30 MIN13 AUG 2026

Running Logos Basecamp is Easy, as the HodlUp Podcast Found Out

Dr Corey Petty on how to run Basecamp and why Logos is going after full-stack privacy with zero compromises

L

Logos

Tech

Logos

Share

In a recent interview, Dr Corey Petty explains why privacy must be built into a tech stack from the ground up. Logos Basecamp makes that vision practical by making it easy for anyone to run the stack on accessible hardware they control. 

Long-time Logos evangelist Dr Corey Petty recently joined the HodlUp podcast to discuss privacy, parallel societies, AI, building better institutions, and where Logos is headed.

While the whole podcast is well worth listening to, the main take-home message was just how simple it is to run the Logos stack on hardware you control via Logos Basecamp. Find out below.

Basecamp is a fully local launcher for the complete Logos stack, running all default modules – Storage, Messaging, and Blockchain – along with installable modules and apps that expand its capabilities on a device you control. Learn more about Logos Basecamp.

Watch Corey on the HodlUp Podcast.

Logos development progress 

Logos Testnet v0.2.1 is live, and most of the core stack is functional, including execution environments and private atomic swaps.

Development is beyond "wait for testnet launch" and into the "harden and grow" phase. And for that, the network needs real usage, not just sideline spectators. Run Logos Testnet v0.2.1 now. 

Explore the Logos stack's base of operations

Running Basecamp to get started with Logos is easy:

What can you do for Logos Basecamp?

You can help harden the Logos stack. Get involved by:

Why building on Basecamp matters

The more developers building on Basecamp and exploring its capabilities, the sooner we'll arrive at the mainnet release. Simply running a node through Basecamp increases the anonymity set for all users, and building novel modules for Basecamp can reveal bugs in the code that need to be addressed before the network goes fully live. 

As Corey mentioned on the HodlUp Podcast, the bar for Logos’s success isn't a roadmap item shipping on time; it's someone building something the engineers behind it never anticipated. Logos is meant to be built collectively in the open, not developed behind closed doors. 

Basecamp video tutorials

If you’re not ready to dive in and explore Basecamp yourself yet, the video tutorials below show just how easy it is to get it up and running and start your journey.

If you’re struggling with anything Basecamp-related, you can put your questions to the engineers who built it during Logos Office Hours. They’re every Friday at 12:00 UTC. Attend an office hour.

You can also ask for help at any time in the Logos Discord.

What's already running on Basecamp

Since the Logos Testnet v0.1’s release in March, developers have been busy building new modules and sample applications for it. The examples below may not have been updated to run on the latest version of Basecamp, but they do show what’s possible with the stack and will hopefully inspire the development of new modules.

We're building technologies and a social movement to revitalise civil society. We need developers, designers, writers, and activists to help shape it. Come build the parallel with us.

Transcript: Why Privacy Can’t Be Bolted On In Crypto

Atis Shala: Hello Corey, how's it going?

Corey Petty: Going well. Happy to be here, good to meet y'all. I was looking you guys up, doing some background research, and I think this is going to be a fun conversation.

Atis Shala: Definitely. Considering you joined crypto in 2013, if I'm not mistaken, this is going to be a long one. Before we get into everything else, I want to ask you the question I ask everyone: what got you into crypto? What was the idea behind you joining? It's a whole world out there, and crypto has changed so much over the years.

Corey Petty: I might take up our whole time with this one. I originally did a PhD in computational physics, and I've always been fascinated with computation. My PhD was in high-performance computing, so solving really hard computational problems was something I cared about. I've also always been a deconstructionist: I like taking things apart and putting them back together with as few pieces as possible.

By happenstance, I saw a TED talk about Bitcoin while I was doing my graduate studies, and I was fascinated by it. I liked the computational problem it was solving, the Byzantine Generals' Problem, and I thought the solution was elegant. So I researched it, wanted to understand the ins and outs, wanted to see how it could break down. Then I started playing with it, and I learned about money and the weirdness that is money. I found it fascinating that we'd built real, sovereign internet money, something we'd never had before. It was a fundamentally new thing to me, and I got lost in it.

I started mining because the best way to learn is by doing, and the more competent I became, the more fascinated I got. Eventually, I started a podcast and met a lot of people through great conversations – that's The Bitcoin Podcast… shameless plug. I really enjoyed it, and eventually I left academia, because the problems I was solving there, while interesting, were problems nobody cared about. Meanwhile, this huge industry was emerging that I saw as an exponential technology about to take off, one that gives power back to people. I care a lot about cryptography, information, and decentralised systems, so I got a job doing data science and blockchain education, then moved into security.

Then I got a job at Status after their ICO, where I was lead security engineer and CSO. I kept doing it because the ecosystem kept exploding, and I was always trying to build things I believe in: resilient systems built for adversarial settings, resistant to being taken over. That's core to who I am: figuring out how to build systems that aren't asymmetric in power.

Dren Hima: I resonate with that. When we joined crypto, we were drawn in by the same philosophy. You've lived through the most important cycles this space has seen and watched it evolve into what it is today. Do you like it? Did you predict this is where it would end up? It doesn't feel the same anymore. I get nostalgic about a lot of things, but especially about when we first joined crypto. We can talk all day about ideology and institutions, but it just doesn't feel the same. I want your take, because I know you've been critical of the institutionalisation of crypto.

Corey Petty: No, I don't like it, but I'm not surprised by it either. The ideology isn't gone. When we started The Bitcoin Podcast, our whole line was "adoption is the only thing that matters." We were going to replace the banks, give people ownership of their own financial data. But that's not the adoption we got, because it's genuinely hard to do. Using a wallet, taking responsibility for your own private keys, understanding what you're signing, understanding what chain your tokens are on, navigating the weird dynamics of DeFi – all of that is hard, and people don't like hard. It means learning something new and changing their behaviour.

So the adoption we got was driven by scale and convenience, and a lot of what we built ended up being the same thing we already had, just on the internet: traditional finance, online. That isn't what I signed up for, but it's clearly the direction things went, because it's what people wanted. We haven't yet convinced them of the thing I got into this for, and why they need it. I think we're getting there. People are starting to realise this isn't fundamentally different from what came before. I'm still hopeful we can build something that actually feels better than what we already have.

Atis Shala: On the institutionalisation of crypto, I think it was inevitable, like you said. But I also think we asked for it, in a way. Maybe not you specifically, but the majority of the industry. Back in 2020 and 2021, whenever there was news of some new institution getting into crypto, everyone got fired up. I think the industry has an identity crisis around this, and it connects to privacy too, because I think anonymity and privacy in crypto should be non-negotiable.

Corey Petty: I'd agree.

Atis Shala: But how realistic is that? Regular people don't really care, do they? If you ask my parents whether they care that their data gets sold from their social media accounts to feed algorithms that essentially enslave them digitally, they wouldn't care. I try to say I care, and I try to stand behind the movement, but it's hard to stay idealistic in today's world. How would you convince someone to fight this fight? I see it almost as a war: How do you get people to stand behind these values?

Corey Petty: That's a hard one. Honestly, I don't think you convince most people directly. This mirrors something I saw doing security work: people only care about security once it's already been breached, once it personally affects them, and by then it's usually too late. So, as builders, we have to be the ideological ones and build things that don't give people the option to skip these protections. It has to be built into the substrate, the infrastructure itself, so people are protected by default and have to actively opt out if they want to. That's consent, versus the current model, where consent was never really given.

Privacy is the same story. The transparency baked into everything we use today creates a surveillance economy, and the easiest way to profit from that is to aggregate data and exploit it; the user becomes the product. Companies aren't building for what users need; they're building to take advantage of them, because that's what the current substrate incentivises. So I'm less interested in trying to "sell" privacy and anonymity, and more interested in building a substrate that doesn't give people that choice to be exploited by default, one where they have to actively consent, and in some cases can even profit from their own data instead of someone else scraping it because that's the cheapest option.

You can't bolt privacy onto a system after the fact – or you can, but it's much harder. The lifecycle of a transaction has many steps, and if you think of the blockchain as the settlement layer, that's the end of the lifecycle. Almost all the surveillance and profiteering happens before you ever get there. So it doesn't matter if you have a privacy solution on the blockchain if everything's already been harvested upstream, or if bad actors just go after whoever's using the privacy solution instead. You have to secure and privatise the entire transaction lifecycle, so the user can choose when to disclose information, instead of having it sold off before they ever had a choice.

Dren Hima: That's exactly it. People did ask for mass adoption. They did ask for institutional money to come in. It's like asking for rain and getting a thunderstorm instead.

Corey Petty: A monsoon.

Dren Hima: A monsoon with a lot of narratives and political battles thrown in, though we don't need to go down that rabbit hole right now. I want to ask about Logos and the philosophy behind it. You mentioned pivoting away from academia. I imagine you had to unlearn a fair amount from that world to get to where you are now, building Logos and everything that comes with it.

Corey Petty: I don't know that I've unlearned so much as stopped using it the way I originally learned it. I've actually come full circle on this: I think institutions really matter. But you need to build good ones, because institutions are what survive across generations; they carry forward core ideas and complex thought, and train new people to keep doing that. So you need to rebuild institutions in a way that makes them uncapturable, which requires the right infrastructure underneath them.

What we mostly see today are captured institutions. The goal is to rebuild them so they're resistant to capture. That's what we've been trying to do with blockchains: build technology that resists this asymmetric dynamic where a small number of people end up controlling the whole system. We've learned a lot over the past decade and a half about how to actually do that well, and maybe now we're at a point where we can build something that genuinely helps rebuild institutions in society.

Atis Shala: So, how do you actually plan to do that? Institutions keep getting built in ways that are easy to capture. I don't want to be the pessimist here, but it feels like almost anything can be bought with today's mindset – a lot of people are losing their ideals. Everyone you talk to about building something better ends up asking, "What's in it for me, financially?" I get it, it's a business, but we're trying to build something with a different kind of value, not just financial. How do you want to change that?

Corey Petty: A lot of our philosophy is: don't try to fix the existing system, build something in parallel that gives people options, purpose-built for what they actually need, instead of trying to bend something that was never designed to serve them. And you have to build those things so they can't easily be captured or broken.

That means resilient technology that gives people the tools to build their own communities and parallel institutions in their own niche areas, and then supports that growth. Ideally, what emerges are resilient institutions that actually serve real people, instead of the detached systems we have now.

It starts with building technology that's provably resistant in real-world conditions, then going out, learning people's actual problems, and helping them build things that serve those needs, then fostering that community growth. I don't think you get real societal change unless you do both simultaneously: build uncapturable technology that serves people, and understand people's problems well enough to help them use it. Big problems only get solved by big communities, so you have to battle-test this stuff, let it grow iteratively, and keep the focus on actually helping people.

Dren Hima: As an economist myself, I put some blame on economists for this. We tend to assign statistical value to almost everything except privacy. You see projects shipping surveillance tracking in the backend that users have no idea about. But if you asked people how much they'd pay to have their data protected and be anonymous online, I'd bet most would pay something. So privacy can be monetised too.

Which brings me to AI. It's scaled a lot of good things, but also a lot of the bad, including surveillance. I'll be honest, Claude and ChatGPT know a lot about me because I'm the type of person who asks for help with the most minor things. I vouch for total privacy, and yet I'm clearly caught up in this too. I want to hear your take on AI. You've written about how it boosts efficiency, but are there hidden dynamics people aren't aware of, beyond surveillance and privacy?

Corey Petty: That's a big one. I'm fascinated by AI for a lot of reasons: how it works, the emergent property of it actually being able to reason, the environmental and social implications of hyperscalers, how people use and leverage it, and whether it makes them stop thinking or actually think better and become more efficient.

What worries me is the amount of control these hyperscalers actually have, and the potential, from that control, to manipulate society in ways that aren't obvious. You ask it questions the way you'd use a search engine, and it gives you an answer, but you don't know where that answer really comes from. It comes from how the model was trained, post-trained, served, and the rules the provider builds in. This is the first time in history a single company controls the entire information pipeline – from data aggregation to training to serving – and it's all proprietary. You don't really know how any of it works.

Historically, we've had multiple institutions and gatekeepers controlling different parts of an information pipeline, which gave us some checks and balances. That's gone now. These companies are also transnational and massive, so they're not really subject to any single jurisdiction. It's a scary, unproven situation. AI has real potential to make society better, but only if it's built with checks and balances we haven't figured out yet, and I don't think hyperscalers are the ones who'll figure it out. We also haven't solved how to make these systems capable enough without just scaling them bigger and bigger, with all the resources that requires.

So there's real potential for harm and real potential for good, and I'm caught in the middle. Computationally, it's fascinating. I love it, it makes me better at what I do, it helps me learn. But it can also make people dumber if they don't use it the right way. We'll see.

Atis Shala: I saw a post somewhere – "don't outsource your thinking to AI" – and honestly, I think I've been doing exactly that.

Corey Petty: Because a lot of the value in life is in the thinking itself. Struggling with an idea, wrestling with complexity – that's the point of the exercise. When you offload that entirely, you lose the capacity to do it.

Atis Shala: I think at some point you stop being human, in a sense. After a decade of outsourcing everything to AI, people just forget how to think, and that's the one thing that makes us human. I don't want to go too far down that road either. So, you said you're fascinated by AI, but how do we stay decentralised and keep these giants from taking over? Is local compute the answer to AI sovereignty, or are we too far from that?

Corey Petty: I think we'll find ways to decentralise training, inference, and data ownership and aggregation – the whole pipeline that feeds these models. Model sizes will shrink to the point where meaningful reasoning can run on devices people can actually afford, so it stops being a global scarcity problem over who controls the compute. It becomes something you can run on your laptop or phone, once we get better at doing this efficiently.

At that point, you're no longer dependent on hyperscalers, because there's an alternative. I've made this comparison with crypto before: I don't mind using Coinbase, because it's built on a decentralised platform. If I don't like what they're doing with my Bitcoin, I can move it onto the blockchain directly. I have the option to exit. If you don't have that option, a company can do whatever it wants, because you can't do anything about it. So whether we're talking about crypto or AI, you need a place to exit – a way to still do what you want to do, without being subject to any one company's rules. When people have that option, companies have to earn their users because those users can simply leave.

Atis Shala: I agree with all of that, but from your perspective, what role does blockchain play in a future where people run local, private AI? There have been a few blockchain projects aiming at more efficient data preservation than Bitcoin's chain, while keeping its core benefits. I remember one called MINA, back in 2021, though I'm not sure it still exists. I know the concept is out there, but is it actually being practised? Can blockchain support that future while staying private?

Corey Petty: Absolutely, that's exactly what Logos is trying to do. Blockchain plays a critical role in building decentralised, resilient applications by providing meaningful digital scarcity: I can give you something, and you know I no longer have it, because of global total ordering that everyone can agree on.

In an age where AI can manufacture almost anything, trustless verifiability becomes essential. I know something is mine, and it's provable – backed by cryptography, not by someone's word. Systems that operate reliably in adversarial conditions give me confidence something actually happened and that I can prove it. Add zero-knowledge proofs, and I can prove something happened correctly without revealing the underlying details. That combination – total ordering, verifiability, permissions, decentralisation that resists takeover, and privacy – is powerful. It matters when you work with people you don't fully trust, or when you're building communities that can't be captured because they don't leak the information needed to capture them.

Blockchains serve that role, but you don't put real data on-chain. The chain is just there to prove something happened, for as long as you need that proof. After that, you can checkpoint and archive it elsewhere, because the cryptographic linkage already guarantees immutability. That's what something like Logos Storage is for: keeping large amounts of data available long-term while staying private.

Where blockchains have historically lacked privacy is in the consensus and mining process itself, which leaks information and has led to people being coerced or robbed. So we believe privacy needs to be built in at the lowest level of the stack – where nodes actually run. I don't want to know your IP address, your stake, or your influence over the mining process; I just want to know the process is fair and verifiable. That's what we're doing with zero-knowledge proofs and what we call the Blend network – it hides who proposed a given block and also obscures the network forensics around how that block propagates. Even if you can't see what's inside the chain, existing "private" chains are still vulnerable because you can watch who's actually processing transactions and go after them. If you want this to hold up in the real world, privacy has to exist at the lowest level. We believe we've done that with Logos, but it still needs to be battle-tested and scaled.

Dren Hima: How do we keep bad actors away? A lot of the case for surveillance states rests on the idea that privacy enables crime, because authorities can't track bad actors – that's where a lot of the pushback on privacy comes from. Is it realistic to build a world with real privacy that's still safe from bad actors, without undermining the principles that made privacy possible in the first place?

Corey Petty: No, there will always be bad actors. There are bad actors today. The real question is whether the good this technology enables outweighs the harm those bad actors cause. I've always believed ethical people should be the ones building this technology, because if they aren't, the good guys end up playing catch-up to the bad actors' methods instead. Wherever a community reaches a certain size, you'll find people trying to exploit it; that's just how it goes. You build systems that minimise their impact and structure networks so no one can assert outsized control, because bad actors aren't going away. You want ethical builders creating the tools, and you help the people trying to stop bad actors by understanding how bad actors could exploit the system.

A lot of what bad actors need is information. If you don't hand it to them, it becomes much harder to do what they want to do, especially anything involving surveillance or exploitation of others. So no, you don't eliminate bad actors, but you build systems resilient to them, and help the communities using the technology root out bad behaviour where it exists. At the end of the day, it's humans on both sides of this technology, and humans make mistakes; you catch bad actors not by manipulating the system, but by watching the humans.

Dren Hima: I want to talk about the concept of parallel societies. What's the most concrete evidence, in your view, that parallel societies are real and not just a metaphor?

Corey Petty: That's really more Jarrad's territory; it's his whole thing. But I can offer a few examples. We already have special economic zones, which function as financially incentivised parallel societies outside normal jurisdictions. Unconventional communities are operating in international waters, doing their own thing – a modern echo of how piracy historically forced questions about jurisdiction and jurisdiction-free spaces. And throughout history, we've seen parallel institutions stand up to regimes and win – not through violence.

It's hard for me to push my own views here because I've always focused on the technology side of this. I like the idea of people having a right to exit, and spending their time in systems that actually benefit them instead of exploiting them. Jarrad's book, Farewell to Westphalia, has great examples of parallel institutions throughout history that worked: economically viable, sometimes producing real markets worth pursuing. This isn't just an idealistic social movement; there's real business opportunity in serving people this way. But I don't spend my time studying that side these days. I'm more focused on what emerges once we give people the technology to build it themselves.

Atis Shala: Let's look at the future of Logos. You have three products: Messaging, Storage, and Blockchain. What's still missing from the stack right now? I think the unification of the brand happened in late 2025. What's the next step, and what should people following Logos be excited about?

Corey Petty: We have testnets running, and most of the four core pieces are working: execution environments with DEXs, private atomic swaps, all the main components. Now we need to harden them, test them, and grow the user base building on top of them. The best thing anyone can do is download Basecamp, run a node, and either file a bug report or try to break it – or build something on top of it.

We have grant programmes and RFPs for people who want to help build, so it's not just us building this and handing it to people – it's meant to be a community effort. The best measure of success, honestly, is someone building something we never planned for. You can start today: download Basecamp, check the website, and look at the funded opportunities for things we want built but don't have the time or resources for ourselves.

Running a node is genuinely simple: download Basecamp, click run, and it can run on something as small as a Raspberry Pi. We have things in the pipeline to make that even easier, so you're not limited to running it on your main machine – you can deploy it to a small device at home, or rely on someone else's node safely, because our light-client protocols let you verify the data you're being given is correct.

Atis Shala: So, through the Lambda programme, I could go build something like Logos Markets – a prediction market – and get funded?

Corey Petty: If your proposal is solid, yes, we'll fund you.

Atis Shala: I might need your help putting that proposal together.

Corey Petty: Submit a proposal; the requirements are laid out clearly. I actually helped build the evaluation framework, so when people build something, they know exactly what they're building against, and it's easy to check whether it meets the bar. We want people doing this; we've allocated funding for it, because you can't do this alone. You need people building on it, with a real stake in growing the network alongside you.

Dren Hima: Zooming out – ten years from now, ignoring PR metrics and TVL numbers that have flooded my feed – what would tell you Logos succeeded? And what would tell you it didn't?

Corey Petty: Success, to me, looks like large communities actually using the Logos stack to run something they need – a land registry, a local market, a voting system, something meaningful and community-scale. That's real impact. I don't want to see another DeFi protocol that just shuffles money around and profits someone without doing anything else. I want real societal impact, and people getting curious enough to build new kinds of communities on top of it – genuine parallel societies, meaning communities of like-minded people who've opted in around shared values. As those grow, they need some form of bureaucracy to hold together, and the technology can serve that through registries, fair markets, voting mechanisms, and so on.

That's success. Failure looks like exactly where we are today – regulated stablecoins that don't actually serve people.

Atis Shala: I want to ask about Blend, since it's relatively new to Logos, and you mentioned how easy node setup is supposed to be. What's your plan for growing adoption of Blend nodes? It's a brutal market to grow in right now.

Corey Petty: Great question. This is something I've always cared about, because privacy exists in proportion to the size of the anonymity set, and there's a real bootstrapping problem: How do you build and maintain that set?

Here's the short version of how Blend works today: when someone wins the right to propose the next block in Cryptarchia, our consensus mechanism, they have to broadcast it to the network – and that broadcast leaks information. Over time, someone doing network forensics could de-anonymise who holds what stake just by observing how often they propose blocks, since proposal frequency is weighted by stake. That could expose someone's IP address and, ultimately, their physical location, which we obviously want to avoid.

Blend solves this by routing proposals through a network inspired by mix nets – though it isn't quite a mix net – introducing random delays across multiple hops, where each hop doesn't know who came before it. That hides who's submitting what. But you also need cover traffic, so not every message looks like a block proposal, or you can trivially tell which messages actually matter. Plain cover traffic, though, is just wasted bandwidth.

There's something new on the roadmap I'm comfortable discussing now, called EmPoWering – a neat way to solve several of these problems at once. The economics aren't fully worked out yet, but I'm writing that up now. The rough idea: a new node could do proof-of-work to hit a certain threshold and generate a small pool of funds that covers their first transaction on the Blend network, meaning you can gain entry and keep the anonymity set alive purely by contributing computation, without needing outside funding. This incentivises fresh accounts to submit real transactions instead of relying on synthetic cover traffic, and you can auto-tune the size of the anonymity set the same way Bitcoin auto-tunes mining difficulty, matching it against real network traffic.

That gives us real cover traffic made of genuine transactions, funded by proof-of-work rather than some external funding source that would otherwise dox you – say, by requiring a deposit from an exchange. It solves the bootstrapping problem: How do you enter proof-of-stake consensus without funding your node from a traceable source? You should be able to enter and exit the network freely, the same way you can with Bitcoin mining, without needing to fund anything up front. It's a genuinely new approach. Version three of Blend should include an early implementation in testnet, though the documentation isn't public yet. I'm writing a technical piece that covers the economics in more depth.

Atis Shala: So it's essentially a modular way to enter the Blend network.

Corey Petty: Right – it automatically tunes the security and efficiency of the anonymity set, and gives people an onboarding path that doesn't require funding a node before they can send a single transaction. You can mine your way into your first transaction.

Atis Shala: Looking forward to that write-up.

Dren Hima: How do we get the average degen trader into Logos? Privacy as a narrative is arguably having its best year yet: ZEC has had a moment, Monero keeps coming up, and there are more privacy-by-default chains launching. But how do we make it stick and bring in the next wave of users? We've had Session on the podcast before – a decentralised alternative to Telegram – and they're relying on donations because it's hard to scale something with real utility without eventually needing the average degen trader in the network.

Corey Petty: We need trading activity; things need to move for any of this to be sustainable, and people need to use it.

Dren Hima: Exactly, so how do we bring them in?

Corey Petty: I don't have a full solution, but I have ideas. One is building something efficient enough to support applications that genuinely can't be built elsewhere: a fully private transaction lifecycle that doesn't require negotiating a multisig transaction over Telegram, real private atomic swaps, and so on. Another is a developer experience that's second to none and unified across the whole ecosystem – interacting with Storage feels similar to interacting with Messaging, which feels similar to interacting with the blockchain layer. Because these pieces are merged, we can offer a seamless experience for building an entire application – chat, long-term storage, consensus, token swaps – all within one wallet, one integrated system.

If the infrastructure is solid and the developer experience is genuinely simple – without the usual glue code of stitching together Ethereum for one thing and Solana for swaps and something else for storage – that complexity mostly disappears. Good infrastructure, real guarantees, real control over when to disclose information, and ease of building on top of it: that's how you get people to build the applications that eventually pull in that next wave of users.

Atis Shala: Suppose you succeed in driving privacy adoption and build out a whole ecosystem around it, similar to what already exists for non-private blockchains, and then a government decides to ban anything connected to privacy platforms, threatening serious jail time for users, and other countries follow suit. Realistically, what can we do? I know Monero was recently delisted from most major exchanges. Is enough being done to engage policymakers and convince them that some of these regulatory approaches to privacy are wrong?

Corey Petty: I don't know how to solve politics. It matters a great deal because those decisions affect so many people. Even if the technology works perfectly, if using it becomes practically unusable because of the legal consequences, you won't get adoption: people will be too scared to use it. That's not a problem you fix by building better technology; it's a problem you fix by talking to people – your local representatives, your community. Ideally, when one jurisdiction gets something wrong, others call it out. Public pressure and reputational cost are really the only tools that have consistently worked to change behaviour, but that requires global coordination and people actually caring.

Part of our job, as builders, is proving this technology is genuinely good for people, so they demand it and go tell their own local representatives why they care. Without that grassroots demand, you don't get real political change – and to get that grassroots demand, we have to show people solutions that meaningfully improve their lives, not just talk about ideals.

Dren Hima: We've had a lot of guests on this show who are polished and media-trained, saying what they know how to say. It's rare to get someone who genuinely knows what they're talking about. Dr Corey Petty, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a genuinely eye-opening conversation, and I wish we had more time, because there's so much more we could dig into.

Corey Petty: Thank you, I appreciate that. There's so much to talk about; it's a fascinating space.

Dren Hima: It really is the most interesting industry in the world – chaotic; sometimes I question why I joined, but here we are, building asshole-resistant technology. Cheers to that.

Corey Petty: Thank you for having me; this was great!

Dren Hima: Thank you.