Watch: The Fight for Privacy by Ameen Soleimani
Another great talk from the Protocol Berg conference! My bad, this one was from EthBerlin04. Keeping it here because how relevant it is to us imho.
I was happy to hear that Ameen mentioned @zooko in a neutral way, hopefully he is moving on from the hostile tone. He has however not moved on from Privacy Pools even if it seems obvious this won’t scale and/or end in drama. Either way, he’s the best and most fearless privacy advocate of the entire ecosystem and I am thankful to him for that.
Finally, I’d like to propose that we send 2500 ZEC from the dev fund to the defense of Pertsev & Storm. Is there some support to this? Under the previous governance we’ve spent way more on useless stuff, can we spend a bit on something that actually matters? Shall we have a token holders vote on this @aquietinvestor?
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What’s being a cypherpunk in the 2020s? Is our old manifesto from the early 1990s still relevant 30 years later? Our socio-economic environment has changed; where before computers were for a select few, we have now embraced digitalisation on masse. How can you play a part in today’s environment? A talk for builders, not limited to coders.
“The new Cypherpunk generation”
Great talk from Michiel Degruytere during the latest Protocol Berg conference in Berlin.
The finish on Monero was certainly surprising to be honest but it raises an interesting question on the why. I have no doubt this person known about Zcash, so there’s a pattern of great people picking Monero over Zcash. Food for thought, and hopefully one day, somehow, we get to know why he made that choice.
(thanks @Shawn for moving this post in here!)
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Software commons systems produce shared resources, which are at risk of capture from internal or external entities. This talk will explore long term capture in Ethereum: precedent case studies (Linux, Chromium), the landscape, risks, safeguards.
Presentation: Long term capture risk in Ethereum by Trenton Van Epps
Quite relevant to Zcash as well.
Among the topics raised were the importance of multiple clients running the network. I understand the intention here is that once zebra is stable, all the orgs intend to run their own fork of it; which is a good first step. Eventually, hopefully we also get implementations in various different languages as well, as that’s important for resilience to implementations bugs.
Also the importance of having token holders spread out instead of the majority of it in just a few hands. It is not easy to determine with complete certainly on Ethereum, and by design impossible on Zcash, but there’s no secret Zcash is not well known and therefore chances are that we don’t have that many “smaller” token holders is quite high.
Presentation: The Lost Values of Web3
The title says it all. It’s a bit of an informal discussion panel, but for those that have been in the space for a while, it’s worth taking a pause to notice the values drift that has happened in the past decade or so. It may be a normal and expected effect with the explosive growth of blockchain users, but still worth reflecting upon.
The lack of anon cypherpunks participating to the governance of Zcash, a project with privacy at its very core, should really give us all a pause.
An often overlooked element of securing your digital assets is determining how paranoid you should be. Many times users go down rabbit holes of complicated schemes to backup and protect their wallets which ultimately causes complications when they need to access them. However, there are situations where you may be in a position of power or public identification that you need to go deeper. Do you need to secure your assets like Vitalik does or like my Mom does?
Presentation: Are You Vitalik or Are You My Mom? An In Depth Analysis of Wallet Security Set-ups by Hudson Jameson
Kind of nice refresher for anyone holding a fair bit of crypto, and a must watch to anyone else anyway.
In the context of Zcash, Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS) is evidently mentioned and I can’t help but cry thinking of the massive increase of Shielded tokens that is most certainly happening due to ZEC stored on Keystone Wallet, which has a broken implementation of SSSS. I know we have the best cryptographers but I remain deeply skeptical about the actual privacy & security skills of the teams making Zcash happen. Nobody but @artkor said a thing about the SSSS issue on Keystone, what the heck.
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This a work in progress attempting to answer seemingly simple and not very contradictory question. “Why can we not have ethics of blockchain applications?” We seem to have a burgeoning field of AI ethics, and even with a reasonable criticism against it, AI ethics does flourish both in industry and as research in academia. Contrast it with blockchain ethics which is hardly a mature subfield, but more of a painful (and emotional) topic. Are there good reasons to care about it? This is an empirical, philosophical, and normative question.
Presentation: Blockchain Ethics: Pure Reason or Pure Madness by Georgy Ishmaev
Nowdays, anyone can code, anyone can crypto. Meh. Yet that’s pretty much all the profiles we have in Zcash. Ethereum has developed a very rich ecosystem comprising of economists, philosophers, actual cypherpunks activists and many other specialties, what happened in Zcash that there is such a lack of diversity, skillsets and otherwise? Philosophy is something very important to our project, as evidently we have a tough question on our hands. Is shielded money an overall net-positive for humanity, given it can absolutely be used for nefarious things? I believe so and I could make my argument, but I’d rather hear people who dedicate their lives to those kind of questions.
But no, all we’re able to do is:
- technical talks
- non-technical talks but without the proper skills and/or experience to do so
And it’s not like it’s difficult. Invite those various specialists to the conferences you make, talk with them on your podcasts. It’s literally not rocket science, you can do it and make it fun and positive for the ecosystem.
Hopefully you don’t wonder why I am roasting the project at every opportunity. As a large token holder, evidently I do this because I want to see change where it is sorely needed.
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This talk offers an anthropological analysis of the original cypherpunk ethos, examining its historical foundations, core values, and ideological commitments. While the cypherpunk movement emerged as a response to centralized power through technical resistance, this talk argues that for cypherpunk principles to remain relevant in today’s rapidly evolving global landscape, they must expand beyond purely technological solutions.
Presentation: Goodbye Cypherpunks values? Adapting to the new world order by Costanza and Ann Brody.
Great talk, evidently relevant to us as well.
This is a talk about “having nothing to hide.” A talk about oversharing in the age of TikTok and Instagram, about doxing in the era of public blockchains, and about data sovereignty in a world dominated by centralized repositories. Why is privacy so often dismissed, and what does it really mean to give it up?
Presentation: Privacy ist mir Wurst. I Got Nothing To Hide. by Lefteris Karapetsas
I think we are all on the same page in here regarding this talk, but it’s a handy one to share to people that may not yet understand why privacy is critically important.
How does a private blockchain differ from transparent blockchain? Core components: blended private and public state, client-side proof generation, zero-knowledge property (not just a snark), anatomy of a private smart contract, private composability. What does it all mean for developers? What is the right mental model to approach building private dapps?
Presentation: Anatomy of on-chain privacy by Lisa Akselrod
Great one reminding builders about some fundamentals of privacy and how to implement those in a way that will not drive users away. By now I’m noticing a major shift to privacy in the Ethereum world and around it, and Zcash (or even Monero) is nowhere to be found. I’d have expected for it to be at the center of all this but here we are.