I spent the last week in Kyiv, Ukraine meeting with both public and private sector stakeholders about how they can make use of tools built on Tari.
The demand for privacy-preserving infrastructure in these environments is real and urgent. The conversations were genuinely exciting and I’ll follow up with more detail as things develop.
But it raised a critical question:
How do we position Tari as sellers of shovels during the gold rush without getting caught in the politics?
Business is agnostic. Technology is agnostic. But the world isn’t.
Some questions for the community and future Council to consider:
Do we follow the guidelines of our respective governments?
Do we establish our own decentralised framework for navigating sensitive markets?
Where is the line between providing infrastructure and taking political positions?
Privacy tech has enormous demand in conflict zones, authoritarian regimes, and politically sensitive regions. This is arguably where it matters most … no need to beat around the bush
A few years ago I was working on a mental health startup, and one thing that really surprised me was just how deep political divisions run, even in places you wouldn’t expect.
For example, I saw a professional association effectively ban Russian therapists from attending conferences and training events because of actions taken by their government. That never sat well with me. Punishing individuals for decisions made by politicians they may not support, and often have no influence over, feels wrong.
My view is that people should largely be treated as individuals.
We’re building agnostic technology. Privacy, communication, and financial tools shouldn’t care where someone was born or which flag happens to fly over their country. If the technology is useful for them to use, they should be welcome.
I always liked the approach that Brian Armstrong took at Coinbase. The focus was on building products and creating value, not turning the company into a vehicle for every political movement or geopolitical dispute.
So my personal view is that Tari should avoid taking political positions wherever possible. Individual builders and businesses should comply with the laws that apply to them. Beyond that, I don’t think government preferences or political stances should determine who is welcome in the ecosystem.
We need people from everywhere. Especially in privacy. The places where privacy is most needed are often the places where politics is most complicated.
There is no element of one’s life that can’t be political. The nature of politics is ‘whose rights are we violating and why.’ As a simple example, most people agree on violating the property rights of others to pay for public schooling and roads (taxation.) Who you are allowed to be, what you’re allowed to do, and who you’re allowed to associate with and in what manner are all things that can be forcibly decided by law.
All that to say that this shouldn’t be surprising on reflection, but it can be anyway just because it’s the air we breathe.
I agree here. I’ve found in my own business work that the best policy is to take a stance only when the nature of a political movement is diametrically opposed to your project’s functioning. For instance, if there’s a push to ban confidential blockchains, it’s obvious you have to oppose that in any way you can.
But you really don’t have to push beyond that. People need confidentiality for all sorts of things. Even states, which would prefer to see everything their citizens are doing, have need of confidential transactions-- between their own arms, or to private businesses that are delivering goods and services to them.
I can think of a million reasons any individual political faction would want to have confidential transactions. And when you’re talking to someone who you know is of a particular political persuasion, bringing these up can be very convincing. But there’s no need to emphasize one political alignment’s needs over another as a project, for instance. If making concrete examples, I usually try to include ones from every side of the aisle.
Technology is incredibly political, and cryptocurrency was born out of politics. The entire reason this technology was created in the first place was out of defiance for central banks and perceived violations of personal rights by the government/centralized financial institutions.
Tari is already failing to be politically agnostic. The only outreach is targeted on a platform run by a man that invests billions of dollars to interfere in elections and public sentiment around the world. Elon uses his influence to target minorities, LGBTQ+, and political opponents - the exact groups of vulnerable people that cryptocurrency was purported to protect - and nearly everyone here is signaling either support or indifference to those very political issues by using that platform. These things are diametrically opposed to our project’s functioning. There couldn’t possibly be a set of more incompatible values.
That is a political position. That the Tari Labs official account only exists on that platform - that is taking a political position.
“Hey, we’re a decentralized privacy project building a censorship resistant network for private payments and applications. Yes, our main form of outreach is on a platform known for extreme censorship and manipulation run by the man that stole the private data of every single American citizen.”
Do you guys see the issue here? Do you see how this might make it difficult for people like me to onboard developers that actually care about these issues? We look like hypocrites.
I don’t think we should be diving headfirst into these issues or making political posts from the official socials, but if the goal is to be agnostic (and I would like to see us move further in that direction), then we are already failing, and I can assure you it is actively costing us developers and community.
This is base truth. Bitcoin was to prevent control by central bankers. Tari is driving it further by keeping large corporations/institutions out of private lives.
I’d been more thinking of the question in terms of ‘should Tari endorse any particular political position explicitly.’ I’m of the mind that actionable endorsement is more powerful and important, but also not what people usually talk about, despite it being the bigger game.
…Which makes this a cutting critique. This is where our actions aren’t lining up with the words we do choose to say, nor the basic principles of what our project is supposed to be.
I guess it’s important to define what “politically agnostic” means in this context.
I interpreted this more as “politically centrist”, “appealing to/upsetting both sides equally”, or a more traditionally libertarian ideology (like that which Bitcoin was founded on).
To me, agnostic/apolitical means more “I don’t know where I stand/what I believe in” which is fundamentally incompatible with most (all?) crypto projects, especially Tari, as we are already taking a (very centrist/libertarian) position on issues like privacy and censorship resistance.
Absolutely, and this is the real issue here. People respect authenticity and they can see right through empty words. It’s our actions as a project and community that matter more than anything. We need to “walk the walk” if we want to appeal to our ideological allies - the only types of developers/investors/community members that will be drawn to contribute to a project that’s down 98% going into a bear market.
For what it’s worth, I think this approach also appeals to individuals that might not align so closely with more “traditional crypto values”. How many times have you heard (perhaps on social media) some variation of “Oh that guy’s a dumbass [insert political party affiliation here] but at least he’s consistent/believes what he says - and I can respect that”? We either stand for something, or we stand for nothing.
