Zcash cofounder, protocol developer and crypto researcher. Encrypted Money at Planetary Scale (https://xitter.cf/t.co/zlrTusSQoJ), Zakura Maintainer (https://xitter.cf/t.co/dWoA1XQc3z)

Joined May 2014
Sean Bowe retweeted
Over the last month, the zakura runtime has gone from dependencies with 250+ aggregate maintainers to now sub 100. And it is only decreasing. This is the lowest to have ever existed in zcash’s rust nodes
Critical things to apply to any software: - minimumReleaseAge 3-7 days for any dependencies, to prevent npm credential takeover attacks - reduce the number of packages your software relies on by 80%. AI can often oneshot an equal or cleaner implementation for your specific usecase - update to the latest software versions, even LTS often hides worse architecture that can hide more bugs - stop using php. in general, choose an optimal stack even if it means a rewrite. linux + rust with strict typescript frontends are a solid base - continually run abliterated GLM-5.3 redteam models across your codebase. adversaries will be reverse-engineering binaries, you have a defensive advantage via source code - reduce the blast radius. does everything need to run through trusted centralized servers or can you do edge-to-edge encryption/authentication? crypto's decentralization patterns have many security advantages which also apply to web2
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Sean Bowe retweeted
JUST IN: @ZakuraZcash 1.7.0 is out, activating NU7 on Mainnet in ~15 days.
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NU7 is finally activating on Zcash! Zakura 1.7.0 activates it on height 3543405, which is the evening of November 5 for us Americans. Blocks will occur three times faster in Zcash. Other changes like NSM funding and retiring the Sprout pool appear in this upgrade as well.
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Friday, I record with @zkDragon and @ebfull for technical coverage of the Zcash roadmap What would you like to know?
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Sean Bowe retweeted
November 5, Encrypted bitcoin becomes 40x faster than unencrypted Bitcoin :)
Zcash's NU7 Mainnet activation height is being set to 3,543,405 (~November 5) as part of final changes to ZIP 259. We've reflected this on our NU7 dashboard: zakura.com/nu7/
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Sean Bowe retweeted
Zcash's NU7 Mainnet activation height is being set to 3,543,405 (~November 5) as part of final changes to ZIP 259. We've reflected this on our NU7 dashboard: zakura.com/nu7/
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Stay shielded with Vizor
gm frens 🤍 we've looked at different wallets building around Zcash. today, let's look at one that's bringing several parts of the Zcash experience together. 𝐕𝐢𝐳𝐨𝐫. what i find interesting about Vizor is that it's not just focused on helping you hold and send ZEC. it's also trying to make the whole experience easier to navigate. @vizorwallet is an open-source, self-custodial Zcash wallet built by the team behind Keplr. you can create or import a wallet, manage multiple accounts, receive ZEC through shielded Unified Addresses or transparent addresses, and send from your shielded balance. and if you receive transparent ZEC, you can shield it before spending. but there's another feature i really like. 𝐙𝐄𝐂 𝐠𝐢𝐟𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬. with Vizor, you can create personalised gift cards containing ZEC, share them with someone through a link or QR code, and let them redeem the gift in Vizor. it's a different way to share ZEC with someone, beyond simply sending them a wallet address. but that's not all. Vizor also supports cross-chain swaps powered by NEAR Intents, giving users access to hundreds of assets across different networks. it supports Keystone hardware wallets too, allowing users to keep their keys offline while signing transactions through an air-gapped QR process. and there's even a coinholder voting feature in beta, allowing ZEC holders to participate in Zcash community votes. what i like about this approach is how much of the Zcash experience Vizor is bringing into one place. from managing your ZEC to gifting it, swapping across networks and keeping your keys offline. it's all part of making private money easier to use. 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐙𝐄𝐂. 𝐠𝐢𝐟𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬. 𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬-𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐰𝐚𝐩𝐬. 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐭 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭. that's Vizor. study privacy. study @Zcash.
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Sean Bowe retweeted
you might recall @jadler0's talks about resource pricing w/ smart contracts the same concepts apply to p2p networks! IFF we can verify that every byte is useful and carefully budgeted, then it's actually perfectly safe to send Gbps of bandwidth to randos on the internet
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Sean Bowe retweeted
Zcash nodes must stay useful under attack. Here’s how our new P2Pv2 stack uses resource budgets and backpressure to limit the work peers can trigger. zakura.com/engineering/p2pv2…
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Sean Bowe retweeted
Zakura has published a design, still in review, that would give every Zcash address posted during a NEAR Intents swap its own viewing key. The aim: a future quantum computer that cracks one address learns about one swap, not a wallet's whole payment history. unchainedcrypto.com/zcash-bu…
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Sean Bowe retweeted
Dev Ojha’s full talk on the path to scaling Zcash at Token2049 Singapore. Timestamps: 00:00 - The dream of digital cash 01:29 - Satoshi can’t spend his coins 03:18 - Making Zcash quantum recoverable 04:44 - Scaling encrypted money to the entire world 05:35 - Tachyon changes the scaling problem 07:23 - Zakura: scaling Proof of Work 08:35 - Privacy is the real scaling bottleneck 10:01 - Private Information Retrieval changes everything
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Zcash is the only top to bottom project building the end state of cypherpunk money
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Sean Bowe retweeted
we've been putting in a lot of thought into @ZakuraZcash's new p2p stack It needs to serve as a future proof scaffolding for the rest of zcash - high throughput - low latency - "strictly typed" DoS resistance - shared consensus engine for light and full clients - permissionless addition to the network - advanced property testing
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Sean Bowe retweeted
This is such a leap forward from the Bitcoin based P2P protocol Zcash uses today to a state of the art protocol of tomorrow
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Sean Bowe retweeted
Scaling Zcash to Visa-level throughput requires a next-generation networking stack. We're excited to share P2Pv2, which you can try out today in Zakura! zakura.com/engineering/p2pv2…
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Zakura's wallet and cryptography support libraries are integrating @ValarGroup's PIR-based tech that Tachyon depends on for its payment protocol, and some of it is immediately useful today! Any wallet can use or even fork this code: it's free, open-source, and permissionless.
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Similarly, as we blogged about earlier this month the Zakura Common codebase is switching to a cryptography backend that is used for Tachyon. Goal is to ship this in Common 1.8.0! tachyon.z.cash/blog/integrat…
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(or rather, it will be shipped in Zakura 1.8.0, as part of Common 4!)
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Very excited about all of this coming together. Late last year I realized @ValarGroup's team could solve the payment protocol portion of Tachyon (among other things), which was still an open question at the time! xitter.cf/ebfull/status/20054176…
Replying to @ebfull
Tachyon has been focused on a maximally out-of-band payment and backup protocol for Zcash, though I spent a couple days last week with a fellow cryptographer who is working on a clever (Tachyon-compatible) PIR-based scheme that works surprisingly well!
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