Benjamin Powers
Road to Consensus: Harry Halpin Talks Holistic Privacy, Mixnets and COVID-19 (of Course)
Harry Halpin is a speaker at Consensus: Distributed, our free and virtual event that starts on May 11. A philosopher of the web and all-around radical open-internet advocate, Halpin is the CEO of Nym, a privacy-tech startup. Here he talks to privacy reporter Benjamin Powers about what he’s doing to see out the virus and why “holistic privacy” matters more than ever at a time like this.
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Powers: How are you holding up?
Halpin: I first heard about coronavirus, not surprisingly, through crypto Twitter. At first I panicked and went out and bought about a month’s supply of food and basically started preparing for lockdown, which then did indeed happen. It was the first time crypto Twitter seems to have been correct. I would never trust crypto Twitter when it comes to cryptocurrency, but it was completely correct on the coronavirus.
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In my personal life it’s not a huge change. The main difference is I no longer travel. Our team is spread out among Belgium, London and other places but now our team is just fully remote. On some level I’ve enjoyed not traveling because I can get more work done.
So I just wake, do some stretching and I’ve ordered weights and a punching bag. And so I just wake up, I go running, I stretch, and then will do some weightlifting and boxing. The main issue to some extent is lack of downtime. Because there’s no events or socializing outside of me and my girlfriend basically. So far we’ve not killed each other, so it’s been fine!
BP: We’re all learning a lot about our relationships these days.
HH: But when I call my friends and family in the United States I get very concerned. Most of my friends have lost jobs, and most people we know in the States had their health care attached to their job. They can’t afford it otherwise. It’s interesting, too, because my younger friends, who are Zoomers or millennials, are taking this really seriously, while the [baby] boomers aren’t. It’s really weird but it looks like the boomers are in a deathtrap.
BP: And how is COVID-19 impacting your business?
It was the first time crypto Twitter seems to have been correct.
So we obviously can’t have regular in-person meetings. But when it comes to online meetings and chatting, we do that all the time anyway. So it’s been fine and makes you think that maybe we didn’t need as many face to face meetings as I thought we did previously.
We’re making a lot of breakthroughs partially because it’s easier to focus without a lot of meetings, events and conferences. That being said, we have had a lot of security concerns. We set up our own Jitsi server and we’re phasing out of Zoom. We’re keeping all internal communication encrypted. We are big fans of Signal and to a lesser extent Keybase.
And from a bottom line business standpoint, it’s been fine. In terms of funding we aren’t a huge Filecoin-style project. We’ve never raised that much in f funds, but we’ve done conservative management of the funds we have, so we have a year’s runway or so. Therefore, we’re not particularly concerned about running out of money and, to some extent, we’ve noticed that cutting travel has saved a lot of money.
That being said, we did have to phase back and remove a few contractors and cut non-essential expenses. From the business standpoint the question is, how long is coronavirus going to last? Should we keep our office leases? Those are pretty large sunk costs. We’re also, as a blockchain business, not sure if we even qualify for these government loans and emergency funding.
Tuesday, October 20, 2020