Tel Aviv Blockchain Week Recap – Zero Knowledge & Epicenter Crossover Podcast

Transcript

Hey hi welcome to this crossover podcast between zero knowledge and epicenter you may recognize our voices but this is actually one of the I mean I'm not on video very often I don't know about you yeah I mean we used to do video we certainly don't ever do this kind of format and so this on both of our channels is that the plan that's the plan yeah me so yeah this is kind of cool that we get this down in person and like do this so we're actually sitting in the collider Ventures office in Tel Aviv Tel Aviv is behind us that's the water out there it's actually quite beautiful we're in the Zen go and Bhima office

mm-hmm so nimble Wimble and then we'll implement MIM bull Wimble implementation and then go which is a cryptocurrency wallet has a keyless keyless access and this sort of thing so so we wanted to do a little bit of a recap on the last week or so the Tel Aviv blotching week which was really interesting yeah really good actually I really quite thoroughly enjoyed it totally so I got here halfway through scaling Bitcoin were you you were here for the whole thing I write the night before so I was here yeah on yeah I got here like scaling Bitcoin the first time apparently there

was another event there was something before it but I don't know what it was like DD and some tech thing yeah so scaling Bitcoin I had heard of I mean I've heard of for many years I've never been to one I only caught day 2 yeah but maybe as a kickoff like what what was your you you got a little bit more yeah Quinn than I did so what was your takeaway so scum bacon was interesting was also with my first one and you know we go to conferences a lot and we meet a lot of our guests there I think respectively scaling Bitcoin I I kind of saw a lot of like the early epicenter guests for some reason because a lot of the early episode our guests were more like on the

Bitcoin side of things so a lot of those people were there and I was kind of cool to put faces on those people and and to sort of recognize that there's quite a long standing you know ecosystem here of like bitcoiners and that kind of overlaps into the cryptography space that's very present here when so that was kind of at a high level an interesting thing to to realize and and then in terms of content so I mean it it was much there were much more talks about non Bitcoin things that I

thought was kind of interesting in somewhat surprising yeah you know that was like a plasma cash talk there were other other talks that you know that didn't necessarily have to do with Bitcoin specifically but I guess overlap with Bitcoin and in some way or another there was a lot of sort of mist so I feel like a lot of the zero-knowledge stuff seemed to have been on the first day yeah like Ben fish presenting super Sonics yeah this was like a lot of people were excited about it I was excited about it but couldn't make it yeah didn't see it oleg and drive also gave a talk on this thing that was like way over my head zk p.m. which I hope we will get to do an episode on the podcast

at some point so yeah it was super technical much more technical than I'm usually comfortable with but I did learn a few things and one other thing I wanted to mention was that you know I mean I hadn't been to a Bitcoin conference since Amsterdam 2014 like the foundation of the Bitcoin foundation conference and I was kind of I guess maybe tainted by crypto Twitter because I really expected to get there and I don't know just sounds like arguments with people but it was actually quite cordial there was none of that there Vitalik actually she was there for I

think both days I wish it was like I saw him what what is he doing here he started there too right right but that's not then this is now and so I guess I was yea pleasantly surprised and actually quite happy to see that there was some you know behind all of the drama and the tribalism that exists on Twitter there are people who were actually able to have conversations with each other you know a technical level but also a philosophical level and so that was very nice so I think people need to meet more in person and just leave Twitter behind I was told so I asked some people what scaling Bitcoin was like for what was the usual like what is the scaling Bitcoin all about yeah I heard from a few people that it

was the moment when bitcoiners would like pause the Twitter fights come and sort of like listen to some random ideas for two days yeah and like enter digest it entertain entertain these ideas yeah and then go back to Twitter that was like the way it was presented I mean it's true that I mean even though I guess the audience was fairly heavy Bitcoin sure yeah the presenters were like half half yeah yeah although I got I got a chance to learn more about lightning and there's so much of the pic coin world that I actually never I never really got into because I joined you know in 2017 and I joined and you know I'm based in Berlin and Berlin is

definitely like in the etherium city yeah and so Bitcoin was always a reference but not necessarily like the core of my yeah curriculum even like my learnings about this face yeah I get that yeah I mean being in Berlin you don't get to crossover with with many Bitcoin people from you know quite often I suppose but so that was that was Wednesday and Thursday and then there were two days off of course here in Israel the Friday and Saturday or like the weekend and then Sunday's like you know people go back to work it's like one day so on Sunday there was a cereal which which I attended for like half the day I really

wanted to see oriental or yellow hi on who's the CEO of Zen go he did a panel with with the CEO of Libra which is interesting so I I think I tweeted about that there's like a tweet storm about if you guys are interested in some of the high-level learnings there then but you were at the start where sessions workshop which I heard a lot of really great things about so that was called Starks 101 it was one of the neatest workshop setups I've ever seen just like really well thought out and it was long it was like four or five hours so you got there there was like a little bit of mingling and then there are four presenters and they present maybe like a 10 minute presentation and then they had

they built this what was it called I don't say like Jupiter it was some sort of Jupiter notebook Jupiter it's a Python thing yeah and so basically you could learn the concept and then try coding it up actually like a very simplified form but coding it up correct me if I'm around a jupiter notebook is sort of a specification a formal specification and then how you then code something up in python it could be I mean at least the way this was used though it was it was like courseware like you'd have a question like can you solve this bit of the code okay then if you couldn't you could actually reveal the solution okay so it was really made like a like a mini class okay and you know there were 70

people there was I mean highly technical everyone had laptops it was set up like a classroom yeah yeah it was kind of packed and what was I mean it was I've gone through a lot of workshops and I always get something out of them but this was the first time that I saw just like a room it here's what it was it was like the perfect mixture of an industry workshop and an academic workshop and it was perfect for this space cuz zero knowledge isn't easy it isn't it isn't necessarily like it's not an easy thing to do and yet so like you could go all the way to academia but there needs to be some sort of bridge to the engineering world this was actually really cool it was super inspiring I hope that they take it out of like I hope that they actually do that again

like use it as a format and I would love to see it for other other ideas too like something like maybe a smart construction or some other kind of action done in that format yeah yeah uh so I heard that they're gonna be releasing the code and all the stuff so that we'll be there but I do think the experience of like yeah at the workshop presenting was really quick because you had like mentor is also helping you how did you manage to build your start Cooper I understood everything okay no I mean I I'm not I tried a little bit like I tried to solve some of the problems like I didn't really get them but I definitely got like even and maybe that's something to be said even though I'm not proficient in Python at all

I still got something out of the workshop I didn't feel like it was just like people coding around and I wasn't doing something because there was so much concept in theory mm-hmm that is where I actually got greater insight into something that I've been studying in a way for a while and I did I totally felt it was worth it it's just that when people were actually going through the the code I was you know talking outside not distracting yeah you know yeah yeah I went sightseeing that day but yeah I hope I hope that I hope that they do it again so I can I can attend next time so following that Monday we did starcrow sessions and I was the emcee of one of the stages so I saw my stage yeah but I

like I'm curious what was your take well I was only in that stage so there was two stages there was the sort of half occasion stage and then there was the academic stage I thought that the I would probably learn more and get more out of the application stage because I thought the academic stage is probably way over my head in terms of techniques and technology there are a few talks on I might go back and listen and watch but I was so it was a good conference well at least on on that stage I felt that the talks were technical but they were still you know digestible and sort of very educative so you know I mean the first part was very much on Dex's yeah

there's a lot of decks Dex's were really like sort of the hot topic there and like Dex's with privacy and they sort of things like Martin Kopelman gave a talk and there was like this talk about by one of the one of the product people that stuck where yeah right who also gave a talking about taxes so that was really one of the most present topics I think and yeah it's sort of a relevant topic I think if you're building index to want to integrate privacy I thought David Forex talk on like the problem yes I I loved his talk very very like grounding yeah I don't think it's just like I don't think

it was set I don't think it was like I don't think he was presenting to scare people off from continuing to do amazing research because in the last month there's just been this explosion of really cool ideas but a lot of them around the trusted set up model even if it's trying to get rid of the trust and setup it's still sort of playing with that yes and his presentation was very much about like the problem with that period so there's a little bit of a critique but I still thought it was I thought it was really good to hear oh yeah so I think what's interesting there is you get to see the different layers of trust because that's I asked the question okay well if you have like a trusted set up and okay there's different types of trust is set up and

you might be making different trust assumptions about all those but then do you assume that the hardware is trusted do you assume that the hardware hasn't been compromised or that the hardware doesn't have some kind of thing that allows it to like regenerate or random numbers or something like I mean I'm not an expert in this field but like I can see how they're and I've heard the argument that there are also hardware attacks and so his answer was well you know you would get four pieces of hardware four processors from four different manufacturers that would be generating this and so you just sort of see the different layers and you realize that it's all about making trust assumptions and the probabilistic nature of like the different layers of trust that you that you have to engage with so yeah I would love to do a podcast with

him at some point and so that I think one of my biggest takeaways I mean this is a takeaway from the month just like the amount of new protocols coming out but one of my favorite talks from that event was Ellie Benson's intro talks where he kind of outlined this landscape of zero knowledge proof stuff yeah and like we're different ones live and in terms of like what kind of cryptography and like the he also talked about like the era in which the cryptography was designed so he showed like the cryptography that Starks fit under we're actually comes from work from the 70s it's like the collision-free hash functions I think hash work yeah and then you look at snarf snarf is actually coming from work from the 80s and 90s I believe maybe even know maybe even later

it's like it's a much later entry point eighties and nineties zones and I think the comparison that he was making there was just that it's newer cryptography which sounds like it might be better cryptography but it was newer cryptography in order to like create efficiency because that old cryptography was too slow but what's happened is the old cryptography is started to catch up and at least it's the belief stark ware which would make sense that that older cryptography within which Starks live could be safer yeah but also the older cryptography I think one of his points was also that the older cryptography has roots that go much deeper and I and you know there's much more at stake on this

old cryptography so if you just take a collision free hash functions there are trillions of dollars of transactions that are already secured on this thing like these are cryptographic primitives that have been tested and and like battle-tested for you know decades and as you get you know he had this like great slide where there's like a big tree and like the big tree has all this stuff from the 70s and as like as you move ahead in time you have like smaller trees or like the roots are much are not as deep are deeply ingrained but it also shows like just how fragile things are if one of these you know prim you know very primitive cryptographic hash functions or something I don't know like that was built in the 70s falls apart the whole thing there the whole thing falls apart and you know we're not even

talking about quantum resistance stuff or like you know all the problems that that introduces also in the field yeah so that was that was the talk I mean that in general that topic of trying to map it is just interesting to me and I liked the format I liked the sort of the starting point and I definitely want to do like I want to do a little bit more work to map out like what each one of those sections really looks like and where they're going I mean I think there'd be there'd be different opinions about like the security of those various trees but I I just really liked the present the framing I thought it was great yeah yeah and actually so personally being here in Tel Aviv like I think of Tel Aviv as and I'm like I might be wrong it's weird that I'm

gonna like being this out to the world but I think of the zero knowledge hubs as being Tel Aviv Berlin and SF and I'm sure that there's I think there's some really good companies in London and there's some good there's there's definitely good companies outside of these hubs but that's what I'm seen emerging and it has to do a little bit with like the level of research the academia academic cryptography hubs I mean you could also argue like there's a love-in there's Belgium sure but no four zero knowledge specifically at least these are the ones that are emerging right now and so being here this week for me it was like it was the first time I come to Tel Aviv in general and it's like I'm coming to a place where I've been following or spoken to so many

projects so it's been really exciting to kind of get a sense of like roots go deep here what's next on your radar where you going next are you gonna keep traveling I am done with traveling for the foreseeable future unless unless the fomo really really gets me which I doubt it will I'm not going to Def Con or SF watching week yeah I've been doing a lot of traveling over the last few months especially like going to Berlin for botching weekend like every one of these weeks is great and it's you know very you know you learn a lot and you meet a lot of great people but I also want to do some work that's also on my radar so

yeah doing works on my radar I'm going though you're going so tell us yeah very likely at Def Con it's like that's it that's a good chance mhm and then tell us about your event so yeah I'm actually gonna be doing my own event the zero knowledge summit this would be the fourth in the series I've been doing it every six months in the past always in Berlin and this is the first time I take it to SF it's happening on October 26th it's extremely technical and there's limited spots but there is an application form out right now I think you could probably find it through like the zero-knowledge Twitter for speakers over speakers and attendees so we actually do because it's so small we actually do an application process for all of that okay um we really are looking for researchers and

devs so like if you have someone on your team who fits that profile like maybe send them our way yeah but yeah I'm super excited about it it's like it's super interesting because like it's the fourth one and the first one that we did was very it was quite general and very high-level we had like an introduction to zero knowledge proof it's like a whole talk on that like really really you know the billiard balls and stuff like that and the second one started to get like more focus we're looking at privacy I think privacy tech and then scaling was the third one but now what's happened is basically it's become more and more dense like a more and more technical we've kind of gone further and further down the rabbit hole in terms of content so I'm very much looking forward

to what comes and all those people in SF out like I like I mentioned I think of SF definitely as a zero knowledge hub mm-hmm a lot of people couldn't make it over to Berlin for one day event which means so I'm bringing it to them and then they have no excuse but they have to be there if you do it here it'll be have to be like three days yeah this is totally this is one of the reasons I wanted to come this week too is to like check it out you like could I do ZK summit here too really good I think I could yeah I mean I'll come because it's close yeah cool yeah is that is that all we have to say I think that's a good people who are watching this on my channel vice versa tell us a little bit about epicenter

yeah so epicenters of podcast and we explore the economic technical and societal impacts of blockchain technology at a high level and sometimes a little I mean it depends what we have on the show and who's hosting it you can subscribe at epicenter TV or just on iTunes or your favorite podcast player and you should also if you're listening to on my channel if definitely subscribed to NS podcast it's a zero knowledge podcast which can be found at zero knowledge on FM we talk like so I think it's become more and more of like a zero knowledge podcast I would say like the contents about we still talk about blockchain in general

but I think it's like about sixty percent zero No yeah we've really kind of like net like focused in and I think just to maybe to wrap up one of the reasons we thought it would be fun to do this podcast together is that our podcasts are often kind of like seeing together I think in the same category you guys have always been incredibly like from the very beginning incredibly open and supportive for us entering this space and I want to say thank you to you for that and I do think of them as being very complimentary yeah absolutely yeah I I mean especially where you're going more like especially where yeah you're doing you're spending more time on on zero knowledge stuff you know how like having a podcast in the ecosystem that

is like focus really focus on that niche is great for like not only watching because it's but also this is the zero knowledge you know space in general because I don't think there's any other you know media organizations out there that are doing like specific zero knowledge stuff and like getting all these kind of serial knowledge researchers together at events and advancing that so yeah that's great I think it's good it's great for me I mean I love privacy so yeah cool so thanks and see you in the next edition of see you later