side, without any compromise or privacy and how we can prevent the distribution? And it ultimately is very simple, right?

If we as a user, if our technology, if our automated bot as a user can join a group, then obviously it knows, okay, which servers are used by this group, which files are uploaded, where they are uploaded, and obviously the group, 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 it would be privacy violation and it's even 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 scan everything 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 in distribution of those materials, I think our right as operators of the service is to refuse right.

And we see it happening in Feziverse and we see it happening in centralized platform. Right? All operators define the boundary what's acceptable and what's not acceptable behavior in this network. And as I said before though, what's really important 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 disagree with this opinion, so therefore I want to censor it, it would have completely zero effect, right? Because some other operators, I may disagree. I think Winston Churchill who said that I may disagree with your opinion, but I will fight for your right to express it. And that's pretty much where I stand on freedom of speech.

There are lots of opinions I disagree with, but they have to be heard, they have to be said, they have to be discussed, they have to be debated. And that's the only way to protect freedom of speech and the only way it can be possible. If on the one hand, each communication operator can decide what communication they want and don't want to provide, but on another hand, none of the user depends just on one operator.

Because we historically built communication network when our operator is our everything. If this operator, the platforms we lost, we lost 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 so that each user of the network depends on multiple operators, and not just on one, and depends in such a way that only collective action can result in censorship.

And in this case, yes, we can then prevent distribution of child sexual abuse materials. But whatever mistakes any operator can make in any other limitations would have zero effect because they will be compensated by other. I hope it makes sense what I'm trying to explain, but please ask questions.

And that just technologically makes sense, and I think logically makes sense that that is possible and in a way is right, because data sovereignty doesn't go only one way. It doesn't mean that just the end user should have data sovereignty and have control over their data, but also the person actually providing the service, the infrastructure operator, should also have the right to be able to decide what data is served that they have visibility into, obviously.

And so they would have visibility into public group chats. They could moderate that as they see fit.

But like you mentioned, there's protection against an abuse of that power because if you're using multiple server or servers operated by multiple entities, or you're hosting your own relay server, you have protection against censorship, especially censorship that is illegitimate because they can't remove data from your servers or they can't remove data from servers that are not within their control. So I think that totally makes sense.

And then obviously, just to clarify, private chats, there's no ability to moderate because there's no technical visibility into what's happening 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 actually participating. And so if all of that data lives on one set of servers that are hosted by one entity, then it's trivial to moderate.

Or if all of the operators of the servers that that 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 where people feel like we have to have total freedom of speech. But just like you said, that actually destroys freedom of speech if you allow things that simply should not exist on a place that you have control.

But that's again, the kind of balance that's being struck here is ultimately the user has control over what servers are used, the group operators have control over what servers are used. And so there, there can be balance while still allowing moderation of clearly illegal and unethical data from people servers when you have control over them.

I think that's, that's a, that's a human right as well, to not be exposed or, you know, have things like that done, especially to our young children, you know, which is terrible. But, but they're nefarious people out there. And, but you cannot build technology for the less than 1%. You have to build technology for the masses. And 99.9% of the folks that are using these platforms, 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, you know, people kill each other with guns, so we need to outlaw guns. Well, then you have to outlaw spoons because they make people fat. Yeah. You know, you could go through the list of things, those items by themselves and the majority of the people that utilize them does not constitute banning something or, or censoring something for the, for the less than 1%.

So in my, my view, I, I think, you know, the governments are definitely going to have a challenge on their hand. They're going to have to become more proactive rather than reactive. At the point right now, they're unbelievably reactive. They go and they serve subpoenas across the board. They need to start thinking outside the box, fundamentally.

So, you know, but, but my, my goal is to build it for the masses because I'm protecting the masses and then deal with the folks that are nefarious along the way. So, yes, I do agree with what guinea was saying. I think that that's a perfect, perfect explanation.

So freedom should stop when another person's freedom starts and it's a conflict, inevitably, it requires some management, it requires some discussion of the boundaries, it requires some consent. Right. So in the same way as users have to give consent about what happens to their data There should be at least limited ability for server operators to have consent and rules and limitations about what may happen on operator servers. And the approach that I found has absolutely zero compromises.

And we hope that it will be analyzed and used by whatever politicians that really want to solve the problem of child sexual abuse online. Because the way they see today is effectively compromise everybody's privacy. It's like UK government, sorry for political tutorial. They literally discussing okay, let's require idea 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 is ridiculous, right?

How about we do something that actually works right? Rather than something that compromises everybody's privacy and converts our world into a really nightmare. And it wouldn't even work because the problem is that criminals will always file away. So you have to. Dan is absolutely right. You're right. We have to develop technology for majority of the users finds in the right balance and protecting this majority of the users from any nefarious activities.

And we already hear for example, you may say okay, online enthusiasts and techno geeks and cyberfunks would use Simplex Network at this stage. But we hear a lot from family users who say, okay, we like the fact that nobody can 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, we can share family photos and nobody can reach out to them and say hello.

And that's not something that any other platform can provide. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that we have to say that public spaces do not require protection from nefarious activities. So that's all hard balances. And it's really important that there is a way to achieve safety in digital spaces without any compromises to privacy and security, which is what we hear in various warrant proposals in European Union.

I really hope that this will stop that this whole idea that we can solve the problem by client side scanning. No, we can't. We won't. We will only make it worse.

But it's Definitely one that I'm, I'm thankful you're willing to talk about and talk through and actually just have open and honest discussion 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 I don't want to keep you too long, but I just want to wrap up by giving you each a chance to talk about kind of what are you most excited about with Simplex moving forward?

Next things on your roadmap or concepts that you're excited to push out and then the same for you. Dan, I'll let you wrap up with telling us a little bit more about what you have planned with Flux. But Evgeny, why don't you kick us off?

And we have some groups that several thousands of users and we know how badly they work because currently groups are fully decentralized and every time you send a message to a group, your client effectively has to send it to every group member, which works up to hundreds of members. And it starts working really, really badly when there are thousands of members.

And we're developing the approach when there will be some high power participants specifically for public groups that will provide privacy and actually would improve privacy comparing with the current group design by rebroadcasting messages to all 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 have all current groups migrated to this new technology and they will be able to scale to tens and thousands, hundreds of thousands of members. So that's literally our number one priority for this year.

So if it exists within the messenger, you'll have drastically more users who are willing to Also use it for just individual private messaging and other things. But it's also a use case that fits very well once y'all can iron out the architecture issues. Because, you know, like you said, the current architecture is not ideal for huge groups. But I'm excited to see how y'all, y'all do solve that problem in the future. Um, but then how about you.

But you, Dan, what's, what's coming up next for Flux? What do you want people to be aware of?

But that goes hand in hand with what we're doing 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 application and it has massive redundancy. So helping guinea with redundancy on, on Simplex is huge for us and we finally have the capability to do, do that with the release of Arcane.

So I think the big thing for us is our, our roadmap is really around fine tuning and honing the products because the products were all created, they're here, they're here today. Whether you're launching front ends, back ends, game servers, all in a decentralized manner, all ran globally, it all runs today. It's, it's getting that user interface tweak so that we can really go, to go to go to massive market with it. So we're already getting a ton of interest from, from Web2.

When I say our legacy technology, as I like to call them, they want to understand moving forward how they're already in kind of save my *** mode. They understand that there is going to be an exodus, a mass exodus from their technology platforms because people are becoming more aware of, of their privacy and how they're being utilized as assets. So I think Flux is going to continue to keep doing that, supporting projects like Simplex that is hands down doing something nobody's done before.

Super proud to help them and continue to keep building with them. But we're going to really focus in on those things. Privacy, decentralization and security.

Definitely have to have you back on in the future and definitely have you back on as well of getting in the future as y'all keep building Simplex like crazy. So thankful for you guys. Hope you have a great rest of your day.