Zcash

Transcript

Hello, thank you all for coming and listening to this today. Thank you for being here. My name is Zuko. And uh uh I'm here to tell you about Zcash. What is Zcash? Zcash is money. Money for an infinite civilization. Uh I'm one of many many Zcashers, uh people who are devoted to supporting Zcash. And the reason we're devoted to that is because we want a freer, fairer, safer, stronger, more prosperous civilization for us and our children to live in.

And I'm going to tell you the story of how we got here because as Raj said, Zcash is one of the most talked about and the most uh valuable tokens in the world over the last like 1 year or so. And so I'm going to tell you the story of the 10-year overnight success. It started in October of 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper. And 3 months later, I was the first person to write a blog post about Bitcoin on the internet.

>> [snorts] >> Uh January 2009, I wrote about Bitcoin because I thought it was awesome. It was really cool. Um And uh immediately thereafter, Satoshi posted the Bitcoin 0.1 homepage. he linked to he linked to my my website among three of total of three websites that he linked to at that time. And then um even though I I loved something about Bitcoin, which was that it was decentralized and uh hard to stop, right? Hard to shut down.

But, there was something that I thought was fundamentally broken about it, which was that it exposes its users' privacy over the network to strangers. And there's no way around that. And I could see that right away as soon as I saw it. And Satoshi saw the same thing. So, in uh 2010, there was a new cryptographic concept called zero-knowledge proofs that people had thought of, but nobody knew how to create zero-knowledge proofs in practice. And Satoshi wrote this This is a a post that Satoshi wrote. He's the author of this. And he wrote, "How do we use zero-knowledge proofs?"

He said, "If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible." Um and then, like 11 days later, he saw me on the forum and he said, "Hey, Zooko, thanks for helping out." And then, 6 months later, nobody had found a solution. There was still no solution for how to give people money they could use that did not expose them to enemies and hackers over the internet. It was unsolved. And at that point, 6 months later, Satoshi stepped away. He disappeared from the internet forever.

And 2 years after Satoshi disappeared, a solution was found. Satoshi had said, "If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient version of Bitcoin would be possible." Nobody knew how to do it. And then, in 2013, this computer scientists discovered how to make zero-knowledge proofs. Okay, that happened in 2013. The first thing they did was 1 month later, they went to the San Jose Bitcoin conference. This was the second Bitcoin conference ever held and it was really weird and exciting because venture capitalists and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss showed up and uh that was surprising at the time cuz

Bitcoin was just this tiny niche weird thing. And so these computer scientists who had discovered the zero-knowledge proofs went to this conference and they proposed to put zero-knowledge proofs into Bitcoin. And the Bitcoin core devs who were present at that conference said, "No." So the computer scientists uh turned to me. They they called me and said, "Will you help us make zero-knowledge proofs uh a real thing so that people can have decentralized money that protects its users' privacy?"

Um and actually I said, "No." as well. That first that first time. Um the computer scientists who had discovered the cryptography called me and I said, "Well, no because Bitcoin is already started. Bitcoin can be the mainstream thing that everyone can know and use. And so if we invent uh a niche thing that only a few people would know and use, that wouldn't be good enough. It wouldn't help society enough." So I said, "No." But then I slept on it and I called those guys back the next day.

And I called them back and I said, "You know what? Actually, yes because the mainstream thing that everyone can know and use, it has to protect privacy. Uh if you want to run a business or if you want to uh buy and sell goods for yourself or your family or um anything and everything that you want to do on the internet, you need to control who can watch you and who can um interfere with your business. So, therefore, this new invention can be the mainstream thing that can take over in place of Bitcoin. So, I called them back and said, "Yes, I would do it." And that was in 2013 or so, and it took us 2 and 1/2 3 years to um implement

Zcash and launch it. And it launched in 2016. then >> [laughter] [gasps] >> So, it was It was 2016 when we finished the first version of Zcash and we launched it. And um someone who had been a good mentor to me and taught me a lot about uh business called me after we had launched it and he said, "Good job. One of the best I've ever seen. And now for the hard part."

And he was totally right. After we launched it in 2016, then we had about >> [sighs] >> 8 and 1/2 or 9 years of grinding to fix all the bugs, protect all the users, improve the functionality and the security. And then, as you might have heard about a year ago, people started buying Zcash. this is where we are today.

And there's four simple aspects of Zcash. Okay, this ends the history lesson. This is the first half of my talk. Now you know the 10-year overnight success. And now for the the uh the qualities of money. There's There's four simple aspects of money that everyone wants for themselves and that you need to have for your economy. And the first one is scarcity. So, we copied this from Bitcoin.

Just like you know, we we were inventing Zcash in about 2015. And at that time there weren't very many models to to look at. We just looked at Bitcoin and said we're just going to copy whatever Bitcoin does. So, just like Bitcoin, there's only 21 million Zcash that ever exist and new Zcash gets issued continuously, but at a slower and slower rate. So, that the amount of Zcash will always go up, but it will never exceed 21 million. And that's it. That's a simple That's a very simple rule and I used to think that you needed a more complicated rule if you wanted money for people to use in an economy. You wanted the amount

of money to go up and down in response how productive people were or something. And then so someone taught me that uh that's all unnecessary. All that you need for people to plan their economy and make their plans and execute their plans is predictability. So, everyone can predict how many Zcash will exist. Same as Same as with Bitcoin. Um and you can make your plans around that. The second quality that you need from or for for money in a real economy is fungibility.

And this is what I knew from the first start from from when I wrote the first blog post about Bitcoin. I already knew it failed at this and couldn't be fixed. Fungibility means that if someone if someone offers you two $100 bills, it doesn't matter which $100 bill you take. They're both worth the same as each other. Um and that's important for an economy so that you can you can treat money as um a way to allocate resources for yourself and your society without exposing yourself to being tracked and controlled. Fungibility is just a necessary basic property of

money. If you don't have fungibility, it's not really money. Now, this is the one that it required a scientific breakthrough to achieve. This is the one that Satoshi was saying it's very interesting it would enable a more convenient useful implementation of Bitcoin if it were possible, but he didn't know how to do it how how how it was possible at that time because you in order to achieve this, the way we do it in Zcash, and in my opinion, the only way that it can actually work at scale, is to encrypt the uh history of each coin so that you have a shared global ledger that everyone can rely on and everyone knows um

that transactions have happened and that transactions are final and trustworthy, and yet the history of what came before is encrypted and is not visible to to anyone else. Okay? So, that was a scientific breakthrough that um is called zero knowledge proofs, and Zcash was the first thing to implement it, and now it's become um a general-purpose tool that's used by um all major companies like Google and and all and so forth to protect information on the internet.

The next quality that you need of money is durability, which means you feel >> you feel safe holding on to it long-term. That's important for people to plan and save and exercise their plans, and that's important for a an economy. And there's an interesting thing about Zcash, which is totally different from Bitcoin, which is that instead of 100% of the newly issued coins going to the miner, 80% of Zcash goes to the miner and 20% goes to the developers.

This is called the dev fund. And >> I myself don't receive any of this funding. Um me and my company, we only rely on donations from Zcash holders and supporters. So that I can tell you I can tell you about this and I can say this dev fund thing where the Zcash blockchain is paying developers, that's a good thing. And you can believe me because I'm not one of the developers getting paid. There's it's paying a bunch of other developers, and I think that's a critical fact for why Zcash survived for those 10 years that it took to become an overnight success. It was because all along it the blockchain itself was

paying for developers to improve it and protect it. Now the um The last quality that we need the the final one of four qualities that we need is security. this has been dramatically demonstrated to everyone over the last like 12 months or so because of the AI-powered security apocalypse, right? Um it was already bad to where hackers were robbing people and extorting people and taking advantage of people worldwide for years and years before this, but 12 months ago it got even worse when the

uh attackers get got powerful AI. in the Zcash team that I'm part of, we saw this coming um because we're really security focused. Um we're really into cryptography and security. We're kind of obsessive about it. We totally think about security all day long. Security's our favorite thing. And we saw that the AI apocalypse was coming in about I think it was February of of this year, I think. And so we hastily raced to uh take advantage of AI and to find any flaws before the bad guys could find the flaws and and exploit people.

And we won that race just barely. We we hired the best person in the world for that job. And we got him access to the Mythos AI uh 2 days before it was banned by the American government and so forth. we we we succeeded. We found a bug in Zcash that would have destroyed it. And we fixed that bug before we found it first before the bad guys did and fixed it before the bad guys could take advantage of it.

a lot of other companies and projects and software uh packages in the world have have failed at that and there's a lot of damage happening all all all around. And currently, we're now engaged in doing the same thing again. And this time for cryptography. That last time around over this the course of 2026, we successfully protected all the Zcashers from AIs finding uh software bugs, right? If if there's a bug in your program, then an enemy who finds that bug might be able to take advantage of it and abuse or rob your users.

Well, now we're applying the same question to cryptography, right? Cryptography is the science of encrypting and digital signatures and the fundamental mathematics that underlies all of not only all of blockchain, but it's the fundamental mathematics that underlies all of computer security. Uh your operating system, every server, every internet connection all of the devices in all of the militaries of the world all of this relies on modern cryptography for uh confidentiality, so that enemies can't read your traffic.

And it also relies on cryptography for integrity, so that enemies can't hack in and take over your systems. And we live in this really exciting, interesting, dangerous moment when AIs, not to mention quantum computers. It says post-quantum crypto up there, and that's true. Quantum computers are also a thing and also very interesting. But in addition to quantum computers, AIs have just now gotten have just now accelerated to the point at which we don't 100% know if they could break modern cryptography.

So, I already had written the concept of this speech when I woke up this morning and saw that the leading AI has just now announced 174 mathematical breakthroughs as of like two or three hours ago. Any one of these 174 mathematical breakthroughs might well have been like the biggest event of the year among human mathematicians a year ago. And now they're coming faster and faster.

So, that's part of part of what we consider it's necessary to do for Zcash because we think Zcash is important for human civilization itself. And one of the things we're going to have to do, like we did before with zero knowledge proofs, is solve fundamental science problems that uh everything in society relies on because you got to do that in order to have security and you've got to have security in order to have money that protects people that they can rely on and that can protect and empower whole societies and a civilization.

>> [panting] >> Thank you for listening to my talk. This has been the history of Zcash. Stay tuned for what happens next. Thank you. >> [applause]