Scaling Encrypted Money

Transcript

Uh hello everyone. Uh I'm Dev and today I'm going to talk about how we scale Zcash. And first like what's the origin of like what we care about? Well starts with the Bitcoin white paper peer-to-peer electronic cash. It's kind of the promise we're all made and with Zcash the goal is to actually fulfill this. So what's going on? Bitcoin started with the promise of being digital cash. And there's this great Nick Carter post, the narratives change over time. Starting 2019, you'll never hear anyone call digital cash. You'll start hearing it be called digital gold or store value. With Zcash, instead we started the opposite way. What do you need to be a perfect store of value

initially? You know, you have to be fully sovereign and same as Bitcoin and then you need to be fully funible and be able to hold this for many years. And now it's time to start adding scale to be towards digital cash. Cool. So cash has three non-negotiable properties. Well, I guess add being sovereign as a base point. Then fungeible, you know, should be durable should hold it for long term and scale as in like if I'm paying uh with cash for coffee, it should not block Alice from paying Bob somewhere else. Cool. So funible fancy word just means one ze equals one ze.

I'm not going to spend too much time on this. So go fast forward to scale. But tldr the problem is Satoshi could not spend his coins. So you know to get funible you have to do privacy at every layer of the stack. So Zcash pioneered onchain zero knowledge proofs. And what's unique to Zcash is we care about privacy at the RPC level and in your wallet software. So this leads to work like private information retrieval and like using to or DCnetss to hide your IPs.

Okay. So going to skip this for durability for just basically how do you security max tlddr you can already hold ze in if you just shield your ze it's safe from like quantum computers in that if one comes that's fine you can prove your balance and get going okay so scale is the last part so how much TPS do we need well let's just look at Visa and Mastercard two credit card networks they uh have about 50k TPS of capacity and use about 10k TPS on average. So today's Zcash is like sub 10. So how do we get there? Well, step one, Tachon. Sean Bo,

co-founder of Zcash, just told you about how it works. So Tachon converts the scaling problem uh at least at the chain level from being uh this hard thing with how to do state growth, etc. to now just being scale extensive bandwidth and your memples. So um we get a straightforward equation at the end of this. Every transaction is going to be 2 kilobytes big. We need 50k TPS. So we need to be able to do consensus on 100 megabytes per second.

This is the same level of what Salana needs. And we have to do this in pure proof of work which is great. Um we'll do things like faster block propagation and uh do recursive agregation of zks in the mele. There's another talk by Evan later here that goes through it. But we do this with the new node software Zakura. So there's one other really hard part about privacy which is actually the the real bald neck. How does your wallet figure out you got paid? These payments are anonymous which means no one knows who it's from, who it's to, or how much is in it. So yeah, how do you find out what transaction is to you? Well, normally in every other blockchain, your

wallet just gives a server your address and says, "Hey, what's my balance?" The server learns exactly whose IP it is is and whose address it is and what its balance is. In Zcash, at any point if there's a trade-off that sacrifices uh UX versus privacy, they always take the privacy maxing thing. So today, you download every single transaction in history. Uh this kind of obviously doesn't scale. Now, let's work through the numbers of it. Today, if you just want 100 TPS, you'd be your phone would have to download 2.5 gigs a day. 50k TPS is uh over a terabyte. And if you wanted to go post quantum, you'd be downloading 8 terabytes a day. obviously doesn't work. So we use this new cryptographic

technique called P that converts this 8 terabytes to less than 10 megs. uh tlddr the private p is a private key to value lookup and uh you basically a server does a really big matrix mole which is just what AI already needs and then you can get uh privately fetch your balance and what's cool is everything that we talked about is already happening so visor is one of the premier wallets it's already gotten zk proving 20x faster and it's using p to protect your privacy He add soon it'll be doing it for scale. So uh on the chain side there's an upgrade in

like 27 days that 3x speeds up using the chain because uh look it's not digital cash if it takes like tens of minutes. So yeah the brief summary of how we get towards peer-to-peer electronic cash actually this time. Uh thanks everyone for your time and just try out private walts.