Zcash and the Fight for Privacy

Transcript

hello oh my goodness there's a lot of you thank you all for being here uh my name is Zuko I'm an old school Cipher Punk my dad worked in the computer home computer industry in 1979 when I was five years old he brought home one of the first ever home computers and let little old me play with it and I immediately in love computers were magic and I basically never got over that computers are magic and it's magical what computers let us do so uh now I'm 50 years old so between then and now I've spent most of my life researching and

building technologies that increase freedom because as a scientists I think there's a lot of fertile territory out there where we can get new knowledge and new tools and as a human I think freedom is the most important factor in whether our society is better or worse in the future so in 2016 uh I I was leading a team of brilliant creators who created the cryptocurrency zcash zcash is a purely decentralized money like Bitcoin and and the difference is that in zcash all of

the transactions are endtoend encrypted with modern strong encryption so that only the parties to the transaction can see anything about it like the addresses of the senders or receivers the amount of money the kind of money anything about it is only visible to the people who are party to the transaction okay that was the big difference like Bitcoin zcash has a 21 million coin limit so that the monetary policy can't be a tool a tool a lever for political manipulation now in order to create zcash we had to implement zero knowledge proofs for the first time bology says we

were the zero to one of zero knowledge um real quick this wasn't in my script but I really want to explain real quick why we had to invent zero knowledge proofs because if you think about it the the minors in an open distributed Network the validators or whoever they have to exclude bogus false invalid transactions and they have to include all the valid transactions well how can you do that if the transactions are encrypted so that only the parties involved get to see them the answer to that is zero knowledge proofs where the parties involved can prove to all everyone else on the network that the contents of a transaction satisfy all

the validity rules even without revealing any anything about the contents of the transaction so um zero zcash kicked off the the use of zero knowledge proofs and practice and they've really flowered over the last few years over the coming years I expect zero knowledge proofs to really increase the safety scalability and privacy of all kinds of things both in the crypto blockchain web 3 world and also in the broader um Computing infrastructure structure zero knowledge proofs turned out to be one of those areas of fertile territory to explore okay now I want to talk about

privacy because zcash is the flag bearer for strong privacy that's solely under the end user's control um I want to make three claims to you privacy is necessary for Morality it's necessary for the viability of parallel institutions and it's necessary for civilization itself so first of all morality if you hold a tool in your hand like zcash where no one else can control your decision about what you're going to do with zcash this goes to an extreme because not only can no one else control what you do no one else can even find out what you did so responsibility for

your decision rests solely with you and responsibility is morality I believe that while a few choose to do evil that most choose to do good and that's why human civilization improves and grows better over time second privacy is necessary for the viability of a parallel institution um if you don't have privacy you don't have sovereignty a good example of that is when uh the Canadian truckers were protesting National policies in

Canada some well-intentioned people donated Bitcoin to support their protests that Bitcoin was tracked and seized by Justin Trudeau's government when you don't have privacy Whoever has the Monopoly on power can control what everyone else does it any organization needs exclusive control over its own resources and it needs the ability to coordinate internally and externally and no institution can survive for long if its competitors and its enemies uh can penetrate its information security privacy is necessary for the viability of parallel institutions and lastly I'm going to

argue that privacy is necessary for civilization itself uh a healthy res resilient growing Society requires a balance between public and private interests it requires space for competition uh for evolution and privacy is a part of all that and privacy was a part of every successful Society ever and it was part of all of our societies uh when I was born in the 1970s and about 20 years ago we started this radical experiment throwing our entire Society into a neverbe tried experiment

of eliminating this basic human need from our entire Society this is very dangerous because when privacy is fully eliminated Society becomes brittle unable to change and evolve because the people at the top gain the ability to uh forbid even the possibility of change the last thing I'm going to argue is that now is the time to act because it's 2024 and if you wait until you need it it'll be too

late but that's fine now now is the time when we have the tools and we have the communities that you can take action to improve your privacy now both for now now and for lader and here's among many things you can do here's some of them the first one is you can buy and hold zec Ze the zcash coin that gives you optionality regardless of what surprises the future has in store and also by doing that you're supporting the worldwide underground zcash movement buying and holding zec is what makes you a member of the Hidden Z Network

State and the second thing you can do is self custody your zcash so that QR code and that URL there lead you to a zcash wallet when you move your zcash into that wallet the magic happens it disappears from the internet um from that moment forward no one else in the world except for the people that you choose to opt them into your life uh can see what happens to your zcash so try it it's easy and the third thing you can do now and you should

start doing now in 2024 is um integrate the zcash protocol and the zeec asset into your products and communities and activities that's also supporting the movement now that's all I had to say hit me up in person um let's work together to protect and defend our civilization and to enable it to grow thank you [Applause]