code(s), information theory, linguistics, brains,β¦ β ErdΕs #4 β former board member @LeastAuthority and @ZcashCommGrants committee β aka @KetoCarnivore β
Boulder, CO
Joined January 2010
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L. Amber O'Hearn π‘ Right here, right now πΈ retweeted
10 years ago, we launched Zcash, making a private version of Bitcoin. But the origins go back to the 80s, when, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, cryptographers first dreamed of private electronic cash, and the story runs through Satoshiβs invention of Bitcoin.
Zerocoin came three years before Zcash launched in 2016. Weβd written it as a zk-mix for Bitcoin, and then a year later, Zerocash, which introduced SNARKs to cryptocurrency and is now the de facto approach to private payments on chain.
More than 30 years before that, in the early 80s, cryptographers first dreamed of private electronic payments. This was right after the invention of public key cryptography, the Watergate scandal, the Church Committeeβs revelations of intelligence agency wrongdoing, and an ongoing fight between the nascent academic crypto community and the government over regulations and alleged backdoors.
It was also right as it became clear that the growth of the internet and electronic payments would pose a major surveillance risk. Today, there are a number of cryptographers who think crypto is simply math, devoid of purpose, and a number of folks in cryptocurrency who do not care about privacy (or perhaps even cryptography). That was not the case in the 1980s.
Starting with David Chaum, cryptographers first designed e-cash, a centralized private payment scheme that required a trusted bank to blindly sign special tokens. These went nowhere: existing trusted institutions, like banks, didnβt adopt the protocols, and no one wanted to trust magic internet money run by a strange company. Then Satoshi invented Bitcoin, overcoming the trust issue by inventing a blockchain. Bitcoinβs key innovation was the blockchain, which replaced a trusted bank with a public database anyone could participate in running. Because anyone could participate, it got off the ground without convincing a bank to run it. But because anyone could participate, there was no privacy: everyone could download the database of payments. And we couldnβt just use an e-cash scheme, as that required someone to keep a secret signing key, and the entire point of Bitcoin was that no one had to be trusted.
This is where Zerocoin, Zerocash, and Zcash come in. They replaced the e-cash system with a zero-knowledge proof and, this fact is not well understood by many, strengthened the privacy of e-cash schemes by giving the recipient full privacy even if the bank was malicious.
L. Amber O'Hearn π‘ Right here, right now πΈ retweeted
Happy birthday Zcash!
pro tip: donβt miss the ending!
AI amplifies both expertise and ignorance.
The tricky part seems to be teaching people how to recognise which side of that divide they or their advisor are actually on. And unfortunately medical degrees are not a guarantee of expertise (nor strictly necessary).
L. Amber O'Hearn π‘ Right here, right now πΈ retweeted
nine years in crypto, zcash was always there
my journey in crypto had an unusual start: during my grad studies, i joined a chainalysis when they were a 20-people startup in copenhagen
my job: apply ML (aka AI before it was cool) to break the privacy in cryptocurrencies and blockchains like bitcoin, ethereum, etc.
i also read and analyzed dash, monero, etc. and
that's when i first learned about zcash β and it completely blew my mind
the weakest point of all crypto and blockchains is how much data is leaked and published on-chain, combined with how much OSINT and privately gathered data (kyc) can be correlated with on-chain data
the fact that zcash essentially removed the need to publish any data basically meant that there was no data to analyze β in other words zcash was at the frontier of crypto
it heavily inspired me to ditch AI and pursue decentralized protocols instead
from ethereum, through cosmos, many other L1s in-between, and anoma for the last 6 years, I wasn't formally involved with zcash β yet somehow zcash was always there
because everything I've worked on shared Zcash' values of decentralization, privacy, and self-sovereignty
my mind was shaped by zcash (think like an attacker, analyze data flows from end-to-end, etc) and a whole lot of my work has been inspired by cash too, from custom protocols like Namada and the Anoma DOS to end user products like Namadillo, AnomaPay, and recently Zillions
and now that i think about it, i probably would've left crypto a few months ago if zcash wasn't around anymore
i've grown increasingly disillusioned with the industry: the hypergamblification brought by memecoins and the dominance of centralized protocols and products (combined with this brutal bear market)
like many, i've considered leaving this industry
because I didn't join to make casinos faster and more addictive β i joined because of the initial ethos of this space, to build an alternative to the financial system, one that gives people real sovereignty over their money, data, and lives
in an industry where even ethereum is losing its roots, zcash remains true to its values and even today the community is full of ethos-driven and strongly aligned people (come to a zcash conference and you'll see, they feel like 2017)
zcash has been like a north star to me,
a reminder that the original vision of crypto isn't dead,
there are still people willing to build for principles rather than speculation
so yeah, it's been 9 years since I've joined crypto, and without zcash, i probably wouldn't be here anymore
happy 10th birthday zcash!
honored to be part of this community, and more excited than ever to contribute to what comes next
Reminder
Zcash wouldn't exist without @zooko. He seeded the technical and cultural values of the project that have kept us vigilant in defense of its integrity.
Much of Zcash's recent success has been because Zooko plays a less central role in the project, and it has decentralized and grown to transcend him. I think he would agree! But he is still a major spiritual force of the project, and an ally that wants it to succeed.
Let's be mindful of the signal we send our next generation of risk takers, by how we treat his legacy. Zcash has a long road ahead of it, and no single one of us can carry it across the finish line.
We're all liable to end up in @zooko's shoes one day. You do not want to be on the receiving end of the poetic justice served for the things you said when you were once on the winning team.
I've been rooting for micropayment spam prevention for decades. Are we close yet, please?
We should be allowed to set a call rate ($/min) that the caller has to pay to be able to call us unless they are on our contact list. This is a basic feature. If they pay the rate, they can call me all day π - if it's a new friend you can add them to contacts and any fees paid get returned.
Might be a good feature for X calls
L. Amber O'Hearn π‘ Right here, right now πΈ retweeted
This is the least surprising graph in the world if you understand how gradient descent works.
"Until users make that mental leap that privacy doesn't come from something you move your money through, it comes from *where you store your money at rest*, they'll keep making this mistake."
Miner update: went home for a few days to try to build a silencer for the Z15 pro with my parents so it can heat the house this winter with reasonable sound properties.
We ordered partially pre-cut MDF (unfortunately not very accurately cut) and my stepmother added some cuts. The plan is to line some of the surfaces with rockwool, but we were concerned about fibre fragments getting pulled in and I was unable to acquire speaker fabric to cover it in a timely manner so we stopped at having the frame built.
Decibels reduced from >70 to ~55 with the box alone! However, even in this 5Γ2Γ2' box with fans at both ends, it was overheating. I had to leave the lid partially off for now. Probably could have figured out a better solution (maybe small internal fans to direct the air better), but it was time to leave until next time.
I got my 2017 Tesla S retrofit in order to use FSD and I'm finding it stressful to use. In traffic it often jostles back and forth between lanes quitting in the middle. Driving home at night last time it slowed to a crawl on my street and then just stopped. Does it get better?
Which Zcash wallets work on @GrapheneOS ? @vizorwallet ?
L. Amber O'Hearn π‘ Right here, right now πΈ retweeted
Why Standard time is the correct clock position.
L. Amber O'Hearn π‘ Right here, right now πΈ retweeted
I laughed so hard at this example of grammatical ambiguity in the critical thinking textbook I've been using
L. Amber O'Hearn π‘ Right here, right now πΈ retweeted
An aside: if you attempt to prevent people from ever being able to do anything bad, it can only be by virtue of preventing them from doing many if not most good things as well. I do not want to live in an infantilized world where you need a special license to ask even moderately interesting questions. Screw that.
Hobbyist node update. π¦πΈ
A few months ago I decided I was going to run Zcash archival nodes on an old, otherwise unoccupied machine.
I wiped a 2015 MacBook Air and clean installed Ubuntu, and I attached an old spin drive by USB with a few terabytes to hold the data.
I started running archival nodes onto the same disk--first got Zebra running, then added Zakura. It took a long time to get through the initial blocks, maybe weeks? I don't remember exactly now. Once they were synced and going, though, it was pretty smooth, but I was noticing some timeouts on requests--the drive access over USB was just too slow.
So I caved and spent money on a new SSD. Zakura is running on that one now. So fast!
Two days ago Zakura 1.5.0 came out so I started backing up the database onto the slow drive. It took 2 days to back it up! By the time I was ready to install there had been two more releases. π€£
I was 2000 blocks behind. It took 2 1/2 minutes to catch back up.