They are politically charged words. In many cases they are risk models where failure means death or imprisonment. As Emma Goldman once remarked “As an anarchist my place has always been on the side of the persecuted.”
I work with sex workers, queer communities, activists and journalists because they are the communities that have the most to lose from a lack of privacy. They are communities that understand what is at stake. They live their risk models.
If you can’t protect the privacy of those that society deems deviant or criminal then you can’t protect the privacy of anyone.
is it a hint that you want to focus spending money that won’t directly benefit the common folks ?
This is an incredibly naive take. Do you want “privacy” or do you want privacy? To me the core robustness, dare I say the anti-fragility, of the privacy and security (and thus the future) of Zcash must be on the margins, on the extreme ends of the risks that undermine freedom - that means building systems that understand those extremes, and can work with them to ensure that everyone shares in the power that the system controls.
My research has always focused on those extremes. It’s why I first started delving into the extent of deanonymzation vulnerabilities on dark web drug markets - because if people who have skin the game when it comes to not getting caught screw up the technology then guess what? "common folks " don’t stand a chance in hell.
Can you be more clear about what you intend to fund ?
Here is a short and incomplete wish list:
- Wallets that have a utility beyond the simple sending and receiving of transactions - I’d like to see more thought given to:
- Organizational Accounting - Beyond CSV export and into integrating with various other software, providing safe & automated tracking of worth against various other assets (BTC / USD etc.)
- Trading Integration - One day soon I’d like to see sheilded zcash become an option on decentralized exchanges like Bisq, but even basic integration would go a long way
- Donations
- Research and Development into Memo based applications (more experiments like Zbay and Token Based Services) and the future of memos within the Zcash ecosystem.
- Projects within targeted communities to understand the limits of Zcash adoption within those communities. Projects within those communities to experiment with possible on-the-ground applications. Along with the development of an ethical review process (as I helped Zbay design: Request for feedback on Zbay user-interview design) to ensure that such work is held to the highest standards and prevents the parachuting that haunts the rest of this space.
- Libraries to make efficient / secure in-app light client integration a (secure & private) possibility.
- Security and Privacy reviews of the software and hardware stacks around Zcash (Tor, new Mixnets, User Interface Libraries, Kernel Extensions etc.) to ensure that holes in our environment don’t compromise the privacy of Zcash and Zcash Ecosystem projects.