A Short Story About Private Law | Peter Van Valkenburgh

Welcome to the final talk of the Bankless Summit, which was a series of talks from speakers around the Ethereum ecosystem, all presented at a one-day event hosted the day after DEF CON called the Bankless Summit. Peter Van Valkenberg is perhaps one of the greatest speakers in the entire crypto industry. He works at CoinCenter, defending our rights to hold crypto, have privacy, and retain all the cypherpunk values that spawned this industry. Peter's talk at DEF CON, I also recommend watching just because Peter's talks are always so special. He gave a little short story allegory, a story about a town with houses and buildings made entirely of glass, with nothing to stop anyone from seeing inside the houses. I'll let your imagination try and guess what that's a metaphor for. This talk that he gave at the Bankless Summit poses a potential inversion of that same metaphor, which leads Peter to argue why we need more of this thing that he calls private law. I hope you enjoy. Let's go ahead and get right into this talk from Peter.

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Thank you.

I'm a lawyer. I have notes and all this stuff here going on. Yeah. Okay. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And water. This is lovely. Thank you, David. Thank you for having me. I hope this is interesting to you all. As I said, I am a lawyer, a very Washington, D.C. lawyer. So of course, this talk has to open up with a disclaimer. But you're lucky. This is not my normal disclaimer. My normal disclaimer applies: I am a lawyer, but I'm not any of your lawyers. That's definitely true. Like, do not rely on anything I say. And if you get in trouble, you're on your own. Has nothing to do with me. That's my normal disclaimer. The special disclaimer for this one is this is also not part of my day job. My day job is Coin Center. Show of hands if you know Coin Center. Oh, that's really good. That makes me feel good. So Coin Center is a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., and we've been advocating folks in DC, in Congress, and in the agencies and through the courts to understand these technologies better and to give them enough space, just a little opening to actually grow and build and make the world a better place. That's increasingly difficult because of issues like investor protection and securities laws, and increasingly, increasingly difficult now because of issues like sanctions and North Korea usage of the chain or North Korean usage of things like tornado cash. So that's my day job. And we are suing the government, by the way. We're suing the Department of Treasury for its tornado cash sanctions.

Thank you.

Our claim is pretty simple, is that the statutes for sanctions laws are important. They're part of our national security. And Congress said, here, you have this power, President, to identify foreign persons and property who are, you know, enemies of the state and block Americans from interacting with those things. But Congress said that really clearly.

And they said foreign persons or property. And an immutable smart contract, the Tornado Cash immutable pools, is neither a foreign person nor any foreign person's property. So if any of you, show of hands if you're American, or maybe you don't want to admit to it, if any of you donate to Coin Center, an American nonprofit 501c4, and use the immutable pools in order to make that donation private on chain, there's no foreign person involved. There's no foreign transaction nexus. This is not about national security. That's just about civil liberties. The statute should not empower Treasury to block that transaction, and that's what we're fighting for. We have oral argument in that case this coming Tuesday. So look forward to some new news on our appeal. This is a very long disclaimer. So let me get into the meat of my talk because David, when he invited me, said, you can talk about anything you want. This is the Bankless Summit. We want it to be like podcasty and interesting. And so I was like, oh, oh, okay, the guideline is interesting. Well, my idea of interesting is hopefully similar to your guys' idea of interesting, but it's a little weird, I gotta admit. And so I was like, all right, well, interesting to me is something that someone's personally passionate about.

And maybe even angry about. And yeah, I could be passionate and angry about Tornado Cash for a whole half an hour, but I want to do something different.

So this isn't a talk about privacy law. This is Peter, just as Peter, not Coin Center, talking about private law, like the civil court system, the Anglo Saxon common law, and how we need to accelerate the private law. I actually want more lawsuits. I'm a lawsuit maxi.

And that's gonna sound crazy, but hopefully this talk will explain why.

I'm seeing some nodding. This is a great audience. I hope you enjoy this. So, David told me I could do my talk about anything. So, what I decided to do was talk about seed oils, actually. Because seed oils, especially the long-chain fatty acids here with the double carbon bond in the middle, it makes it kinky. They screw up our metabolism, right? And they're in everything. They're in hamburgers, they're in things that look like Whole Foods, but actually they've got like canola oil in them. It's because of all the money from the corporations. And this guy, RFK, he's gonna he just kidding. This talk is not about seed oils.

Seed oils are actually bad, by the way, but this talk's not about seed oils. No, this talks about something else that makes me passionate and sometimes angry.

This talk is very personal. It's about my kids and um

where I live

in Washington, DC.

So these two little adorable things are my two kids,

and this is their bike or my bike.

And you know, I kind of agonized about this because I was like, hmm, I see people being afraid to talk about their kids in front of public audiences on the internet. And they I see even on Instagram, pretty normally people like put these emojis in front of their kids' faces. Because I guess like facial recognition, right? And personal privacy. And I get it, but and we've got a lot of big problems there. But Jesus, like a couple of emojis is not going to fix that problem. And so actually, like these are my kids.

They're so cute.

And um you probably noticed that the background here is a city.

It's a pretty dense area. I don't just live inside the beltway. I live in the densest neighborhood in Washington, DC, population density wise. And it's nothing compared to like Bangkok, you know, or let alone Manhattan or Paris, but

I'm determined to stay there in DC because I have to be in DC for my work, for lobbying and bringing lawsuits.

And I just really don't want to be that person who, in order to go get a beer and a burger and hang out with the neighbors who also have kids, where I have to hop in a car and drive through two neighborhoods where I just pretend not to care about those people.

I want to like meet my friends at the bar in the corner and meet more friends along the way. Because I'm kind of an introvert, believe it or not. I give these presentations, but like I need to be next to somebody to finally like intimately get to know them. I can't. If I was living in the suburbs and had to drive everywhere, I'd never see anyone. You know, I'd be too afraid to call them up and be like, hey, let's get a beer. And so I'm really committed to being in this neighborhood in DC, but it's hard. You know, the schools aren't great.

They're getting better. They're difficult. The school closest to us is probably not great. So that's why I have that cargo bike is to take them to school. And is the crime problem real? Yeah, it's very real. And it's it's kind of getting worse sometimes.

Like I said, nothing like Bangkok in my neighborhood, but still dense. And this is like this is the bar we go to. I'm gonna keep these smiley faces on the neighbors' kids because that's not my place to share them. But like, and we met because you know, one of them works for the Federal Reserve, another is a contractor at Deloitte, and I'm a crazy crypto lobbyist. And but we all have kids, and it makes us come together, it makes us happy. And here she is drawing on the like the bar gave her the chalk. They're like, go ahead, scribble on the specials. Nobody cares, it's a fun bar. So she's mischievous like me. And because I live in the city, I hate cars.

And I see cars as a symbol of something that went wrong technologically about a hundred years ago

that is a lesson for how we might go wrong for the next hundred years. This is pretty close to me. I I won't tell you exactly where I live. My OPSEC is bad in this presentation, isn't it?

This car flipped, you know, and these are the sidewalks I walk on with a 17 month old who's just kind of like starting to go like this. And so David said I could do this talk about anything. So actually, this talk is all about how cars are evil.

We're just gonna watch a bunch of not just bikes videos. Any fans?

It's a great YouTube channel. You should watch it. No, I'm kidding. This is the second bad bait and switch joke. This talk's not about cars.

But in a way it is, because as I said, I really want to live in a city that's dense, interwoven, where I'm forced to be in touch with people all the time, learn about their weird things and their cool things, and even have conflict with them and bump into them so we can talk about it and find a way forward together. I don't want to go off and be a mountain man in the wilderness to use Vitalik's term about people who are gonna fully validate the chain on their own. I want to be a part of a society.

And this is what I want to be a part of. Does anyone recognize this?

This was the engraving cover of Hobbes' Leviathan, the great European political theorist.

And Leviathan's always talked about as this like monolith, this power, this evil, evil government that we have to just submit to or die, or be in the wilderness, nasty, brutish, and short, struggling for survival and unhappy.

There's a way to read Hobbes that isn't like that, though, and I think it's actually what Hobbes meant. This guy, this powerful king, he's not a dude. He's a dude of many dudes and dudettes,

right? Like

Like this one here, this is a human. This could be me. And over here's Naraj at Coin Center. And like over here's Amin Suleimani. And I'm like, I'm happy to be in the same dude as you because you're weird and I like the ideas and I want to work together.

So, like, this is what we need to enable to be able to prosper in a system of ordered liberty and move forward with our lives. And I'm worried that we're not preserving this. We're not living up to what Hobbes would have actually expected us as political theorists. We're going in two opposite directions away from this towards an actual tyrant that isn't made up of the people, or towards a world where we're all alone in the wilderness, nasty, brutish, and short.

So let me let me talk about cars just a little bit more, because I do think they're a good symbol.

This is how most people take their kids to school, right?

And you stick your kid in this car seat and like look at him. Look at this poor guy. He's got like this great view of the sky.

And he's gonna sit there, maybe in traffic for like 20, 30, 40 minutes. And those minutes are so precious when you have a little kid. Their brains are just developed, they're learning how to interact with the world. And what are you showing them? You're showing them the sky. And they just kind of get teleported to their safe destination. They don't walk through the neighborhood. They just suddenly end up in the Montessori school. And the Montessori school might be really good, but no wonder they grow up anxious. They're like, I don't know how to get from A to B. It's just magic. It happens. I'm in a glass enclosed box and then I'm in where I'm supposed to go. Like they've got to bump into each other.

The problem with bumping into each other though is it's scary as a parent. Like I really worry about my kids' safety when I take them out on a bike. They much prefer it. They love the fresh air. They love seeing the neighborhood. They love the wind on their face. They love me behind them with them in the bucket talking to them because you can have a conversation. But I worry about cars. There's good bike paths, so it's reasonably safe.

I worry so much that I bought this 360 camera. Remember you have like an Insta360 or something or the newer GoPros lenses on both sides. They're great for like skiing and snowboarding and stuff. I want to mount it on my handlebars because then I can just have a document. It's like a dashboard cam, but it's all around me. Have a record of people who mess with me as I drive. And that's kind of maybe a silly solution, but it made me feel a little better. I was like, okay, well, at least, you know, if somebody messes with me, I could, I don't know, start a website of like shaming people in DC for driving into the bike lane and messing with this bike full of adorable kids. What are you doing?

Well, that was gonna be the next slide was a video of me driving my kids to school 360. It would have been really cool.

It didn't happen

because as I was writing this talk,

This happened. This is like a weird like cement wall in the back of my townhouse. It's like 10 feet tall. It's where I keep my bike in there, and the door's locked. And that's my bike.

And this guy is lifting it up out.

How he got in there, I'm not sure. I don't have footage of that. And it's like a 150 pound bike, by the way. That's why it wasn't chained up in there because I was like,

who's gonna lift this bike up over a 10 foot wall? Stupid of me in retrospect. I blame myself a lot for this, but.

The bike's gone. He disconnected the camera at this point because he probably saw it. And then I suspect he just threw it over the side of the wall. And that was the end of it.

And you know, this is okay. The bike was insured. I'm lucky that I live in a civil society that's pretty good about this stuff. And the only hard part was explaining to Ada, my daughter, like,

oh, we can't go to school on the bike today. We have to drive because the bike needs to get fixed. I didn't want to have the conversation with her about scary people outside taking our things. So I guess I'm going to have to have that conversation someday. I just don't know when.

And you know,

the police didn't really help.

This is my favorite scene in Big Lebowski where he wants to get his rug back, you know, because it tied the room together. And the cops, like, oh yeah, we got a lot of leads. We're gonna have a team of the cracked team of people working on it, you know? And I don't blame the cops in my neighborhood. I like the cops in my neighborhood. They have bigger priorities than my cargo bike. Like, there's violent crime.

So, what was my response as a parent, as a human being? I was like, more cameras.

Because I didn't have enough angles to like ID the guy. And this is just like an impulsive response. And you might have noticed the little Nest watermark in the earlier surveillance footage. I was like, well, that's wrong. I know that's wrong because I'm just actually making myself more vulnerable with those cameras on a certain sense. Like, what if Nest gets hacked? People are going to learn everything about me. So I built a whole system that I installed hurriedly before coming to Bangkok because I wanted to like get it working so I could spy on my house while I'm in Bangkok. And it's got, you know, power over Ethernet cameras, so they're all wired. They all go to a switch in my house that runs PF Sense routing. And they go to an NVR, a network video recorder, and it's all local. I got like 16 terabytes of storage, and it just rotates. It's about a month of capacity for two 4K video cameras, which is great. And I'm going to get more cameras.