We have this strange relationship with trust. To be sure of something, we want to see it all. To trust a ledger, we want the ability to verify every entry. In order to trust a system, we want God mode, so we can see the whole thing. We get uncomfortable when that is not available to us. Intuitively, privacy and certainty are at odds because what is hidden cannot be trusted, and whatever is trusted cannot be hidden.
But Physics has shown us that this is wrong. It’s the human demand for God-mode that breaks the world, and He doesn’t play dice.
I recently started down this rabbit hole by looking into the work of Paul Raymond-Robichaud (X: @PaulRRobichaud) after he began accepting Zcash donations to support his research on his “local-realistic” quantum theory. But first, let’s back up.
The physics
In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) argued that the current understanding of quantum mechanics was incomplete. They started from two assumptions they considered reasonable: a) local, where nothing could influence anything else at a speed faster than light, and b) realistic, where properties are definite regardless of whether or not they are observed.
Thirty years later, John Bell was widely regarded as having shown that local realism was dead. The popular reading is that you must accept either influence at a distance or that nothing is definitive until measured. But that’s not quite right. He showed that one kind of local realistic theory didn’t work, where entangled particles carry a common set of instructions, or hidden variables. But he himself recognized that often impossibility proofs only reveal a lack of imagination.
Often, there are other doors yet to be explored, and many are simply hidden in some unexplored reaches of the universe in our minds.
Which brings us back to Paul Raymond-Robichaud. Paul, along with Gilles Brassard, one of the fathers of quantum cryptography, walked through a previously unexplored door. Their theory, as published in Parallel Lives, posits that local realism is possible when the observer is not assumed to have a single outcome. When measured, you split into the possible outcomes. Both are real. Both are local.
The “spooky” correlations are simply the meeting of outcomes. The universal wave function (the universal common state) isn’t a complete account of local reality. And it’s not necessary because a local description is sufficient, and the whole is stitched from those local descriptions. You only need the local reality. There is no need for God-mode.
So what is the correlation with Zcash? What follows are correlations, not derived. So please read in that light.
At the edge
A Zcash shielded pool hides values and spends while ensuring the total supply is protected against counterfeiting. Historically, the promise required trust in the correctness of a cryptographic circuit. The recent vulnerability discovered in the Orchard circuit broke that trust.
The criticism from many who want God-mode for public cryptocurrencies is that a pool whose contents are hidden cannot be trusted to guarantee its own supply. Privacy and verifiable scarcity cannot co-exist.
But that’s a simple argument, and like with Bell, a limitation on imagination, not math.
The since-patched vulnerability was due to a human’s missed check on a particular cryptographic circuit, not a failure to privately protect the capped supply. No one needs to see inside the pool. The observability comes at the edges where funds move in and out from transfers, swaps, and the turnstile. With the Ironwood upgrade, the old pool is sealed to new deposits and internal payments. Funds are forced through a turnstile that effectively audits the pool’s supply. Supply is guaranteed at the edge rather than in the interior.
Note that the circulating supply is a global invariant. It’s not an argument for God-mode. The pool itself does not secure the invariant. That happens at the edge. But no global observer can read every transaction and balance to confirm the total. No one gets a privileged vantage point.
The supply guarantee can still cost a particular person. The turnstile indiscriminately bounds the funds leaving the pool. It’s a tradeoff. The alternative is that an exploited pool without the bounds check would affect everyone using the protocol. The turnstile exchanges the unbounded, hidden, and permanent risk for one that is bounded, localized, detectable, and public.
In the Parallel Lives paper, global conservation is maintained while denying any one observer visibility into the complete global state. The guarantee is not that trust was maintained in the interior of Orchard, but that it is checkable at the edge.
Privacy and verifiable scarcity can, in fact, co-exist.
One law
In another piece, Brassard and Raymond-Robichaud discuss whether a fully deterministic universe can be foundational to human freedom. Brassard, writing for himself, asks whether a fully deterministic universe can be the foundation of human freedom. His co-author does not believe in free will at all, so they disagree.
I’ve always struggled with this question of whether we introduce randomness into an otherwise pre-determined universe. While the theory behind their work seems to imply that all paths exist and therefore all paths are determined, I still like to believe in a little magic.
In our shared reality, whatever that means as I type this, the analog holds. Consensus rules are deterministic. Every rule is the same for every person. It does not discriminate. It doesn’t care who you are, if you are a whale, or just checking things out. Because with discretion comes censorship. If an authority is in place that gets to decide, your agency is constrained. And so for people to truly be free, the protocol must have consistent, immutable laws. If enough people want different rules, the chain splits.
In this case, it’s the very determinism embedded as consensus rules that are the foundation for liberty.
No God mode
So we know that we can have verifiable scarcity without seeing inside the pool. We can have freedom because rules bind everyone evenly. But what about privacy?
The classic assumption is that to trust is to verify. But verifying doesn’t have to mean knowing all things universally. With zero-knowledge cryptography, a proof of local knowledge can be created, and a verifier determines with certainty that a statement holds while being denied the fact that makes it true. It is knowledge that something is valid, decoupled from knowledge of what makes it valid.
This correlates to Raymond-Robichaud’s thesis. A complete account of a local reality can be built without understanding the inexpressible state of a universal reality. The proof checked locally is enough to ensure universal coherence. No one has God mode.
This is what cryptography is. It’s not a trick to hide things. It’s an epistemology of vantage points and an answer to a precise question. What is the minimal set of information necessary to verify a shared reality? And it’s the lack of a single source of truth, while being able to verify that it is universally true, that gives us each liberty. It’s a world without a God mode.
Tying it together
A century after scientists began debating quantum mechanics, we still haven’t discovered all the answers. Physicists agree on math and verifiable predictions, but disagree on what it all means.
Likewise, we are still evolving our understanding of what can and should be done to bring ZEC to billions of people. All of those people will not share the same worldview. The Zcash protocol does not ask that of them. It simply creates and verifies zero-knowledge proofs without bias. It is a privacy-preserving machine.
But this machine isn’t central. For each person with a wallet, it is local. The information is solely yours. Deterministic consensus allows for our bubbles to intersect.
God doesn’t play dice.
Here’s what we built this week:
Zodl Mobile
- Zodl 3.6 shipped to users, bringing multi-currency conversion (USD is no longer the only fiat), the Automatic/Manual server-selection redesign (all users move to Automatic except those on custom servers), and chain-tip tree-state for new wallets so first launch skips the unnecessary scan.
- Produced a working prototype of a new sync engine that will bring significant improvement to Zodl’s syncing speed.
- Finalized and tested Zodl 3.7, with multi-server transaction broadcast and security fixes, which ships next week.
- Continued progress on security hardening and other bug fixes.
Looking ahead at Mobile:
- Primary focus on the Orchard to Ironwood migration specification and implementation.
- Continued security hardening.
- Swapkit integration, which will deliver the Maya DEX.
- Native macOS app prototype.
Zcash Core and R&D
- Zallet alpha.4 launch corridor opened. All three gating sync-engine items closed: the ChainIndex trait migration landed, the Zaino dependency was bumped to v0.4.0 (unblocking NU 6.2 support and ephemeral databases), and the breaking-change Zaino database-format migration completed.
- Fixed the Keystone disconnect defect. The bug in zcash_client_sqlite where delete-account failed whenever cross-account transactions existed, which had broken the Keystone hardware-wallet disconnect flow for users, is fixed.
- Broadened zcashd-migration coverage to pre-Sapling HD seedless wallets, with the regtest wallet builder updated and the integration test in flight.
- Brought foss.zodl.com live as a self-hosted F-Droid repository; the FOSS distribution channel now auto-updates from our own infrastructure.
Looking ahead on Core:
- Ship Zallet alpha.4; the release ticket is open and the team is dog-fooding the build.
- Alpha.5 scope: the refuse-to-start-on-incompatible-consensus-rules check has started, with PCZT JSON-RPC methods, z_sendfromaccount, P2SH wallet.dat import, and legacy transparent-pool semantics next in queue.
- Note quantization and splitting ahead of the Orchard to Ironwood migration and the Ironwood network upgrade.
- Drive the Zaino to lightwalletd gRPC parity integration tests to completion to keep the multi-region public lightwalletd honest against Zaino-backed deployments.
Zodl iOS Analytics
- Unique Installs: 44.4k (+0.3k)
- Total Downloads: 53.2k (+0.5k)
- App Store Rating: 4.9★ (no change)
Zodl Android Analytics
- Install Base: 16.2k (-0.1k)
- Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 52.9k (+0.3k)
- Play Store Rating: 4.21★ (-0.04)
Policy and Regulatory
- PGPZ Community launched and produced its first weekly update and a special first-half 2026 update.
- PGPZ Coalition launched and invited its first cohort of prospective members, with the first PGPZ Breakfast on June 30.
- Arktouros met on Monday on the evaluation of ZODL running its own wallet infrastructure; diagrams and documentation were produced and posted to their dashboard, with a follow-up on June 23.
- DC Privacy Summit and Cypherpunk Policy Dinner logistics being finalized, with details expected to lock in next week ahead of invites and registration.
Other / Company
- Summit preparation continued across presentations, logistics, and security.
- Hiring in progress for a Marketing Analytics and Optimization Specialist and an interim Security Director.
Market and Ecosystem
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Zcash: a store of value that is completely unseen, tappable anytime, with no intermediary, around the world in seconds.
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Tushar, Co-founder of @Multicoin: “Zcash is a return to crypto’s roots. A return to the cypherpunk ideals that crypto was founded on.”
Building the machine,
Onward.