Where the Heck is Panquake? And Who is Bad Banki?
Panquake is now on a test net and already worth millions despite relentless establishment attacks. Read how Suzie Dawson's dedicated international team are taking on a major bank in a fight for us all
Viral social media project Panquake kicked off in 2021 as a fledgling crowdfunding campaign staffed by a handful of volunteers with no operating budget but huge passion and aspirations to reform an industry desperately in need of change. By 2024, careful planning and relentless execution mixed with blood, sweat and tears culminated in a robust and sophisticated international business structure capable of changing outcomes for internet users worldwide. Meet Talk Liberation: the privacy-respecting software development house that has developed a stable of products valued in the tens of millions of dollars generated by propelling forward innovative projects like Panquake, Pnqk.me and Lnqk Me, despite great adversity.
Talk Liberation Founder Suzie Dawson wrapped up 2024 by speaking via video conference at Monerotopia, the world’s largest privacy-focused crypto conference, based in Mexico City. In her presentation, Dawson updated the Panquake Community on everything that has been going on and what is coming next.
“Without the actions of ‘Bad Banki’, you would already have Panquake in your hands. But because we didn’t give up and we innovated, and we never lost sight of our ethics or our commitment, Bad Banki will be held to account, and you will get Panquake!” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
Talk Liberation is committed to providing equal access for individuals with disabilities. To view an accessible version of this article, click here.
Key reveals:
Panquake is very much alive and thriving: Dawson announces that Panquake has been deployed on a test network, and for the first time reveals the impressive size, scale and value of Talk Liberation, the independent development house that she founded and which is bringing Panquake to life
The inside story on what really delayed Panquake: How an Icelandic bank unjustly froze Talk Liberation’s seed funding in 2022 - but that still didn’t stop Panquake, who never gave up and are now suing the bank who they call (tongue in cheek) ‘Bad Banki’
The WikiLeaks influence: The Icelandic legal team behind WikiLeaks’ successful USD$10 million settlement of their suit against Visa and Mastercard are now representing Talk Liberation in their quest for compensation
The open source deliveries: How Panquake Me (Pnqk.me) and Lnqk Me (Lnqk.me) are empowering internet users to protect themselves and each other when sharing and marketing digital content online
How Talk Liberation is rebalancing the power dynamic between internet services and internet users: Why are links so important, anyway? Suzie explains
What’s coming next?
Below is an audio recording of Dawson’s full 2024 speech at Monerotopia, Monero blockchain’s annual conference, held in the heart of Mexico City in November.
There is also an audio transcript provided below. Please share this post if these messages resonate with you!
[TRANSCRIPT BEGINS]
Hi guys. Hi everyone.
My name is Suzie Dawson, I am the founder of Talk Liberation, a new type of software development house that is completely privacy focused, and developing a number of products, including our flagship product, Panquake, which some of you may know about. I was here a year ago to talk about it, and I want to give you some updates today, and some more information.
I want to just shout out quickly to our team who’s on the ground there with you; Hi, you guys, and to our team who are online as well. And I also just want to say there’s been one big change in the world since I was here a year ago, and that is that Julian Assange is free! That is something that I personally am absolutely thrilled about. This world is a better place with Julian out of Belmarsh. So hi J, how are you doing?
Okay, I’m going to go ahead and present.
Like I said, I’m from Talk Liberation. Talk Liberation is a company that we founded in 2021 with donations that we raised to create Panquake, as I mentioned our flagship product, which is a blockchain based social media network, that in all regards puts user privacy first.
So I thought I would start by recapping on my speech here at Monerotopia last year. Last year we talked about the inspiration behind Talk Liberation and Panquake. I talked about my history with Julian, with WikiLeaks, and the inspiration that the Cypherpunks movement has brought to many of our devs on our team, who are kind of like the next generation of Cypherpunks, and some of the old original crew as well.
“Panquake is not just a blockchain based social media network, it’s actually a Layer One blockchain.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
I also talked about my history with activism and journalism in New Zealand, citizen journalism, and my experiences of political persecution in my home country of New Zealand. I now live in Moscow, Russia. I’ve been here since 2016, so nine years nearly now. And I’m in pretty good company I must say, both historically in terms of Ed, and also many others who have been joining us here in recent years.
We talked about the first open source release of Talk Liberation, which was a project called WL Dragnet, you can find that at WLDragnet.com. That was an extremely important project. It was the first time our team released a FOSS product. It is a search tool that searches documents that we obtained, which are from a variety of U.S. defence contractors who have been surveilling social media users, and as we say “dragnetting” them based on their political affiliations, and in particular their support for WikiLeaks. I won’t get into the whole thing again, as we talked about it last year, but definitely check it out if you’re interested. We created a tool that allowed Twitter users to input their handles and see if they had been pulled into the dragnet. If they were in the database, then our tool allowed them to, on the fly, compile a PDF of all of the instances of their handles having been pulled into these reports that were compiled by these intelligence agencies.
So I also talked a lot last year about Artificial Intelligence. I talked about the ways that it’s being used in social media to profile users as well. And I talked about the connections between Artificial Intelligence predictive targeting models, and how that’s tying social media surveillance to the war machine, and to the targeting of individuals physically on the ground, particularly by U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Air Force. So yeah, last year’s topics were pretty weighty and important. And I do hope that you’ll go back and watch that speech again if you didn’t hear it.
I also talked about the innovations that my team has been working on in blockchain tech. Our product, Panquake, is not just a blockchain based social media network, it’s actually a Layer One blockchain, and we have some very unique innovations that I’ve certainly never seen in any other chain before. We’re creating a non-financialised chain, where we’re recording user actions, network actions and interactions, and also content moderation actions as transactions on block, rather than just financial transactions. So again, you can go and check out my speech from last year if you want to hear a bit more about that.
I also talked a lot about how important it is, in my opinion, to not be monopolistic in our business practices and in our projects. To not see other people as competition, but actually to be as interoperable as we possibly can be; as communicative and as collaborative as we can be because we really are stronger together, and we really do need each other. And I told a bit of the story of Panquake, our flagship project, and I’m going to pick up where I left off with that story, today.
So this year I want to keep things pretty simple because we have a pretty large community of supporters in Panquake. Our crowd funding campaign went viral in 2021. We raised the funds that we were wanting much faster than we ever dreamed that we could. We had millions of users come to our website and support our campaign. And our campaign was not funded by venture capital. It was not funded by corporations or governments. We had a marketing spend of zero dollars. We had a PR spend of zero dollars, and despite that we were able to make a really big splash. And with those funds, we were able to establish a multinational corporation: Talk Liberation Limited. And we’re now operating in half a dozen countries, and we are employing dozens and dozens of people all around the world.
So I think the key questions that I’m going to cover off today are: what is Talk Liberation; what makes us different? What happened to Panquake? Because there is a story to be told there, and what is all this stuff about links?
“We were able to establish a multinational corporation: Talk Liberation Limited. And we’re now operating in half a dozen countries, and we are employing dozens and dozens of people all around the world.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
So as I mentioned we released WL Dragnet, our first open source codebase. Last year we released a project called Panquake Me - Pnqk.me – which is a short link cleaning and archiving service that we released for free. And I’ll talk a bit more about that soon. And we just this week announced our third open source project which is called Lnqk Me (pronounced Link Me) – Lnqk.me. And one of the questions I’m hearing on the internet right now is: ‘Why does Suzie care about links? Why does Panquake care about links?’ And so we’re going to get into that today. Also: where is Talk Liberation at right now? What’s going on with us, and what’s coming?
Okay, so moving along. Talk Liberation is software you can trust. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t actually trust any software. I can’t think of any software, and certainly not any software development house, that I would put any type of credence or trust in. And at Talk Liberation, what we are trying to do is solve the problems of the internet one piece at a time, through developing and releasing free and open source software. It’s super important to us that there be a software development house that is purely about protecting users, and enforcing user privacy at an architectural level, as well as in the functionality and the workflows too, and even in the links, which we are going to get into very shortly.
“Talk Liberation is software you can trust.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
So we have this suite of products, you can see a few of them, they’re up on the screen, but there are actually more, which we haven’t released yet. And we like to make really slick, sexy, customisable, attractive, drag-and-drop style dashboards that are intuitive and easy for people to use, which have cutting edge functionality, and which are interoperable with the Fediverse and other projects, and which are free and open source.
So just as it says here on my slide, serving users and not Big Data is what we’re all about. We engineer our products to respect user privacy first and foremost. We do not track our users. We do not sell their data. In fact, we go to extreme lengths to avoid capturing user data. And we’ve made multiple innovations that enable us to not store user data, even in situations where it would be expected that a piece of software would.
“We like to make really slick, sexy, customisable, attractive, drag-and-drop style dashboards that are intuitive and easy for people to use, which have cutting edge functionality, and which are interoperable with the Fediverse and other projects, and which are free and open source.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
We don’t use algorithms to manipulate users. We don’t capture attention. We don’t insert ourselves or our content into a user’s timeline. It’s truly freedom software. It’s about giving users total power and control over the software that they’re operating. And we also don’t believe that AI, and certainly not in its current forms, is an ethical solution. We believe that AI is being used to experiment on users, to turn them into guinea pigs.
Not only is all of our software AI-free, but we also, in the course of building software, do not use any AI tools at all. In fact, we don’t use any Big Tech tools at all. We do things very old school. It’s a very back-to-the future approach. But we think we get better results out of it too.
Okay. So we also have a Substack, Talk Liberation does, which you can find at TalkLiberation.com, where we really try and keep, not just our users and our community, but also ourselves, really up to date on all issues relating to internet, user privacy, law, biometrics, surveillance; all that kind of stuff. You can follow our Substack for free, or if you want, you can donate five bucks a month and help support the team, totally up to you. But that Substack is absolutely chock full of really relevant information about what’s going on around the world, and particularly as it pertains to privacy.
“Serving users and not Big Data is what we’re all about. We engineer our products to respect user privacy first and foremost. We do not track our users. We do not sell their data. In fact, we go to extreme lengths to avoid capturing user data.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
Okay, so the Panquake story. This is from Panquake.com/press, the page that you’re looking at right now. It’s a slightly updated version of what you saw last year, and this is the story up through the point that I made the speech last year at Monerotopia. And you can see where we first came up with the idea of Panquake.
We launched our crowd funder. We started planning out our development. We hired our first developer. We wrote our first line of code. We revealed the look and feel of the Panquake interface, and then the functioning interface itself. We did the mobile app preview. And then you’ll see down here, there’s actually something really momentous that occurred that I haven’t been able to talk about very much until now, and that’s right here you see; our delivery was funded.
So obviously our crowd funder, even though it was wildly successful, would not pay for an entire dev team for very long at all, and we needed to raise some funds. But like everything else we do, we did it ethically. We didn’t go to VC’s. We didn’t go to corporates. We didn’t go to governments. We didn’t even go to NGO’s. Instead we were able to obtain private funding from a funder that has the same ethos, same goals, and same motivations as us. And we were also able to retain control of our organization. We still to this day, even three years later, we ourselves are the majority shareholders of our company, which is amazing. And we are the only holders of voting shares, which is also amazing. So we’ve managed to keep our independence and our autonomy.
“We don’t use algorithms to manipulate users. We don’t capture attention. We don’t insert ourselves or our content into a user’s timeline. It’s truly freedom software. It’s about giving users total power and control over the software that they’re operating.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson.
But there was just one little problem that we faced. And you can see here on our crowdfunding page: raised offline; one million and twenty two thousand U.S. dollars. So we very transparently made visible to our entire network the funds that we had raised when we got our seed funding, and exactly how much that was.
However, Panquake, being a disruptive technology, and Talk Liberation being a disruptive company, has been subjected to myriad methods of interference, sabotage, and really attacks since we started the company. And I’ve outlined some of them here on this slide that hopefully you can see right now.
So our very first campaign livestream in 2021 was due to be simulcast on the Jimmy Dore Show to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It was due to be simulcast to a number of independent media YouTube channels. And that stream was hacked, throttled, interfered with, sabotaged on multiple different machines, and multiple different streams. And it kind of played into our hands, to be honest with you, because when the community, who knew something big was coming, witnessed the level of interference and sabotage, they actually doubled down in their support of us. And I actually think it ended up contributing to the viral success of the crowd funder. But from that first moment, we understood exactly what we were up against in terms of the scale of resources that could be set against us.
Sure enough, in a matter of months, Paypal banned our Paypal account. They froze all of our donations. They refused to return them to our funders. They put us through circular appeals processes that never went anywhere. It was a whole drama, and of course we were never able to access those funds. Simultaneously, Twitter suspended all of Panquake’s Twitter accounts without any reason, then they randomly turned them back on, and then they suspended them all again. And so the six thousand odd people who had swiftly followed Panquake on Twitter, all of a sudden didn’t have access to our content, and we weren’t able to effectively communicate with them on that platform. We basically haven’t really bothered going back to Twitter again. We have applied many times for the account to be unbanned, but nothing’s happened about that. I suspect that’s because a certain new owner of Twitter is not really big on allowing competition on his platform.
“When the community, who knew something big was coming, witnessed the level of interference and sabotage, they actually doubled down in their support of us. And I actually think it ended up contributing to the viral success of the crowd funder.” Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
We’ve also experienced what could only be described as extremely sophisticated and large scale DDoS attacks on our hosting provider, our infrastructure and services, our websites, our domains, you name it. I say sophisticated because there has been a lot of network obfuscation and, again, a lot of resource, it all comes down to huge amounts of resource being wielded against us to try and cripple us, and cripple our progress.
We also had 24/7 smear campaigns. We have had accounts posting up to two hundred and fifty smear posts per day, claiming Panquake doesn’t exist, Panquake’s never written a line of code; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you name it, which is absolutely insane to be subjected to, frankly, but again, indicative of the scale of resources that have been set against us.
But then, and this is what I’m now talking about for the first time ever, something else happened to us, and it happened around our delivery being funded for the Panquake blockchain completion and delivery. And that’s a bank - who I’m just going to call for now “Bad Banki” - that is in Iceland, which was where we were planning on having our commercial operations be situated. They froze our seed funding when it was deposited into our Icelandic bank account, and they kept it from us for a very, very, very long time, and they did it for completely spurious reasons. In fact, I’d go so far as to say just deeply incorrect reasons.
Now it wasn’t a surprise to them that our funding was coming. In fact, we had told them ahead of time. We had been very proactive. Our funding source was completely above board. We had done all of our compliance, all of our due diligence, but the bank just decided to freeze our funds and sit on them, which threw our budget into disarray. Threw our strategic plans into disarray, and it took some time for us to find strategic solutions, and be able push forward with the project.
“A bank - who I’m just going to call for now “Bad Banki” - that is in Iceland, which was where we were planning on having our commercial operations be situated. They froze our seed funding when it was deposited into our Icelandic bank account, and they kept it from us for a very, very, very long time, and they did it for completely spurious reasons.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
Now we aren’t the only people to have had banking issues in Iceland. You may recall that WikiLeaks, in fact, won a lawsuit in the Icelandic Supreme Court against a payment processor called Valitor, who was, at the instruction of Visa and Mastercard, blocking donations and payments to WikiLeaks. Thank god they finally won, but as you all know, it really crippled WikiLeaks’s funding for some time. And again, you can see the scale of the resources that were set against WikiLeaks.
And while I certainly have not experienced anything on the level of what Julian has, and I want to be really clear about that, I have no doubt that there is some synergy going on around technologically innovative projects being denied access to traditional financial systems, even without cause.
I’d just like to point out at the bottom of the BBC website, you can see that little cookies notice right there. You will never ever see that on any of our websites. If you go to Panquake.com, there is no cookies notice. If you go to Pnqk.me or Lnqk Me, no cookies notice. We don’t use them.
Okay so here is the second piece of news that I have not ever spoken about before. But that is that the legal team who represented Wikileaks in the lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard in Iceland is representing Talk Liberation and Panquake. We are suing Bad Banki. We are currently engaged in litigation against them, and we will be holding them to account for what they did to our project.
“I have no doubt that there is some synergy going on around technologically innovative projects being denied access to traditional financial systems, even without cause.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
Bear with me a moment please.
Okay, so while fighting Bad Banki to unfreeze our funds, so that we could hire in the remaining specialists devs we needed to complete our blockchain, we realised it was going to take some time, and we didn’t want to deprive our audience of the technology which we had already invested in building until that point. So we quickly pivoted, and we began productising and releasing the pieces of Panquake that we had already developed and finished. We knew that technology had the potential in and of itself to manifestly change outcomes for internet users, and I believe already is. And that’s why we put that technology into your hands straight away, and for free, in the form of Panquake Me - Pnqk.me. And we’ll have a little look at Panquake Me right now.
So here’s Panquake Me. This is a screen of what the Panquake Me webpage looks like, like I said, freely available to anyone. Some smart influencers are already converting all of the links that they share online to Panquake Me links. So, basically you take a link that you want to share to someone, or anywhere on the internet, or that you going to turn into posts, or email, or whatever. You go to Pnqk.me, and you enter that link, and you hit the one button on the page, and it gives you a short link, a Pnqk.me link. That link is automatically cleansing every UTM tracker code, every tracker or nasty thing that’s in a link.
“Users are learning that when they see a Pnqk.me link, they are being protected, and the person sharing the link is trying to protect them as well. And they have a much higher degree of confidence to click through on that link, knowing that they’re going somewhere that’s been validated, and that doesn’t contain any Big Tech trackers or cookies.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
So for example, if you’re coming off of some really hideous Big Tech platforms, or one of the E-Commerce platforms, or one of the social media platforms, or one of the news platforms; those tend to be the worst offenders. You put their link into Pnqk.me. You grab the short link, and it is cleansed of any nasty crap from Big Tech. You can then directly share out of Pnqk.me onto various platforms, or you could just copy that link and go and email it, or SMS it, or whatever you want to do with it.
And what that means is that the recipient of that link, when they click on it, they are only tracked back to the Pnqk.me service. They’re not tracked back anywhere beyond that. And you are then not tied to that user in the way that you would be if you were sharing with them directly off of a Big Tech platform. So what we’re doing is we’re putting a protective wall between those who are generating links for sharing and posting them, and those who are the recipients of that link or the audience. So it’s really quite a spectacular thing.
It also has an inbuilt archiving service, both to Archive.is and Archive.org. There’s multiple archiving options. We also have a quite amazing domain validation technology built into it as well, where if Panquake Me does not recognise the root domain of the link that you’re sharing, it will by default only give you short links that lead to the archived versions. Then we go through and validate those domains. And we make sure that they’re not going somewhere nasty that’s got malware, or going to infect the user, et cetera, et cetera. If we can see that it’s not, and it passes our validation checks, then that’s whitelisted. And that means that the next time that you enter that domain, you’re going to get a short link that will allow you to pass through to the original page, or what in the industry is known as the target URL. But if it is somewhere that’s going to infect the user, or hurt them in some way, they’re going to not be able to access that except for archived versions.
“So what we’re doing is we’re putting a protective wall between those who are generating links for sharing and posting them, and those who are the recipients of that link or the audience. So it’s really quite a spectacular thing.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
So this validation process means that we are continually expanding our list of domains that we’ve validated, and we’ve now validated over a hundred thousand domains on our project, which is quite cool.
The user adoption metrics on Panquake Me have been absolutely through the roof. Over 86 per cent of users who hit the page actually complete the work flow and create a link. And also as influencers have begun using Panquake Me before posting any links, they’re only posting Panquake Me links, the click to link ratio has gone up exponentially as well. I think they’re up 600 per cent. So slowly over time, users are learning that when they see a Pnqk.me link, they are being protected, and the person sharing the link is trying to protect them as well. And they have a much higher degree of confidence to click through on that link, knowing that they’re going somewhere that’s been validated, and that doesn’t contain any Big Tech trackers or cookies.
So we also had a lot of requests from people who want to create multiple links, who want an enterprise version, who want to be able to create QR codes, want to be able to do other things like that. And for that reason, we went ahead and created Lnqk Me: Lnqk.me. You can go ahead and apply if you have a project that wants to use Lnqk Me.
Lnqk Me provides a truly cutting edge digital marketing dashboard. Again, same kind of drag-and-drop fully customisable, same kind of really light workflows and high usability as the Panquake application, and interface design.
And on Lnqk.me, you can create bulk links, you can integrate your own custom domains, you can create and customise QR codes. You can create and customise your own short links. And they all have that same built in validation and security that Panquake Me does, but just with a ton more flexibility and functionality. You can create and edit projects, and you can invite in users from your team. You can create teams within the dashboard and assign them to different projects, so you can run multiple projects simultaneously. You can create links and QR Codes, and assign those to the projects. And so you can really collaborate on a proper digital marketing campaign. It really is a digital marketing campaign tool.
“When you are inputting a link into your browser, and hitting enter, you are connecting to other people’s computers. You are then subject to their rules, their laws in many cases, and their choices. Their choices around their network architecture, and how their websites operate, and what they collect from users, or don’t collect from users.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
But it’s also a metrics engine, and it’s an anonymised metrics engine. So Lnqk.me does give you the same type of metrics functionality as you would expect from a digital marketing dashboard except everything is anonymised. We’re not in any way collecting data on individual users, but you’re able to see your click data. You’re able to see what different types of links are the most successful. What different projects are the most successful, et cetera, et cetera. So you’re able to get high level business statistics without compromising the privacy of your users, and that’s something that’s really never been done before in the commercial space at this level. So it’s pretty significant, and I urge you to check it out if you’re interested.
It’s a great way to be able to compete as a business without compromising on ethics, particularly if you’re a privacy minded project. It’s also much more affordable than the typical digital marketing campaign dashboards because we don’t penalise you with charges per click, which everyone else in the industry does. So we’re trying to clean up the short link industry, clean up the QR code industry, and actually clean up business itself. And that’s a big goal that we’ve got going forward.
Here’s another view of the Lnqk.me dashboard. You can see there the ability to create new projects, links, QR codes, connect domains, upload bulk links. It also has a business reporting feature, where literally in one click you can have a presentation-ready report containing all your project data and metrics that, again, is in no way compromising user privacy.
“We have in no way given up on Panquake. In fact, we’ve made substantial progress towards delivering it.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
Cool. Okay, so that gives you some idea of what we’ve been up to in the meantime, while we were dealing with the whole situation around Bad Banki and our funding, and waiting to be able to finish our blockchain build for Panquake. So we have in no way given up on Panquake. In fact, we’ve made substantial progress towards delivering it. And I’ll be talking a bit more about that too. But first I’m going to address this question I keep seeing floating around the internet, which is: ‘Why does Suzie care so much about links? What is the relevance? And why should we care about links as users?’ And I want to kind of look at that from a lay-person’s perspective, and why they should care.
So I know we have a bunch of techies in the room, and what follows might be a little bit dumbed down for you guys, but I think this is important for the wider community, who aren’t necessarily developers, to be able to understand what the significance is.
So first we’ve got to think about what is a link? We know if we open our developer tools in our browser, when we input a link we can see that we’re connecting to a server. We can see the server address, and we can track the network activity. But regular people can’t necessarily do that, or know to do that. And so what they need to know is that when you are inputting a link into your browser, and hitting enter, you are connecting to other people’s computers. You are then subject to their rules, their laws in many cases, and their choices. Their choices around their network architecture, and how their websites operate, and what they collect from users, or don’t collect from users.
And sometimes you don’t even know, really, where you’re going when you click on a link until you get there. And sometimes you don’t know really know the consequences of you visiting that link until long after, if ever.
So a link is an address, and a link that someone gives you is an invitation to visit that address. So a link is like a passport or a boarding pass, and when you’re transiting the internet, that’s like a digital airport. And you show up at your destination with luggage that you may not even know that you’re holding. And you may not know or understand what is in your luggage. But a largely invisible internet airport security, or border control, rifles through your luggage and stores copies of it, which they keep forever. And then they share with people that you don’t know. And sometimes they do it for profit. And sometimes they’re just doing it for control.
“Thanks to Talk Liberation products, you’re traveling the internet in a much safer way without any baggage. Without anything that can be taken from you, and without anything that can be given to anyone else without your knowledge. And that is pretty, pretty special.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
But even worse, in your luggage, they find out who told you to go on this trip in the first place. It could’ve been your Mother. It could’ve been your neighbour. It could’ve been someone you don’t even know, or that you never want to know again. But you have effectively reported on that relationship just by making the trip. And now you’re tied to that person forever, and the internet border control has you tied together with that person for all eternity.
Once they’re done rifling through your luggage, the airport security add a few things of their own into your bags, and then hand your luggage back to you. And off you go onto the next address with even more luggage than you started with.
So what happens when your ticket or your boarding pass is from Panquake Me – Pnqk.me, or Lnqk.me? Well, when the internet border control open your bags, that’s all they see. That’s all that you’re arriving with, a boarding card that says Panquake Me or Lnqk Me. And nothing else is in your bags. And you haven’t reported on anyone. And your social network and relationships aren’t being mapped. And you’re a free agent.
Now when the internet border security add their trackers to your bags and send you away, and you take those bags back to Panquake Me or Lnqk Me and enter the link that you’ve been given, you’re cleaning out your bags again, and you’re free to travel on unhindered by the past and where you’ve been, and without fear of the future, and where you’re going.
So thanks to Talk Liberation products, you’re traveling the internet in a much safer way without any baggage. Without anything that can be taken from you, and without anything that can be given to anyone else without your knowledge. And that is pretty, pretty special.
“We didn’t want to deprive our audience of the technology which we had already invested in building until that point. So we quickly pivoted, and we began productising and releasing the pieces of Panquake that we had already developed and finished. We knew that technology had the potential in and of itself to manifestly change outcomes for internet users, and I believe already is.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
In terms of social media, links are highly relevant, especially to us building a social media product. Every page on a social media website is a link. Your profile is a link. Your timeline is a link. Your individual posts are links. When you invite someone to a network, that’s a link. When you are sharing content, that’s a link. When you are posting some type of media, or uploading some type of media, that’s also a link.
And we have links, in the context of Panquake - we’ve got links to other content from the web that will get introduced onto our platform. So people want to share their Twitter posts on Panquake. They want to share their Facebook posts on Panquake, god help us, that also has links involved. Links that we’re ingesting from other platforms. And then also when people are wanting to share Panquake content out to the wider web, that also involves link generation.
So we had to work out the optimal way to engineer Panquake links to best protect users for each of those use cases that I just described, and that was when we built the short link service that became Panquake Me and Lnqk Me. It’s actually a part of Panquake. It’s already in the Panquake application, and we designed these links in a way that they would never contain, or that they would strip out where they already existed, these nasty trackers and cookies and what-not from these third parties, so that we could know that users of the Panquake network were never being tracked by a third party, and certainly never being tracked by us.
“We have a 100 per cent AI-free technology stack. We have no GPT’s. No stable diffusion. No machine learning. Zero cloud infrastructure. No Big Tech products, services or dependencies. All our sites, apps and digital assets remain cookie-free and tracker-free. And we do not log or store visitor IP addresses or other personally identifiable information, PII, on any of our services.” - Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson
We also were actually asked by our community to look into content archival as an option, archiving. And that was where the original idea around also optionally archiving content came from as well. So since we had already done that work, and it was already working in the Panquake application, it was very easy for us to package that and spin it out into what became the Pnqk.me service. And then to add in QR codes and anonymised metrics. So it was very easy for us to then branch that out to Lnqk.me.
So in three short years, and despite all the opposition that we faced, we have managed to innovate and deliver multiple solutions that are game changers. Not just for social media, but also for the short link, QR code and even digital marketing industries in addition. And there is much, much, much more to come.
So in terms of the last 12 months, I just want to give you some basic metrics about our team to give you some idea about the scale of our operation. So despite our issues with Bad Banki, we were able to successfully complete a Series A funding round. And with five products in the works, and the level of maturity of those builds, we were able to successfully complete that round at a US$81 million dollar valuation, which is obviously extremely significant.
Subsequently in the last 12 months, our development team grew by 80 per cent. We tasked 803 dev tickets. We produced 2,009 code files, containing 243,857 net lines of code. We configured 14 new servers, nine development, testing and production set ups. We deployed Panquake and Lnqk.me alpha test nets. We have built the Panquake blockchain queuing service, hired new blockchain devs in to complete the chain build itself. We implemented a self-hosted privacy respecting metrics engine.
And after all of that, we still have a 100 per cent AI-free technology stack. We have no GPT’s. No stable diffusion. No machine learning. Zero cloud infrastructure. No Big Tech products, services or dependencies. All our sites, apps and digital assets remain cookie-free and tracker-free. And we do not log or store visitor IP addresses or other personally identifiable information, PII, on any of our services.
So without the actions of Bad Banki, our valuation would have been much higher than it came in at last year. And without the actions of Bad Banki, you would already have Panquake in your hands. But because we didn’t give up and we innovated, and we never lost sight of our ethics or our commitment, Bad Banki will be held to account, and you will get Panquake!
[End of transcript]
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I worked for a startup aviation firm 15 years ago. The IT guru was in his late 70’s. We used IBM software and he kept the servers in his house. I asked him why we didn’t progress to the more popular MS suite of software. He said it was because all of our laptops were nodes of the system. Even if the servers were attacked, he could recover all of the data through the nodes. That was well before I’d even heard of the Blockchain…
Thank You Suzi