geoff.eth

.@Snowden on how he came to participate in the original Zcash ceremony: “I was aware of it from a professor at Johns Hopkins University by the name of Matthew Green. I think he tweeted a link to a paper called Zerocash. This was before it became Zcash. And I just saw the idea of this. Of course, I had been a longtime Bitcoin user, and I was like, ‘This is amazing. This is incredible.’ It’s something very important that, frankly, should have been integrated into the actual Bitcoin network through protocol improvements at that period in time. But they hadn’t really taken privacy seriously, and unfortunately, they still don’t. So, I was looking at this more like an academic project than some kind of—everybody makes crypto coins now to try to get a capital return on it. But this, they were going, ‘How do we get this key—construct this key—that if anybody had it, it would be harmful, and how do we make sure nobody does?’ So they created this thing called the ceremony, where they would basically do a cryptographic round among many different participants around the world—different people. The way it was structured was such that if there was one honest person in the entire cohort, the dangerous part, the dangerous properties of this key, wouldn’t exist. You could basically ensure the network was fully safe. And all you needed was one honest person—one person whose keys weren’t stolen, whatever. Everybody else could be against it, could be trying to exploit it, could be doing whatever, and it would work. This was something that I got approached about. I can’t recall actually who approached me. It might have been @zooko—I believe it probably was Zooko—who might have gotten to me because I had written about this paper and my interest in it and said, ‘Hey, would you be willing to serve as a part of this ceremony?’ And I went, ‘Well, why not?’ You know, I am one person where nobody knows where I am, what I’m doing, whatever. It would be very hard to target me. I know quite a lot about computer security, but at the same time, I can at least have the honesty layer. So my sort of vulnerability in this would be hacking, right? It would be surveillance, it would be cameras in the walls from the Russians or whatever, stealing my computer, using a bad computer, or whatever. Other people might not have a hacking risk—they might have a social risk, they might have an honesty risk, something like that. But by being a part of this larger cohort, you could make sure that basically nobody cheated the network, and it worked, right? Since then, there have never been any—as far as anyone knows—sort of greater emissions that should have happened on the network. And eventually—and this is why it came out later—they moved beyond it, and that key is no longer used. It’s no longer a threat to the network. That whole sort of proving channel is gone. And they used a more modern solution that didn’t have these same risks.”