Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

P2P Messaging & Scuttlebutt with Dominic Tarr Jun 12, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we meet with Dominic Tarr, a protocol designer and security auditor at Least Authority who works on Scuttlebutt - a decentralized secure gossip platform. We discuss P2P messaging and the challenges of sending messages within a p2p network in a truly decentralised manner.

Here are some links we mention:

https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf

For more on Scuttlebutt, please have a look at these resources.

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

For more on Dominic, check out this article in the Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/meet-the-counterantidisintermediationists/527553/

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

On the Frontiers of Validation with Bison Trails Jun 05, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw from Bison Trails - a validator infrastructure company based in NYC. Recorded during the NYC blockchain week, we chatted about the latest PoS systems to launch, what it means to be a validator, how the incentive structures can impact the ecosystem development and potential futures for this uncharted validator landscape.

Thank you to this week's sponsor - Event Horizon

Event Horizon is a Energy Blockchain event happening in Berlin on June 19-20 . The event is packed with everything you need to learn about how Blockchain tech can impact the Energy sector, it features the people making this happen, both from the engineers building the Ethereum based Energy Web Chain and the energy sector innovators looking to bring this tech into their industry.

If you are interested in finding out more, you can use our special ZeroKnowledge discount at www.eventhorizonsummit.com/ZeroKnowledge.

We are also giving away two free tickets - just ping us on twitter or in our telegram channel with the hashtag #EventHorizon #EH19 for your chance to win these!

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Privacy & P4 with Liz and Chris from Least Authority May 29, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, we sit down with Liz Steininger and Chris Wood from Least Authority to discuss the state of privacy today, the case for private crypto subscription payments and their P4 proposal. The Private Periodic Payment Protocol, P4, uses the shielded account feature of Zcash to provide a fully decentralised method for recurring end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments.

Links mentioned:

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Diving into Cosmos with Sunny May 22, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna sits down with Sunny Aggarwal to talk about his journey into blockchain, the beginnings of Blockchain at Berkeley, how he discovered Cosmos, his role as a validator and as a podcast co-host.

We discuss:

Coursera course that Sunny mentions https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking
Blockchain at Berkeley https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/
Cosmos https://cosmos.network/
Sikka https://www.sikka.tech/
Epicenter Podcast https://epicenter.tv/

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Funding Blockchain Development with Kevin Owocki May 15, 2019

Show notes

In this week, we sit down with Kevin Owocki, co-founder of gitcoin, to have a look at how open source blockchain development is funded. We cover the different methods for funding open source work, what has worked in the past, what hasn’t, how funding blockchain projects can be quite different and what people are experimenting with today.

We discuss:

EIP1337
Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
A handy guide to financial support for open source
Funding through foundations
Grants programs
Crowdfunding
Token payments
Founder rewards/block rewards

Thank you to this week's sponsor Apograf! Apograf has built an extensive collection of open access research papers on cryptography, distributed computer systems and blockchain

If you are interested in finding out more, check out apograf.io or this link to a curated list of cryptocurrency course materials: https://apograf.io/c/cryptocurrency_class

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography May 08, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we welcome special guest Sean Bowe. Sean is an engineer at the Electric Coin Company and the author of the Sprout and Sapling Zcash trusted set ups and much of the underlying cryptography of the protocol. We had a chance to chat about his history, what got him into the topic, some of the joys & challenges to working with SNARKs, and what ideas are inspiring him.

We also covered the story of Zcash and the Powers of Tau trusted set up, MPCs, the story of the bug, SONICs, ZEXE, the BLS12-381 Elliptic Curve Construction

Early on in the episode, we mention the Radiolab episode about the zcash trusted setup: https://archive.org/details/radiolab_podcast17crypto_zcash_ceremony

Questions from the audience: https://twitter.com/AnnaRRose/status/1122818062061797376

We also mention some of our previous ZK centric episodes that can be found here: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/zkseries

Special thanks to this week's sponsor: Trail of Bits

Trail of Bits is offering a service for young technology companies who could use expert security support, but aren't quite at a stage to hire their own team. The service includes staffing a #security channel to answer questions, review high risk PRs, and integrate the latest in continuous testing into your build pipeline. Visit www.trailofbits.com for help securing your product.

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Exploring Aztec with Zac Williamson May 01, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we sit down with Zac Williamson of the Aztec Protocol to discuss zero knowledge tools, range proofs, the Aztec Protocol, the different approaches to bringing privacy to ethereum, and how standards in the space are emerging.

Check out Zac's talk at the ZK Summit for more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIg2aJQqNNc&feature=youtu.be

Here was our episode with Benedikt Bunz talking about Bulletproofs

As well as Zokrates and Matter Labs

Thanks again to this week's sponsor Neufund. If you’re interested in how Neufund's open-source technical environment is enabling tokenization of real-world assets or the QA position, check their GitHub profile at github.com/neufund or the Neufund job offers at neufund.org/careers

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

Blockchain 101: Randomness and Random Beacons with Justin Drake Apr 24, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, we sit down with Justin Drake, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, to discuss randomness in blockchain, how it can be created and what adversarial models exist. We also discuss the random beacon and how that concept has evolved in the development of ETH2.0

Our initial definition of randomness in cryptography comes largely from this article by cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-production/

Check out Justin Drake's DevCon 4 talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI with the slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VKBMcEMaY6PQjDJK4yAFtxn0vD41eYXW05YA3vdTBsI/edit.

Explore vdfresearch.org for more on the topic of VDF

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

J. Ayo Akinyele Talks Lightning Network & Building Bolt Apr 17, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, we invite J. Ayo Akinyele to the podcast. Ayo is a co-Founder of Bolt Labs which will be focused on developing the Bolt Protocol, a privacy preserving layer 2 approach for anonymous micropayments, which is similar to Lightning Network.

Bolt, which stands for Blind, Offchain, Lightweight, Transactions, could be used for both scaling zcash or providing a scalable privacy solution for other chains.

Here are some additional resources:

Original Bolt Paper by Matthew Green and Ian Meiers: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701.pdf
Bolt description the Electric Coin Company's blog: https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/
Ayo was on the podcast before in our Zcon0 episode: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/32 (he features around the 17 minute mark)

Here is some additional information about the Lightning Network and the projects Casa Nodes and Bitrefill which are mentioned in the episode.

Special thanks to this week's sponsor: Trail of Bits

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

zkSNARKs for Scale with Matter Labs Apr 10, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, we sit down with the Alex Vlasov and Alex Gluchowski from Matter Labs to discuss their approach to using zkSNARKs for scaling the transaction processing capacity of Ethereum. We chat about the inspiration for the Roll-up project, the Matter Labs implementation, their proposed Franklin network and more.

To learn about the project check out: https://matter-labs.io/ and their github

If you want to find out more about the Roll-up project mentioned, it can be found here: https://github.com/barryWhiteHat/roll_up

If you like what we do:

Join us on Telegram - https://t.me/joinchat/B_81tQ57-ThZg8yOSx5gjA

Support our Gitcoin Grant - https://gitcoin.co/grants/38/zero-knowledge-podcast

Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge

Or directly here:

ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a

BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz

ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ