My conversation with Zooko, Nate Wilcox, and Sean Bowe about the Zcash protocol.
Zooko is a cypherpunk who co-founded Zcash along with his brother, Nate Wilcox, and others. Sean Bowe is a cryptographer and engineer who has played a crucial role in the development of Zcash and has made significant contributions to advancements in zero-knowledge proofs, particularly zk-SNARKs, which underpin Zcash’s privacy features.
Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.
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Timestamps
0:00 - Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn
0:04 - Writing the first blog post on Bitcoin ever
6:21 - Bitcoin’s fundamental privacy flaw
9:40 - Unstoppable private money
12:19 - Will Zcash compete with Bitcoin as a store of value?
14:24 - How many people are using Zcash?
16:18 - Good security is good usability
20:10 - Social credit systems and ubiquitous surveillance
23:43 - Why Monero’s privacy tech can’t work
35:21 - Integrating ZKPs into other blockchains
39:51 - Privacy comes from money at rest, not from money in flight
47:42 - Why did the price of ZEC fall so drastically in the beginning?
51:49 - Zcash stablecoins?
55:50 - Quantum threats to Zcash
1:02:50 - Encrypted love notes in the blockchain'
1:07:07 - Privacy enabled cultural trends
1:12:43 - Nate Wilcox
1:14:38 - Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?
1:16:16 - A brief history of Zcash
1:22:42 - Why does Zcash have opt-in privacy?
1:26:55 - Does Zcash still rely on a trusted setup?
1:30:49 - Upgrading the Zcash protocol to Hybrid PoW/PoS
1:40:50 - A bug that almost killed Zcash
1:52:40 - Zcash’s funding model
2:09:09 - Why can’t privacy be added as an L2?
2:14:35 - Scaling Zcash and making it more interoperable
2:23:16 - Shielded Labs
2:24:39 - Nate’s vision for Zcash
2:27:53 - Sean Bowe
2:32:53 - Censorship resistance is a spectrum
2:35:26 - Will privacy coins be banned?
2:37:49 - Privacy and scalability
2:41:47 - Programmable money
2:43:31 - Summary of Sean’s contributions to the field of cryptography
2:55:17 - Zcash might get privacy against quantum adversaries for free
3:00:14 - Halo
3:05:34 - What Sean’s working on right now
3:11:54 - What has influenced Sean’s thinking in cryptography the most?
3:13:36 - Being a high school dropout working in crypto
3:15:08 - Zcash is just getting started
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